Yet another silly article written by an uneducated journalist. Your mere question of "which console is more powerful?" is flawed because you have not defined “power”. Already two years ago we knew that the PS3 had more raw CPU power (approx. 150 single-precision GFLOPS). So that answers that question immediately, if you are concerned with pure math calculations (matrix/vector calculation) - which we are not. We are interested in game performance in this discussion. In this case, the Xbox 360 is more powerful – let me explain before you all go into denial attack mode.
I will make this clear so that everyone understands for once and for all. It doesn't help at all having all that CPU power if the GPU and RAM are the major bottlenecks of the platform. Having a powerful CPU will do nothing for the rasterisation process. It will not increase the pixel/vertex shading capability of the console! The only way in which the Cell processor can slightly alleviate the stress on the GPU is to do more physics and particle calculations etc. - if programmed to do so. This is the case with these exclusive games, and therefore why more bandwidth and GPU power is freed up to do more graphics. This does not change the fact that the GPU is still limited to its performance ceiling! This is so logical and obvious that I cannot understand how you people cannot see it, other than through deluding yourselves. The freeing up of a few resources of the GPU is all that is happening here, nothing more. Incase you didn't notice, the framerates still take severe hits in all these games when shading gets heavy!
The only other way that the cell processor might be able to assist in graphics calculations is to perform ray-tracing. However, it is years off until ray-tracing takes a proper stance in the market, and the cell is anyway not powerful enough to do full dynamic ray-tracing in a gaming environment (the little static cell broadband ray-tracing tech demos mean nothing because they are not fully dynamic gaming worlds with AI etc. so don’t even think of throwing that rubbish at me). It is an absolute joke when you consider the puny 250MB of system RAM that is available - ray-tracing requires a lot of RAM (the other 250MB is dedicated to the GPU), and will never be enough to perform ray-tracing and handle a full gaming environment!
Furthermore, I believe that the only reason that some of these exclusives look “better” (obviously this is a subjective comparison, seeing as there is no direct comparison on the Xbox 360) on the PS3 is because they are big production games and a lot of money and effort goes into optimising the graphics engine. In case you haven't noticed, just look at the rubbish draw-distance in every game on the console. Notice how the distance is a blurred static image. There is a lot of trickery and cleverness that goes into these optimisations, which increases framerates and allows for apparent better visuals, but says nothing for the graphical grunt of the console itself when comparing it to another console.
It is a fact that the Xbox 360 has a better GPU and memory subsystem. The GPU has dynamically allocated shading units (all shading units can do either pixel or vertex shading depending on load). The PS3 has statically allocated shading units (some shading units will not get used if the proportion of vertex to pixel shading requirements is not in line with the hardware proportion). This is an inferior design, and the same reason that this unified architecture is used on all PC GPUs since the G80. Also, the memory subsystem of the Xbox 360 is unified – the GPU and CPU share 500MB (which is also a puny amount), but still better that a fixed partitioning, for similar analogous reason to the unified shading system.
The fact that the GPU in the Xbox 360 is more powerful than the PS3s is apparent through the graphical detail differences in multiplats. The fact that the Cell processor is not being used completely has nothing to do with it. These are purely GPU ceilings. A simple example would be to compare a PC with a single core CPU and 8800GTX to a quad core with a 6600 Ultra. Which one will run games better? I think I’d obviously go for the former. GPU is the main determining factor in graphics, NOT CPU (hint: that is why it is called GRAPHICS processing unit, and does GRAPHICS acceleration).
I hope people will start to understand this, because it is the most ridiculous and stupid argument that has carried on forever, and websites keep using it as bait to increase hits on their sites.
Where do I stand? I would say that from the initial launch of the Xbox 360, up until a few months ago, it would have been better to buy an Xbox 360, because the games were better, as well as multiplats. However, even though the PS3 is a weaker GRAPHICS machine for games, the exclusive games that are coming out now display a greater quality (and invariably apparent better graphics), and would therefore buy a PS3 from here on.
Facts: Multiplats will always look better on the Xbox 360, so don’t delude yourselves. Both consoles are already hopelessly outdated compared to modern PC GPUs, and every game on any console is basically “ugly” if you compare it to their PC counterpart. This is why exclusives on the PS3 are the key to Sony making a comeback, because it can’t be “ugly” if it can’t be compared to anything (i.e. Xbox 360). When ray-tracing becomes the norm, the PS3 won’t matter anymore, because it will be ancient and next gen will already be out. For ME, Playing FPS games with a controller sucks, a mouse is the only way, so Killzone 2 is inherently annoying (for me). Final fact: If you disagree with my argument then you must be pretty stupid.
