Best looking game I have seen. A+

I actually have no clue. I cannot explain how, but I think I can explain "why".

I think in general we are gonna start being surprised. One reason is because all the console devs (the majority of the industry) are moving onto the the new SM3.0 hardware (from fixed function junk!) and are providing new solutions to old problems. e.g. Occlusion mapping was thought to be an offline rendering solution, but PGR3 introduced a nice hack for it. I know a dev at B3D who has worked out a possible Shader hack for fairly decent HDR effects with minimal performance impact.

Another reason we are seeing some new stuff is because up to this point shaders have been under used. Until recently most GPUs had 8-16 Pixel Shaders and were fairly rigid in regards to programability and most were 24bit percision. Devs, sadly (but wisely) have to develop to the lowest common denominator. So shaders were mainly used for bump mapping, normal maps, etc...

Now the world just got ripped open to them. 32bit percision across a programmable array, real dynamic branching and flow control, a TON of shaders to do effects they never even thought to try, etc... To put into comparison, RSX and Xenos each have more peak programmable math power than CELL. X1900XTX has more than 2x the programmable power of CELL. DX10 GPUs, which Crysis will use some features of in the DX10 path, allows a ton of new speed up techniques. e.g. Instead of a ton of passes for a cube map, DX10 allows it to be done in 1 pass. All those nice clouds? Geometry Shaders allow them to do them all on the GPU with little input from the CPU. So the new GPUs offer a lot of stuff never available before.

A small Xbox 360 plug... this is one reason looking at numbers is worthless to a large degree. Some numbers, like bandwidth, are important because they tell us bottlenecks. But in general a lot of numbers are meh without a context of realworld performance. It may not sound sexy, but stuff like "strong dynamic branching" or "unified shaders" will be more of a factor in future game performance than peak numbers. Architecture, and how effecient a part is is very important, and in these areas Xenos is really, really strong. It is designed for long shaders; few PC developers have created a shader over 100 instructions long (let alone console devs). As SM3.0 becomes the baseline we will see more and more devs push out stuff on par with Crytek--but Crytek definately is leading the pack right now.

Anyhow, back to the ambient maps... I have no clue how their technique works. I did not like Far Cry much, but it was pretty. Crytek has some talent... but I never imagined this much. Read the below link and you smack your head going, "Whuh?!" It is a funny read because it shows how other games have used some lower-quality examples of some features and how people went gagga over them... Crytek is pretty much using every trick we know of... all in one game. And then some we had not even seen in realtime.

http://www.1up.com/do/previewPage?cId=3147944&did=...
http://www.1up.com/do/previewPage?pager.offset=1&c...

I am really hoping Crytek does a UE3 like demo movie and shows off all their technology and talks about it some because it is really, really impressive.

Now if only guards would not spot you in a forest 1/2 mile away while hiding in trees, have perfect aim on the run, did not have cheesy lines, etc... Far Cry was a really good "splash" for them, much better than many veteran teams, so I should not be so hard. But Far Cry just didn't do it for me.

Btw, for those who missed the 720p demo from last year:

http://www.xboxyde.com/leech_2157_en.html

They'll surely develop console titles with this graphics engine so awesome ! I'm still thinking of the jungle passage when the guy goes through the plant which is moving. The jungle looks like so realistic with such details.

sorry to side track... but just think, Bugies 'next' game may looking better then this.
Just imagine chasing an Elite through that jungle.

Yes & Maybe. Yes, the game is coming, engine et al. The question is graphical quality. e.g. the Original FC or FEAR, note how turning on ALL the bells & whistles was not possible even with the best, fastest GPUs. It took a year to get the game at high resolutions, with AA, and all features on. We may very well see this game not run with everything enabled on an R600.

But there is light at the end of the tunnel. One of the most demanding features in graphics right now is HDR. The 360 chews through it (FP10) with no performance hit at all. Now that tiling is in place, most games are now using 4xAA as well with negligable performance hit. So 2 of the biggest performance eaters, HDR and AA, the 360 can enable (with some planning) without a significant impact to the game.

Another big advantage is the 360 is targetting 720p... and you never know when a company will pull a Bizzare and go 600p (33% less resources bandwidth, fill rate, shaders) and scale. But there are some questions.

- Memory. The good news is there are solutions. Reduce some texture quality compared to 512MB GPUs. Use of 3Dc (since every 360 has it) which is a 6:1 Normal Map compression. Another aid here is that a 512MB GPU with 1GB of system memory really is akin to 512MB of GPU memory and 512MB of system memory because frequently the system memory caches/overalaps with the GPU memory. Toss in the OS and background tasks...

- Xenon. Multi-core, in order chip. This will be a hurdle to extract high level performance from such a challenging chip. The game looks demanding (physics, AI, interactive foiliage, destructable environments). On the other hand they may gain some memory space and free up some CPU time by doing other things better (like geoemtry instancing on the GPU and procedural data on the CPU).

- Gamepad. From a design perspective this is an issue. Crysis is a PC game first, and I have found games not designed to be console games tend to not mix well with Consoles sans tactical FPS. Maybe they will slow the gameplay down, but this as much as anything bothers me.

My guess is that some things may get toned down (like soft shadows, accuracy of physics, etc) but the game in general will be kept in tact. I hope so at least!And that is another real possibility. I am not sure the levels need to be smaller (the 360 does have 512MB of memory and a lot of compression schemes, in addition to the fact closed boxes can be used for streaming better) but we may very well see some tradeoffs and short cuts to make the game fit consoles. I would actually expect that.

Now that WOULD be awesome... but my impression has always been that Bungies strength is game design, not necessarily 3D technology. They make nice looking games with solid technology, top 5-10%, just not sure their next game will look better. You said may, so I know where you are coming from... I guess I am being a pessimist, especially since I heard they are using an upgraded HL2 engine :(

/me runs away before he gets killed...