Why Gears of War looks better than Resistance

Why Gears of War looks better than Resistance: "Insomniac Games bod Brian Hastings has responded to critics who have complained that the company's PlayStation 3 launch title, Resistance: Fall of Man, isn't as good-looking as the Xbox 360's Gears of War. In a tirade titled "10 Reasons Why PS3 Will Win This Console Generation", Hastings was keen to explain why Gears trumped Resistance in the visuals department, despite the latter appearing on a more powerful platform.

"Sometimes people ask us, 'If Resistance takes 14 gigabytes, why doesn't it look better than Gears?'" began Hastings. "Well, for one, Resistance didn't support texture streaming, so we had to make choices about where we spent our high-res textures. Resistance also had 30 single-player chapters, six multiplayer maps, uncompressed audio streaming, and high-definition mpegs. That all added up to a lot of space on the disc.

"Starting with Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction we are supporting texture streaming, which will make the worlds look even better, and will also consume even more space on disc. Gears of War is a beautiful game and shows off the highest resolution textures of anything yet released, partly because of the Unreal Engine's ability to stream textures," he continued. "This means that you can have much higher resolution textures than you could normally fit in your 512 MB of RAM. It also means that you’re going to chew up more disc space for each level.

"With streamed textures, streamed geometry and streamed audio, even with compression, you can quickly approach 1GB of data per level. That inherently limits you to a maximum of about 7 levels, and that’s without multiplayer levels or mpeg cut-scenes. There’s no question that you can always cut more levels, compress the audio more, compress the textures more, down-res the mpeg movies, and eventually get any game to fit on a DVD. But you paid for a high-def experience, right?"