Too reasonable.

That's entirely dependant on what portion of the graphics pipeline you're talking about.  The Cell is awe-inspiring at vertex ops.  It just can't be used to do pixel/fragment ops efficiently.  The more vertex ops you offload onto the Cell, the more breathing room the pixel pipelines have during the frame to do their work as well.

When I see games like inFamous, I just don't understand stuff like this...

Double post

That isn't completely true, because the RSX is a non unified architecture, so the number of pixel pipelines is independent of the use or not of SPUs for vertex rendering. You can generate models of a higher vertex complexity, but the pixel fillrate is where the bottleneck is in PS3's case, SPUs used or not. If RSX were an unified architecture, the gains in performance could be much higher, because you could almost use all the power to do pixel work, but it isn't the case.

let me put it this way... Do you think the RSX spends any time waiting on its 8 vert pipes, since its basically doing no skinning, no morph targets, no vertex anims, no nothing, other than projecting the vertex into screen space?  I might add that say.. doubling the number of verts in a model goes a lot further towards making it look good (esp. with good lighting) than adding some minute fraction of extra texture resolution does.

If you add skinned meshes to a game, and have a decent vertex count, are doing facial anims, etc... don't you think you might want to devote a fair number of the Xenos' pipelines to doing that (vertex) work, or are you claiming the "awesome" shared-cache-resource Xenon CPU can cover such work efficiently?

I'm not saying that Xenon could do vertex work more efficiently than Cell, I'm sure almost nobody will say you that. The problem is that Xenon work isn't to cover that, but other aspects of the engine, as gameplay/IA/sound/networking code... Graphics engines are made to tax more the strong points of Xenos architecture, the fragment ops. PS3 architecture is a beast at vertex power, but flat polygons were used generations ago, nowadays post effects are much more important than meshes, as you can approximate very efficiently high polygon models with low polygon models and shadow/normal maps. And we shouldn't forget the texelation unit in Xenos, which will provide much more vertex power to the X360.

tesselation it's a directx 11 feature.

rumours say it can apply to xenos, though. even it's only a DirectX9 capable.

right now ps3 its doing 20k polygons models without problems (God of war 3), even without tesselation.

Tessellation is a directx 11 feature, but you could find a tessellation unit in the radeon 8500, a directx 8 card! (TRUFORM) The problem is that as it wasn't a standard then, it was barely used (Serious Sam and Return to castle wolfestein were two of a very low number of games that gave you the option to use it)

It should be used much more frequently in the future, as is exposed in directx11, and reciently in the newest 360 SDK, so games that use it in it's windows counterpart should use it in the X360 version, where you could use SPUs to do a similar function.