[RobertR1]

You can turn on "skulls" to make the game quite difficult in co-op if you prefer.

[Deepblue]

Actually, one part of Halo 3's graphics is just atrocious - human faces. Ugh.

[Joshua Luna]

Originally Posted by Deepblue

Actually, one part of Halo 3's graphics is just atrocious - human faces. Ugh.

No love for helmet hair?

[MJP]

Originally Posted by Deepblue

Actually, one part of Halo 3's graphics is just atrocious - human faces. Ugh.

I would agree, at least based on what I've seen from the stills. I actually played a bit of Halo 2 last night, and was noticing how the quality of the faces really hasn't improved all that much.

However on the flipside the lighting and HDR effects seem to be quite nice based on gametrailers footage. I suppose its just part of a tradeoff made to support the huge outdoor levels they like to have in the series.

[AlStrong]

Originally Posted by MJP

I would agree, at least based on what I've seen from the stills. I actually played a bit of Halo 2 last night, and was noticing how the quality of the faces really hasn't improved all that much.

You're saying that the quality of this hasn't greatly improved in Halo 3

[Nebula]

Actually the change looks to be minor except more high res normal maps.

Edit: The change is bigger than I thought, it is just hard to spot it on the above screenshots.

[czekon]

Originally Posted by AlStrong

You're saying that the quality of this hasn't greatly improved in Halo 3

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/25482.html

looks better in motion

[AlStrong]

Awesome stuff, way better than the first ones.

[swaaye]

I just wish they'd anti-alias more console games. The hardware can do it. But it's not a priority, and I don't understand why. I'll be playing it on a SDTV tho, if I buy it, so I guess that'll help out with the jaggies.

But, c'mon. It's 2007. The hardware is designed for anti-aliasing. I've been using it on my PeeCee since 2002 or so. That and anisotropic, which 360 should be even more capable of than AA with decent speed.

Yes, graphics whore here. I'd trade some specular shader nonsense for nice, clean edges, eh.

[Tap In]

Originally Posted by swaaye

I just wish they'd anti-alias more console games. The hardware can do it. But it's not a priority, and I don't understand why. I'll be playing it on a SDTV tho, if I buy it, so I guess that'll help out with the jaggies.

But, c'mon. It's 2007. The hardware is designed for anti-aliasing. I've been using it on my PeeCee since 2002 or so. That and anisotropic, which 360 should be even more capable of than AA with decent speed.

Yes, graphics whore here. I'd trade some specular shader nonsense for nice, clean edges, eh.

check out some of EA's games then...NBA LIVE is amazing how smooth the AA is and Medal of Honor:A and Sega Rally R are great too. Also in motion even games like this look much better than the static screens..

NBA 2k8 looks like such a Jagfest that I'm not even getting it evn though it's the best BBall sim ever.

Originally Posted by RobertR1

This should be lit up well come tomorrow Pretty cool concept I think. That's with 4,700 players.

very cool

[Dave Glue]

Originally Posted by swaaye

I just wish they'd anti-alias more console games. The hardware can do it.

It depends completely upon the game and the resources it needs. It's not like the PC where you simply say "turn on AA" - the 360 makes it far more complicated, and with the PS3 you're rather limited in bandwidth off the bat so enabling high levels of AA just really isn't feasible for most games.

But, c'mon. It's 2007. The hardware is designed for anti-aliasing. I've been using it on my PeeCee since 2002 or so. That and anisotropic, which 360 should be even more capable of than AA with decent speed.

But your PC and 360 are quite different hardware. Obviously, if the 360 was capable of anisotropic filtering that easy, more games would have it. Forza2 for example could really use it, yet it has really crap filtering.

It's likely just the nature of the R500 in the 360. Remember that while anisotropic filtering has rarely had that huge an impact of framerates in PC games for the last few generations, the quality didn't always stay the same. Nvidia and ATI were constantly "tweaking" their ansio algorithms to keep the speed up, usually at the expense of quality. Only with the most recent gen did aniso not cut that many corners will still maintaining speed - and these are cards with 50+ megs/sec of bandwidth to their large memory pool. With engine complexity + high resolution, anisotropic filtering can take a good performance hit if you want to keep the quality.

Yes, graphics whore here. I'd trade some specular shader nonsense for nice, clean edges, eh.

The lack of AA - and perhaps aniso even more - stick out to me like a sore thumb definitely in a lot of console games, but I don't think it's a case of developers just not caring about them per-se, it's just that the hit they take in a particular game may not be worth it or it may involve too much complexity with the current engine.

I've seen some awesome HDR shots from Halo3 though, I really think the stills of the game won't do it justice.

[Mintmaster]

Originally Posted by Dave Glue

But your PC and 360 are quite different hardware. Obviously, if the 360 was capable of anisotropic filtering that easy, more games would have it. Forza2 for example could really use it, yet it has really crap filtering.

