Sony Computer Entertainment's press conferences are infamous for being low-energy, too-long Powerpoint presentations, year after year. The beginning of this year's press conference was no different, with slide after slide about the history of the PlayStation, the success of the PSP, the story of the PlayStation 2 (which is apparently the world's first digital media hub; seeing as personal computers weren't doing any of these things, nope).

It's hard to be too disappointed, though, as the presentation led straight into the hardware details for the new PlayStation 3. Sony's plan for setting the PS3 apart from the previous generation and the competition is to change the way console games are rendered. Instead of relying primarily on textures (flat bitmaps bent and stretched around polygonal surfaces), the PlayStation 3 will rely primarily on shaders to determine the final look on-screen. Sony touted the fact that it this is the way rendering is done in movies.

This is a very processor-intensive way of doing rendering, but the PlayStation 3 will have the processing muscle to handle it. Much emphasis was put on the PS3's Cell CPU's ability to calculate approximately 2 teraflops, or 2 trillion floating point operations a second. (For a standard of comparison, the render farm Sony used to render the CG segments in Spider-Man 2 was processing 10 teraflops.)

[Editor's Note: Pictured above are KillZone 2, Formula One, and I-8.]

Whether the numbers are real or not, the technology demonstrations were indeed stunning. One technically impressive demo was a likeness of Alfred Molina's head. The light from behind him bled through his ears realistically, his eyes and skin looks like...well, eyes and skin. Watching his eyes move, or forehead tense and loosen, or lips move was absolutely stunning. It wasn't photorealistic by any means, but it was like nothing that has been shown before.

The centerpiece demo, presented by Tim Sweeny, was a demonstration whipped up by the Unreal team in two months using the Unreal Engine 3. At first, it looked like your typical game trailer, with a macho guy in power armor blasting away at a lithe android pursuing him. The difference was that it wasn't a trailer; they showed the sequence a second time, and stopped it occasionally, to look around at the incredible sparks or fog, or the amazing detail in the character models. He even took the camera out one window to look at the fully 3D landscape in the background, which is only glimpsed momentarily in the normal course of the fight. The entire thing was rendered in real-time, on (what I can only presume is an early) PlayStation 3 devkit.

Some other, less intangible, features will also be available in the PlayStation 3. The number of ports on the console itself is rather unusual; there's (deep breath now) six USB 2.0 ports, a detatchable 2.5" hard disk drive slot, a gigabit ethernet port, a Memory Stick slot, a CompactFlash slot, an SD card, Blutooth wireless for up to 7 controllers, Wi-Fi for wireless networking, two(!) HDMI video plugs for HD video, an optical sound-out port, a plain old AV connector plug, and a Blu-Ray disc drive (which supports - another deep breath - CDs, DVDs, SACDs, and the new next-gen 50-gig Blu-Ray discs). Some of the implications of all these plugs are quite nice; all of the PS3's controllers are both wired and wireless at your option, and proprietary memory cards are a thing of the past. Another odd tidbit is that it will be technically possible to actually hook up two different HD TVs to your PS3, for (say) a panoramic racing game, or multiplayer play with each of two players having their own screen.

[Editor's Note: Pictured above are Killing Day, Bandai's Gundam 0080 game, and Five Phantom Saga.]

The hottest system in the world isn't very much good without any games, and Sony did show off a number of in-progress games. Front and center was EA's Fight Night 3, which was running in real time on a PS3 devkit. The demonstration emphasized the faces, and with good reason. Watching one boxer's face darken with rage as he throws a knockout punch, or the other boxer's goofy look of confusion when he's hit with that punch, was quite a treat. The goal is to make the facial rendering expressive and clear enough to use your opponent's expression as a useful indicator in a fight. If EA can pull it off, it will be quite a coup.

The rest of the demos were concept demos, and, as such, might or might not be running on the very early PS3 devkits. These trailers included... (deep breath again):

• F1 Racing from Liverpool Studios
  
• Devil May Cry 4
  
• An unnamed Gundam game (with mobile suits from Gundam 0080)
  
• A demo from Namco showing Jin from Tekken
  
• An unnamed Old West game from Rockstar
  
• Killzone 2
  
• Vision Gran Turismo
  
• I-8, a first-person shooter from Insomniac
  
• Ni-Oh, a brawler set in Japanese history from Koei
  
• Eyedentity, a very unusual game where you issue orders to a pair of secret agents using the camera and microphone
  
• Heavenly Sword, a very Dynasty Warriors-like brawler from SCEI
  
• Five Phantom Saga, a first-person shooter(!) from Sonic Team
  
  
• A remake of Incog's fan-favorite Warhawk
  
• Killing Day, a first-person shooter about the Russian mob from Ubisoft
  
• Motor Storm, a visually-stunning off-road racer from Evolution Studios