Jawed said:
Also, while you're at it, would you care to explain how a 170GFLOPs X1800XT is as fast as a 313GFLOPs 7800GTX? Or faster? 
Anyone dealing with theoretical numbers with any sense of due diligence would note that theoretical peaks are just that, theoretical, and they should be taken with a large grain of salt. Architecture and its impact on real world utilization are the most important aspect of any design. It is what you can use that is not important, not what is there. If you cannot realistically utilize performance on the chip then for all practical purposes counting it as some fantastical metric of what chip is better is really useless.
Interestingly, ATI has been quoted as saying current GPUs architectures, including their own, are only 50-70% effecient.
50-70% of 170GFLOPs is 85-119GFLOPs of "real world utilization". And that does not begin to take into consideration of the ROPs.
Last time I checked 119GFLOPs was about half of 240GFLOPs.
Bobbler said:
what we've seen from the Xenos hasn't been 2x the capabilities of R520 (the "devs haven't had the time!" card doesn't really work -- if Xenos was truly 2x, or anywhere near, the power it would be doing a lot more than 720p at 30fps with 2x AA),
This assumes that the bottleneck on titles is the GPU. I would say this assumption is wrong. We have already heard of a number of cases of developers offloading tasks to the other CPUs and the framerate improving dramatically.
Xenon is a tricore in-order PPC chip with shared cache. This is a very different environment than the PC/Xbox--where most of the devs come from--which had a single large OOO x86 processor and on the PC had a bit more cache per core.
As for their kits, they got final Beta Kits in Augest as confirmed by IGN's recent editorial and there were numerous delays after E3 in getting material and transition kits out.
Almost all the launch titles are Xbox or PC ports to some degree. Xenos, like any specialized hardware, needs to be taken into consideration in the design stages to get the best performance.
The fact a number of Xenos features, like hardware tesselation, are not being used by many devs is kind of indicative of the state of affairs: They don't have the time to create custome engines from the ground up, testing what works and does not work with the real hardware and then choosing the right engine path to exploit the strengths of the architecture. We just are not seeing that for obvious reasons.
Xenos ran the ATI R520 demos quite well. I think as developers transition to shader heavy code (which is Xenos' forte) that takes its unique design features into consideration that we will see it perform well.
Judging any console on launch titles is kind of scary. They have been developers with paper specs in hand and not much else. I still remember the PS2 launch which anyone remembers would not be classified as a launch that really showcased what was later to be produced from the system.
I guess the proof on who is right will be in the future games in late fall 2006 and into 2007 when we see the first games written for the Xbox 360 architecture from the ground up appear. In this regards I must give some praise to Sony to partnering with an IHV that had SLI with GPUs of similar features to design on. This gives PS3 devs a good heads up on the architecture to get the most out of their launch titles.
