DISCLAIMER: I'm heavily biased towards PC gaming so take everything with a grain of salt 
Getting back on topic and away from a hopeless PS2/XBox flame war (I mean c'mon both look crap, really. Poly counts mean nothing when you are playing at low res with horrible 60hz refresh. How can anybody handle that? See, biased, uhh back on topic now...) I think that sony are doing a lot of hype and that is never a good thing. No way they are going to deliver all their promises. So PS2 is 100x the power of the PS1? It sure does not look 100x better. You always get diminishing returns, doubling polys won't make scenes look twice as smooth. Check out ToyStory vs ToyStory2. I would argue that in the scene complexity you can only notice a small difference yet TS2 has twice the poly count of TS. It looks nicer but not twice as nice (at least IMO).
The PS3 will not be able to render FF:TSW in real time. Its nice to dream but it won't happen. By 2005 when the PS3 comes out it will be expected to render to HDTV not current TV resolution, which is still lower than film but already quite high. Offline rendering of FF:TSW would take several hours per frame. Say a frame takes 10 hours to render and we want 60fps that would mean 10*60*60*60 = 129,600,000 that is how many times faster the PS3 CPU would have to be compared to a current CPU to render it. Sure factor in lower res and dedicated hardware and that number gets smaller but I doubt it would be anywhere near possible (ok, I'm kind of pulling these numbers out of a hat with no backing whatsoever so don't trust it one bit, its highly theoretical).
To clear a few things up: raytracing/radiosity? Not gonna happen for a long time. Even big movies use lots of tricks and shortcuts and do not calculate accurate lights. One of the first things you learn when doing CGI is how to fake radiosity-like lighting by using multiple light sources at varying intensities around a scene. You know the shiny plastic helmet thingy Buzz Lightyear in Toy Story has? Gues what, it uses a relfetion map like used in games these days not raytraced relfections. One of the first movies to use radiosity was Ice Age and that used a highly optimized (read: inaccurate) algorithm and not for all scenes either. Most of the time if it looks good enough its good enough (why do raytraced reflections when a reflection map looks just as good esp. in a fast moving scene and it renders like a bazillion times faster?). Sure, you can simplify/optimize movies if you want to render them in real time with minimal loss of quality but you will not get quite so substantial speed gains as some people seem to think unless you start removing a lot of polys but then it will be noticeable (some people might be fooled but not those that know what to look for, just like some people think Gollum in LOTR looks real while others do not).
Anyhow, what will be the impact of a 1 TFLOP PS3. Or more precisely: What will be the impact of the PS3 regardless of what real specs it will have? Same as the PS2: it will be amazing when it first comes out and then other next-gen consoles will come out (XB2, GC2) and next-gen PC graphics cards will come out and will start to look dated maybe 6moths-1year down the line. Will it be a cool piece of tech? Sure. Will it change the way we lead our lives and deliver us to graphics utopia as Sony would want us to believe? Nope.
One more thing: A supercomputer in every home! Man, I think that is so funny. We already have supercomputers in our homes if we go by the standards of a few years back. You know the computers they used to get people on the moon? Probably less power than your average scientific calculator these days. Simulations of nuclear explosions/reactions? You could do 'em on any home PC these days if you had the code. Sure, in 5-10 years time you can do the weather simulations and whatever it is they do on supercomputers these days on your PC (or PS3/4) but why on Earth would you want to?
Getting back on topic and away from a hopeless PS2/XBox flame war (I mean c'mon both look crap, really. Poly counts mean nothing when you are playing at low res with horrible 60hz refresh. How can anybody handle that? See, biased, uhh back on topic now...) I think that sony are doing a lot of hype and that is never a good thing. No way they are going to deliver all their promises. So PS2 is 100x the power of the PS1? It sure does not look 100x better. You always get diminishing returns, doubling polys won't make scenes look twice as smooth. Check out ToyStory vs ToyStory2. I would argue that in the scene complexity you can only notice a small difference yet TS2 has twice the poly count of TS. It looks nicer but not twice as nice (at least IMO).
The PS3 will not be able to render FF:TSW in real time. Its nice to dream but it won't happen. By 2005 when the PS3 comes out it will be expected to render to HDTV not current TV resolution, which is still lower than film but already quite high. Offline rendering of FF:TSW would take several hours per frame. Say a frame takes 10 hours to render and we want 60fps that would mean 10*60*60*60 = 129,600,000 that is how many times faster the PS3 CPU would have to be compared to a current CPU to render it. Sure factor in lower res and dedicated hardware and that number gets smaller but I doubt it would be anywhere near possible (ok, I'm kind of pulling these numbers out of a hat with no backing whatsoever so don't trust it one bit, its highly theoretical).
To clear a few things up: raytracing/radiosity? Not gonna happen for a long time. Even big movies use lots of tricks and shortcuts and do not calculate accurate lights. One of the first things you learn when doing CGI is how to fake radiosity-like lighting by using multiple light sources at varying intensities around a scene. You know the shiny plastic helmet thingy Buzz Lightyear in Toy Story has? Gues what, it uses a relfetion map like used in games these days not raytraced relfections. One of the first movies to use radiosity was Ice Age and that used a highly optimized (read: inaccurate) algorithm and not for all scenes either. Most of the time if it looks good enough its good enough (why do raytraced reflections when a reflection map looks just as good esp. in a fast moving scene and it renders like a bazillion times faster?). Sure, you can simplify/optimize movies if you want to render them in real time with minimal loss of quality but you will not get quite so substantial speed gains as some people seem to think unless you start removing a lot of polys but then it will be noticeable (some people might be fooled but not those that know what to look for, just like some people think Gollum in LOTR looks real while others do not).
Anyhow, what will be the impact of a 1 TFLOP PS3. Or more precisely: What will be the impact of the PS3 regardless of what real specs it will have? Same as the PS2: it will be amazing when it first comes out and then other next-gen consoles will come out (XB2, GC2) and next-gen PC graphics cards will come out and will start to look dated maybe 6moths-1year down the line. Will it be a cool piece of tech? Sure. Will it change the way we lead our lives and deliver us to graphics utopia as Sony would want us to believe? Nope.
One more thing: A supercomputer in every home! Man, I think that is so funny. We already have supercomputers in our homes if we go by the standards of a few years back. You know the computers they used to get people on the moon? Probably less power than your average scientific calculator these days. Simulations of nuclear explosions/reactions? You could do 'em on any home PC these days if you had the code. Sure, in 5-10 years time you can do the weather simulations and whatever it is they do on supercomputers these days on your PC (or PS3/4) but why on Earth would you want to?
