Great post gives you a little insight as to what's going on with the visuals....

Ok just to put you straight on this. The reason why it does 4xMSAA ( Only on cars and hands in cockpit, or have you not seen the horrendous jaggies in the environment ) is because the game was designed to run in half 1080p ( 1280x1080, as opposed to 1920x1080 ). Which meant a few things were sacrificed. 1. environment detail. 2. collision detection. and most important 3. 120 hertx physics. How you can call it more advanced physics than FM3, graphics or polish for sim is beyond me. FM3 has 360hertz physics, 2xMSAA on the WHOLE image and recreates tyre deformation at 360hertz as well. GT5P isnt even doing tyre deformation. So no, GT5P is quite a way behind in simulation terms and in graphics it's personal. FM3 has more detail overall. GT5P has better lighting on the cars and paint. Thats it. Both have about the same polys on cars, but environments in FM3 destroy any other racer.

I hope you're not reffering to Multi User Dungeons. In that case, the closest thing that comes to mind is Crysis, which pretty much gives the gamer the level of creation the developers had...Wonder if Crysis 2 will as well.

MUDs are very low in graphics, so of course this isn't going to be like that. However, the meaning of certain words and concepts can change over time, or even be repurposed or shared with other concepts; This is one of those situations. Heck, certain peopole are appaled that we would call final fantasy an RPG when clearly you need a dungeon master, 12-sided dice, a pen, and lots of paper for a real RPG and, story wise those types of RPGs are...I'm not sure I can think of a direct adjective to describe how linear they are in comparison. Do I care...Of course not...Again there's no adjective/situation I can find for how little I care...No I got one: I care for this as much a Sony cares for Japanese games (Well, at this point in the generation, at least)

Either way, bringing this up is rather completely...pointless given that you know exactly what I'm reffering to when I say 'Sandbox'.

:)

digital foundry says otherwise :p. and even so GT5 will keep this and all that's missing, GT5P got prologue on it name for something ;P.

and 360hz physics it's just marketing, haven't you seen bullet cars in action? laughable physics bug, mainly because physics are not realitic, but tweaked.

360 hertz is 'NOT' marketing if you know your racers. 120 hertz is 120 times a sec. Against 360 times a sec updates to the physics. Now say your in the Bugatti Veron doing 160 mph, the 360 hertz engine will give the player inputs every 2 and a half metres. Whereas with 120hertz physics that changes to every 6 metres. Thats alot of bumps and dips that cn affect a cars handling in 6 metres that can never be simulated on a 120 engine. Why do you think the PC community complain and avoid a racing sim with less than 360 hertz physics? RFactor on PC is a mighty 520 hertz engine. It's a real awesome sim. Best out there.

"No more suspense, Alan Wake astonished us from its production to the atmosphere that's been created, but above and beyond all, its technical mastery. Remedy used to be known for its top-notch rendering engines, and they prove again they are worthy of their fame. To be clear, none of the existing Xbox 360 games even compares to it, and even on PS3, which have more real exclusive titles, it's hard to find an equivalent. Killzone 2, Uncharted 2, Crysis, these are the few games which can compete with it. Whether it's the real-time projected shadows produced by the essential flashlight (those were obviously missing in Condemned 1 & 2), the total absence of aliasing (720p 4x FSAA), the breathtaking realistic lighting effects, the huge size of certain levels, SSAO, the atmospheric effects, the humongous size of some moving objects, the vegetation which interacts with characters and wind, or the largely satisfying framerate (with a light tearing that should disappear in the retail version) and many other physical and graphical effects, Alan Wake never ceases to amaze you with relative ease.

This technical mastery leaves us deploring Microsoft's choice not to favor more real exclusive titles for its console, as it shows how powerful the Xbox 360 is and how poor multiplatforms engines can be. But let's stop moaning and let's appreciate this one as it's not only a technical performance but it also comes with an excellent production."

http://gamersyde.com/news_gamersyde_preview_alan_wake-9022_en.html

Maybe the biased people can begin to see the truth with this article.

It's very biased.

It's full of assumptions, claims and opinion written off as fact. I'm not interested in debating this with you though so I prefere if you don't reply back.

its interesting im starting to notice a pattern in your posts

its like you don't even think the ps3 exists at all or it doesnt count as console for some reason
im curious if you have one tho?

you seem to be really into graphics uncharted 2 and killzone 2 look great, might be worth checking out.

(alan wake does look amazing, a technical achievement)

I think the real reason here is that we've seen the capabilities of the PS3 and have a good idea of what to expect.

The console's power has been explored and touted often. The thing is: we already know this. Not many people know of the graphical capabilities of the 360. They just see the exclusive games that have come out up until this point and see these capabilities not as such, but rather as limitations. This couldn't be farther from the truth and, again we know the PS3 has good graffickz.

He is trying to spread awareness that the 360 can do visuals just as well. The PS3s largest asset is it's cell processor...But most people for some reason believe that this is an all purpose processor and does just about everything.

And I can agree with him that it's unfortunate MS has not taken the opportunity to show of its capabilitiies until now. Sony has a proprietary engine; as far as we know Microsoft does not.

