PS3 Half Polygon Performance Of 360 ???

Are developers having a hard time with the Playstation3...

XBOX 360 v PS3 - The Battle continues..

Rumours where abound yesterday that question the overall performance of the CELL processor, throwing doubt as to whether the Playstation3 will contest the Xbox 360 in certain areas.

Stemming from information and pictures allegedly leaked from DevStation, the Inquirer alleges that the Playstation3 RSX chip will suffer in raw polygon performance, managing to push 275 million triangles p/second, compared to the 500 million+ possible on the Xbox 360.

Further still, although the information contained within this article should be enough to make most people feel technically inadequate, it appears that the CELL processor is handicapped with a local memory read bandwidth of ~16MB p/second. Developers on the Playstation3 will have to work around such a design constraint, with official Sony documentation suggesting that code shouldn't be read from local memory, but written to main memory via the RSX and read from there instead.

So there you have it, although not exactly the smoking gun that will have mainstream Playstation gamers switching allegiance to the Xbox 360, it will nonetheless be interesting to see whether developers struggle to create the visual standards that Sony has maintained - but surely they've never tried that before have they...