As for more efficient hands down this is the most efficient 3D card ever in fact it's so efficient that some developers are saying It'll take one or two generations of games to approach its tech limits while it will take 2 or 3 gen for RSX to do the same thing. you know we can go on like this forever but I tell you what lets wait for Unreal Tournament 3 if what people in Epic are saying is true they are more concerned with making this game right than optimizing UE 3.0 for Cell ha ha ha
ok I don't dare argue with getsetgo but he made one mistake Xenos is not "lightyears more powerful" now I say this not because I'm 100% sure this is my opinion, remember when GeForce 8800 came out? this was the first PC 3D card with unified shader architecture just like Xenos back then we found out that Shaders in this card were not as complex as shaders from previous generation of cards but they ran at higher speeds so if this is true with all unified shader architecture cards and recent performance from ATI cards makes me think it is, shaders in Xenos are less powerful than the ones in RSX as for shader ops/sec this depends on how many shader ALU operations/pipeline per cycle is xenos capable of 2 as I've heard or 4 second one makes Xenos outperform RSX while first will make it almost two times less powerful than RSX but even with 4 ALU RSX can sneak ahead if it gets some help from Cell BE.
That IGN articles was probably prompted by someone working for MS. As for SPE not able to run anything related to gaming it has been said that there are things like physics and sound, that will work best on SPE rather then on PPE. Take Unreal 3, this engine itself uses Ageia PhysX for physics and and Mark Rein the vice-president of Epic Games said:The PlayStation 3 Cell architecture is very similar to the hardware design of the Ageia chip plus Ageia PhysX code was wery nicely optimized for Cell so physics is definitely PS3 game.
One more thing PowerPC never was the best CPU architecture out there so putting 3 crapy cores together doesn't automatically make one good CPU now Cell BE is a different story and I hope it works The reason SC is Xbox 360 and PC exclusive is that SC very much depends on lighting and if you have not noticed writing this for Xenos is completely different from writing lighting for RSX so Ubi had no choice making a PS3 version costs a lot porting Xbox 360 version will not work cuz' of this lighting stuff. And Unreal Engine 3.0 was built not only for Xbox 360 but also with PS3 in mind.
c'mon sworder this IGN article is crap E3 2005 this is more than a year before PS3 was finished and since both Cell BE and Xenon were co-developed with IBM, PowerPC technology is in their roots so Xenon is basically using three tuned versions of PowerPC core where Cell BE has one PowerPC core 1 dual threaded PPE(surprisingly resembles cores from Xenon) +7 SPE. It is not that Cell BE will have to use 4 SPE for physic simulation it is that code has to be written completely differently to make use of Cell BE architecture.
Unreal 3.0 in GOW does not processes as many interactive objects as the one in SC so Xenon is quickly approaching its tech limits. It took Xenon 2 years to use almost 2/3 of its power with this rate we'll get third gen Xbox in 2009.
sworder my man Xbox 360 DOES not have 3 CPU's running at 3.2 GHz each it has 3 cores and Mathieu Ferland, Senior Producer on Splinter Cell Conviction said that it takes 1 core for physic simulation as majority of objects are interactive inthis gane. So there goes your endless Xenon power and SC Conviction only uses heavily pimped version of Unreal 2.5 now think when SC 6 comes up with Unreal 3.0.
I don't think DIRT is a what you call a truly Next-gen game it takes a lot more than pretty graphics and a decent damage modeling to make a really new game as for phisics and driving I'd say you can't go further than GT4 while using a controller .
AvtoC's comments