Will next gen consoles finally put an end to ugly low res textures?

[blip]

I recently got my first HDTV. So I've been playing my Xbox 360 a bit more and one thing that strikes me is that even the AAA rated titles are just one ugly texture after another. The games look great when your viewing things at midrange but even the games with the quote-unquote best graphics are a mess when you get up close. Modern Warfare 3 actually looked better on my fairly decent SDTV. The HDTV exposes the low resolution its rendered at natively (I think it's 600p for multiplayer.. garbage)

Will next gen consoles (xbox 720, PS4 etc...) finally put an end to this? Is it mostly a RAM issue? Would the 360 be putting out way better textures if it had 2 gigs of RAM?

I hope the next gen consoles, if anything, finally put an end to low res textures. They really are awful to look at.

 

[tunafish]

Will next gen consoles (xbox 720, PS4 etc...) finally put an end to this? Is it mostly a RAM issue? Would the 360 be putting out way better textures if it had 2 gigs of RAM?

Yes, it's absolutely a RAM issue. The next gen will momentarily bring the texture quality up to where it is on the PC at the time, and after that it will stagnate again as the PC gains more ram.

 

[archie4oz]

Yes and no... Yes resolutions will go up (more RAM). No because your standards will increase and you'll still bitch about it. Trust me, this happens every generation...

 

[blip]

Yes and no... Yes resolutions will go up (more RAM). No because your standards will increase and you'll still bitch about it. Trust me, this happens every generation...

Actually, there is a certain level of quality at which I think I will be pretty much satisfied. For example, I think the Halo games did a pretty good job of maintaining texture detail up close, am I right? That was actually one of the things that blew me away about the original Halo at the time, they had those detail textures that looked better than what anybody else was doing on consoles.

But when you go up close to a texture on Modern Warfare 3 on Xbox 360 it looks like garbage, am I right? And the 600p resolution is just terrible... they really underpowered the 360 and PS3 if they wanted them to run truly high-definition games (and not just games rendered at 600p, upscaled to 720p/1080p, just so you can get a clearer view at how low res everything is...)

My TV is only 720p and these games have a ways to go, imo... 512mb RAM for HD games wtf were they thinking.... *facepalm*

 

[Devious]

I'm not sure how to properly put this question, but is it possible to finally get grass that looks like it's actually rooted to the ground? I was in theater mode in Halo: Reach when I couldn't help but notice the grass looking like this. Where it looks like 2D paper on top of some very low resolution dirt.

Is there a way around this? Or would this require a really beefy console with tons of GPU power and RAM? I know this is something that most people don't go around noticing every second so I guess developers just don't bother with it, but I was just wondering if it was possible (or if it is already)..

 

[Grall]

They didn't underpower anything, it's more like they overpowered it for the price the damn thing was allowed to cost... (Remember the RROD fiasco?) It's always a price issue, more power costs more money - and likely emits more heat too.

The 360 launched in 2005 IIRC, and it was actually quite hardcore for its time, specs-wise. It was the first piece of hardware with unified GPU shader units, had a triple-core 3.2GHz CPU with hyper-threading and so on. The first editions of the 360 also burned like 200 watts of power, which was unheard of previously in a console. The original Xbox had been the hungriest last generation before that, and it only needed tiny fans and heatsinks to keep cool.

Then on top of everything else, remember it took YEARS of billion-dollar losses before the xbox division became profitable, so it's hard to see where they could have poured in even more hardware while still maintaining a price point even remotely affordable...

What held (and still is holding) the 360 back more than anything I'd say was the reliance on the DVDROM for storage, due to the gimped arcade edition. If all 360s had had harddrives from the start and MS had allowed harddrive installs, things would have been better today - not by much though because you can't work miracles with fundamentally limited hardware, but still it'd been better than just the god-awful slow optical drive. But, alas. They did not. So there we are.

