Anyways in a recent thread people have wondered how can Cell help the RSX so much as it has to do all the other work in the game as well.
One thing to remember is the Cell is very very powerfull in maths and can make diffrent aproaches for graphics. For example Cell will wipe the floor with any GPU today on Ray casting or Ray tracing. Also Cell has much more of an open architecture, this means that diffrent techniques can be used. In the above example instead of using artist to do huge levels of detail and textures have the Cell do it for you with pracedural generation.
And out of intrest this is not pie in the sky stuff. As the Cell is allready doing Ray traced volumetric clouds + procedural generation (of the waves) and other graphics effects in Warhawk. In addition it is controlling the AI of hundreds of onscreen 3D objects in very large maps.
Again refering to another point someone made in I believe the games part of this forum regarding the PC being > than PS3 in 2008. I seriously doubt it. The Cell is currently 7> better than any chip on the market in many maths tasks and 100s of times better at graphics. The Cell is also 6-7 times more powerfull
than the GT 7800 at raytracing.
It's the power of the Cell to do these types of calculations leaving the RSX to do the shading etc. That will make the PS3 the killer Physics, Graphics and animation console for this generation.
Because of the nature of the Cell comparisons with the way that graphics are GPU bound are an apples to orange comparison. This is due to the fact that the Cell doesnt inherantly need a GPU to do graphics in the first place. The fact is that Cell allows developers to have compeltly diffrent aproach to how to program a game from graphics to physics etc.
Procedural generation is a prime example of how the Cell can be used to create graphical environments without the need of massive textures drawn by artists etc.
GameTomorrow