PS3 screenshots: HOLY FUCK

[A Black Falcon]

Epic's Mark Rein dropped by our forums to clear up all the hoohah regarding the Playstation 3 footage from yesterday's unveiling:

In addition to the Sony demos being shown by Phil Harrison, the Epic and EA presentations were the only third party portions actually running on the PS3 in real-time. But most of those movies, which I probably watched 3 or 4 during rehearsals for the event, look very achievable and some were probably rendered on the actual box but in non-real-time. When a system is year away, heck even with a system is 6 months away, it is reasonable to expect the power of the dev kits would still only be a fraction of the power of the final system.

I know we'll certainly be able to achieve much more on the final box than we were able to show in our demo after working with the early dev kit for only ~2 months. As Tim mentioned our demo only really showed off the power of RSX and then still we're talk about an RSX that's nowhere near as fast as the final one will be. When we get home from E3 we'll also start diving seriously into the power of the cell processor. This is a very powerful system!

Sony's cell demos were extremely cool and inspiring but are totally achievable, and over time even surpassable, by third developers like us because, as Tim Sweeney said, the development environment is made up of parts we're already intimately familiar with: OpenGL, NVIDIA graphics, Linux, and PowerPC. Think about Epic's experience, for example. We rock on NVIDIA hardware. We have been doing OpenGL since Unreal1. We regularly ship our games on Linux and we've won several Macintosh Game of the Year awards including a special World-Wide Design Award directly from Apple for UT2004. We're going to be able to kick serious ass on PS3, and so are a lot of our licensees and other 3rd party developers, in a way that wasn't remotely possible on past consoles.

I should add that we're in a similar position for XBOX360. It's also made up of parts we're intimately familiar with.

My point is that developers are going to be able to get SO MUCH MORE power out of these consoles than they ever could in the past and so much closer to the raw power of the components.

The next generation is just going to be AMAZING!!! Next gen games will be a huge leap forward over current gen.

Can you tell I'm excited?

Thanks a bunch for the comments Mark, always appreciated.

http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/615/615152p1.html