 

[Rangers]

Low res compare to what? This gen textures look great compared to last gen, and next gen's will look garbage compared to the gen after that...

It's an ever moving goalpost with no set win condition and that should be obvious.

For your specifications complaints, These consoles are 6 years old. At the time they were made these specs were good. I happen to think graphics this gen for the most part are amazing (a simple battle in the FFXIII-2 demo dropped my jaw the other day, the guys who made FF1 on the NES could never have believed this).

But there's a long way to go and next gen will look even more amazing.

Threads like this sure stand in funny contrast to the diminishing returns/Wii U crowd though.

 

[TheChefO]

I think the Halo games did a pretty good job of maintaining texture detail up close, am I right?

Indeed.

I'm not sure exactly what Bungie was doing that most/all other devs couldn't do WRT texture detail up close, but Halo1 still puts other games to shame even today on xb360/ps3 when it comes to texture detail.

I'm hoping nextgen Sony and MS institute a standard for replacing/adding detail in a texture via procedural synthesis when the texture is at a certain distance to the screen it starts to become blurry.

The object should then start to fall back on its primitive surface type:

Concrete
Brick
Dirt
Wood
Marble
Granite
Cloth
Bark
etc

These textures would be generated by procedural synthesis to at least add and mix detail to the existing texture if not replacing the texture outright so as to prevent any sign of pixilation.

Hopefully the nextgen boxes can muster up enough performance to handle some realtime procedural synthesis for textures ...

 

[Rangers]

Halo 1 just used some trick that the textures looked good up close, but not as soon as you backed away a little bit.

And I'm quite sure the textures on anniversary look much better at any distance. Considering it has 8 times the RAM...

 

[nightshade]

I'm not sure how to properly put this question, but is it possible to finally get grass that looks like it's actually rooted to the ground? I was in theater mode in Halo: Reach when I couldn't help but notice the grass looking like this. Where it looks like 2D paper on top of some very low resolution dirt.

Well I think MGS3 did grass amazingly and that was PS2, granted the grass blades were all individual blades but there were so many of them and it was so dense while each of them interacted physically to just about anything in the environment (even bullets). I don't think I've seen any other game do it in a scale like that.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Yes, it's absolutely a RAM issue. The next gen will momentarily bring the texture quality up to where it is on the PC at the time...

At some point we should have texture resolution at 1 texel per pixel up close, at which point more RAM could only bring more texture variety. Whether next-gen has that much RAM for ideal textures or not, I don't know, but eventually at 1080p texture res should get 'solved.'

 

[Ninjaprime]

Yes, it's absolutely a RAM issue. The next gen will momentarily bring the texture quality up to where it is on the PC at the time, and after that it will stagnate again as the PC gains more ram.

I'd disagree on both points. Virtual texturing means RAM is not so much of an issue any more. Sure more RAM will be nice, but I don't think its really the main limit of texturing at the moment. On the second point, I think by the time the real next gen consoles launch, we're gonna be near peak RAM for PCs. 22/20nm will be out, ~8Gb chips, and theres maybe only one or two steps beyond that for traditional semiconductors to go to. I don't think we'll keep expanding RAM just for the hell of it. Perhaps theres something on the horizon that I don't know about that is going to eat up the 16GB of RAM a typical computer will have by then, but I currently can't think of anything.

 

[hoho]

Actually, there is a certain level of quality at which I think I will be pretty much satisfied.

When I played X-Com for the first time in my life I was amazed at how that life-like things are possible on a computer and I didnk't even know it was possible to get any better.

How was the texture quality when the consoles were just launched? Back then 512M for GPU* was extremely rare and expensive. Nowadays 1GB+ is considered mainstream (except for IGP's).

*) Yeah, I know other data takes some room as well on consoles but I'm fairly certain that majority of it is for graphics and especially texture data.

I'm sure next-gen will look decent when it launches and garbage by the end of their era.

