Has the 360 reached it's limit?

[thekitchensink]

Well, I think there are lots of things to be considered regarding this issue.

-The first of which is that the first Gears still holds its' own, graphically, almost two years after its' release--it's still ONE of the best-looking games on the market. All that, despite only using one of the 360's three processor cores (source: http://xbox360.qj.net/Gears-of-War-Only-Running-on-One-Core-/pg/49/aid/3378).


-Second, the character models in GoW 2 do look somewhat better, and the environments are much, much larger than in Gears, with more enemies.

So, in addition to characters with more polygons and better textures, mixed with better lighting and shadows, highly realistic water, the game also renders (some) environments that are many times the size of those in Gears, while also processing (at some points) hundreds of enemies--meaning hundreds of individual AI processes, the possibility of hundreds of guns firing at once, and character models for all said enemies and guns.

-Third (and this doesn't specifically have to do with Gears), some multiplat games with the updated Unreal Engine run better on the 360. Specifically, Unreal Tournament 3. I know this game had six more months dev. time, and I'm not necessarily saying that it's 'more powerful'.

But the fact that it can play UE3 on split-screen coop (meaning rendering every level in the SP game twice) when the PS3 didn't have this, at least shows that the 360 is still capable of being competitive.



I understand people's worries here. But to conclude what I was saying about Gears 2, the system is essentially running a somewhat-better-looking game than Gears 1, with the chance for exponentially more 'things' possible onscreen at once--massive environments, hundreds of enemies, etc. So, I would conclude from this that, were the environments the same size as they were in Gears 1, with the same amount of characters onscreen, this version would look exponentially better.