That doesn't mean Epic isn't further ahead or more progressive. What's the big difference between ID hiring an ex-Sony, ex-Naughty Dog programmer and Sony sending programmers to optimize UE3? Anyhow, I can accept that because of his ideology, Carmack may have come to the party later than others, and that others have expended more time on the problem of multicore development.
The stuff they showed its quite good, though it's not like on screen there's a lot of stuff going on at any given moment (and I thought I would have never said anything like that about Carmack's work..)
Gears of War was running on a multicore architecture as of last year if not earlier, so Democoder is right in saying they're ahead of id on that front. As for id Tech 5's performance on PS3, it just means id had the foresight to hire someone with experience to optimize for the PS3 while Epic were busy making Gears of War and not caring about UE3. That said, UT3 is already running quite well on PS3(thanks to Sony) as evidenced by the E3 demo.
The question we should ask to ourselves is "was it possible to launch, in the 2005/2006 time frame, cost effective next gen consoles able to compute between 100 and 200 gigaflops per second using OoOE cores?"
) 30 FPS is good enough. Personally, I prefer the extra eye candy that 30 FPS provides.This is true for every game or technlogy, though we must admit that we don't see quite often that kind of graphics on screen running at 60 fps on current <next gen> consoles (oxymoron of the day!)
