“AA on the cpu is MLAA Morphological Antialising. We saved 5-6 miliseconds by moving it off the cpu’s. Many props to our coder Cedric for making this happen and it looks way better!
For GoW3 we are not using screen space ambient occlusion. We are using a couple other versions of AO including baked for environments, AO texture maps and a pixel calculation that creates better shading on normal maps in indirect lit areas.
Number of dynamic lights – ALOT! that is one of the big features of our engine. We built it around being able to use up to 20 dynamic lights per game object. The light can be big or small, it doesn’t matter. In the end, i believe we support up to 50 dynamic lights per game object. We are not using a differed lighting scheme. Our lead programmer Vassily came up with this amazing system during pre-production, us artists love it!!! We can place lights in Maya and have them update in realtime in the game on the PS3, its like being able to paint with lights. Lighting is fast and a very enjoyable artistic process.
Off the top of my head i don’t remember exactly poly count numbers for the character. We use as many polys as it takes. My guess for Zues, Kratos and Hades is 25-30,000k triangles. Again, off the top of my head, texture sizes for these character is quite big. I think we are using 2048′s for the lower, upper body and head. Each character gets a normal, diffuse, specular, gloss(power map), AO, and skin shader map. We also use can layer textures to create more tiling, and use environment maps were needed, etc. “