I am sure it's impressive. The thing is, it does nothing in relation to what we are talking about. My guess is the logic builds the textures, and then loads them into the video card. it then instructs the video card to process the textures in the same manner as a traditional game would.

What makes it impressive, is the disk space it saves, not the performance while it runs. What would be cool, is something like this:

Let's take the 10,000 barrel example. In Crysis, each barrel model is loaded into the card (well, probably only one is, but anyway). Then it's textured (probably on one here as well). Then the card does a lot of fancy stuff, like figure out what barrel is really going to be seen on the screen, and what surfaces really show up for each barrel. Then the individual processing is done to each barrel to calculate light and reflections. This takes several passes per barrel. Now the important part that most people overlook. The Video card then turns it into a 2D image. While we like to think this is all 3D, we still only have a 2D screen.

That's one way of doing it. Another equally viable solution, would be:

The CELL textures each Barrel, and figures out the lighting. It then loads a 2D image into the video card, and say's "put this simple object here on the screen".

In the end, you would get the exact same image, so why do you care how it got created? The video card needs much less power and memory to do such a thing, but the CPU in the system needs to have a ton of power at doing mundane floating point operations. Luckily, the CELL is designed to do just this kind of thing.

This is what I mean about changing the way we code for the CELL.

Sorry but that doesn't solve the memory problem either...

First, my point is not the storage, my point is the amount of memory needed, if you download and play the game you will notice something, it runs in mediocre machines, but with one condition needs almost 512Mb of ram...

Why is the ram so important?? everything you see in screen is in vram, but everything that is ingame is in ram, there is no aproach to use less memory, you can take away things, details, models, or streaming them from disc, but none of this solutions gives you the same performance and quality of using the ram...

Off course you can use the cell, but that only takes away the load from the GPU, the same models, textures etc, are in ram, thats my point, thats why is easy to make a port from the PS3 to the 360, and is harder to make a port from the 360 to the PS3...

The issue remains the same, ram and vram...

if its true then good for ps3

 I agree, the issue is ram (not so much vram, but system ram). I stated that as the biggest hurdle this game would have to overcome in this thread.

There are a lot of tricks that still can be done. You could write a method into the video card that used part of it as a virtual disk, or store large matrixes in it, and access it when needed. The bus from the CPU to the Video ram is slow (compared to main ram anyway), but with these tricks, you can overcome the issue of dedicated memory for system and video. Well, you can steal VRam for main ram, but you can not steal main ram for video ram. It's not that big of an issue, as with the level of visuals we expect from the PS3, most people will (and have) pre processed the objects in the CELL, requiring less VRam utilization.

While this is an issue, games like UT3 run great on the PS3 with 256 Meg of ram, yet in Vista you need closer to 2 Gig to achieve the same level of performance (system Ram, not Video). So while 256 Meg is low compared to todays PC's, it's still a crap load of memory. Great developers can find a way to make it work. 

If I owned a ps3 I wouldn't really even want Crysis to come over, it's not really a great FPS when compared to some of the other nice ones that came out this year('07) like CoD4.

I have it on my PC and other than graphics, it really just seems like a below average FPS, clunky interface, retarded AI, bad aiming and vehicle controls.

I'll admit I did crack a smile the first time I blew a tree in half, but that can only hold my interest for so long :)

1) Its called streaming, already done... not that usefull even in Crysis (Yeap Crysis use it and a lot)

1) Sorry I misread you, again, not that good idea but if you want to know about it try to look for the GPGPU projects, CUDA, Luxrender and Indigo... its easy to put data in the vram the hard part is take it back...

2) Games on PC has been fighting with this for years... still there is no solution, HDDs are very slow...

3) Games using the UE are not that detailed, a PC which can get 120FPS in UT3 can only get 27FPS in Crysis, BTW Vista sucks, just keep playing in XP...

4) Yeap, you can ask Factor 5 about the sprites VS real 3d models...

 amen.

I have no doubt that if optimized well enough, Crysis on the PS3 and/or the 360 would look (and maybe run) good. However, I do have doubts with how close it could come to the PC version as the best set-ups can't seem to run the game perfectly.

Are you kidding me?  The PS3 could only run this game on low settings.