"In the render bandwidth dept. Is that a good thing? Read on to find out...

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Not only does it allow you to live with deep and bitter regrets about what might have been, occasionally it allows you to look back and unearth hidden gems you didn't even know you possessed.

So it was today as we pored over our notes and recordings from Monday's ELSPA International Games Summit. You may remember we quite fancied the look of ATi's Assassin demo which we thought was probably our first true indication of the Xbox 360's graphical prowess.

We're still working hard to bring you that in all its full graphical glory (hopefully by end of play today) but in the meantime, we've been poring over some details on the 360's Graphical Processor which ATi's Richard Huddy provided during the presentation. Huddy claimed that the 360's GPU will have: "256 Gigabytes per second of render bandwidth," which he said was roughly, "fifty times the power of the original Xbox" and around "five times more than any other next generation console."

It sounds awfully impressive, but to be honest we're not the biggest tech bods on the planet so we're going to leave it to the more graphically gifted amongst you to decipher the significance in the forums below. However from what we can gather from our resident experts and Huddy's claims, render bandwidth is the graphical pipeline which consoles use to splurge all those saucy looking graphics onto your screen.

No matter how fast your console's CPU and GPU are, if you ain't got the bandwidth to make use of them, you might as well be on current gen. It also echoes certain of Microsoft's claims about the PS3's Cell processor at E3 in that it might be fast but the console wouldn't have the bandwidth to make use of that power.

Of course ATi being the supplier of the 360's GPU you can't say they are exactly unbiased but claim and counter-claim all adds to the great next-gen debate. Please feel free to enlighten us further in the forum below."

If this is all ATI can bring to the table to prove their prowess, I am unimpressed. I am certain this isn't the complete presentation, but nothing tells me this is actual gameplay footage. For one there is no first person or third person (avatar) views. I noticed the gentleman's black suit looks like it's made of plastic. It's not nearly as impressive as the Killzone footage. If you can get a high-quality version of that footage you can see the texture of the fabrics and such. I just can't understand how anyone thinks the Xbox 360 will be the king of the hill when hardware is concerned. PS3 is 2 terabytes of power. Xbox is 1. Raw horsepower is no indication of software, that being said faster hardware generally will yeild higher potential. This is proven with the current generation of systems, Xbox is clearly the superior machine over PS2 and GameCube. PS2 maintains it's spot due to the fact they have excellent coffer of developers that make a very wide variety of games for the system.