No, it's not that obvious. Only recently have PC games actually put the option of AF in the game itself rather than rely on gamers to use the driver control panel. No games to my knowledge enable it by default.

I would guess that we'd see 10x the percentage of PC gamers care about AF than that of console gamers. So if PC games don't even have it enabled by default, how can you expect console games to? If you ask console gamers what they'd like to see improved in graphics, very few would say "improved textures on angled surfaces". Even among supposedly expert opinions from reviewers, very rarely, if ever, is there such a suggestion. Even in your Forza example, they'd rather see a GT4 quality lighting feel first and foremost.

It's a matter of priority. I would never play a game without 16xAF, but other would sacrifice almost anything to run the game at as high a resolution as possible, especially LCD owners aiming for native resolution. HD console gamers are just as obsessed with resolution. Show everyone an A-B shot and maybe most would reconsider, but that's not going to happen. For whatever reason, lack of AF just doesn't stick out like a sore thumb to them as it does to me and others on B3D.

Xenos is fast enough for 100 texture accesses per pixel per frame at 720p/60fps. There's more than enough capability to selectively choose some critical textures to have AF with minimal overall performance hit.

[kyleb]

Originally Posted by Dave Glue

The lack of AA - and perhaps aniso even more - stick out to me like a sore thumb definitely in a lot of console games, but I don't think it's a case of developers just not caring about them per-se, it's just that the hit they take in a particular game may not be worth it or it may involve too much complexity with the current engine.

If Bungie had any respect for AF then surely they would have put the option in Halo 2 PC, but apparently they think massively oversampled bullshots are the only way to make their textures look good.

[AlStrong]

Originally Posted by kyleb

If Hired Gun had any respect for AF then surely they would have put the option in Halo 2 PC

Fixed.

[kyleb]

Originally Posted by AlStrong

Fixed.

Ah, Bungie said they worked closely on the project, so surely they could have given us an AF option if they thought the feature was worth having.

Originally Posted by zed

(discount that the above screen comes from halo3, ie imagine it comes from lair or something else, ie im not knocking halo3 im just commenting on the tech)
hmm im guessing u think thats a lot of verts? IMO it looks like 128x128 or 256x256 onscreen ie not that many, pretty easy for even a 5 year old cpu/gpu to churn out

It is far more tris than we get for the watter in most games.

[GreekDNA]

I just played up to the 2nd level

its good but nothing more nothing less

it really feels like a halo 2 exapansion tbh.

that said ill finish the the whole game before i give my final judgment.

[Tap In]

Originally Posted by GreekDNA

I just played up to the 2nd level

its good but nothing more nothing less

it really feels like a halo 2 exapansion tbh.

that said ill finish the the whole game before i give my final judgment.

what's your gamertag?

[Mintmaster]

Originally Posted by swaaye

I just wish they'd anti-alias more console games. The hardware can do it. But it's not a priority, and I don't understand why. I'll be playing it on a SDTV tho, if I buy it, so I guess that'll help out with the jaggies.

But, c'mon. It's 2007. The hardware is designed for anti-aliasing. I've been using it on my PeeCee since 2002 or so. That and anisotropic, which 360 should be even more capable of than AA with decent speed.

Yes, graphics whore here. I'd trade some specular shader nonsense for nice, clean edges, eh.

I totally agree.

AF is the most important one for me. At least AA is somewhat mitigated in motion due to the random nature of stair-stepping. Without AF, though, you loose so much texture detail affecting such a large percentage of the screen.

I wouldn't trade shader quality, though (and to be honest 'specular nonsense' probably doesn't cost much performance anyway). I would trade resolution, though, and I'd rather play 480p with 4xAA/16xAF than 720p without either. Upscaling the former and writing HUD/text at full res wouldn't look that bad, IMO. Framerate would be drastically improved as well, allowing stupendous overdraw for grass, foliage, smoke, etc.

[Dave Glue]

Originally Posted by Mintmaster

I wouldn't trade shader quality, though (and to be honest 'specular nonsense' probably doesn't cost much performance anyway). I would trade resolution, though, and I'd rather play 480p with 4xAA/16xAF than 720p without either. Upscaling the former and writing HUD/text at full res wouldn't look that bad, IMO. Framerate would be drastically improved as well, allowing stupendous overdraw for grass, foliage, smoke, etc.

I also notice the lack of anisotropic filtering probably more than AA myself, but I'm not going to go that far.

Bury 640x480, it's just done. Heck, those 1024x600 res games on the 360 stand out for me big time - TR:Legend and COD3 look quite blocky on my 20" LCD. Even with aniso and high AA, 640 res is just too damn blocky and/or blurry.

