I question ATI's ability to mass produce high end chips, as their last 5-6 products have taken much longer to get to market than planned. And when they have actually gotten on the market, they high performance cards have been extremely rare, artificially inflating prices. Other than that, it's a PR squirt-fest between Sony and Microsoft and no one will know which one is best until you have it plugged into your TV. It's likely they will both be pretty good and the real winner will whoever delivers the best gaming experience
IIRC, ATI won't actually be making the GPU's for Microsoft. They are just designing it and letting Microsoft make it themselves. That way, Microsoft can give the contract to a manufacturer with the lowest price. They could also make there own adjustments to it, instead of asking ATI to do so. This is a big difference than the deal they had with Nvidia this gen. By relying solely on Nvidia, they didn't have much power when it came to minimizing costs on the GPU; they fixed that this time around. BTW, there is some new info about Unreal Engine 3.0 from GDC. Here are links to Gamespot and IGN articles about it: http://xbox.ign.com/articles/594/594856p1.html http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/03/09/news_6120126.html Some interesting things mentioned in the GS article include: They mentioned one MMORPG using it, which I believe I have seen before. Whoever was making that game really game the engine a bad name though; they somehow made it possible for a game model to look amazing and horrible at the same time. While the articles mentioned they didn't have media of it, some videos of the demonstration are up on the web: http://www.1up.com/do/download?cId=3138759 The fourth one is the best one, IMO.
