Silent Hill 5 will be technically doing it. If you read up on the game, it's going to be borrowing the style from the movie. This means it will be the real world and then in real time change slowly to the messed up world (with no loading, no "Open door and new world is there like the old games). So I guess that would make two games that will do this 4D thing ;)!da1writer
I read an article about this that was about 2 years old. I can't exactly recall the name but its some form of procedrial animation. Basically the dev makes a texture and its coded to be able to change given certain circumstances (i.e. change color & or texture without having to reload a seperate texture set) so yeah things can literally rot before our eyes.
The 1st game i know of that can do this is MGS4 in Snakes Octo Cam suit! The SPE's of Cell are alot like an GPU's ALU's except that both ALU's and multi core processors used in "other" devices spread an instruction set evenly then render it on screen while the Cell addresses a group of instruction sets to each SPE. (Which is why its more difficult and called asymetrical by John Carmac, creator of the Doom 3 engine)
In other words a PC or 360 would use each core/thread (lets say 3) to draw, shade, and color 1/3rd each of the screen all at the same time until the frame is done (exp. core 1=33.3 core 2=33.3 and core 3=33.3) while the PS3 will use one SPE to draw, another to color, another to shade, ect until the scene is done which is alot faster. One example of this 1/3rd parralele processing is in SLI! When you get 2 GFX cards running in SLI one GPU renders only the top half of the screen while the other renders the bottom half which is why an GFX card running SLI doesnt give you twice the overall performance (if ya get 30 fps with a single card dont expect to get 60 if ya drop in a 2nd card for SLI) the performance increase is roughly 30-42% in an SLI configuration.
The only hope PC gamers have is by DX10's shader model 4.0 which is a substitute for such algorithym to run through a GPU's ALU but you'd need a mobo with 3 PCI-E slots to handle the GFX then the physics and last the procedural textures. Thus far DX10 isnt really proving much throught its use of SM4.0 so only time will tell.
Note: most of this was taken from that article. The creator also stated the problem with such a thing in the PS3's Cell architecture is that if a dev thinks they can force code to run parallel like a PC/360 port the performance will suffer cuz SPE's aren't meant to "share" the same instruction set they have to be given their own like an assembly line which seems to be what Bethseda did with Oblivion compared to all those earlier ports!
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