[Mintmaster]

Originally Posted by Dave Glue

Bury 640x480, it's just done. Heck, those 1024x600 res games on the 360 stand out for me big time - TR:Legend and COD3 look quite blocky on my 20" LCD. Even with aniso and high AA, 640 res is just too damn blocky and/or blurry.

That's because they don't have high AA/AF, and 720p w/o AA would run slower anyway (twice as many texture/shader ops), so you're not comparing apples to apples.

If you took a 720p game without AA/AF, reduced the resolution to 1024x600, and enabled 4xAA and 16AF, I'm sure it would both look better and run faster. Why? 720p has 60% more pixels.

The "problem" is that this would need two tiles on Xenos. I just can't understand why tiling is such a pain for some developers unless they have a rather primitive render engine with crappy frustum culling. Otherwise, frustum culling for a half-screen tile is just as easy as culling for the full screen. Just do it twice, and additional triangle load will be far less than 2x. For a title like Halo where there are many characters/objects on the screen at once, it should be very easy to mark 90% of them as being in one half or the other.

[Shifty Geezer]

Originally Posted by swaaye

But, c'mon. It's 2007. The hardware is designed for anti-aliasing. I've been using it on my PeeCee since 2002 or so. That and anisotropic, which 360 should be even more capable of than AA with decent speed.

Can't say I agree with that. I've never had a PC that can run the games I run with AA without a notable framerate hit. eg. Guild Wars can drop down to 20 fps regularly on a 9600 Pro, a PC that at least matches the recommended system. Now I don't PC game a lot, so perhaps I just pick up titles that don't handle AA well, but in my experience, I've never got stable 60 fps without AA, so never consider adding it. The only hope is playing old games on modern hardware, and in those cases the reason I can get faster framerates with AA is because the graphics are inferior. So sure, tone down the graphics a load and you can get AA, but then the rest of the game looks rubbish! On PC you're used to crappy all-over-the-place framerates, but that's not what I want from a console, and I don't see that any games targetting modern hardware can have all the bells and whistles at a good, stable framerate alongside AA unless you have an over-the-top rig far in advance of what the game was designed for.

[Mintmaster]

Originally Posted by Shifty Geezer

Can't say I agree with that. I've never had a PC that can run the games I run with AA without a notable framerate hit. eg. Guild Wars can drop down to 20 fps regularly on a 9600 Pro, a PC that at least matches the recommended system. Now I don't PC game a lot, so perhaps I just pick up titles that don't handle AA well, but in my experience, I've never got stable 60 fps without AA, so never consider adding it. The only hope is playing old games on modern hardware, and in those cases the reason I can get faster framerates with AA is because the graphics are inferior. So sure, tone down the graphics a load and you can get AA, but then the rest of the game looks rubbish!

You're exactly the type of person I'm talking about. Why not keep all the graphics settings the same and simply reduce the resolution one notch before enabling 4xAA? Your framerate will increase in almost every game, even in the most intense sequences.

So your pixels are now 25% bigger in each direction. So what? You now have ~3x the effective edge resolution. The only real details you sacrifice are non-magnified textures.

The problem is that people enjoy artifical detail. Its the same reason people will buy a 10mp camera with a tiny and noisy sensor, or a TV with sharpening effect despite the ugly halos.

[AlphaWolf]

If you want 4xAA at the sacrifice of detail, why not just smear a little petroleum jelly on your glasses?

It really depends but for the most part 480p with AA looks noticeably worse to me than 720p without AA on my 46" tv. ymmv.

[Mintmaster]

Originally Posted by AlphaWolf

If you want 4xAA at the sacrifice of detail, why not just smear a little petroleum jelly on your glasses?

It really depends but for the most part 480p with AA looks noticeably worse to me than 720p without AA on my 46" tv. ymmv.

I mentioned AF as well, you know. On the steepest of angles (e.g. watching the road 30m ahead from inside a car), 720x480 w/ 16xAF gives you more detail than 11520x7680 w/o AF, i.e. the equivalent of fifty 1080p televisions.

Moreover, you wouldn't be looking at the same assets/shaders, because 480p w/ 4xAA can be rendered 2.5 times as fast as 720p w/o AA. You lose some of that when enabling 16xAF, but there's still plenty of spare power to enhance the visuals.

My whole point is that you're gaining detail by adding 4xAA/16xAF at lower resolution.

[Shifty Geezer]

Originally Posted by Mintmaster

You're exactly the type of person I'm talking about. Why not keep all the graphics settings the same and simply reduce the resolution one notch before enabling 4xAA?

Because I've got a fixed resolution TFT and anything other than it's native resolution looks rubbish? If it's a choice between 1600x1200 no AA and 1280x1024 with 4xAA, I'll try whichever looks the best (and I do try all the settings to get a balance I'm happy with), but, like many folk, my monitor only likes one resolution and you stick to that one.