The Xbox 360 GPU, manufactured by ATI, is the least PC-like of the two GPUs for a number of reasons, the most obvious being its 10MB of embedded DRAM. Microsoft announced that the 10MB of embedded DRAM has 256GB/s of bandwidth availble to it; keep this figure in mind, as its meaning isn't as clear cut as it may sound.

The GPU operates at 500MHz and has a 256-bit memory interface to 512MB of 700MHz GDDR3 system memory (that is also shared with the CPU).

Another very prominent feature of the GPU is that it implements ATI's first Unified Shader Architecture, meaning that there are no longer any discrete pixel and vertex shader units, they are instead combined into a set of universal execution units that can operate on either pixel shader or vertex shader instructions. ATI is characterizing the width of the Xbox 360 GPU as being 48 shader pipelines; we should caution you that these 48 pipelines aren't directly comparable to current 16-pipeline GPUs, but rest assured that the 360 GPU should be able to shade and texture more pixels per clock than ATI's fastest present-day GPU.

Now let's move on to NVIDIA's RSX; the RSX is very similar to a PC GPU in that it features a 256-bit connection to 256MB of local GDDR3 memory (operating at 700MHz). Much like NVIDIA's Turbo Cache products, the RSX can also render to any location in system memory, giving it access to the full 256MB of system memory on the PS3 as well.

The RSX is connected to the PlayStation 3's Cell CPU by a 35GB/s FlexIO interface and it also supports FP32 throughout the pipeline.