It's got power, but it's at the line of overkill. Developers aren't exactly having fun with the cell architecture, either. Sony is busy driving a format war rather than securing exclusitivity rights to major game franchises for their precious new console, they hesitated giving developers final hardware specs as long as they could, and dev kits are few and far between. Usually there's one or two playstation exclusive titles out that I consider worth the price of admission, but all of the franchises that I was interested in have either dropped exclusitivity to Sony or have gone in a bad direction with the franchise (See: Devil May Cry). They lost a ton of exclusive titles a couple of months back and I was suprised at a few of them (Mainly GTA), I figured that was that. However, it's continuing on more and more. Virtua Fighter 5 was just announced this week as 360 bound. Looks to me like either Sony isn't coughing up enough cash to keep these exclusive, or developers are losing faith in them. Hmmm...
Sony is playing catchup and will be for quite awhile because of the year headstart Microsoft pulled off, and in all honesty I have to question why exactly they needed another year to release the PS3. It becomes quite clear when you look into the reasons for the delay that they really place their format war before the success of their new console. The 360 has an optional HD-DVD drive attachment that you can purchase if you really want to, they did not force you to upgrade unlike Sony. Beta deck, UMD, and now Bluray. All failed formats, all Sony formats.
It's really a shame that the cell processor's future is riding on the success of the PS3, because it has a lot of potential. In the hands of a company only interested in squeezing every last penny from their customers, it will sink just as fast.
If you're really interested in reading about what the PS3 can do in comparison to the 360 I suggest you read this:
http://dpad.gotfrag.com/portal/story/35372/?spage=1
It gets real interesting at the GPU breakdown section;
Quote:
Did Microsoft just make a mistake or did they purposely misrepresent their GPU to lead Sony on? The 360’s GPU is revolutionary in the sense that it’s the first GPU to use a Unified Shader architecture. According to developers this is as big a change as when the vertex shader was first introduced and even then the inclusion of the vertex shader was merely an add-on not a major change like this. The 360’s GPU also has a daughter die right there on the chip containing 10MB of EDRAM. This EDRAM has a framebuffer bandwidth of 256GB/s which is more than 5 times what the RSX or any GPU for the pc has for its framebuffer (even higher than G80’s framebuffer)
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"Competition is natural to the ignorant; and cooperation is natural to the wise." - Manly Hall
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