I' ll appologise for the longwinded post in advance......Sorry!

When PS3 was unveiled at E3 last year there was an awful lot of ooooh-ing and aaaah-ing and yet it wasn' t made entirely clear what of the footage shown was ' real' or pre-rendered.

Some people still aren' t actually sure about the video' s shown. SOME people think that if the Killzone video was pre-rendered CGI, yet it wasn' t. Now none of the footage shown was created with and/or running on PS3 dev-kits, they hadn' t been finished yet. The platforms they were developed and running on were custom IBM PCs containing an early Cell processor and two NVIDIA 6800GT graphics cards working together in SLI configuration. Although Cell was unfinished, Sony (and NVIDIA) claim that the two 6800GT' s represent the capabilities of the now finished RSX and referred to as the ' alpha' kit.

Now...

KILLZONE:- Probably the most stunning (along with MGS4) video shown was, technically, running in realtime on the hardware noted above. It was however running at less than 5 frames per second and sped up to 60 in post-production.

WARHAWK:- Again running in realtime but without any ' cheating' or post-production added effects.

VISION GRAN-TURISMO:- A very high-res version of GT4 with added pit-crews and bystanders. Tons of post-production effects added to the technically ingame generated ' vision' . (Gran Turismo sucks!)

I-8:- Insomniacs 8th game (hence the codename), running on the ' alpha' kit. Doesn' t look anywhere near as good as Killzone and that' s because it' s realtime and probably a very good representation what the final product will be like.

The Getaway:- A massively updated tech-demo based on Team Spho' s previous Getaway games. Higher resolution textures, advanced lighting effects and additional animation added in post-production. Again running in realtime on an ' alpha' kit.

FIGHT NIGHT ROUND 3:- Real time and playable demo showed up at E3. Looked nice but not actually as nice as the soon to be released Xbox 360 version.

Most of the others were pre-rendered CGI, those include Motorstorm, Tekken, Gundam, Ni-oH amost others.

The other big game showed at both E3 and TGS was MGS4 and although running in realtime on an ' alpha' kit (as demonstrated by Kijoma-san), still wasn' t running on final PS3 hardware. An impressive (to say the least) cutscene that we all hope is a close representation on what the game will be like.

Anyway, on to the hardware...

Cell itself with a core clock rate of 3.2GHz and with 512MB of onboard RAM and 7 Synergistic Processing units (SPE' s) each with 256KB of work RAM sound very impressive. It' s certainly fast on paper but is bottlenecked bu only having 256MB of main system memory available to it. Still, it' s certainly fast enough for games since it' s the GPU that doesn the bulk of the work.

The GPU (basically the graphics card) in PS3 is based on existing NVIDIA technology. Dubbed the Reality Synthesizer and running at 550MHz and with 256MB of video memory attatched to it (although it can poach the 256MB that' s available to Cell but would have to take none or all of it). The GPU in PS3, because it hasn' t been custom built and is just there to serve it' s purpose is outdone by far by the GPU in 360.

PS3 can support higher resolutions than 360, but only if you have a HDTV that will take them.

The amount and diversity of available ports (USB' s, HDMI' s etc) don' t actually interest me and most will not be used by casual gamers. They add to the cost.

Now, the main topic here is what PS3 will be capable of, and will it be capable of what was shown at E3 and TGS, The short answer is no, not initially. PS3 will likely suffer from aliasing issues in it' s first generation of titles until the game developers and middleware tool developers come up with ways around it. 360 doesn' t have to worry about that because Microsoft had 10MB eDRAM (VERY fast) embedded RAM added for just this kind of thing. That' s not to say the games won' t look great, but the jaggies will be even more apparant when playing games in a higher resolution (on a HDTV).

Other than potential and likely jaggies in titles launched within the consoles first 6 months on release, developers tryng to figure out how best to utilize the RAM available which will likely produce sub-standard (when compared to late 1st gen and early 2nd gen 360 titles) graphics, i see only 1 other problem. Blu-Ray!

Beacuse Blu-Ray is still in it' s infancy, Sony only have working 1x and 2x drives. This, coupled with PS3' s lower (than 360) memory bandwidth will mean longer loading times than you may be expecting. The drive will only be able to ferry so much data from the disc to be rendered by RSX per revolution, much less so than 360. It' s not REALLY a problem and Sony are looking into an 8x drive for PS3 but that' s unlikely to make the launch models, simply due to the additional cost. The 2x drive adds more than $101 to the final cost to produce the unit so faser drives will initially cost them more.

I have no doubt about PS3' s potential capabilities and when developers have been given time to learn more about the system then we' ll see a similar evolution in it' s visuals as have been seen with PS2. But don' t exect anything like you saw at E3 to be available at launch, it doesn' t work like that and neither do Sony.

PS3 has other issues but none that relate to this subject.

What do you guys expect to be playing when PS3 hits, what to you envisage for the future?