As for the rest ... I stand by my statements.  Whether it is normal PR or not, it's still silly and stupid, and quoting Jack Tretton saying "Playstation is great!" serves no useful purpose I am aware of.   

@ Final-Fan

A second opinion regarding XBox 360 vs PS3 costs and specs:

"Pocket-lint is reporting that they have had Microsoft confirm to them that the Xbox 360 will not get Wi-Fi due to keeping the price down.

It makes me wonder really how much Wi-Fi would bump up the price, as it really is a needed option with the fact that the Xbox 360 system is based about Xbox Live.

I paid just around £60 ($120) for the extra device that gives the 360 Wi-Fi; surely they can make an integrated Wi-Fi cheaper than this, in fact much cheaper.

The Sony PS3 only costs a little more when you think about that much money for Wi-Fi, let alone the extra HD Drive if you wanted it.

The fact is I do not know anyone that does not have Xbox Live for their 360 and cables are a nightmare compared to going wireless.

I do understand that some people who are not interested in having wireless technology should not pay for what they do not want, but then they should of made the core system have no Wi-Fi and the deluxe have wireless."

http://www.product-reviews.net/2007/09/25/microsoft-confirmed-no-built-in-wi-fi-for-xbox-360-its-down-to-cost/

This is like an addition to the original post, explaining the benefit of the additional space available on Blu-Ray disc to greater depth, taken from one of my posts from another thread:

Not trying to get into a argument with anyone but isn't it pointless arguing about a systems technical capability but not discussing the games that are on them.

The fact is people on this site are console owners and are loyal to one or more of the big three manufacturers systems. If tomorrow some unknown company announces a system that is more powerful than PS3, 360 and Wii I doubt any of us are gonna start singing it's praises and become converts.

All I'm saying is be happy with what you got. I don't own all three consoles but I as sure as hell would like to!! In my perfect world everyone would!

Obviously the games are ultimately the only truly important thing (unless the technical differences are tangible in other ways, as is the case for the PSP).  However, the technology is important in determining the kind and quality of games that each system can produce.  And we have spent some time on what can be done in games on both systems, and which system can do what better.  

Most importantly, though, this whole thread is not devoted to determining which game system is "better" in terms of games or sales, but rather it is devoted to comparing the respective TECHNOLOGY in each of the PS3 and Xbox 360.  So it would be off-topic for this thread to speak of fanboy loyalty, exclusives, other consoles, etc. 

And hey -- it's good to see a new face!  (AKA "Welcome to VGChartz") 

I dont think this thread was created to compare games but to specifically compare the 2 consoles :Xbox360 vs PS3.
that is all.

(and I must say: it is quite complicated !)

This thread was mostly aimed to dispell and address some PS3 FUD and rumours floating around on forums and even mistakes in some technical articles, which again fuel some people's anti-PS3 sentiments.

On a technical level the PS3 is a solid and impressive product, which line-up of games you like personally or if you prefer Nintendo or Microsoft that's another matter and is greatly dependent on one's own bias and preferences.

Again a cross post from another thread, as this again regards PS3 technicals I think this is very suited for this thread. This time with regard to claims of the SPEs being useless with regard to pixel shading:

Some initial research indicating the contrary:

"This paper studies a deferred pixel shading algorithm implemented on a Cell-based computer entertainment system. The pixel shader runs on the Synergistic Processing Units (SPUs) of the Cell and works concurrently with the GPU to render images. The system's unified memory architecture allows the Cell and GPU to exchange data through shared textures. The SPUs use the Cell DMA list capability to gather irregular fine-grained fragments of texture data generated by the GPU. They return resultant shadow textures the same way. The shading computation ran at up to 85 Hz at HDTV 720p resolution on 5 SPUs and generated 30.72 gigaops of performance. This is comparable to the performance of the algorithm running on a state of the art high end GPU. These results indicate that a hybrid solution in which the Cell and GPU work together can produce higher performance than either device working alone."

"We have explored moving pixel shaders from the GPU to
the Cell/B.E. processor of the PLAYSTATION®3
computer entertainment system. Our initial results are
encouraging as they show it is feasible to attain scalable
speedup and high performance even for shaders with
irregular fine-grained data access patterns. Removing the
computation from the GPU effectively increases the frame
rate, or more likely, the geometric complexity of the models
that can be rendered in real time.

We can also conclude that the performance of the Cell/B.E.
is superior to a current state of the art high end GPU in that
we achieved comparable performance despite performance
limitations and despite using only part of the available
processing power. Our current implementation loses
substantial performance due to DMA waiting. This results
from the fine-grained irregular access to memory and is
specific to the type of shaders we have chosen to
implement. We have explored shaders based on shadow
mapping [15] which require evaluating GPU fragments
generated from multiple viewpoints. These multiple
viewpoints are related to each other by a linear viewing
transformation. Gathering the data from these multiple
viewpoints requires fine-grained irregular memory access.

This represents worst-case behavior for any memory
system. "

http://research.scea.com/ps3_deferred_shading.pdf

The Cell's SPEs are very flexible with regard to which kinds of code they can help facilitate, the SPEs act as true processors allowing multi-threading and such like I pointed out earlier and are very suited to take workload off the GPU as well as the PPE. This though does mean legacy game engines need to be modified and game development approaches require different programming tactics.

So unless you read articles from Cell programming or hardware design experts IMO take any comments you may read with a grain of salt, seemingly especially if they originate from XBox 360 fans.

I think this article sheds some light on how the SPEs are currently used in Killzone 2, and addresses the advanced deferred rendering techniques Guerrilla Games already implemented for the game so far.



Deferred Rendering in Killzone 2