There was no Cell based GPU - there was however a Toshiba project designing the PS3 gpu before NVidia got involved (https://www.neogaf.com/threads/ps3-cell-made-sonys-first-party-what-they-are-today.1636357/) there's some commentary on what might have been in this thread.What original GPU? You mean the Cell-based one?
Tons of stuff - higher-fidelity realtime lighting & shadowing systems, bigger NPC crowds, substantially more complex AI interactions (and more physics interactivity) etc. It's not entirely dissimilar from MGS4 example. The resolution was always the same too - the only thing that changed in retail game was upgrading the scan-out buffer to full height (so when frames are dropped, you don't drop res) but rendering was already @ full frame.Was it? If I recall only the escape from the Tanker sequence was cut. It was also running at a lower resolution than the retail game.
I gave very concrete examples of exactly that. Both Division and Watch Dogs were little more than concepts when first shown - that entire 'city block' they demo-ed was little more than a thinly disguised corridor of near-field detail + clever camera work to make it 'look' like going around a city, and the gameplay - while 'playable' was almost entirely canned. That's what 'vertical-slice' demos most commonly do - you concept out blocks of what you want your game to look & feel like - you don't actually build all the layers out in cut-down fashion (that'd cost orders of magnitude more to do and would never be on time).If it was only a concept trailer, similar to a CG trailer, they wouldn't have showcased the demo in real-time at TGS and talk about how they were planning on making it look much better still:
And doing it in realtime has certain benefits - not the least being confirming it's at least somewhat plausible to run on target (that is - assuming that your target isn't completely made-up, something all these 3 examples had in common).
Indeed - this is already well into 'hw iterations became familiar' territory, they knew really well by then what they were doing on PS3 and what was realistic.The other time Kojima showed tech early in development was the Fox Engine and it looked pretty much on par with what we saw in MGSV: