Originally Posted by Cowboy X

The PS3's cell processor as good as it is, is constantly being held back by the poor RSX in 2 ways.

1/ The RSX is slower than the Xenos in the 360 and takes alot more work to get the same image quality............. and often does not.

2/ The benefits of the Cell can never be realised if the cell constantly has to use its 'extra' resources to bail out the RSX and do gpu work instead of cpu and dsp work.


A perfect example occurred earlier this year when a leading game dev was interviewed and was gushing about the untapped power of the cell and how new techniques were being employed which could see the cell process textures like a beast (code speak for Cell doing the RSX's work). He went into the the fancy workarounds that could be used to significantly boost game performance or graphical quality or both. The PS3 fanboys were quite pleased and happily quoted the dev's words regarding its unused potential and bandied around the % figures given by the dev. They of course neglected to realize that these were programing routines being developed to get a around a serious performance impediment (RSX).

They also happily ignored a later part in the interview when the journalist asked him what sort of performance they might see if they tried the same with the 360. The dev then said that they had no need to do it because the 360's gpu was (is) a beast (relative) and because the 360 easily handled the code without any workarounds or CPU offsets.

Finally the RSX is based on the Geforce 7800 card and as such has some serious problems with image quality relative to ATI products like their X1000 line. So even in a game which performs quite well on the PS3 compared to the 360............... the 360 will still frequently have better image quality.