DigitalFoundry

With the current generation of HD consoles nowhere near their sell-by date, the recent release of the Gears of War 3 multiplayer beta is noteworthy for several reasons. Not only is this the first opportunity we have had to get hands-on with the game - an event in itself - but it also serves to give us a preview of the kind of technological enhancements we will find as standard in future games using Epic's highly popular Unreal Engine 3 technology.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-gears-of-war-3-beta-tech-analysis

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Consider it done.

Tectures have taken a hit, sharpnes and depth of field by the looks of it. Lighting, motion blur and the general look of the game has improved

Why is it now the norm to analyse (sp) betas and things that are inconsequential? Why not wait for the final product?

One place to save space is to end up using less complex textures.  Due to a cap on downloading size, Capcom complained to Microsoft that their Bionic Commando (2D) title would not look as good as the PS3 version, because they had to limit the texture size.  And considering the beta is being used to test balancing of gameplay, and give the engine a run, it makes sense they wouldn't go with premium textures.  They also cut out a number of modes of play that will be in the full version, because they weren't interested in testing that.

If the full version of Gears 3 ends up looking like the textures take a hit, then Epic did manage to nerf textures to make other things work.

I think the updated UE3 looks fantastic the only thing letting it down is the lack of AA. Previous Gears featured dynamic AA, Gears 3 has none and to me at least it's quite obvious.

Totally agree and considering this was a downloaded beta I'm sure the final game will be even more fantastic.  Like others have said there is a cap on how much MS allows to be downloaded for these kinds of things so Epic probably nerfed some visual stuff in the beta to make sure all the stuff needed to balance gameplay was perfect.

And the sheer fun factor has sky rocketed and I was a HUGE Gears 1 and 2 fan, but 3 really blows those two games away just from this beta alone.

@Bolded

I know what you mean, I start playing different games just to find myself wanting/going back to the beta.  I also think this beta is more polished than a lot of games out right now.

DF seemed happy enough with it and still only the beta code.

In common with the vast majority of UE3 titles there's a native 720p resolution with no anti-aliasing. Gears 2 appeared to feature 2x multi-sampling anti-aliasing on some of its render passes, an effect that was then blitzed by later effects, giving a 0x AA effect with just a few smoothed-off edges remaining. In the new sequel it looks as though UE3 doesn't bother wasting GPU cycles on an effect that is mostly killed off by additional processing, and it's the right thing to do in freeing up Xenos resources for effects that do matter.

Despite the lack of any form of AA in the beta code, it has to be said that overall image quality in the beta is excellent, and jaggies are hardly an issue at all; this is mostly down to a combination of the artwork style lacking extreme contrast and also in the accomplished post-processing effects. Indeed, if anything we see an improvement over Gears 2 here - the majority of the older game's specular aliasing issues are all but gone.