IGN Cube recently posted an interview with Factor 5 President Julian Eggebrech. The interview details the history of Factor 5 and how they got started with Nintendo. It also speaks a bunch about the GameCube. Here are some highlights:

IGNcube: What effects did you not have implemented in the [Star Wars] demo that the GameCube could easily do?

Julian: Tons. Tons. I mean, in the demo you don't see any bump-mapping, for example. GameCube and Xbox could do all of these effects and a lot more. The demo is really base level. Of course all of the lasers you see are real-time lights, but the surface of the Death Star is just lit by one directional light and that's about it. Real games for the system will look a lot better.

IGNcube: What about [the comparison of the] GameCube and Xbox versus PS2?

Julian: They [GameCube and Xbox] will look significantly better. Things like bump-mapping and several texture stages, which you can do, make both Xbox and GameCube extremely strong versus PS2. Because with PS2 you always have to use multi-pass rendering and that is a big problem. It has a very basic graphics chip. The system can pump out enormous amounts of polygons if fed right by the Vector Units, but on the other hand can do that too. PS2 has a very high fill-rate, which GameCube also has and Xbox hopefully will have. But it doesn't have the multi-texturing or texture compression and that's going to make a big difference.

GameCube and Xbox will also look very similar because they both have the same texture compression on chip -- they both use S3TC.