The PS3 has been the top selling console in the world for over two years since the Wii started to rapidly fade in popularity.

Console gamers obviously are doing the exact opposite of what you are suggesting.

Yes, desktop PC are massively inefficient compared to a modern graphics architecture like the one in the PS3.

You have gimped processor with pathetic floating point performance thanks the horrendous Intel x86 chips that should have been done away with years and years ago. The performance is so bad relative to more modern computing hardware that the hottest programming area in PC development is going through the tedious and wasteful effort of trying to shoehorn heavy computational task across the main bus to the GPU.

The GPU is sitting across a relatively slow bus that is managed by a software driver that the programmer has no control of. Hence why GPUs on PC are constantly having to ramp up the onboard memory because the last thing you want to be doing in a PC game engine is streaming large amounts of data from the CPU side to the GPU side. And why PC programmers have such trouble writing a modern graphics engine where all data is streamed just in time over highspeed asynchronous buses like in the PS3. Instead they try to treat the hardware just like the archaic desktop PC where you are effectively forced to dump the majority of your working set of data into the big expensive and inefficiency GPU memory so you are bogged down by the slow main bus and unpredictable CPU to GPU bus driver.

That's just an unavoidable reality of commodity hardware that no single entity is in charge of. And hardware that needs to function from simple dumb terminal for checking email all the way up to the highest end games. The tradeoff is a huge amount of waste and inefficiency and extra cost for the same graphical performance relative to console hardware.

And the little kid pretending to be 'console developer' blows it by parroting a silly rumor.

Here's a hint kid. Don't try to bullshit about things people have sitting in the offices right now.

Give it a rest.

I've had to read the lame attempts of countless little kids like you over the past 15 years since the Dreamcast arrived. You're about a 2/10 compared to the rest.

You've never seen the inside of console development house.
You've never touched a real life PS3 devkit - let alone done actual work on one.
Nor will you ever.

You're just yet another boring and not very bright kid doing a poor job of pretending he's someone he isn't.

Dreamcast, Xbox, and PC fanboys have been doing the stupid shit you're trying to do for the past 15 years. Most of them a much better job than your lame attempt at pretending to be a 'console developer'. Not a single thing any of them spent so much effort on ever had the tinniest effect on the console market.

Get a life.

"Console developer here"

No you're not. And you're doing a really poor job trying to pretend to be one.

Your problem is went to far with your hyperbole to the point even someone who might fall for your stream of cut and pasted techno babble would know that regardless what you are saying that whatever it is it is obviously not true since PS3 games are running at higher resolutions, much larger amounts of geometry, much more detailed materials, much more advanced lighting models, and on and on.

What is funny about your attempt at pretending to be a 'console developer' is it is exactly the same silly attempt that guys like you have been making going all the way back to the Dreamcast days. PC programmers(or guys who listen to PC programmers) who don't have a clue how anything other than the archaic desktop PC architecture works and how game engines are written for it. They are frightened and completely lost by anything that isn't that sort of architecture - hence the lashing out at modern architectures like the PS2, PS3, etc.

It is fun to go back and read guys like posting the solemn and desperately hoping to be authoritative pronouncements about console hardware graphics capabilities.

Don't you guys ever get tired of being wrong?

"Graphics quality have little to do with the power of the hardware. It's how much time the devs spent optimizing for a particular console that defines how good the game looks."

I don't know how anyone could possibly write something so inane.

Why would you post something so obviously untrue?

"They originally planned not to need a GPU because Cell was supposed to have enough FP power to do the 3D graphics all by itself but that turned out not to be the case."

Please stop parroting crap from the Beyond3D forums.

Our company is large enough to have had access to the PS3 hardware designs at a very early stage and were in a dialog with Sony engineers about the design. At no time did the PS3 have any other design than what is in the shipping hardware today. The only things that were to be determined were clockspeeds, number of SPUs, etc.

Not only is that stupid lie started on the Beyond3D forums false, it doesn't even make sense. The PS2 and PS3 have almost identical hardware designs. That is the feedback we console developers gave to Sony - we want a PS2 taken to the next level. Which is exactly what the PS3 was and is.

I don't even know what the hell that rambling wall of text is supposed be.

Our company being one of the largest developers/publishers working on the original Playstation our engineers worked directly with Sony on the design of the PS2(and the PS3). The PS2 was our dream console.

It is such an elegant machine. It was able to put out graphics that were just as good for all but a few areas like multipass rendering and AA as the Xbox while easily surpassing it in areas like frame buffer effects(one of the major reasons the Xbox couldn't handle the Metal Gear port from the PS2 without bogging down) and physics calculations for animation thanks to the insane floating point power in the PS2. And all this while the manufacturing cost of the PS2 was roughly half that of the Xbox 360.

It really is bizarre to read someone who has never worked on a real console game spew a bunch of techno babble.

The PS2 and PS3 are almost identical hardware designs that are almost perfectly designed to maximize graphical power with the absolute minimum hardware costs. The only exception being the Blu-Ray drive which was very new tech compared to the PS2 more mature and cheaper drive tech.

It really is strange to hear desktop PC game programmers cry about how the PS2/PS3 isn't exactly like their desktop PC and how they can't just dump their code designed for a completely(and massively inefficient) architecture like the standard x86 desktop PC is.

The main engine starts off on the EE/PPU. Does basic setup. Loads tasks into the VUs/SPUs. The heavy lifting tasks on the VUs/SPUs start firing away asynchronously while the main engine continues along with the less computationally heavy game code. As data in the VUs/SPUs become ready for rendering, that data is DMAed over to the GS/RSX.

Over time you continue to maximize the parallelism going on and get to the point where all three parts of the PS2/PS3 are cranking away at their respective tasks. Thanks to the bus architecture of the PS2/PS3 this happens with a minimal amount of bus contention slowing the system down. It is always funny to hear some PC programmer or someone on the Net parroting them crying about the split bus architecture and how they can't just dump everything into one big block of memory.

That amazing design by Sony is the PS2 was able to put out graphics that were so close to a machine that came out a year later and had components that cost roughly twice as much.

I remember the excitement in the company when the first PS2 devkit arrived and were placed in a locked room. Only a few top engineers in the company had access to the room. People would come and stare through the glass at the devkit demos running on the screens and standing around chatting with the guys working on the PS2 hardware. And I remember the engineers holding mini seminars in one of the conference rooms diagramming out the amazing PS2 hardware architecture and how engines will be written for the hardware.

Sony did an absolutely amazing job with the PS2 hardware design. It was a system that much resembles some finely tuned race car that has had every single bit of wasted weight trimmed from it and setup so the driver can do one single thing, drive fast. Looking back at the PS2 code for our games it is wonderful to look at just how small and straightforward the PS2 engine code is. Pack as much data into DMA packets down to the point where not a single bit is wasted. None of the wasteful lines and lines of setup code one has to go through when writing engines for a desktop PC(or a desktop PC in console case like the Xbox).

It is no surprise Sony was able to keep the PS2 hardware viable for almost 13 years. Unmatched console hardware design and manufacturing prowess mixed with the best developer support and tools.

And Sony treats developers better than anyone else. They've always had the mindset of tell us what you need and well make it happen. Nintendo has always been too focused on their own first party titles and have always had an underlying attitude of 'we don't really need anyone but ourselves'. And Microsoft...I don't know where to being with how bad they are with supporting developers. The fact that they managed to piss off their sole important first party developer Bungie so much that they forced Microsoft to let them leave the company is a good an indication as any of just how bad Microsoft is with supporting developers.