Of course you need to remember the majority of improvements and 'technical prowess exhibited thus far are feats of artistry rather than feats of technical talent and coding. This is the reason why the art team far exceeds the size of the programming team for any game out there, because they are the ones who truly make the most difference to how a game looks. Any time you get a talented developer and you give them a lot of time and money to work with you can recieve a very artistically sound game.

On the other hand if the game design is very challenging technically you can have unlauded technical showcases because the results of the artists work aren't as obviously represented on the screen. For instance if you take games like GTA 4 and Red Dead Redemption you have games which cannot as obviously be an artistic showcase because of their open world nature and the divided attention of the artists who cannot optimise every second of gameplay but represent top level technical showcases appreciated by those who know as much if not more than linear titles.

In general if you take a great team and add a great quantity of money to them then you can achieve a great looking game pretty much on any platform which stands above the majority just as you can have a movie with a great quantity of money like Avatar be a technical showcase for CGI and 3D effects.

My 2 cents.

loved this thread (Y)

Totally agree with you statement regarding the Amiga and Neo Geo.  Initally the Amiga was only able to display 32 of its 4096 color pallet but thanks to many inivations, programmers were able to tweak the hardware to display more colors then were thought possible at the time of its release.  I see the PS3 as being very similar in regards to the posibility of utilizing the Cell to overcome the limitation of its GPU. 

I think your spot on with your second paragraph. Part of why games like Uncharted and God of War 3 can look so amazing is partly to do with their game design. The actual game design has a massive influence on both the technical and artistic merits of these games. The views in Uncharted 2 for instance looks spectacular, but only a few select areas are actually traversable so greater effort can be put into the views vs open world games like Oblivion.

Technical feats like fighting on the Titans in GoW3 and in a collapsing building in U2 are also acheivable due to the nature of the games.

Completely agreeing with you on this one. As It wrote a few weeks ago in another forum : The RSX is not as capable as the X360's Xenos, that's a fact but when the Xenos has to fight against an RSX/CELL Combo for the graphics, that's another story

While that is true, Infamous looks better then either of those by a significant amount in my opinion what is significant is open for interpretation but anyways another thing i noticed is that Infamous has a much larger draw distance then other open world games, you can see so much farther, I think it's fairly obvious that ps3 is capable of much more then 360, and I'm glad the software if finally coming around with multiplats

it was understandable that devs preferred the 360 since it was familiar and had far more refined dev tools and was pretty much established how to program for versus the ps3 who's archetect had never been used for this application so it was basically like starting from scratch which made multiplats particularly difficult since you have to either program for both or program for one and make it work on the other, and that at point programing for ps3 would have made it almost impossible to play on 360, but now that the software is being improved so much we are seeing more and more advancements, the ps3 has come alot farther in terms of technical quality of games then the 360 has, 360 is making small improvements but the ps3 is in a league of it's own almost, I just hope the next playstation uses the cell so all this work these devs are doing isn't wasted 

I really hope all future multiplatform games start implementing the MLAA technique.

Sony should get Naughty Dog, Guerrilla Games and Santa Monica Studios to collaborate and create a new engine that takes advantage of the PS3's hardware and give that engine to 3rd parties so they can take advantage of the system.

@ VoiceOfReason

> I just hope the next playstation uses the cell so all this work these devs are doing isn't wasted

The good thing in taking the PS3 approach of development is not only beneficial to the PS3 itself, it allows for better performance on other systems as well including modern PCs and the XBox 360. So future Playstations will certainly benefit nomatter if Cell based or not (as will a future XBox). Of course I myself also hope when a new Playstation will be released in the distant future it will be based on one (or more) CPU(s) of similar design. This should be the case if they stay on the PPC route taking into consideration IBM's comments regarding their future console roadmap.

The PS3 way of developing mainly means efficient modern smart design. That's beneficial not only to the PS3.

cool