Square Enix surprised the world today announcing the Luminous Engine. The Luminous Engine is the first known graphics engine for the next generation of game consoles. Square showed off tech demo's and claimed that the engine will be available to external developers. The engine is said to even reduce development costs by up to 30% alongside reducing dev cycles. The engine hopes to be state of the art offering photo realism on the next line of consoles.

Square revealed what their engine is capable of doing. Which could indicate what the next gen systems will be capable of.

Above is the screenshot from the Luminous Engine. Below is the comparison between the engine's version and real life.

A few minutes ago I broke the story of the new Men In Black game which is said to be coming to Next-generation consoles. Of course there seems to be two ways to interpret that announcement. On Twitter some developers and press are saying its from the upcoming generation of consoles but else where people are claiming it is just 360/PS3. Both explanations are possible based on what has been officially announced. When Activision comments saying which consoles the title is headed for I'll clarify.

But right now this is the second story involving the graphical capabilities of next gen systems and unlike Men in Black this is for sure. Whats your thoughts!

I'm both impressed and not ... I saw papers a few years ago with similar results performing real-time rendering.

What I wonder is what kind of hardware this requires to run, at what kind of performance you get from that hardware. If fairly modest hardware can achieve similar results (possibly at a moderately low resolution/frame-rate) I would be very interested; but if they require cutting edge hardware I'm not interested.

S-E with all the new Nintendo love... I'm betting this is pushing WiiU games. :)

At least I'm hoping 3rd party dev kits are being built with Nintendo in mind as well as MSony.

Didn't a press release with Final Fantasy VS state they were going to use the new luminous engine?

how impressive is a plain white hall Square Enix thinks ? , this isn't something to be wowed about

Square Enix creates more engines than games.

Troll harder. They only created 1 engine for this generation.

This Luminous engine is for next-gen consoles.

Yeah this will probably run on Wii U as well. Those 25gig discs will help too!

I believe they said they were using a specific engine more suitable for Action RPG for Versus that will utilize the lighting tools that will be available in the Luminous Engine.

As someone said above, still image looks great but who knows what hardware will be necessary or if it will even limit some things, primarily framerate.