Quite a lot actually. But the PS3 hasn't changed at all over the past 4/5 years.

more like evolved, the tech will live on, on powerPC family, but i won't be called cell. ;)

that article u are missing.

The Radeon HD5870 is capable of playing most PS3 games with higher detail, more advanced effects,  at well over double the resolution at a frame rate that is 3 to 6 times what the PS3 does; and even the (roughly) $100 Radeon HD4770 would probably get 4 to 6 times the frame-rate of a PS3 game at a similar resolution and detail level.

While there may be some limited effects that the Cell processor may be able to aid with and achieve better results easier than it is possible on the PC currently, a modern mid to high end PC is so much more powerful than the PS3 today that any wide comparison between the two will turn out poorly for the PS3.

those cards were released a year ago, the ps3 its turning 4 year old-

and PC its not only  a GPU, you need CPU, HDD, etc etc.

So I played Killzone 2 yesterday at my friends... thought I would post my thoughts here. Killzone 2 is an embarassement to the FPS genre and I dont even hold a high standard for fps's. Sorry but the game is almost unplayable due to controls and framerate which I believe are related in this case. The graphics... are horrible. Up close the textures are basically 5 year old technology. Crisis looks 100x better and that is older. The art style is cool but I simply wouldnt want to play it due to controls. It feels like im driving a tank not playing a FPS.

The game masks the textures with darkness, excessive shadowings and that horrid blur effect that degrades textures while moveing to keep framerates constant. If this is your case for best graphics then you are sorrily mistaken. My friend, the PS3 fan, also agrees and is not able to play the game because it gives him motion sickness because of how slow the character turns which we believe is done on purpose to keep the game from regressing to slide show. What we got from our analysis is that anyone can make a slideshows with high quality graphics but we have to question the wisdom in making a game practically unplayable in doing so.

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As for the PC price argument. Why are you guys spending so much for a mobo+cpu? An Athlon dual core 5000 and up is more than enough to play games like crysis on full. Your limiting factor is gpu not cpu. Futhermore, most mobos are just reference boards anyway, so no point in paying more than $50. Granted some manyfacturers use better electronic parts but in general I have had just as many problem with boards by Asus and Intel as I have had with ECS and Gigabyte.

Furthermore we are just trying to match the PS3 price not blow it out of the water.

MOBO+CPU = $79 = Phenom II 550 w/Gigbyte Mobo (overkill from Frys)
2 GB memory = $40 (pricewatch)
GPU = $60 = Radeon 3850 512mb ddr3 (pricewatch or amazon)
PS = $30-$35 = 600w (amazon)
Case = $20 = any cheapo will do
HD = $28 = 160GB (Pricewatch)
DVD = $10 (pricewatch)
Wireless KB+M = $20 (frys or pricewatch) I paid $5 for my set
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$292

The cool part is those prices havent changed a whole lot since 4-5 years ago. You could have gotten an Athlon x2 with mobo for about the same price. The GPU was only about $100 back then. Memory hasnt changed much. The rest is the same.

so, we're suppose to believe you and your fried vs the majority here who says that its got great graphics? and that its a good game? hmmm... i'll believe the majority thank you very much.

To your cheap pc claim, i've been trying to  put together a decent pc for a month now and i've been canvasing everywhere for cheap parts and i still cant come up with with one that's less than or at least = $300. And that's even considering generic parts.

Well, theres about 70% PS3 users here. I guess that makes them majority. I can't say anything about that game, because I haven't tried it. Parts he posted do seem to exist and thats not really decent PC, but it is better than PS3 or X360.

One more funny fact, heres a game that cannot be run on PS3(It would just need something PS3 doesn't really have. Well, you could get 1fps or lower, but anyway.) and even those tiny minilaptops can run it.

http://gaygamer.net/2007/12/review_dwarf_fortress.html

(That is not a joke. Its actually true.)

Truly epic...

actually givin taht new techiniques are being developed the effects of what cna be done on the Cell BE is limitless. u might wanna do some reading, . it details the cell BE pretty closely, u must make note of a few key things thats designe don the cell be, 1st 1PPE and 8SPE's leading to its 2.0 TFLOPS max theoreticle performance, dedicated XDR ram, much faster than the ram in ur comp. at the bottom is an exert from the article detailing on how the SPE's allocate the data, it helps them to come closer to their maximum theoreticle output. not saying the pc's arent powerfull but there is still a lot of untapped potential in the cell BE, even in U@ naughty dog said they have kept the cell running a100% of the time but they can still optimize a lot of the code, just cause the processer is busy doesnt mean that its doing everything the most efficient way. 1 more thing, im waiting to see what kind of games can come out of the  phyre engine, or the new crysis engine running on the ps3, when it debuts I believe they will see fantastic results.

