Please stop discussing Ray-Tracing guys... We're decades away from being able to use that in games.

if you'd even bother to look at the video you'd see that its not

That (probably) isn't as impressive as you would think:

http://graphics.cs.uni-sb.de/~woop/rpu/pics/Spheres4-large.jpg

This was done in real time on a ray processing unit in 2005 that was under 1/20th of the potential performance they could get if they took advantage of the latest and greatest technology that was used in GPUs; hypothetically speaking they probably could have (roughly) 100 times that performance today and developers are saying that ray-tracing is not viable for games for several years.

Bump for first intelligent post in this thread. Thank you. and welcome to VGC! You´ll like it here.

Well since you clearly misrepresented the opinions of at least 2 members in this thread, both of whom claim to have never said that (and you have never provided a link to them saying that), I'm locking this topic as it's just become a flame war location.

Well that and the reasonable resolution to the topic was reached quite early by d21 and Zenfolder, and now it's just bickering.

Not if you look at Intel's roadmap (larrabee anyone ?).

But you are right, RT is NOT the subject of this topic.

One of the main problem is that those that know nothing on how 3D images are rendered confuse "graphics" and 3D, and those that know a little tend to associate the word "graphics" to "3D".

On the 3D departement, neither PS3 neither Xbox360 have an edge on the other, simply because their GPU are in the same class.

On the "graphics" one, the PS3 May (with a big "M") have one.

Well, them let me put it for you in this way, why if the PS3 as he said is so powerfull why do they need to add a GPU, this so called real time demo even with the bad quality shows things that are usually done by GPUs, whats the point of showing of this demo if at the end the PS3 required a GPU in order to make good graphics... and after the CGI trailers of MotoStorm and KIllzone, I barely believe him anything about realtime on that point of the life of the Cell...

Fishie, usually game characters all share the same animation data.  The work that bogs the processors down is called animation blending.  Taking data from a "run" animation and a "jog" animation, and blending them together based upon a characters forward movement speed, for example, to give a smooth transition from one animation to the next in the game.  This is a lot of work, especially if your character's skeleton has a large number of nodes ("bones"), and its something that the Cell's SPUs are *really* quick at.  Each Cell is individually a LOT faster than any of the 360 cores at this, as a matter of fact.  While the 360's cores tend to yield a general performance improvement over the PS3's PPU dual-thread core for more abstract programming (like game logic), those same cores also need to tackle tough math work like animation blending, which the PS3 SPUs absolutely slaughter the performance of the 360 cores at.  Unless you design the game around advantages like this one, or the fact that the SPUs can pump info right to the PS3 GPU (like do the work of skinning vertices based on the bone transforms, rather than delaying the GPU with that task... again a lot of work which scales with the number of skinned meshes you are rendering each frame), you're not going to see much of a difference between the two platforms.

If you *do* design your game to take those advantages into consideration, the PS3 is going to look better, no question.  No many games, and especially no cross-platform games, will ever be designed around the features of only one console, for obvious reasons.  The PS3 excels at the mathematics work behind the polygon pushing... so you might see, as a major "graphics" difference, characters in PS3 games using alot of face viseme blending, for nice looking facial animations and voice matching, whereas the 360 version would have to do with just a couple "pre-recorded" facial morphs.  The difference would be subtle (except in cases where your game has VO matching for multiplayer, perhaps), so calling this a difference is something of a stretch, and you'll NEVER see it in a static screenshot.  All that extra mathematical horsepower of the PS3 does have its uses, but they aren't showstoppers, unless the game is designed to take advantage of it -- like has 50 characters onscreen at once in a MMO, where everyone is blending different animations from their shared set, and thus looking different, etc.

In short, the PS3 is "better", but only if you consider things in motion to be something you're looking for, as far as graphics go... Higher character bone counts, more interesting characters onscreen at once, more subtle animations of the face, hands, etc., better looking hair... and so on.  Otherwise, they are effectively identical.

This thread is not going anywhere. its just full of useless fanboy bickering!

360 fanboy: gears 2 will look better than heaven!

PS3 fanboy: no, killzone 2 and resistance 2 will look best and they will run at 700fps!

360 fanboy: NGII looks better than mgs4!

PS3fanboy: Its all in the cell: power! Power!! POWER!!!

360fanboy: Halo 3, Bioshock, Mass Effect + JRPG exclusives + more games = best system!

PS3 fanboy: MGS4, Uncharted, Ressistance 2, Killzone 2 , LBP, FFXIII >>>>360 !

360 fanboy: PS3=expensive blu-ray player

PS3 fanboy: 360=RROD!

When is it enough?