I miss the raw numbers of 'polygons per second.' Interesting that ps3 does 250-300, I've never read that anywhere, I guess it matters less and less over time, but it is still interesting.
And? The PS3 design is what, seven years old at this point? I would be shocked if some clever dick couldn't jam that many vector units onto a middling processor and call it good, at this point.
The reason that, say, Uncharted 3 looks so great has very little to do with any commonality with this ARM design and much more with sophisticated tooling that is now available.
Yeah, you are right. It’s totally not a big deal that tablets will soon be able to compete head on with consoles. That totally doesn’t change anything at all about the future of consoles.
There are new tablets every year. At the very least this might force Sony and Microsoft to move faster.
While I totally agree that the progress of mobile GPUs is amazing and Sony/Microsoft should be scared... this comparison ("we have a GPU that's almost as good in one particular area as PS3") is very much flawed.
The GPU in PS3 is probably it's weakest part. Most of games that push the hardware end up using a ton of SPUs to do work that a GPU would normally do. Image postprocessing, deferred lighting, skinning, vertex transformations etc. It will take a while until the mobile chips can host the power of PS3's SPUs!
Another big point is memory bandwidth. Even if ARM's new GPU could achieve these vertex transformation rates in theory, I'd bet in practice it wouldn't because of much, _much_ more limited memory bandwidth on a mobile system compared to a console. And bandwidth will not rise fast there, since memory subsystem is one of larger energy consumers.
Sure, the PS3 is seven years old and even the PS3 slim is a few years old now. The thing is though, that even the slim is an appliance, it's something that you need to allocate space for in your living room. That level of power in a mobile device is a whole other thing.
