At the Sony booth, we enjoyed a real-time battle between characters from the movie Antz rendered in real time, as well as interactive sequences from the upcoming Final Fantasy movie shown at 1920x1080 pixels and a sustained rate of 60FPS.
In the Antz demo, I counted 140 ants, each comprising about 7,000 polygons, which were rendered using a ported version of Criterion's Renderware 3. All ants were texture mapped, and the results looked surprisingly close to the quality of the original movie. The Final Fantasy demo was just data from the now-in-development full-length CG movie based upon the game series, rendered in real time by the GScube. It showed a girl (with animated hair threads) in a zero-gravity spaceship, with a user-controllable camera viewpoint. The demo rendered about 314,000 polygons per frame, and included an impressive character with 161 joints, motion-blurring effects, and many other cinematic feats. According to Kazuyuki Hashimoto, senior vice president and CTO of Square USA, the GScube allowed them to show real-time quality, in "close to what is traditionally software rendered in about five hours." Sony believes that the GScube will deliver a tenfold improvement over a regular PS2, and future iterations of the architecture expect to reach a 100-fold improvement.