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http://www.blachford.info/computer/Cell/Cell0_v2.html

SPE Local Stores - No Cache?

To solve the complexity associated with cache design and to increase performance the Cell designers took the radical approach of not including any.  Instead they used a series of 256 Kbyte “local stores”, there are 8 of these, 1 per SPE.  Local stores are like cache in that they are an on-chip memory but the way they are constructed and act is completely different.  They are in effect a second-level register file.

The SPEs operate on registers which are read from or written to the local stores.  The local stores can access main memory in blocks of 1Kb minimum (16Kb maximum) but the SPEs cannot act directly on main memory (they can only move data to or from the local stores).

By not using a caching mechanism the designers have removed the need for a lot of the complexity which goes along with a cache and made it faster in the process.   There is also no coherency mechanism directly connected to the local store and this simplifies things further.

This may sound like an inflexible system which will be complex to program but it’ll most likely be handled by a compiler with manual control used if you need to optimise.

This system will deliver data to the SPE registers at a phenomenal rate.  16 bytes (128 bits) can be moved per cycle to or from the local store giving 64 Gigabytes per second, interestingly this is precisely one register’s worth per cycle.  Caches can deliver similar or even faster data rates but only in very short bursts (a couple of hundred cycles at best), the local stores can each deliver data at this rate continually for over ten thousand cycles without going to RAM.

One potential problem is that of “contention”.  Data needs to be written to and from memory while data is also being transferred to or from the SPE’s registers and this leads to contention where both systems will fight over access slowing each other down.  To get around this the external data transfers access the local memory 1024 bits at a time, in one cycle (equivalent to a transfer rate of 0.5 Terabytes per second!).  

This is just moving data to and from buffers but moving so much in one go means that contention is kept to a minimum.

In order to operate anything close to their peak rate the SPEs need to be fed with data and by using a local store based design the Cell designers have ensured there is plenty of it close by and it can be read quickly.  By not requiring coherency in the Local Stores, the number of SPEs can be increased easily.  Scaling will be much easier than in systems with conventional caches.

Local Store V’s Cache

To go back to the example of an audio processing application, audio is processed in small blocks so to reduce any delay as the human auditory is highly sensitive to this.  If the block of audio, the algorithm used and temporary blocks can fit into an SPE’s local store the block can be processed very, very fast as there are no memory accesses involved during processing and thus nothing to slow it down.  Getting all the data into the cache in a conventional CPU will be difficult if not impossible due to the way caches work.

It is in applications like these that the Cell will perform at its best.  The use of a local store architecture instead of a conventional cache ensures the data blocks can be hundreds or thousands of bytes long and they can all be guaranteed to be in the local store.  This makes the Cell’s management of data fundamentally different from other CPUs.

The Cell has massive potential computing power.  Other processors also have high potential processing capabilities but rarely achieve them.  It is the ability of local stores to hold relatively large blocks of data that may allow Cells to get close to their maximum potential.

Bro... i told you where to get them from in my post... Those prices are readily available, they are not even sale prices. You can actually do much better if you look for sales at Fry's and Amazon.

What there to believe? Have you played Killzone 2? Are you telling me that the blur effect shouldnt be counted against the game? What about the abysmal turn rate? What about the horrid textures on most inanimate objects once you are within a few feet of the object? I am sure someone will play them off as "features" but the proof is in the pudding. If you want to measure popularity then its obvious what the masses believed. KZ2 = 2.19m sold. Meanwhile games that were barely even advertised, with clearly lower res textures but much better framerates and movement sell more in less time.

Last 30 or so reviews at gamespot also show significant weakness in the score and echo exactly what I said. The game plays like driving a tank after drinking 8 litres of king cobra. Drawing pretty (low movement) images should not qualify a game for graphical awards especially when it clearly effects gameplay. Note: that I didnt say its a bad game, but people are actually hailing it as a graphical wonder on this board... the graphics are horrible when you are actually playing the game. The game itself may still be very good DESPITE its graphical and gameplay flaws.

I don't see the point in the above PC discussion nor this thread. Anyone who is truely an enthusiast, anyone who has exacting standards would not make their primary gaming machine a console. Trying to convince people here of the merits of a PC gaming rig would be like trying to convince a Toyota driver of the merits of having 'an exciting ride'.