New PS3 tech demos: The underwater fish demo looks amazing!
http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3148958

Real time Getaway screen shots.. Hot damn!

^^ Dude I looked at the first screenshot without reading your comment and thought it was a photo of something! That looks damn nice

The amount of programming and graphical work to achieve that level of detail must take forever...

Not every company has to go with this. But publishers like Square Enix that do good business in America will hopefully take advantage of it.

I'll buy that when I see your character and a health bar in the screen as well. Otherwise, it's just a bunch of nicely-rendered cut scenes.

Multiple news sites have stated that they moved the camera around in real time so it was a real time remdering. Not a pre-rendered cut scene. I realize it's not a "game" per se, but the fact that you could manipulate the scene in real time and move the camera is impressive nevertheless.

ps. I've been to that Mc Donalds, Gap and Boots before. Weird.

heres some stuff on some game demos not sure if its been posted

" Warhawk, while looking great, was essentially a barren section of ocean with a lot of fighter ships (they were aiming for a hundred for the final game) going around destroying larger vessels and some nice looking water (wave simulation with procedural animation) and clouds (volumetric raytracing). Overall it was a great demo but a far cry of what was shown last year and gave a nice sobering introduction to the rest of the demos which was shown towards the end. Fortunately it will be playable at E3."



Next up was Motorstorm and just like Warhawk was no where near the E3 target render. The car models and physics were decent although the texturing and the environment was PS2 level of quality. The real star of the demonstration was the deformable terrain which worked quite well with the physics of the cars. The demo also had HDR, post processing effects, and occlusion.


he next game was Resistance, the title formally known as I-8. Out of all the games this one was the farthest along but unfortunately the least interesting. It was your standard FPS affair with highly linear levels, decent A.I. and moderately interesting weapons. The lighting/texturing/modeling was all decent but nothing groundbreaking.

The next title from Insomniac was a bit more interesting and also confirmed that the Ratchet & Clank series is moving to the PS3 in fine form. The demo was a large and vast city environment similar to R&C with a massive amount of cars on screen and some great depth of field.


this is from http://gaming-age.com/news/2006/3/22-53

Another view from IGN:

Resistance:

Once the demo itself began, it was obvious that it wasn't looking as good as the trailer from E3 last year. Price explained this discrepancy right off the bat, "This is in an interoffice demo from several months ago," he said (which Phil Harrison later confirmed to have been from December). "We were using this to show off the look and feel of I-8. And keep in mind, when we programmed this demo we hadn't moved any of the subsystems to the SPUs yet. This was programmed only with the main processing core in mind" [Paraphrased, not a direct quote]

Warhawk:

In the demo, the game was shown with a full HUD of the new futuristic Warhawk ship. Across a massive battlefield, you could see ambient warfare everywhere, with background battles raging far away from you. Our editors report great lighting, volumetric cloud effects, and incredibly fast motion. One of the coolest events involved burning pieces of capital ships raining down and falling into the gorgeous ocean below.

Motorstorm:

Compared to the E3 presentation, the game is close in presentation and functionality and look to its promise, with detail not reaching the level of the astounding E3 demo but still running with some very cool technology to provide a new way of playing in the mud. Developed by Evolution Studios, the game's presentation featured buggies and motorcycles running through a rugged desert. The game's advanced new mud physics were incredible, leaving ruts behind in the mud using real physics. For example, a motorcycle was seen cutting a deep groove in the mud while kicking up muck at a white truck following it, the trailing vehicle buckily wildly as it battled off the streaming mud while also trying to find a line to drive in the groove-etched bog. The particle effects, however, were not nearly at that level of quality, looking very temporary at this stage of early development. Hopefully, the unfinished details will be sweetened up as the game goes on, and the gameplay already showed signs of achieving the frantic nature of the E3 2005 teaser video.

Its like they were looking at different demos...

Considering that level of detail is there in Oblivion, I don't doubt those screenshots one bit.

Well, since it was the PS3 IGN site, I'd have to take their impressions at least with a grain of salt. Gaming Age and 1Up said the demos looked pretty good, but nowhere near what Sony led us to believe. Only time will tell.

A couple of screens, one from I-8 and one from Ratchet & Clank.





Looks pretty good to me. I suspect despite Sony's posturing and self-induced hype at last year's E3, the graphics will be about the same as the 360, with some titles looking better on PS3, and some looking better on 360. Otherwise, I believe differences will be negligible. Specs and technology is just too similar.

The I-8 shot is old and the R&C shot looks like it's from the PS2 version.

