None of the consoles were ever used for their potential. The Xbox 360's CPU wasn't really used to its potential either, if you look at its theoretical numerical

None of the consoles were ever used for their potential. The Xbox 360's CPU wasn't really used to its potential either, if you look at its theoretical numerical throughput compared to the actual throughput. The GPU in the PS3 isn't as powerful as the Xbox 360's GPU, but there are a number of great libraries available that permit augmentation of the GPU with the SPUs. From experience, architectures that are designed first for the PS3 run very well on the Xbox 360, but architectures that are designed for the Xbox 360 (or, worse, PC) will not perform well on the PS3, which punishes you for pointer chasing. The tile-based lighting in BF3 that you mention is interesting because the Xbox 360 CPU did not have enough horsepower to crunch the lighting data so they had to leverage the GPU to augment it. This was challenging because the Xbox 360 GPU was a DX9.0c+ era part and wasn't intended for GPGPU computation. Colin Barre-Brisebois spoke at SIGGRAPH about how this was done: http://publications.dice.se/attachments/BF3_NFS_WhiteBarreBrisebois_Siggraph2011.pdf http://publications.dice.se/attachments/BF3_NFS_WhiteBarreBr... I really like developing for the PS3. It's challenging to code for initially but the rewards are definitely there if you try.