good analysis.someone who realizes art direction is important (this time from a technical stand point). its one of the reason why okami still has the best graphics to me.

saying is easy ,even MS with all that money hasn't brought a game this impressive .Sony has .Let's not take away from what Sony has done here. with all the beating they take from media /financial crisis, they actually delivered.

MS on the other hand has most of it's exclusive running on unreal engine 3.

So the effort goes to Sony for trying and investing in it.also let me remind you that this is one of many impressive game engine sony has created/is creating for PS3.(uncharted engine,GOW III engine they are all making their own game engine)

can it be done on 360 ?we don't know.

So... what you're saying is Killzone looks better because Gears has... trees?

Right.

Personally, I don't think Microsoft really cares about spending the extra millions to make their 1st party games look better. I think they've settled into the mindset that those that really care about graphics have purchased the PS3 since it is the more powerful console. Sony sank millions more into Killzone 2 than other games because they needed to proof that the Playstation 3 was more powerful than the Xbox 360 to their fans. I think Microsoft uses that money for exclusive content and is just pleased that quite a few multi-platform games look a tad better on their console.

Also, what you call "impressive" I call a blunder. If Sony wanted to be impressive, they would have continued development on the Playstation EDGE, an engine being worked on by several of their studios and licensed to exclusive developers. Making a new engine from scratch makes sense every generation for a third party publisher, but first party developers can benefit from each other to develop a car instead of re-inventing the wheel in 40 different colors.

definitely have a point there.  good for sony on this one.

on the other hand, they need to be licensing those engines.  The ps3 takes a while to adapt to and those engines could be used.  the other hope is that the ps4 uses the cell so devs can scale up instead of restarting.

This is something that I've been saying for 6 years. The smartest thing Sony/Microsoft can do is buy Epic Games and include the unreal engine in their SDK for free to any developer making an exclusive game. Developers are already so familiar with this engine, having it exclusive and for free would land countless exclusive deals. Sadly, that would be very expensive. Next best thing is to finish the Playstation EDGE (hint hint Sony)

I just think you are pretentious.  You pretend you understand from a technical standpoint everything going on on screen  and you "know a lot" about Epic Games and Guerrilla Games developement process and their use of technology.  

Finally, in a last paternal move, you spare me of the might of all your knowledge.  

Sorry but I rise the BS flag.

@786_ali: so true pal. jealousy perhaps?

@jetri: you have to do better than that. everything that you wrote was utter non-sense. sure you are a programmer (as you claim) but you are not as talented as the people from guerilla games. these guys knows more shit than you (at least on the side of the ps3). have you programmed with the cell architecture before to claim non-sense? do you know that there are a lot of methods to do rendering?

and please, do not dare compare KZ2 with GeOW2... ever again. its just ... NOT REASONABLE!

I agree with you both here.

@xaviertooth & Jaaau!
Since you requested It, I'll post a short technical analysis of how the Killzone 2 engine is doing what it is doing. Give me a few minutes to write it all out, I just wanted to give you a heads up so you know something is coming.

xaviertooth, yes, I have developed for the Cell architecture before. Around a year ago I joined a team at Lockheed Martin exploring new architectures and technologies for our simulation platforms. We tested, x86, PPC, UltraSparc(no idea why), the Cell processor, and GPUs. Although we were capable of achieving some pretty impressive things on the Cell, the manpower required was high and the code didn't scale well across 20+ SPEs. Luckily though, CUDA had just come out and the latest GPUs offered over 4X the performance of the Cell processor and we went with that instead. Right now I mostly do multi-threading coding to prepare data for the GPU, but yes, I have developed for the Cell before.