[Cid Highwind]

I lean for nonrealtime videos for promotion. There are visible poligons in the second versions of each pic (see chest area in the first and second).
If thats so, such misrepresented promotional use of supposed ingame streams wouldnt have been very honest.

The less complex textures in some of the second shots would tend to support the possibility of them being optimized for lower media storage than what bluray offers, btw.

The weird thing is that there's no need for that. If it works properly on one system, and not on the other, why should you need to downgrade it on the first one? It's not like they made Dreamcast games look like their PS2 ports. I remember reading that it was common to make good textures and then they would downscale them to the appropriate size, depending on the system. Why not use the original HQ ones for PS3 and use downsized for other systems?

But well, it was probably just a render target then, the differences aren't too big still, let's just hope it will be a smooth 60fps game with nice AA.

 

[Cid Highwind]

as i said, Fat lot you know about texture size.

I had just typed out the exact same reasoning as Ramadear, I too find it highly unlikely that disc space is the limiting factor. Unless the PS3 has some magical compression ratio that would beat the X360 they still have roughly the same amount of memory available. I doubt the size of individual textures has a difference that huge that it would justify Bluray.

 

[Cid Highwind]

to debunk that also another reason on why the vid ram is less on the ps3 is cause it has dedicated cores from the cells rather then useing ram which can produce better texture then the 360
(plz do ur math^^) if u ask me id rather have a CPU making the textures then the ram (can get faster FPS v-sync etc with all good performance) rather then struggling with just a GPU and 512 ram, and if u look at my sig i own all the systems soo im not picking sides i just read up on the systems before i buy them

What? You mean you want to put the textures in those 256kb of the SPEs? You might just be able to fit an average PS2 texture in there but otherwise I doubt it works like that. Textures have to be stored somewhere before they can be used, that's what we have RAM for, not cache. Why would you want to have a CPU do textures anyway? Unless the Cell is a master at graphic calculations, GPUs have proven to be much more efficient than CPUs anyway. That's why we're offloading all sorts of things to them (CUDA etc).

Cell may be able to do some type of calculations that were otherwise performed by the GPU, but I doubt texturing is one of them.

 

[Cid Highwind]

maybe on a pc that would be the case but the PS3 streams textures in real time. Only what is shown on screen at the present time is kept in memory.

So in that case the amount of data being worked with is still limited to 256MB, roughly the same as on the 360 if you just ignore the fact of the shared memory there. You don't want to stream huge quality textures anyway because of optical drive speed, which would lead to heavy pop-in if it's not loaded in time. Also, while pre-loading / streaming you already need to get rid of stuff residing in the memory at that point to store the new data.

So in that case, you're still limited by the RAM that's needed to store what the CPU and GPU work with, not by the amount of textures that can be stored on the optical drive. Unless, of course, you have a game so huge it has such an abundance of low res (yeah, that's what I call console quality) textures that it would create problems for the DVD-DL format, which seems unlikely to me at this point. So yeah, it may boil down to FMVs and audio, Dreamcast wasn't exactly a star in FMV either because of the limited space compared to DVD. On the other hand, I think FMV is just a novelty, let them work on realtime animations instead.

 

[Cid Highwind]

People are overestimating the PS3, there's nothing you can do about a shortage of video memory. I looked at the FFXIII screenshots and in terms of textures I have seen nothing, but really nothing groundbreaking.

Maybe I'm picking wrong examples, but even MGS4 has its fair share of bad textures:
First batch

Characters look great, the world just suffers from lack of video memory. But well, memory is expensive, or at least easy to cut costs on, so it will always be the achilles' heel of consoles, just like we saw in the previous generation. But well, it really depends on the developers, Kojima Studios did quite a good way to cover it up, as long as you don't force people to look at the aspects that got low-res textures you're fine.

 

[Cid Highwind]

The site already mentions that subscription fees are TBA, so it will be pay to play.

 

[Cid Highwind]

Why exactly would the PS3 stuff need more space than that? 50GB is already humongous and normally the only reason why the size of games increases is because either the quality of textures, sound and FMVs goes up, or the games become longer. Since it's a system with a set amount of graphical processing power you won't need that much space anyway, because the texture resolution is the limiting factor. You're not going to find games that suddenly have more content than Final Fantasy, MGS or The Elder Scrolls because it's simply too expensive to produce. FMVs aren't cheap to make either, so I think 50GB will be the most a PS3 game would ever need.

 

[Cid Highwind]

Please quit the pointing fingers here.

I think it's pretty clear that apart from allowing uncompressed audio and a truckload of FMVs, bluray's impact on ingame graphical quality is next to none. Let's give that horse its rest now...

As for a good looking PS3 game, I think Killzone would be a good contender against MGS4. Uncharted looks good as well, though I heard it benefits mostly from having smaller areas, allowing for more detail.

Edit: Nice find Koko