At some point we should have texture resolution at 1 texel per pixel up close, at which point more RAM could only bring more texture variety

But higher-resolution textures would make AA problems that much smaller, wouldnt' it?

 

[Prophecy2k]

At some point we should have texture resolution at 1 texel per pixel up close, at which point more RAM could only bring more texture variety. Whether next-gen has that much RAM for ideal textures or not, I don't know, but eventually at 1080p texture res should get 'solved.'

Indeed, but then surely virtual texturing could also solve the texture variety issue, therefore once you're at the 1 texel per pixel texture resolution level, the only way that might be reasonable to go could be faster RAM & storage medium rather than more RAM.

 

[Prophecy2k]

Indeed.

I'm not sure exactly what Bungie was doing that most/all other devs couldn't do WRT texture detail up close, but Halo1 still puts other games to shame even today on xb360/ps3 when it comes to texture detail.

I'm quite sure you are misremebering Halo1 because I don't think there are any current-gen games that i have played that have lower texture quality than Halo, except perhaps HD remakes of PS2 on the PS3. Saying Halo1 had better textures than some PS3/360 games just sounds like nonesense hyperbole to me and is rather far from the truth.

I admit there are some 360/ps3 games with some utterly obnoxious textures, but they are few and far between. Every game will have some textures that are lower quality that the rest of them up close, however good devs put those one in areas that you're not meant to see up close ;-)

It's also important to note that (especially on some early PS3 games) some post-process AA methods also blur texture detail, as well as many games exhibitng texture streaming bugs that cause you to see obnoxious textures in certain areas of games. I could still see some of these issues presenting themselves next-gen even with more RAM and higher displayed texture fidelity.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Indeed, but then surely virtual texturing could also solve the texture variety issue, therefore once you're at the 1 texel per pixel texture resolution level, the only way that might be reasonable to go could be faster RAM & storage medium rather than more RAM.

Yes, but VT isn't applicable all game styles and engines, so limited RAM will result in limited textures in some games, unless that sweet-spot can be hit in what we consider limited RAM. 4GBs next-gen should be enough for very high texture quality such that more RAM would have negligable improvement (at 1080p). It'll be a shocking disappointment if next-gen has low-res textures.

 

[Prophecy2k]

Yes, but VT isn't applicable all game styles and engines, so limited RAM will result in limited textures in some games, unless that sweet-spot can be hit in what we consider limited RAM. 4GBs next-gen should be enough for very high texture quality such that more RAM would have negligable improvement (at 1080p). It'll be a shocking disappointment if next-gen has low-res textures.

You're correct Shifty. And in a way i wonder whether texture variety is even an issue in the first place? Especially given the fact that it's not a complaint railed against current games that i've actually ever heard at all.

Of course there are games that have heard complains about asset re-use, but the number of games in all genres that don't have these problems tell me that it's some thing which can be cleverly designed around such that the vast majority of gamers never even notice.

 

[hoho]

And in a way i wonder whether texture variety is even an issue in the first place? Especially given the fact that it's not a complaint railed against current games that i've actually ever heard at all.

When people have been taught that repeating textures is the norm for literally decades they don't even imagine things could be any better. How often did you hear people complaining about games not having dynamic (soft/self) shadows?

 

[Prophecy2k]

When people have been taught that repeating textures is the norm for literally decades they don't even imagine things could be any better. How often did you hear people complaining about games not having dynamic (soft/self) shadows?

Agreed, however something like texture reuse is something that artists and game designers can cleverly disign around, such that it become much less of an issue as it's simply less imediately apparent to the gamer.
Whereas the average joe would be able to instantly tell the difference between a game that has dynamic (soft/self) shadows and one that doesn't regardless of what the developers of both games do.

 

[hoho]

I'd say once we get more games using unique texturing while keeping details at close range better than Rage did we'll see more people complaining if games aren't doing it. Detail textures help for sure but I'd like something better.