Yeah, sadly the Jasper motherboards do appear to be MIA so far. :-/

I appreciate this post, and would be very happy to learn more about the PS3's architecture from you.  Considering you're a game developer and appear to have a good amount of experience with programming the PS3, would you be willing to write and post to a thread an article giving a high-level overview of how the Cell and it's many parts do their magic?  I for one would like to better understand the special-sauce that gives the PS3 it's oomph.

Who knows, it might even help to keep some of the "BS" out of these threads.

Actually, I think its a fair bet to say that any engine designed with multithreading in mind to begin with does use the SPUs for general-purpose work, in addition to intense vector math work.  I think the PS3's architecture is a great one... I just think that tools have traditionally been designed around the single-core PC idea, and that the PS3 suffers (much) more from this fact, and the fact that developers are not used to thinking in parallel terms, than the X360 does.

On-topic: The authors of GT5 have clearly embraced the PS3's architecture, as have many 1st-party exclusives, and it shows in their quality.  The fact that this is difficult to do, doesn't really diminish the fact that it can, and has, been done.

@ Groucho -> thanks for your info.

And don`t listen to MikeB,he always has justified his purchase. He bought an expensive black box,I have bought a white box at half the price. We both back it up,and I see nothing wrong with that.

I do know that the 360 is cpu limited now,because only one core is used. MS will try to get the 2`nd core working with the help of the magic of software (developers,developers,developers).

But is it true that the 360 can acces the memory in one framerate at the folowing -> 2 read and writes for the CPU and 3 read and writes for the GPU ? I know that every data is coming from the memory. The ps3 can acces the cpu and gpu at once ( 1 read and 1 write) while the 360 does this separate,but much faster.

So am I correct?

25 frames per second is movie animation quality. Generally correct, we usually don't notice much more fluent motion than that in general, only maybe for some very fast moving games. Far more important is having a solid framerate, framerate fluctuations are usually worse for perception.

We do however notice screen updates as in "frames per second", 100 Hz displays will usually strain the eye a lot less than 50 Hz (after-glow and such is also a factor), but this actually relates to less flickering rather than fluent motion.

we might see the PS4 do this not the PS3

Movies use motion-blurring unlike most games, which is why they can get by at 25 fps.

The easiest way to prove that the human eye can see the difference between 60 fps and 30 fps is to play Mario Kart Wii at both framerates. The difference is extremely obvious for everyone I've met.

(30 fps happens in Mario Kart when playing online split-screen)

Its more the fact that custom programming has gone out the window. Developers use libraries of tools and they call them up by a function and they never rewrite them unless they absolutely need to.

Btw, the memory management systems in the Cell are a real headache, the more cores they use the more painful it becomes to balance the workload. Unfortunately from the last time I heard about it, the SDK didn't automate a lot of even the low end balancing and it forced the developers to do it by hand.

I was going to back out of this thread, but I feel obligated to answer questions... but I don't really understand your question, I'm afraid.

The PS3 uses a ring bus architecture, which allows various parts of the architecture to be communicating concurrently, whereas the 360 has to mitigate traffic on a shared bus, as I recall (been a while since I did anything low-level on a 360.. close to 3 years, actually), but the performance issues with the different bus architectures are widely varied, and highly subjective with regards to the application -- I wouldn't say there's a clear advantage to either one, or rather that there's a clear advantage to one, or the other, in different circumstances.

Yes motion blur helps a lot in fast moving scenes and is used for some fast moving 30 FPS games as well, for fast high resolution games like WipeOut HD and GT5 60 FPS is certainly a benefit. But IMO anything above that is overkill, a waste of resources.

I haven't played Mario Kart Wii, but maybe they downgraded some other things for split-screen as well, that happens sometimes due to being more demanding.

Well Groucho,i was trying to tell you this:

The Graphics chip in 360 provided by ATI is a custom built chip that on whole is more powerful then the PS3 Nvidia chip. It is capable of more complex shaders and is also set up so that it can take advantage of DX10 features which the PS3 is not able to do.

Also regardless of the cells processing power, the PS3's bandwidth holds the system back. For exdample even though the Ps3 can acces memory simultaneously with CPU and GPU at the same time it is significantly slower at doing so than the 360. In the time it takes PS3 CPU and GPU to acces memory once each at the same time, the 360 cpu can access twice and GPU 3 times or vice versa. Even though the 360 has to do it in turn! So thats 2 read and writes to memory for PS3 (1 cpu and 1gpu) and 5 read and writes for 360 (2 cpu and 3 gpu or vice versa) in the same time frame. The bandwidth numbers are available so you can do the math.

It's a major issue, considering that any info the CPU proccesses HAS to come from the memory first. Hence PS3 cell is limited.

So is the 360 more powerfull at GAMES than the ps3? Is the 2`nd core activated yet (and what`s it for ->AI,physics?) ?