More demo information (a bit clearer);
http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=59243Gist is... most of the demos were 'made to spec' of the PS3. which implies they were rendered with the game assets. He (PH) specifically says
some were rendered.
[q]Eurogamer: One question on the lips of many people at the moment: how much of what we saw in the PlayStation 3 demos was actually running in real-time?
Phil Harrison: Everything in the demos was real-time.
Eurogamer: And what about the game footage clips?
Phil Harrison: Not all of that - in fact, none of it was real-time because it was all running off video. If you make a presentation to two and a half thousand people, you're going to put some of it on video just to be on the safe side.
I've been asked this question a lot. The way we put those videos together, everything was done to specification. Everything was done to PS3 spec. Virtually everything used in-game assets; some things were rendered.
Eurogamer: How representative of what we're actually going to be seeing in PS3 games were those videos?
Phil Harrison: I think very. I think depending on the game, different games took a different approach to their way of expressing what the games are like - but clearly, something like MotorStorm uses more cinematic, replay-like cameras than you would ever enjoy in-game. So that makes a big difference... But everything is done to spec.
Eurogamer: A fairly significant number of the games we saw - including many of the most impressive ones - were from European studios. Is this indicative of SCEE perhaps focusing more on preparing for next-gen than other territories?
Phil Harrison: I just think we had great stuff to show! Yeah, I'm really proud of the way the European content has been received, and I'm delighted with the response to Heavenly Sword, MotorStorm and Killzone in particular.
But even things like The Getaway technical test - and I was at pains to point out that this was not Getaway PS3, this was what happens when a team rolls off a game and we start getting them thinking about what is their vision for taking that technology and scaling it up. I think it was a good A to B comparison, because people know what Getaway looks like on PS2, and then they were able to ramp that up on to PS3 - albeit on very early prototype hardware, so it was a bit painful along the way for them! I thought that was a great example.
Zoom in
Eurogamer: So The Getaway was one of the things that was running on real hardware?
Phil Harrison: Yeah, good example - I mean, you could see actually, the way that those cameras worked. That zoom-in camera was done in real-time to capture the kind of video-like footage that we had.
Eurogamer: Some of the developers who worked on demos for the launch have said that even those aren't running on hardware approaching the full power of the final unit - so what percentage of the full performance was that running on?
Phil Harrison: It's really hard to say, because as technology gets more and more complicated, there's no concept of the "perfect" engine. We used to say on 16-bit that a game used 90 per cent of the machine's power, or Gran Turismo uses, you know, 94 per cent of PlayStation 1's power... There's no concept of the perfect game engine that uses everything. So it's hard to say.[/q]
