What's Known About the PS3

1up has an expansive piece up exploring everything they know about the PlayStation 3. They cover rumours, prices, technology, and the limited information currently out there on upcoming games. From the article: "While the hard facts are still tough to nail down, the general consensus is that the PlayStation 3 is the most powerful of the three next-generation systems, although probably not by as much of a margin as Sony would like us to think. The arguments for the technical strengths of the PS3 go into CPU floating-point capabilities and the difficulties surrounding programming for parallel architectures, but the long and short of it is that whether or not the advantages of the PS3 are apparent will depend on developers' ability to utilize the PlayStation 3's unique architecture."

Comments

That's without the PS3's NVidia GPU

[Animats]

I went to a talk at Stanford where the lead architect of the Cell processor described that demo. That's running on a Cell processor which is actually doing the rendering. Sony's original plan for the PS3 worked that way, but they eventually put in a conventional NVidia chip.

So in the PS3, the Cell processors aren't doing the rendering. The Cell should render about as well as everything else with a current NVidia part.

Flyovers are easy if you have enough RAM and a GPU. How much RAM did the demo rig have?