I was able to spot the “fakes”—but only in comparison to the real ones; otherwise, I would have just glanced and accepted them as real.

Cool.  A bit spooky, but cool.

Wow!!  Incredible images.  The seascape image is almost perfect (needs just a *touch* more atmospheric fog), and the image of the shack would be perfect but for two things - too much light relection comin’ off the chain link fence, and the grass in the foreground looks like it was sprayed in with one of those “nozzles” in Painter. (Yes - I need to criticize these images because the fact of the matter is, i’m VERY jealous.)

And this is a GAME engine?

Can’t wait to license this technology and sell packaged scenarios to the DoD for ultra-realistic combat training simulations.  hmmmmm . . . .

Got ‘em.

Hey, lookit, I can detect design, me!

Snort.

did

i agree with ***dave.  i was able to spot them with carefull analysis and comparison to the originals.  but left alone, i would easily accept them as the real thing. 

crazy.  and cool!

(btw, that perfect chain link fence in #4 gave it away for me.  it’s too perfect for that shack.)

It was obvious to me that image 2, and not image 1, was the Real McCoy. The too-cotton-y clouds and the blurry water effects of number 1 gave it away. As far as images 3 and 4 went, I had no idea as to which was real and which was the imposter.

Beautiful original photos, by the way (and the video game renditions aren’t too shabby, either).

I was able to pick them out too. But if you hadn’t mentioned that they were fakes I probably wouldn’t have noticed.

It’s quite impressive, until you realise these images aren’t even 640x480. Even the dev-shots of some PS2 games can look pretty good when touched up and scaled down.

I thoought 1 was real, because I could have sworn that was the entrance to the Cirque de Salazie on La Reunion (French island in the Indian Ocean) where I spent two weeks two years ago…

Damn good stuff. Now I only need a game with advanced time-slowing technology TM so I can play all the good shit coming out now and in the future. The days of my youth where we had all the time in the world, those seem far off…

Todd: But if you hadn’t mentioned that they were fakes I probably wouldn’t have noticed.

Yep. Pretty good. 

You can see 1 is fake because of the lack of depth for the buildings vs trees on the coast.

You can see 2 is fake because the grass looks cheap/unblended.

I spotted them the same way Moloch did.  But they’re pretty fucking impressive (as they say in New Zealand) for in-game graphics.  I’m still waiting for Smell-O-Vision, however…

The first picture looks like it could also be somewhere on Maui or Kauai.

I wasn’t totally sure about the coastline shots, but #1 had very “repititious” mountain features.  Too much of a pattern seemed to appear to me.  Minor detail, though - the shot is freaking fantastic.

Yeah, the chain link fence gave the shed away.  The frame is also too square to be real.  I didn’t look at the grass until I read the comments, but that was a giveaway too.  Like ***Dave said though, the fence had to be compared to something.  It looked more like a new mesh of some kind.  The grass is the real giveaway.

It’s quite impressive, until you realise these images aren’t even 640x480. Even the dev-shots of some PS2 games can look pretty good when touched up and scaled down.

What you’re suggesting? Because these screenshots are small PCs wouldn’t be able to to produce same quality at high resolution?
You clearly haven’t seen even two years old Far Cry which is already major way behind capabilities of PCs… For example that trailer 3 doesn’t do any justice to amount of details in game.
http://www.farcry-thegame.com/uk/movies.php

It’s the consoles which can’t produce even crap without antique technology display device with real resolution not much over 320x240. (because of excessive free “anti aliasing” which is required for hiding imperfections)

All older consoles produce low quality crap, Xbox 360 sure has few nice capabilities but when coders finally have knowledge of how to use it efficiently PCs are considerably ahead.
And Sony’s new deceit box again… all that scheisse about “supercomputer like” capabilities. Already getting game engines to take lot of benefits from couple CPUs/cores is going to be difficult because processing of game engines can’t be really well parallelized… at least when coders can produce top speed code for that consoel is already getting old.

I could bet that when this game comes out top end PCs will run it quite nicely nearly at 1600x1200 resolution.
And I can guarantee that no matter how much they spew out PR BushShit these new “super” consoles can’t produce nothing near that, already very limited memory resources means that content has to be raped badly to fit it into those small memories… current top end graphic cards alone have 512MB memory which is same amount that those consoles have, except that in consoles it has to be enough for everything. (one advantage for Xbox360: memory isn’t shared rigidly unlike in PS3)

Here’s some HDTV resolution stuff.
http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/05/15/e32006_crysis_demo_video/

What you’re suggesting? Because these screenshots are small PCs wouldn’t be able to to produce same quality at high resolution?

No.

**I was saying that low res screenshots tend to make a game look more detailed than it really is. It’s a neat mind trick. At higher resolutions, those images would likely be much easier to pick apart.

The thing that fingered #4 for me was the jumbled piles of lumber in which every stick is exactly the same size and shape as every other stick.  Real piles of lumber, like the one in #3, have sticks of different sizes and shapes.

There’s something funky about that palm tree in the center, too.

#1 was easier - those mountains are too steep.  They’d erode.  Also, no sign of human habitation in an area that beautiful?  Gimme a break.

But I agree with ***Dave - if it wasn’t for the side-by-side comparison, knowing one was fake and scrutinizing them to find out which, I probably wouldn’t notice.  You have to actually *think* about them to spot the fakes - they aren’t obvious like previous generations of technology.