Why are graphics so important? It seems like the best stick to beat your "enemies" with.

But hell, I bet I enjoy games more cos I sit there and play them instead of worrying about how much better/worse the graphics are on "the other" system.

And to be honest, I wish they would reach the limit cos then they can put their time into making a decent game instead of just trying to make it look pretty.

Graphics are important for a lot of people as it enables them to be immersed into the game designers world. While its popular to say that they aren't important, more than 2/3rds of people here would respond to a game better if its visually more appealing.

Based on some of the peoples comments here, I don't know why they would have even bothered upgrading from the SNES or the PS1 but Its funny I've never heard anyone say in the same breath that the Wii was overpowered visually and that gameplay > graphics.

I don't know why anybody would even argue about whether the PS3 or X360 is more capable at this point. It seems ridiculous that anybody would even care about the tiny difference between the two systems which will only produce a very slight difference in graphical capability at the most. In reality until the end of this generation the vast majority of games released on either of these consoles will be released on the other and they will look nearly identical on both. The real showcases of graphical power will be the exclusives and their graphical prowess will show more the ability of the programmers than the ability of the hardware.

The EDRam is another step in the 360 architecture and cannot be added to the main ram like that. The EDRam's small size is an important limiting factor. The main use of EDRam is adding effects like AA and HDR while maintaining good framerates, sadly the EDRam is too small in higher resolutions, it does not fit even 720p + AA so devs resort to tiling which greatly diminishes potential.

Also the PS3 has a default harddrive, think of this as virtual memory. Streaming data from Blu-Ray disc and the default harddrive, the PS3 provides higher memory bandwidth to the media next to its much better internal memory bandwidth as well as far more data storage (potential for more varierty of data and/or higher quality data). The comparison is therefore misleading, look at the NeoGeo which had very limited system memory, but the console could achieve much more with regard to gaming than PCs of its time which had many mulitple times the amount of system memory.

Just some factors to take into consideration.

@ Squilliam

@Squilliam:

You, of course, do realize that this Tesselator of yours is no silver bullet don't you?

See, those additional triangles you've just made using it will all have to be put through the vertext shaders you're using. Which will have to process them one-at-a-time, so your game will still be limited by vertex shader capacity - tesselation or not. They will also all need to be renderered, from the same polygon budget you had before tesselating. Meaning using the tesselator won't allow you to use more polygons in a scene than before.

It is mostly useful because it allows you to skimp on memory/bandwitdth requirements for some of your polygon models. Everything else you do with them will still require the same old resources it always did (including the polygon/texture budget and shader limits).

So yes, it is useful and yes it might make games look a tad better but it won't change their looks dramatically.

There's a major difference between comparing graphics of the 360 and PS3, and of consoles from different generations.  Graphical leaps were very important because it meant games can do things it previously could not - could Mario 64 be done on the SNES?  Or could GTA3 be done on the PS1?  I'm thinking no.  This is one reason the Wii can do so well, even though the graphics aren't HD - they're good enough to flesh out any game concepts thought of right now.  There aren't really games on the HD consoles that cannot be done on the Wii (with lesser graphics).  Graphics were also important because they were so far from what reality looked like - now that we're approaching it, they don't matter nearly as much.

When people argue about the 360 and PS3, it's ridiculous because it practically takes experts to determine which system is better than the other.  If it has come to that, the graphical difference simply doesn't matter, even to most of the people on this site - if they say otherwise I'd guess it's out of console fanboyism.

The main use of the ED Ram is to act as a frame buffer, and it has an extremely high bandwidth to serve this purpose. If it wasn't stored on the ED ram it would be stored on the system ram. Much of the bandwidth requirement is for the framebuffer which is why the ED ram exists in the first place. Its for that reason that the Xbox 360 doesn't need to have as much bandwidth in other areas.

Virtual memory is not real memory. You cannot use more objects or code than is currently stored in your main memory. COD IV renders at 60FPS or 1.66MS per frame. The average HDD access time at best for a Laptop HDD is 8ms. So at best it would take 4 frames of animation before the HDD could even be accessed, then you add tranfer and processing time onto that as well. So yes you can stream, but no you cannot use it as virtual memory.

Regarding the Neogeo flash memory acts like a rom so its not comparable with either the PS3 or 360.

 @SPE code usage - "

On a Pentium 4 HT running at 3.4 GHz, this algorithm is able to check 24-million edges per second. On the Cell, at the end of our optimization, we achieved a performance of 538-million edges per second. This is an impressive result, but came at the price of an explosion in code complexity. While the algorithm in Listing One fits in 60 lines of source code, our final algorithm on the Cell measures 1200 lines of code."

Gears of War could have been done on the N64 as gears of war stickmen edition - would it have been the same game essentially? Yes. Would it have been appealing to many people? No. Graphics look good now because the industry has been able to fake it so well, but there are limitations and you don't have to look far to find them. In Gears of War - every door looked the same, every covered window in a row of 10 would look exactly the same and there is always only one path to take so the developers can stream the required data. But I do agree theres hardy a game type now that cannot be done on the Wii.

@ PS3 vs 360, you're right.

That's a bit of a false comparisom though. Not all algorithms will need this sort of optimisation. Nor is it said that you can't just run the 60 line version for similar (i.e. about 24 million edges per second instead of the Cell powered 538 million) performance instead.