» Wed Jun 24, 2009 5:56 pm
By optimizing on consoles you automatically gain new insight into general facts about hardware, on Xbox 360 especially because its structure is like that of modern PCs whereas the CPU on PS3 is a complicated, individualistic piece of technology. I bet Crysis 2 on PC will show how much better a game can look and run, on an identical PC, than Crysis and Warhead did. According to one youtube-video...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_s24K9aLmY
...the GPU of a machine in a showing room was a gtx 260, and the game ran at full hd in "high" settings, AA and VSync On (whatever that means in regards to AA). I won't judge how great it looked from off-screen footage but the aiming was clearly Mouse controlled so this really was PC footage.
To me it seems quite different from the original game - closer to photorealism in terms of how dark shadows are, how shiny objects reflect light etc.. Surfaces in general looked very convincing when the player got closer to them, the movement also appeared fluent (I detected no lag in the gameplay).
I bet the textures haven't been improved greatly (I wouldn't if I was in charge of a multiplatform game that uses a lot of shader effects) and the Poly-Count won't be much higher either. But I am confident that the resulting game will look better and run better on identical machines, and that's a great achievement imo.