Well that is new to me: the video gaming industry which generates more money than movies btw... is about .. ART ? Not money ?

On your remark about the """"outdated UR3""": We are not talking about fundamental science here.... iterative development are the best way to obtain a good results. Making a new big bang from scratch is expensive and generally not worth the investment, if you cannot recycle it later.

To some people "trounces" could mean 20% better.  To others people "trounces" is basically an unreachable sliding bar that constantly changes based on whatever the top performing game is.

The reality of it is that Killzone 2 "trounces" ALL games before it except Crysis.  KZ2 "trounces" Crysis in SOME areas (animations, character models, characters on screen, gun models, particle physics, 7.1 discrete audio, etc) but is close in other areas and gets beat in other areas.  Killzone 2 uses the SPEs to achieve up to a 40% increase in GPU performance (WAY beyond the X360)!

Also, Shippy is only speaking of the part HE designed (the PPE of the Cell and the XeCPU cores of Xenon).  That's actually a good benchmark to use.  We know that in most cases of optimized code, the SPE can be around 3x faster than the PPE.

One guy said said something that was incorrect about the BD drive speed in the PS3 vs. DVD drive speed in the X360. Even though the X360 drive is a 12x DVD drive, it maxes out at 8x for DL-DVDs (almost ALL X360 games).  The X360 drive has to build up to that speed over the span of the disc.  The BD drive has a constant read speed across the entire disc.  This ends in the BD drive being just over 1MB/s faster than the DVD drive in the X360.

Here are some links to Cell performance...

http://www.mc.com/uploadedFiles/Cell-Perf-Simple.pdf  (Against the fastest single cores [like Intel Xeon]...1 SPE can perform up to 7 times better than a single core 3.6GHz Intel Xeon)

http://www.research.ibm.com/cell/whitepapers/alias_cloth.pdf  (Cloth Physics on 2.4GHz Cell vs single core 3.6GHz Intel Xeon)

http://www.simbiosys.ca/science/white_papers/eHiTS_on_the_Cell.pdf  (Performance comparison between Intel/AMD dual-core processors versus Cell...also partially explains that realism in games is not limited by the GPU anymore)

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~samw/research/papers/ipdps08.pdf  (Cell beats Intel Quad-Core [Clovertown] at DP GFLOPS, which it's terrible at compared to it's SP (just divide the chart number in half for Cell due to Cell blade being used).

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/power/library/pa-cellperf/  (IBM document on Cell and per SPE performance)

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/ibm-lead-architect-cell-cpu-ps3-gaming,1336.html  (SPEs capable of "running single core scalar programs in their entirety)

http://lzhan.wikispaces.com/Cell+Programming?f=print  (Individual programmer experiments on PS3...shows per SPE output at bottom)

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/physics/pdf/0611/0611201v2.pdf  (Cell almost 20x (2 orders of magnitude) faster than Opteron processor at Molecule Dynamics)

http://www.sintef.no/upload/IKT/9011/SimOslo/eVITA/2008/hagen2.pdf  (Cell versus Intel Core2 Duo in power consumption and theoretical performance)

http://www.power.org/resources/devcorner/cellcorner/hpcspe.pdf  (Cell versus Intel Quad Core [Clovertown] theoretical GFLOPS...and real world Multigrid Finite Element solver running at an unprecedented 52GFLOPS sustained performance)

http://www.power.org/devcon/07/Session_Downloads/PADC07_Bergmann_Sourcery_VSIPL.pdf  (Cell almost 14x the sustained performance of single core 3.6GHz Intel Xeon at VSIPL++ fast convolution)

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1024663&postcount=39  (What DirectX means for your GPU[for the DirectX ? fans])

http://www.cis.udel.edu/~cavazos/cisc879/papers/cellFMwhitepaper.pdf  (Cell [1GB RAM] 11x faster than Intel Quad-Core [Clovertown] w/16GB RAM at SP for financial market applications)

That was just for the people interested in learning.  The others will do what they do best (try to discredit these unversities' real world implementations and me).

@haxxiy: Where did you get the data on the number of transistors on each CPU?

Of course these claims should be read with a critical mind. The Cell is different from 360's CPU in several ways, it has more cores and is much better for many kinds of scientific applications. Maybe he was talking about it from a game performance perspective.

I know it's easy to over look, but it's storage. Yes the DVD transfer rate maybe higher than say BR, but the qaulity of texture can be a lot better. There are factors to take into account. 360 can make textures look better than PS3, but the PS3 can have hands down better textures.

It seems strange, but after a certain res. You won't notice the difference as much. The CPU only process vector math and by the IBM designer claims both systems will make little relevance to gap. What is prized in graphics is texture fill and processing not vector math. So when you see the questioned "better" looking games what you are mostly looking at is the games textures.

so
360 = texture effects
PS3 = better textures

appealing hardcore definition of better graphics = texture qaulity

So yes a game that is designed from the ground up for the PS3 will likely support and use higher textures. While multi plat games will in all likely hood use the same textures. The fact that PS3 fans get miffed that multi games don't look much better if at all on the PS3 just proves this.

 Here you get about PS3, both CPU and GPU (which stands fairly equal at 300 million).

 And here about the X360's CPU.

 Here you get about PS3, both CPU and GPU (which stands fairly equal at 300 million).

 And here about the X360's CPU.

I know it's easy to over look, but it's storage. Yes the DVD transfer rate maybe higher than say BR, but the qaulity of texture can be a lot better. There are factors to take into account. 360 can make textures look better than PS3, but the PS3 can have hands down better textures.

It seems strange, but after a certain res. You won't notice the difference as much. The CPU only process vector math and by the IBM designer claims both systems will make little relevance to gap. What is prized in graphics is texture fill and processing not vector math. So when you see the questioned "better" looking games what you are mostly looking at is the games textures.

so
360 = texture effects
PS3 = better textures

appealing hardcore definition of better graphics = texture qaulity

So yes a game that is designed from the ground up for the PS3 will likely support and use higher textures. While multi plat games will in all likely hood use the same textures. The fact that PS3 fans get miffed that multi games don't look much better if at all on the PS3 just proves this.