Opinion: Is the GPU holding the PS3 back?

258w ago - Self-proclaimed veteran games industry marketer, Bruce Everiss, believes Sony's GPU is holding back the console and that it has made it a less powerful gaming machine than the Xbox 360.

Everiss uses a quote from Richard Huddy of ATI to back up the claim: "I think Xbox 360 technology is likely to outperform PlayStation 3 technology by a pretty healthy margin in the long run. It looks like the GPU is holding the PS3 back."

To quote: For the PS3 Sony wanted to have a technology advantage so they developed, in conjunction with Toshiba and IBM, the Cell processor. A clean sheet design with many innovations this took $400 million and four years to develop.

The intention was to use two of these in the PS3, one as CPU and one as GPU. However at the last minute Sony realised that the Cell GPU wasn't up to the job so they went to nVidia and bought their 7800GTX GPU. This gave them a number of disadvantages:

* It wasn't designed or optimised as a console GPU. It was designed and optimised as a PC GPU.
* The whole architecture of the console was compromised by the last minute change.
* The 7800GTX has less raw processing power than the Microsoft Xbox 360 GPU.