It's everything together. Of course, the low-poly dragons I would call dynamic Meshes allowing for not only lots of dragons on screen, but also 3000 soldiers on that enormous bridge structure, and the low-res textures probably the same. The people complain about the lighting, but it's at the crack of dawn and lighting is very special at that time of day. I woke up on a beach at the crack of dawn myself (after a very romantic night, I might add
) and remember very well how amazed I was at the lighting. Mind you, the light in Lair isn't nearly *that* good, but it has similar tones (it makes everything look like gold), and
if the lighting in this game is indeed as advertised, i.e. it will change in realtime using global illumination (even if you'd call it fake global illumination, whatever ). As for the fake water, well, it's a vast ocean and it has fully animated waves and nice light reflection on the ripples to boot. I have never seen anything like it.
The point is,
imho that's going to be very hard to pull off on the 360. The 360 may be able to do other stuff that is going to be hard to pull off on the PS3, but the SPE's and their streaming capabilities and local store are really bringing something to the table. Lair makes intensive use of that,
and I predict that the 360 is not going to be able to do the same kind of thing. It will have some great shader effects for sure, and if programmers get a grip on the tiled rendering that's going to bring some stuff to the table too. But the Cell is one of those very rare chips that actually are capable of performing to spec.
Anyway, let's take it to this thread where this belongs. I'll copy this post there to make the transfer easier:
http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showthread.php?p=843886#post843886