A GTX 660 is about 5 generations of GPU hardware designs ahead of the PS3's RSX, and almost 200 times more powerful in FLOPS.
Even a modern Intel CPU's built in hardware acceleration will give the RSX a run for it's money!
That PC spec is definitely aimed at delivering much higher quality than current-gen consoles do.

Dropping down to that resolution would be very noticeable...But, are you saying that this is not done on the ports to PC of such games?

It's noticable for high-frequency details. Many details only change at a low frequency (except at edges), like indirect lighting, ambient occlusion, smoke/dust absorbtion, circle-of-confusion radius, etc... These can be computed at low-resolution, and then upscaled with a bilateral filter to fix edges, or the edges can be re-rendered at high resolution (using Hi-Stencil to avoid re-rendering the upscaled data).
PC games likely use the same techniques, especially when selecting low detail settings. It's a standard optimization these days -- e.g. if playing in 2048*1152 on PC, expect some calculations to take place at 1024*576.
Perhaps if you select uber detail settings, they'd not perform these optimizations.

I'd like to read that information, sources?[/quote]Halo 3 internally uses 1152×640, Reach internally uses 1152 x 720, however Halo 4 uses a new engine that apparently uses full 720p.
I remember Bungie explained their choice somewhere (probably here), but googling [[font=courier new,courier,monospace]halo 720p 640 1152[/font]] brings up some other links besides the wikipedia one above.

You can find lists like this by searching for something like [1080p ps3 games], but keep in mind that these will include false-positives --
When a game boosts, it checks your XMB/dashboard settings to see what your desired TV resolution is, and then it can choose to create it's "front buffer" at that resolution, or a lower one (e.g. if you've selected 1080i, the game can still make a 720p front buffer). However, even if the game does create a 1080p front buffer, it may still be rendering at 720p and then up-scaling the results to 1080p itself.
[edit]Here's a good list: http://forum.beyond3...ead.php?t=46241[/edit]

Most games choose 720p over 1080p because it's half the pixel cost, and compared to modern PC's, the consoles suck at pixel processing.
Games with a lot of pressure to look great (like Halo or Modern Warfare) often go further, like the 640p example. Others dynamically change the resolution, like Wipeout. The last game I worked on, we'd time the GPU and if it started taking more than 33ms per frame, we'd continually reduce the horizontal resolution until the frame times stabilized (or until we hit a minimum resolution of 1024*720).

Isn't eDRAM an advantage?

It's good and bad. It's separate to the regular 512MiB of RAM, which means if you want to bind a render-target and keep it's previous contents, then you've got to copy the previous contents from RAM into eDRAM. When you've finished rendering a render-target, you've also got to copy the results out of eDRAM into regular RAM. This means that switching render-targets can be very expensive on the 360 so you've got to avoid it (on other GPU's, switching render-targets can be as simple as changing a single pointer).
Another down-side is that eDRAM is fixed size, and fairly small -- just 10MiB on the 360. This makes deferred rendering very hard (e.g. a 720p G-Buffer with 3 layers + a depth buffer is 14MiB) and also makes HDR complicated (e.g. a 720p RGBA FP16 + depth buffer is 10.5MiB). If you want to use those types of render-targets, then you either have to reduce their resolution until they do fit into the 10MiB limit, or split the target into multiple parts, and render your scene twice (doubling your vertex cost).
The upside is that eDRAM is lighting fast, so you're almost never ROP bound, even with alpha blending and high bits-per-pixel formats.

I was raised with nintendos and I still like playing their games on a console.
I am not sure why, when I play Donkey Kong Country on my SNES, for example, it is a lot of fun but in my computer (using an emulator) it doesn't thrill me at all.
So I like having Nintendo's consoles.

Other than that, action, FPS and RPG games that are more [size=2]hardcore I play on the computer.
With Steam Big Picture out there I would rather save money to build a nice game rig and connect it to the TV than buying an XBox360 or PS3.
Note: Xbox360 controller works great on PC
Note2: You can always add your non-steam games to your library.

Of course I am thinking on games that I play more frequently and by myself.
If I want to play Rock Band on PS3 or Just Dance on Xbox360, for example, there is always a friend that have the console and the games

[quote name='Alpha_ProgDes' timestamp='1352232987' post='4998183']
I have a question though. Is it true that the WiiU is not as powerful as the 360 or PS3?

This depends on what 'power' you are talking about; no one system is the over all metric of a systems power.

For example, you can have the best GPU in the world but if the CPU can't push the draw calls then it won't matter much beyond 'making more expensive shaders isn't a bottle neck'.
By contrast, as with the PS3, having a good CPU (SPUs are very good at what they do, if not a pain to work with) but a GPU which is a pile of garbage means you can push all the draw calls you want but can't render them.

At some point I should probably check how much knowledge about the Wii-U is in the public domain so that I can properly point out why we are worried about the CPU on it...
[/quote]

So I saw this news article just now. And it said,

“The specs are quite different than the competitive systems, much more graphically intensive,” he stated. “If you do a side-by-side comparison you would see that third-party games like Call of Duty look dramatically better on our system.”[/quote]

How much of that is true and how much of that is spin?

There's a write up here: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-black-ops-2-wii-u-face-off
From the looks of it, the GPU is fine with the workload, but the CPU struggles.

Buy a gaming laptop instead!

You get email, webcam, Internet TV ( 1000s channels ), Internet Radio, surf the whole web, and get most of the greatest game titles as well as more games than offered by PS or Xbox by the thousands.

A laptop is much more portable and will be obsolete much later, too.



Clinton

For the PS3 owners... has the online experience gotten any better? It was pretty terrible compared to 360 when I tried it a few years ago. I only kept my PS3 for a few months before giving up on it and just sticking with PC + 360.

The only troubles I've ever had were with specific games. I used to meet up with my group every night, and we'd mess around in games like GTA and Red Dead Redemption, and I do Dark Souls and COD a lot. Never really have issues except in Black Ops, because their net code is FUBAR. It eventually got better in Black Ops, but now Black Ops 2 is going through all the same BS all over again, like they learned nothing the first time.

Fable 2 ran at a sub 720p resolution, but even on my 40 inch tv it never managed to look bad when it was being upscaled to 1080p. Never really had a problem with the resolution on any of my games. Of course it could be better, but it never affected my enjoyment. It's about content, not minor tech specs.

I don't know why people bring tech specs into this? What resolution does Red Dead Redemption run at on PC? Oh, right. None. Most of my favorite games never made it to the PC, and a lot of the ones that did didn't survive the transition very well.

The PC has a very different gaming culture. So many genres are under represented, or completely absent.

The best option is a Nintendo console and a PC. You then have the best of both worlds: Fun console gaming and the most powerful hardware that neither the PS3 or 360 can match.