Halo Master Chief Collection [H:MCC] [XO, XBSX|S, PC, XGP]

The graphics of Halo 5 will shock and amaze players, according to a job listing.

I would be shocked and amazed if it was 720p. That's the problem with this noun and verb, they can be used ambiguously.

On a more serious note, given what Killzone Shadow Fall achieved at nextgen launch I am genuinely looking forward to seeing what Halo delivers technically. Think Call of Duty 2 at 360's launch compared to Modern Warfare.
 
I've said it before, 1080p and 60fps can only be done with some really serious trade-offs - practically no new features added to the X360 engine, and only modest increases in polygon count. At least they can still go crazy with the textures, animations and such.

With that said, the engine wasn't that bad feature wise, it's just that many details had to be scaled back to get to 30fps. And Halo isn't really about fancy renderer bullet points anyway, as long as it has huge open levels and dozens of enemies and vehicles. 343 should really just aim for topping the fight with the two Scarabs in Halo 3; hopefully that huge Forerunner thingy in the E3 trailer is a sign of things to come.
 
How about adopt the Killzone SF way? 1920x1080 @ 30FPS for single-player and 60FPS multi-player. I think I could definitely live with that if the Xbox One hardware can do it. 60FPS + dedicated servers .:runaway:
 
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Locking it at 30fps in SP would certainly help, but still too much to get equal feature quality with KZ, especially all those area lights and such.

I don't think they should aim for that though. Do what makes Halo unique, as best as they can, instead.
 
Locking it at 30fps in SP would certainly help, but still too much to get equal feature quality with KZ, especially all those area lights and such.
I'd rather most devs don't try to push the lighting system checkboxes as hard as KZSF does. For all the graphical praise the game gets, the lighting is both extremely muddy and extremely unstable.

Some sections were "impressive", but all told I thought KZSF was one of the least aesthetically pleasing shooters I've ever played.

(That said, Halo 5's dynamic lighting could desperately use being several steps up from Halo 4's. Bringing the system light-for-light up to Halo 1's level would be a start.)

I was being facetious. :p 5.333 aspect ratio is a tad extreme. ;)
Nah, you just need to use 960-degree FoV with equirectangular projection. You'll be able to see plenty of things!
 
I'm not sure Ms has been completely straight up about what we are getting this fall. When they promised us Halo for the Xbox one at 60fps I think they are actually giving us Halo 2 anniversary. As far as a Halo 5 goes I think they are going to use it as a platform to push tiled resources and show what the hardware is capable of when used properly. As far as not being able to add features to the Halo 4 engine when running at 1080p 60 fps. I have no dev knowledge and Im positive that Laa-Yosh knows what he is talking about but, thats a little hard to swallow for me. With the X1 having all that memory and 16 times the shader cores of the 360 and 2x the rops I would think they would be able to add some features to the engine. I agree that 343 using dynamic res would be the way to go if they are shooting for 60 fps.
 
I'm not sure Ms has been completely straight up about what we are getting this fall. When they promised us Halo for the Xbox one at 60fps I think they are actually giving us Halo 2 anniversary. As far as a Halo 5 goes I think they are going to use it as a platform to push tiled resources and show what the hardware is capable of when used properly. As far as not being able to add features to the Halo 4 engine when running at 1080p 60 fps. I have no dev knowledge and Im positive that Laa-Yosh knows what he is talking about but, thats a little hard to swallow for me. With the X1 having all that memory and 16 times the shader cores of the 360 and 2x the rops I would think they would be able to add some features to the engine. I agree that 343 using dynamic res would be the way to go if they are shooting for 60 fps.

I hate dynamic res. Not really recalled any games of it, but just the very idea bothers me. Rather they cut back graphically if it comes to that.

They said 60 FPS but they havent said the res have they? Maybe 900P could be a good compromise.

The way that ad Cyan posted reads, tells me I'm glad 343 appears to still be a graphics envelope pushing studio, and that's good to hear. MS needs at least one.

About not adding features, well it's all crudest back of the envelope stuff from a layperson, but they should have graphical resources left over. X1 should have 5-6 the GPU flops of 360 (depending whether you rate Xenos at 240 or 200, I think some here have posted the latter is actually correct). But that's not accounting for a likely huge gain in efficiency achieved over 8 years of GPU development in the interim. We see what the Wii U is doing keeping up with 360/PS3 with just (apparently) 160 shaders, from a GPU still several years older than what is X1. Pegging that efficiency gain exactly is likely impossible, but I feel safe to say X1 has at least 10X more GPU than 360.

If that's the case and you give up 2X GPU resources vs Halo 4 for 60 FPS and ~2X for 1080P, you're still left with 2.5X remaining.

Which granted, 2.5X may be in an area of diminishing returns, Xbox was probably 2X as powerful as PS2 without really necessarily showing a generational leap. But it's still 2.5X.

All in theory. In real terms I expect Halo 5 to look a whole lot better than 4.
 
A shame they're reluctant to speak more about H4, rendering side.
A shame, but it should be a surprise to nobody. Microsoft has always locked tech talk down tight on their development studios.

Bungie gave one legendary AI talk at GDC 2002, and then Microsoft flipped out silenced them. Sure enough, come 2008, Bungie gave tons of tech talk once again.
 
I'm not a dev either, but the math is like this - 1080p is 2x the resolution, 60fps is 2x the frame rate, and H4 has cut a lot of corners to run at 720p with 30fps already. Stuff like shadows disappearing a few meters out from the camera, or no proper fully dynamic lighting, are trade offs that I'd expect to be removed on the X1 - requiring some additional performance (and memory, of which there's gonna be plenty though).

On the other hand the graphics hardware is about 8x as powerful. So if you do some simple math, 1080p/60fps already takes up 4x of the speed and it leaves just about 2x as much computing power per frame. Add back the proper shadows and lighting and there's little left for any visual enhancements...

I'd expect them to compromise on 1080p though and go with 30-50% less pixels (so maybe cutting back as far as 720p). With some good AA it'd still look good enough (as good as any PS360 game) and the smaller frame buffer would help with the ESRAM as well.

But again this is just some common sense based on what we know so far. 343 may still surprise anyone - just keep expectations at a realistic level.
 
I hate dynamic res. Not really recalled any games of it, but just the very idea bothers me. Rather they cut back graphically if it comes to that.

What's to hate about a feature that dials down the resolution when things get so heated that you wouldn't even notice the change if you were actively looking for it? Granted, I haven't played a ton of these games either (there are very few of them around after all), but dynamic res worked perfectly in Wipeout on the PS3 and the Vita.
When enemies are coming at you from all sides while your screen is already covered in "Strawberry Jam" (or whatever visual cues the devs use to give the player feedback on the character's well-being) you're not gonna notice a bunch of missing lines of resolution.
 
When enemies are coming at you from all sides while your screen is already covered in "Strawberry Jam" (or whatever visual cues the devs use to give the player feedback on the character's well-being)
A shield and/or health bar, plus audio and rumble feedback.

The only time Halo went into strawberry jam territory was with ODST, where the screen goes red and a bit unclear. And the only reason that did that was because they wanted the canonically shieldless character to have a "regenerating shield" without showing an actual shield bar.
 
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