Weird how a "special" processor gives less, and not more. What's so "special" about that?

You mean these people actually paused the game and counted them, recorded all their behaviour, and managed to pause to the next display frame, and analyze what changed, all this through a small sequence of 10 seconds?

No, nobody did that. People talk lots of nonsense, but I've yet to see this detailed analysis of 200 zombies or 1000 soldiers with each their behaviour on screen. The truth is that most of these "objects" on screen have the exact same behaviour (crowd AI), and that the only difference is in graphics: the consoles with more powerful GPU and CPU can "modelize" all of them, the Wii could only display all of them by cheating.

So it goes back to graphics once again.

And processing power IS part of graphics. How do you think all these 3D graphics appear on your screen?

3D is heavy on computing power, just look at graphics card power (dedicated to graphics) compared to a general purpose CPU. And keep in mind the graphics card is SPECIALIZED, while the CPU is for general purpose.

Yes and no. The basic problem is: You have one normal core that can be used as usual. If you want to use the additional power you have to use the SPEs, that have several weaknesses(the programmer is responsible for the memory management (only the local memory of the SPE gives the wanted performance , no load balancing , a very high code dependency (some functions are dramatically slower than the PPE), no shared cache ). How much power you can really get out of the cell depends on the program itself or even the problem behind it. You can't easily compare it with a common multi core system.

An additional problem: AI depends heavily on branching. The Xenon in the Xbox 360 isn't very good in this discipline (a rather deep pipeline) and the Cell is even worse. I always get a funny feeling when people talk about the AI improvements and even the physics advantages are misleading. Games don't use the very complicated real functions, that are used by scientists, instead they rely on simplified functions that give the needed results under certain conditions (a so called numerical approach). Game designers don't care if the car would break in this situation: it looks spectaculare, so it should work in this game. 

After reading these numerous posts, the way I understand it is:

The processors in the Playstation 3, and Xbox 360, create artificial intelligence, and physics. An increase in complicated reactions is also possible.

The Playstation 3 has twice as much processing power, because of the Cell Processor, but since one of the processors is "special," for whatever that means, it doesn't have as much processing power as it could have. Weird how something "special" could be a bad thing.

The Playstation 3's processing power if difficult to program with, and costs a lot of money. More processing power lets you have more characters on screen, performing differently.

At the end, the Xbox 360, and Playstation 3, have their strengths and weaknesses, but are very similar in many ways. They focus more on graphics than anything else. At the end, just go with the Wii. I'm sure you wont be dissapointed.

Nope. As I wrote it is far from easy to compare the architectures. While there is a special SPE, this feature is not needen in games! You need the special security feature only for secure functions , like the key handling when you want to use a BluRay. If you want to talk about the processing power, this feature simply doesn't matter.

Can someone please take all of the abbreviations in this thread, and tell me what they all mean?

alex - look it up in Google

I'm with ookaze.

A lot of people posting in this thread don't actually know what they are talking about and are spreading the 'AI Physics' BS that is realistically not true.

Physics, yes to a certain extent, but physically to a level that is noticable to someone playing a game? I don't think so. Physics are certainly processor intensive, but if you think you're going to get massive physics increases with the CPU's from Wii to 360 and PS3 then you are wrong.

The physics in something like Crysis is the highest increase that we've seen so far (see bomb explosion, trees falling etc) but even that isn't up to an ultra realistic level yet.

As has been stated many times, the AI is a load of BS also...

The new consoles realistically don't offer much else other than shinier graphics, prettier and more expansive worlds - which in essance could be done stylistically on the Wii anyway.

That's not to say that these greater more expansive worlds aren't better on these consoles... I can tell you now Eternal Sonata is going to be stylistically amazing and far beyond anything that coudl have been done on Wii and last gen consoles. The gameplay of most games could be emulated on the prior consoles with scaled down graphics... this isn't a matter of arguement.

Would the games be as enjoyable with scaled back graphics? For me... no. I moderately like COD3 but the Wii version was craps.

Yes, most of these claims were simply marketing, nothing more. In reallity HD output even for 720p needs a lot of computing power and memory. In fact even the processors were optimized for graphics. Every core of the Xenon has two AltiVec Engines (really good for vector handling), while the  Cell has most of its computing power in the cells, which are optimized for vector calculations ,too.

While you could use these abilities for physics, I'don't knw where these features are really needed. For most physics in games there are much easier solutions, that give results, before you have setup these power houses.

And these plattforms were simply not designed for complicated AIs. While you could do more things, due to ingrease in memory size, most of the memory will be consumed by the graphics. 

There are (generally) two approaches to physics simulations in games/movies: Kinematic and Dynamic.

In the last generation (PS2/XBox/Gamecube/Dreamcast) developers were finally able to do Dynamic physics engines; which essentially means that last generation it became possible not to script a lot of physical interactions between objects. The PS3 and XBox 360 can have a ton of objects that are being simulated physically. There are few games where this actually impacts.

AI hasn't improved from processing power in a long time ... It is a problem which has just had greater resources thrown at it. What you're going to see on PS3/XBox 360 titles is the exact same scripted AI that existed on the PS2/XBox except it will have more scripted events and more "intelligent" characters on screen at the same time.

 The whole point of Gearsof War is that it looks amazing.

Physics and AI are pretty much decades of bullshit, BTW. There's no such thing as improvements in those areas. You cannot improve AI. You can imrove physics, but it doesn't really do anything. 

I was going to say Gears has stunning ragdol death animations on the enemy soldiers. But then I realized, that's just another way to make it look really cool.

But if you put Gears on Wii it would looks so damn lame everybody would laugh at it. It would not be the same game.