MikeB said:
The RSX is more powerful than the Xenos, both designs however provide their advantages and disadvantages. The Xenos is more flexible (but the amount of EDRam is a severe limiting factor), but the Cell for what the RSX has been designed to take advantage of, is far more flexible.
More powerful? You can't just go by MHz, etc. RSX does have better shading performance iirc, however, it is pretty limited in vertex processing compared to Xenos.
That said, it's about the system as you've implied. When taken together, amazing things can be done. The problem is generally with multiplatform releases, since it's quite difficult to tap the PS3 when creating a multiplatform engine. The architecture is just too different from 360/PC, so at most ... you can hope the PS3 releases aren't signicantly gimped.
For instance, EDGE and many 3rd party engines now use an SPU to do coarse vertex culling before sending the data to RSX. That helps alleviate the vertex delta between the GPU's somewhat, but is obviously not 'taking advantage' of what the PS3 can do. You'll only really see that in 1st/2nd party offerings for the most part.
Hunter D said:
No, it can't. If it could sony would not of used the RSX.
I don't know if those specs are accurate, but they may be ... regardless, that does not imply PS3 wouldn't need RSX.
Those numbers would be for using the SPU's only for vertex generation, meaning you'd only have a single core CPU doing all physics, AI, etc. That would be pretty limiting. Beyond that, it's just talking refering to vertex generation, not texturing, shading, etc. So even on the graphics end, we aren't talking about the whole nine yards.