Let's call your game:

1) you wrote in the OP

Tim Sweeney from Epic Games is quoted saying " Unreal Engine 3 is not optimized as a 360 engine. We do not utilize the specialized EDRam chip on the Xbox 360 for example at 'ALL'.

Fact check:

1a) While it's  true that the Unreal Engine 3 was not designed as a 360 engine and thus not as optimized as a ground-up coding effort, it's obviously somewhat optimized. Actually at Epic they stated that their transitional multithreaded model owes a lot even on PC to what they lerned by optimizing it for the 360 (link):

Tim Sweeney: The Gears of War experience on Xbox 360 taught us to optimize for multi-core, and to improve the low-level performance of the key engine systems. This has carried over very well to PC.

1b) what Sweeney really said about AA back in 2006 (link):

Sweeney- Gears of War runs natively at 1280x720p without multisampling. MSAA performance doesn't scale well to next-generation deferred rendering techniques, which UE3 uses extensively for shadowing, particle systems, and fog.

Please note that it's not like they didn't know or care or use the edram, it's that their engine works in a way that could not make the most of it in 2006. Later they surely optimized their engine further, as Gears 2 -for example- sports some AA.

2) you wrote in the OP

Further apparent is UE3's multiplatform design looking at both ME1 and Mass Effect 2. The former recieveing no AA and the later recieveing 2xMSAA on all except transperencies and effects.

Fact check:

From the Digital Foundry tech analysis (link):

Another interesting element is the removal of anti-aliasing. The first Mass Effect included Unreal Engine 3's somewhat selective 2x multi-sampling AA. ...

For Mass Effect 2, BioWare appears to have turned off the anti-aliasing completely, presumably saving memory and GPU cycles in the process. Depth of field and bloom are used instead, doing a surprisingly good job.

Bold is mine. I find it intriguing that you called ME2's graphics "the best ever on consoles", though it went (feature-wise) in the opposite direction to what you claimed and in the opposite direction to what you want to see in Alan Wake and other engines (more AA).

3) you wrote in the OP (about Alan Wake)

Most impressively though is that the game runs with 4XMSAA on the entire picture, including shadows. ...

The fact that the EDRam has been able to give this free on 360 is 'HUGE'. ...

One thing for sure is Alan Wake will be the clearest crispest game yet on game consoles.

Fact check:

3a) I could not find any official statement about 4x Full screen MSAA from Remedy. The closes thing is this declaration on the remedy forums (link):

I'm pretty sure you'll be very happy with our shipping solution. We hate dithering and aliasing just as much as you I think. Hardware 4xAA on the Xbox360 is nice for a lot of things - it did take us a while to get the most out of it (E.g, refactoring the renderer quite a few times).

which talks about 4xAA, but doesn't say it's full screen 4xMSAA. Nor does it make it sound as if they are getting everything from the embedded ram for free. Merely that they were able to design their engine to get some great benefits out of it, which sounds like having to cope with the limitations of it being only 10MB.

3b) "crispest"?  AA goes in the opposite direction of crisp: jaggies are pixel-grid crisp. AA is basically a selective blurring process.

4) you wrote in the OP

Then theres the 2nd to utilize EDRam this year. Reach boasts 720p, 30 FPS and 4xMSAA on entire image. But more impressively is what that free chip allows the devs to add to the rest of the game, 60+AI + Vehicles + flying = most impressive fights in an FPS on consoles.

Fact check:

4a) Halo Reach is not the 2nd game to utilize the edram this year. Nor in the 360's history of course. Actually the majority of 360 games were designed to squeeze some low-impact AA out of the 10MB edram. Too many links, really... just browse all old Digital Foundry's face-offs for multiplatform titles and you'll more often than not find something on the lines of "on PS3 the game sports no AA (or QXAA), while on 360 it does thanks to the edram"

4b) As far as I can tell, there's no official statement from Bungie on the AA technique used in Reach. Much speculation abounded as it certainly looks very good, but the best analysis I could find of the available videos seem to actually indicate a clever use of depth-of-field and edge blur to achieve better antialiasing, nowhere in sight was an official "free thanks to the edram" 4xMSAA statement.

Ironically you slammed edge blur previously in this thread, when it was advanced as a SPE based solution in the PS3 version of Saboteur (it's not MLAA as you kept stating, go read the updated article on DF)

Conclusion: I'm really glad that people like Remedy or Bungie are spending their energies on creating engines that truly optimize to the archtecture and capabilities of the 360, and what they are going to put out seems to be some of the best the machine has displayed yet, and quite better than the run-of-the mill UE3 based games.

But there's no magic bullet here. There's no magic edram chip that nobody utilized before. There's a lot of honest hard work from good developers to make the best out of known quantities, whose final results look excellent right now and we will judge with our eyes in a not distant future. You did the same in a previous discussion, only back then your magic bullet was called "multithreaded engine" and you claimed that AW was the first game on the 360 to have a multicore-optimized engine, and games that were to use several times more CPU power than every old game were to follow. You were demonstrably wrong back then, but you are falling into the same pattern again.

There's a lot any 360 enthusiast should be happy and even hyped about with these new games but by making up technical facts, and official statements, and distorting quotes, you're not doing these coders any favours, nor are you being helpful to fellow gamers.

If you can provide links to the official statements of which you speak of and that I might have missed, I'll be thankful.