I have no doubts that in the long run the PS3 is going to deliver amazing graphics (the best), I just question at what cost (to both consumers and developers), at what point in time will it really make it to market (I'm doubting November), and what types of games will it offer.

As great as that is, I doubt it'll look as good while playing it. It's like the MGS games, the gameplay graphics and cinematics both look great but side by side the gameplay graphics don't look as good as the cinematics. That's because the console doesn't have to worry about AI and whatnot while generating the realtime cinematics. Once such things come into play, the graphics take a hit. You see this a lot on in the Xenosaga games (although, in that case, the realtime cinematics also vary in quality from scene to scene) as well.

Debateable at this point! I think the differences will be about the same as it was between Xbox and PS2, if not less. As we've seen with the 360, some develops will be able to take advantage of the system, while others can't. We've seen a significant difference in games between the bigger studios with a lot of resources, and the smaller studios. Of course, the 360 has a lot of ports which are not indicative of the systems capability. But when the PS3 comes out, ports from current gen systems will drop substantially and eventually disappear.

I can't wait to see developers start utilizing multi-threaded games that take full advantage of the multiple cores in these systems.

PS3 tech demos on IGN: http://ps3.ign.com/articles/698/698086p1.html

Nothing too exciting except the Fish demo and the Unreal demo look pretty cool.

_______________________________________

More getaway info from IGN:

Following the cooling-off period from last year's Electronic Entertainment Expo, Sony Computer Entertainment President of Worldwide Studios, Phil Harrison had something to prove. "People didn't believe that The Getaway demo was real-time," he said during his keynote address today at GDC. "I'm going to bring back the same demo today to prove that it was."

And that's exactly what Harrison did. Booting up the same scene from The Getaway shown at last May's event, the president moved the camera around to show everyone that it wasn't a pre-rendered movie at all. Shifting camera perspectives, he zoomed in and out of London's Piccadilly Circus and revealed new angles to a stage that hadn't been seen before.



Yes, it's impressive looking isn't it?
Sadly, there wasn't much else to the demo other than that. Cars moved realistically down the road; people walked the sidewalks; light reflected off glass and metallic surfaces. It all looked well and good, and as my colleague Chris Roper put it, "It had HDR out the ass!" (For the unfamiliar, HDR is short for 'High Dynamic Range,' which essentially means the manipulation of an image between its brightest and darkest areas beyond the current standard of modern displays.)

Straightforward as it may have been, the demo was used to prove a point. Harrison wanted to show the crowd why having the Blu-ray storage format was so important. This simple Getaway scene in particular, was so huge in terms of its data (hundreds of MBs), that without the Blu-ray, building the environment wouldn't be possible. It's an advantage that the 50 Gigs (on a dual-layered BD-ROM) can bring to content developers -- the opportunity to build and stream bigger, more detailed worlds.

What will all this mean for the final version of The Getaway when it comes out sometime before the apocalypse? Obviously we don't know yet, but if the finished game looks anything like the demo we could be in for a real treat.

Boy, if you are going to make a game like that which will require hundreds of megs for a simple scene, you better make sure you will sell a lot of them. In an age where killer apps sell well, but the rest are ho-hum, you sure don't want to have a huge development cost sitting on a game that is average.

But it is mega impressive.

Instructions:

1) Check out the PS3 Project offset dragon demo on IGN.com http://media.ps3.ign.com/media/764/764837/vids_1.html

2) Pick jaw off the floor

PS3 sneaky demo pics from GDC:
http://www.joystiq.com/2006/03/25/mo...ys-gdc-keynot/

Dr. Mr. Harrison,

Moving a free roam camera around a map like a replay when nothing is happening on screen is not indicative of in game graphics. That is all.

Thanks.

p.s. I'm still not impressed. I'm sure the 360 can render the same scene, detail for detail.

I just preordered a PS3 today. I'm #4. The cashier told me the PS3 will only be available in bundles has anyone heard anything about this? She said this goes for all stores.

Where did you preorder?

From F.Y.E

so how many people are not going to try to get one during launch? I'm still on the fence about trying to get one on launch.

I plan on buying a few. 1 for me and a couple for ebay.

I agree. Seeing these screenshots does nothing for me and I don't even feel motivated to watch any of the tech video demo's as they aren't real games yet, especially since one of the "game demo's" at last E3 was later found out to actually a tech demo as well (that FPS game). The only game I have no doubt they will achieve the level of graphics is Metal Gear Solid 4.