PlayStation 3 graphics - the truth

Last week we were blown away by what PS3 games should look like, but was it all a hoax?

News has surfaced that the nVidia graphics chip to be used in PlayStation 3, codenamed RSX, isn’t finished yet and that the ‘real-time’ footage and images shown at Sony’s conference in Los Angeles last week couldn’t have been powered by nVidia’s new super chip.

According to T3’s sister videogames site CVG, nVidia’s chief financial officer Marv Burkett revealed at the JP Morgan Technology Conference in San Francisco that the silicon required to build the RSX chip won’t be available until September, meaning that the chip isn’t a reality yet. In defence of the PS3 demos shown at the E3 games show, he said that a combination of nVidia chips with a similar amount of power must have been used.

So does this mean that the footage shown at Sony’s recent E3 conference exaggerated what PS3 is capable of graphically? Not necessarily, however when Sony first unveiled PS2, its ‘real-time’ tech demos seriously embellished the console’s graphical talents. That said, PS3’s Cell processor alone is capable of staggering visual feats even without the RSX chip. Stay tuned for more on PS3 over the coming months.

Source: T3