"Yesterday and the day before we wrote two articles about the Sony PlayStation 3 and what we can expect of the next-gen Console. We received quite some heat from readers about taking sides with Sony and so on. But we also received word from some readers who had something more than pure nonsense on their mind.
One reader fills us in with the Graphics Unit the PlayStation 3 will run and how it will compete with the Xbox 360 solution from Microsoft.

I'm not planning on buying either console, so don't write this off as another fanboy complaint, but your PS3 Fanboy article does have some incorrect info. Your speculation regarding the GPU of the PS3 is wrong. Simply because graphics rendering technology advances at a very rapid pace in comparison to the rest of the processor industry, does not mean that the PS3, debuting March (in Japan, at least), is going to have more rendering power than the Xbox 360. The fact of the matter is, is that Nvidia taped out the RSX months ago, and while it does run at a 10% higher clock speed than the ATi Xenos chipset, it does so with old technology. The Xenos has unified shader architecture that the RSX does not, and as a result, the Xenos may actually turn out to be more powerful than the RSX. Sony may compensate for this by dedicating two or three of the Cell's SPE's to help the RSX out, however. So unless Nvidia overhauls the RSX, in all likelyhood, it will only be as powerful or possible slightly slower than ATi's Xenos. It's entirely possible that Nvidia may bump up the clock speed, but it's unlikely they'll get more than 10% faster than what they have now with that architecture, which will ultimately yield less than a 10% increase in real world performance. More than a marginal speed increase and chip yields become a concern anyway. We already know that the Cell's architecture does not lend itself to games and graphics processing, and the RSX will likely be, if anything, slower than the Xenos.

It would be unwise to conclude that the PS3 will be more powerful at all than the Xbox 360 simply because it's coming out later. It will have more features and they likely won't have the supply problem Microsoft had because they'll have multiple foundries producing chips (both IBM and Sony have foundries that will be producing Cell processors for the PS3), and Nvidia is already producing GPUs based on the same architecture as the RSX and getting good yields. The only thing that could hold Sony back is the Blu-Ray drive and the actual development of games. But do not assume that the PS3 will be at all superior to the 360 in terms of processing and rendering power. Especially just because it's launching later. " [more]