Everyone here will remember how Naughty Dog claimed that it had maxxed the potential of the PS3 with Uncharted 3... Yet here we are with The Last of Us , just announced at the VGA's, and it sports better textures, envirmental detail, character models and extremely dynamic floral - all a grade above uncharted 3.

No before i get to the proof, let me explain how this is possible if UC3 maxxed the PS3 out...

With Uncharted 3 - you will notice that every level or map you enter is rendered in its entirety as with little to no pop-in.  This allows very crisp and dynamic envirments around the player and is visually appealing...the down-side to this tactic is that it is memory intensive.  This limits the graphic potential of Textures and overall detail of both the enviroment and characters.  (though looking at Uncharted 3 you can hardly notice that it is lacking anything)

With The Last of Us however, Naughty Dog's second team seems to have opted to use the clip-plane and blur method (as seen in the Elder Scrolls games for example) but to a very subtle degree compared to the Elder Scroll games.  Using this method, the engine has less to keep track of at any given time as compared with Uncharted 3 which, of course, allows alot more detail to be paid to the immediate enviroment around the player(s)---

This Method combined with Naughty Dogs Uncharted (or Ice) engine that relies entirely on the PS3's Cell Proccesor to render graphics (instead of the built in Graphics proccesor...is a bit rediculous.  It allows for an extremely long clip-plane (or pop in distance) for fine details while keeping the jaw-dropping and meticulous level of detail Naughty Dog is known for. 

Really makes you wonder why other developers dont purchase the rights to the UC3 engine for their games...We're looking at you Bethesda - with an engine such as this you could easily have optimized the PS3 version of Skyrim to match its PC counterpart... instead you gave us a broken and horrible port of what was promised to be an amazing experience.../sad face.

Now onto the proof!

follows the link below or watch it in the next post.

Near the end of the video, after Juno and her father exit the appartment building they are in when the camera is zooming out past the over-grown streets and rubbles -towards what remains of the games city (new york?)  you can see some very subtle pop in of textures, pay particular attention to the large vines growing up the building left.

If this were pre-rendered...there would be no pop in.  You may also notice some very light pixelization of the shadows on Juno's fathers shirt as he passes a window shortly after he beats the living crap out of no-name man #1.

Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ke7lIAe3GRI

that was where I stopped caring what you had to say

juno.........lmao

In-game or not, stunning graphics or not, Naughty Dog will deliver.

How does a graphical engine work without a graphical processing unit ? 

It obviously won't look this good in release. It will probably look as good as Uncharted 3 (which is still dang impressive). By the way, are people forgetting the earlier build of Uncharted 3 (the E3 trailer I believe) that had many scenes that looked better in the trailer than in the actual game?

Thats le power of le cell!!

that is impressive. just when i thought its not possible they proved me wrong. new graphic king? i think so

I don't doubt it's the real time engine. But all the Uncharted games early trailers were too, but the final games always ended up looking different. We see it all the time with trailers. A lot of time the video trailers are "in-engine," but not "in-game," instead rendered offline, resulting in super smooth details that don't exactly look the same when the game ships. The Uncharted 3 E3 trailer looks better than the final game.

I'm sure it will end up looking slightly better than Uncharted 3 or at least more refined. But don't get too hyped about the trailer, it could even be a target of what they hope to achieve. That happens all the time before they start adding in dynamic lighting, AI, scripted animations, etc. It all taxes the hardware and cuts have to be made for gameplay's sake.