There using the Frostbite 3 engine for the next Mass Effect entry, so i expect the facial animation to be a big step up in quality (fingers crossed).

I expect them to pay special attention to all the main characters atleast , and i hope that they do bring in some mo-cap.

Time and money.

Every gaming sight at the E3 demo thought it was a live action shot at first when they saw the female character in the QB demo at the start (me inc) just amazing, the Sorcerer tech demo looked great too.

Are u serious? That quantic dreams demo thing was easily the best tech at the show. that shit literally looked real at time. You could have told me the guy dressed up as a demon was a real person and i would have believed you. If games ever get that good... my god

Are u serious? That quantic dreams demo thing was easily the best tech at the show. that shit literally looked real at time. You could have told me the guy dressed up as a demon was a real person and i would have believed you. If games ever get that good... my god

The quantic dream demo was impressive, but, to me, I was far more impressed with Quantum Break, because it was actually a real game with some impressive looking stuff that is being described as real-time in-game graphics, which I think makes what's being shown, although a ways away from release, more meaningful. I've also always preferred a more stylized and flashy graphical look to a more realistic and restrained look. I like games to look incredible, but if I have a choice between an unbelievable looking game that unmistakably looks like a flashy and vibrant videogame compared to a much more true to life and subdued approach to visual design that doesn't look quite as "gamey" in appearance, I'll always go with the more vibrant and gamey approach, because I don't think what we're all really after in gaming is photorealism. We are after more power to make things that we couldn't ever imagine seeing or doing ourselves look as incredible and as exciting as possible.

I agree it looked fantastic, the specifications for Capcom's Panta Rhei engine are probably no where near as demanding as UE4 or CryEngine3 as it was engineered with consoles in mind. The best thing is the lighting and sub-surface scattering, it's quite impressive.

Now as for Quantic Dream, their games are usually quite scripted so they may not be the best studio to look for actual real-time gameplay at that graphic level. Let's watch and see how that one develops.

Yeah it was only a tech demo, like the first one they did for Heavy Rain with that girl talking then crying, the actual game will not look that good, but for the scripted style of game it is, it should be very close.

PRT has been a built in feature of AMD's GCN architecture since its introduction, so there's nothing new there. However, it doesn't appear as if it was ever properly supported or exposed in the Directx API. It's also pretty significant for the Xbox One because it's so very convenient considering the way the Xbox One is designed. This will be pretty nice for the 32MB of ESRAM inside the Xbox One. Up to 3GB of highly detailed texture data was loaded into just 16MB of GPU space at Microsoft's keynote.

Bandwidth is at a premium in the Xbox One owing to the slower DDR3 memory employed in the console, which does not compare favourably to the 8GB unified pool of GDDR5 in the PlayStation 4. The 32MB of "embedded static RAM" within the Xbox One processor aims to make up the difference, and was previously thought to sustain a peak theoretical throughput of 102GB/s - useful, but still some way behind the 176GB/s found in PlayStation 4's RAM set-up. Now that close-to-final silicon is available, Microsoft has revised its own figures upwards significantly, telling developers that 192GB/s is now theoretically possible.

So how could Microsoft's own internal tech teams have underestimated the capabilities of its own hardware by such a wide margin? Well, according to sources who have been briefed by Microsoft, the original bandwidth claim derives from a pretty basic calculation - 128 bytes per block multiplied by the GPU speed of 800MHz offers up the previous max throughput of 102.4GB/s. It's believed that this calculation remains true for separate read/write operations from and to the ESRAM. However, with near-final production silicon, Microsoft techs have found that the hardware is capable of reading and writing simultaneously. Apparently, there are spare processing cycle "holes" that can be utilised for additional operations. Theoretical peak performance is one thing, but in real-life scenarios it's believed that 133GB/s throughput has been achieved with alpha transparency blending operations (FP16 x4).

I've been doing game environments for the past 13 years. In that time I have worked for 4 major game studios in the US. I don't see the 3D artists perspective voiced much during next gen discussion and I want to give mine. I also want to explain why I am supporting the XB1.

On current gen consoles (512mb ram) we would be lucky to have 200mb available for art at any one time. That means 200mb per load. Some engines like GTA or Red Dead constantly stream data, (no load screens) but there is still only about 200mb loaded for art at any one given time. When I say art I mean all the environment meshes and textures, vfx, characters, vehicles, 1st and 3rd person weapons, light maps, custom skins etc...Audio would get around 75mb, UI around 10mb and the rest of the memory would be spread out through dozens of other systems. Each engine is different but from my experience 200mb has been pretty standard for art.

