They've all been through photoshop hell and back.

While it may have been touched up the second (or middle) image seems to be a level glimpsed in the video released for the title and does include your character in same pose from video so its the only one that I take to indicate possible game looks.

 yes ive read the full article, and it does seem the cell will let them push res higher, ive seen a hd video on psn and it looks staggering. but............ i will stick to my orig opinion that they will on release make the game a fair multiplat.

if it was exclusive, obviously they would have utilised the bluray, hd space an cell. but its multiplat so i think both versions will be the same.

I suspect all this 4d nonsense they are talking about are just homogeneous coordinates which allow any affine transformation (rotation, translation, dilation, reflection, etc) in R^3 (3d) to be represented as a 4x4 matrix acting on "4d" points.

@Deneidez the cell has some interesting architectural properties when it comes DMAs by the SPEs. If you are familiar with past HPC architectures the best analogy I can think of is vector chaining in the Seymore Cray's machines. Although some people call the SPEs vector cores (I don't bc they don't support chaining), what the real innovation is, is that they support something akin to "DMA chaining" (it's actually way more complicated). Each of the SPEs are only quasi-cache coherent, their load/store commands cannot access address outside their L1 cache and hence each have a separate DMA controller which maintains a large list of future and current needs. This is what makes it fast as hell under the right circumstances and hard to actually program for (separate compiler is used for SPE code). If you want a more thorough explanation I can give you one, but I'm going to stop here as I can already feel people's eyes glazing over.

@alephnull

Haven't they used those for a while already(Well, nearly as long as there has been 3D games. I think quake used those already. 1996)? Homogeneous coordinates aren't really a 'new thing'. I suspect that this 4D nonsense is just some sort of fud that has no real meaning. :)

Sure, getting more knowledge is always a good thing. :)

Anyway, as you said they are hard to program for and I know that with complicated programs they are like hell to program(Well, I haven't programmed anything for CELL, but what I have heard from those who have.). The amount of stuff you need to define in your programs and amount of micromanagement when it comes to SPU is just 'too much' sometimes. :)

@MikeB

Heres some some stuff about procedural synthesis on X360,

http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/xbox360-1.ars

As you can see X360 is superior(*shivers*) platform when it comes to procedural synthesis. It is like it has only been made for gaming. THE X360 can do multiple... - - -(*hrr* , I - just - can't - continue -. , MikeB, just how can you do it? :D)