Garden & Butterfly [Original XBOX unveiling Tech Demo]
http://www.unseen64.net
The Japanese Garden demo displays a ton of butterflies flying through an elegant Japanese garden. The demo is very colorful and shows off the Xbox's ability to display a large number of moving objects on screen at once.
We started our XBox screening by taking a look at the "garden" demonstration. This is the infamous scene that includes the plethora of butterflies. This demo had very high-resolution graphics and sound. For E3 purposes, the demo had to options -- a few butterflies or full of butterflies. On the full option, there were a thousand butterflies each fully textured and shadowed. We saw this by Hebenthal zooming in on several random butterflies. Each butterfly had a reflection in the pond below -- which is pretty amazing. Another thing that caught our eye was the fact if you moved towards the butterflies they would fly away from you. Upon zooming to the end of a flower, he stated the flower tip was 4MB in graphics, but could be 60MB if need be as there is 64MB shared between the CPU and the GPU. This allows artists to create scenes "as they should look" as he put it. The butterflies are also intelligent, that is Hebenthal made them spell out each of the "XBox" letters in the sky. Also if a butterfly should land on a leaf or in the pond, the leaf would move or the pond would ripple respectively.
http://www.activewin.com/xbox/xboxe3.shtml