Can you provide a benchmark in any game showing NV2a outperforming a Ti4600 at the same settings today?
benchmarking a console?
you can try with games
the Nv2A lacks totally of local memory, but you can try Doom3, Riddick, Halo, Splinter Cell 4, Half Life 2
on a pc with a celeron 700, 64 MB of ram and a ti4600?
@640x480 do you think to obtain 30 fps with vsync on?
again, do you think that ti4600 can run with this performances a game with the visuals of Black?
and Nv2A is only a GF3 + 1 Vertex unit without local mem (using system mem for framebuffer and textures), on paper it's lightyears worse than a GF3 with dedicatet local memory
Certainly there are features of Xenos than the 1900 can't replicate in the same way but in terms of producing the same level of visuals I don't see why it would be any less capable.
I don't know if an X1900 can run games as Gears of Wars with the same settings, what I remember is the demo of gow showed last year at E3, 10-15 fps with a SLI rig on the pc version of the UE3, ok the code is immature because of the date and in a year of developing the console can drastically improve the performances thanks to special dedicated optimizations
this answer to your question, why R500 can do visuals that cannot be possible on X1900 (that is a great great gpu)?
because R500 is in a closed box and can beoptimized in so many ways
there're so many things that was not yet available to developers..
an efficient tiling system, for example, better extensions, a big direct360 update will be there, in time for 3th generation titles
we'll see a lot of procedural textures and memexport use in future, the whole system is almost underused in this moment and most major engines, UE3 for example, are just port of pc engines and don't use any of the special architecture of Xenos-Xenon
all we have to do is wait and see, in this moment we are in the very early life moment of the console in 2 years we'll see visuals actually not possibile in pc and in console worlds
when this happen we will have powerfull pc, but the consoles will improve strongly the visual quality.. this is the same old story, it isn't?
the major difference is that xbox was born old, as mid-to-low pc specs, 360 was born with a lot of thing yet unavailable in pc worlds (advanced shaders vs 3.0, unified arch. vs old static arch, dx-10
class functions, hardware tessellator, cache sharing, thread locking, cpu that access fragment and vertex data while the gpu is processing this data... etc)
I'm not comparing directly the performance, just because there're a lot of factors (pc gpu have a local 256 bit bus, and if you don't tile to use right the eDRAM you'll take an hit on console of 20-40%..... for
example), I'm only saying that 360 is far better than xbox on his time, wait and see