While most gamers have been quick to accuse Sony of doctoring its E3 demo videos in order to create a positive buzz about its PS3 console, the latest news coming from the land of the rising sun, suggests otherwise.
A report released this week by Japanese website ITMedia claims that the development kits used to run E3 demos such as the truly impressive UT 2007 presentation, were not running on full steam. The story claims that the kits at E3 had processors clocked at 2.4GHz while the real deal will have them running at 3.2GHz, while the nVidia graphics chip has also not been completed and at the time did not fully utilize all of the cell's high end features. ITMedia claims that this means that the E3 setup was only running at 75 per cent.
Some of this makes sense as we have heard quite a few developers drool at the prospect of getting their hands on the final silicon although none have claimed to have it quite yet. Also no one expected nVidia to have a fully functioning chip ready for E3 and after all Microsoft, with the XBox 360 launch date looming in the not too distant horizon, still had to resort to apple based setups for its next-gen demonstrations.
Of course such a discrepancy between the E3 hardware and the final product could mean that games on the system will look even better than what they did during the E3 presentation, but then again, as someone at MG said, b>...you can run a video on a P3 with a GeForce 2 and I'll eat my hat if what we saw at E3 wasn't just that; a video. It seems that we will have to put our hopes and doubts to one side for now as it may be a while longer before we get our answer to the one question that was raised by E3; was that really in-engine footage?