Now over half my job is figuring out what compromises I need to make between what I really want to put on screen and what is technically possible to put on screen in 200mb. We take a piece of concept art and mentally chop that up into repeatable modules that become our set dressing and props. We want to make everything you see unique and high resolution but this is not possible because we have a tight schedule and we are limited by that 200mb gate. (More on the schedule later) To make things more complicated, we need to pre plan for worse case scenarios when designing environments. We need to account for times when every player is on screen, all shooting and throwing grenades, spawning blood splatter vfx smoke grenades, rocket trails... We can't just make a scene run at 30 fps in isolation and call it a day. We need to leave room for a cluster of intense gameplay to happen on top of the scene. This further eats into our vision.

This 200mb limit has been the gate for realtime 3D graphics for the last 8 years. PC exclusives are free from that gate but if it was cross platform that gate effected that art team even if they had high detail mode on the PC version.

The point of me explaining this to you is to illustrate how much more room we now have on next gen systems and how that gate will be pushed up to around 3gb. It could be a bit more or a bit less but that's my estimate. You may be asking why I am not saying 4,5,6,7Gb. This is where the schedule comes into play. It is simply not possible for a team of 15 artists to fill that much RAM full of art data on our tight schedules even if it is available to us. Instead of hiring more artists, studios start outsourcing to churn out more content. Some studios crunch for months filling up 200mb worth of detail. Imagine trying to fill 4,5,6 GB worth of data. Now factor in the state of the industry. Game staff is constantly getting laid off. Publishers have a hard time making profits on all but the biggest franchises. If we don't find ways to create a constant revenue stream (dlc, microtrans, mmo subscription), or limit used games and stop piracy, studios simply cant pay a staff to utilize all this extra RAM. You need staff to stay, to become senior and to know the tools inside out. Artists jumping from studio to studio from layoffs creates a brain drain and ultimately hurts the quality of games. It can take a new artist 6-12 months to fully ramp up on all the tools and custom tech and become proficient. This is a huge inefficiency in the games industry and hurts the final product. This is one reason I support What Microsoft is doing. They understand this vicious cycle and are trying to improve not only games, but the industry as a whole. I'll get off that soap box now. I hope you get it.

Back to the fun stuff. If a game like Gears of War can look good using 200mb, imagine what we can do with 3gb. That is just an unbelievable amount of resources for us to play with. I don't have to sacrifice the concept artists vision any more. I don't have to burn the time and effort making compromises any more. It is much harder to constantly optimize assets than it is to build high resolution from the get go. 3gb is almost enough resources to skip the compromise phase entirely. This makes my job so much more enjoyable and also gives players more immersive worlds to explore.

But...we are not there until developers stop supporting current gen consoles. This is why console games keep looking better and better each year. As we drop the current gen SKU's we can now focus entirely on the next gen without the 200mb gate of current gen. If you think those launch titles look good, just wait to see what is coming in the next 5 years.

I read two article yesterday about tidbits about XBox One and some policy/hardware changes... and this time for the better.

One is that, when a developer has had to patch a game on Xbox 360, MS wanted to charge them $10,000 to do so. Which naturally turned off a lot of developers, understandably so.
They are dropping the $10,000 fee, and making patches to games free for developers. The explanation for having the large sum, was to make developers have all their ducks in a row,
before releasing a game. You can judge for yourself if that plan worked. Although I can see MS's point. They should have allowed 2 or 3 patches for free, then perhaps started charging
after the 4th or 5 patch.

The other fact is that Xbox ONE won't ship with a headset... but it is being rumored on IGN, that Xbox 360 headsets, and compatible headsets will work on Xbox One with an adapter.
This is a nice move on MS's part... or rather... a duh? That is the way it should be. Now if we can get legacy Xbox 360 steering wheels to work on Xbox One.

Maybe after the media/PR fiasco of E3... MS's arrogance is being deflated with common sense. We need two strong rivals in the console wars...
The consumer will benefit from a more balanced offering... not a lopsided/one sided win by Sony.

I'm still hoping to go with both platforms at launch. No my question will be what game to get with what system.

I think i read somewhere that some of the Move Engines will aid/support this also?