Xbox 360 and PS3 top graphics

[milk]

My pick: considering the sum of gemetric fidelity, texture resolution, asset variety, lighting quality and consistency, material expression, scope, etc...

GTAV takes the cake. It certainly is not as detailed as many others under the magnifying glass, but considering all the thousand things it is trying to do simultaneously, I'm still amazed to this day it pulled it all off on PS360, despite the performance woes.

 

[Inuhanyou]

RE5's color grading is hugely suspect, but I'd otherwise agree 100%. RE6 was a giant mess of a game, like one of those artists that just tosses up paint onto a canvass haphazardly, and that was true of not just the design of the game, but also the art style as you say.

Re6 had so many gray and brown places it made me sick. And that would have been bad enough but what really killed it was that most of the game was pretty much shot usually in the darkest areas possible so you can't even usually tell what's going on a lot of the time. Most areas either take place at night or in darkly lit places. I guess they wanted to show off their lighting engine which was nice but also made the game tiring to look at because most of the screen was always in very low light conditions and filled with black

 

[Inuhanyou]

My pick: considering the sum of gemetric fidelity, texture resolution, asset variety, lighting quality and consistency, material expression, scope, etc...

GTAV takes the cake. It certainly is not as detailed as many others under the magnifying glass, but considering all the thousand things it is trying to do simultaneously, I'm still amazed to this day it pulled it all off on PS360, despite the performance woes.

Scale is a little different from graphics. I can't say GTA 5 when held under a microscope has much better graphics than other games that came out at the tail end of the gen. As far as scale goes definitely along with Skyrim and RDR its very impressive

 

[Liandry]

Well, the DX11/PS4/Xbox versions did make use of tessellation, so I was just wondering if they backported that to the 360 seen as the game engine was already using it.

I don't think developers used tesselation unit in Rise of the Tomb Raider on 360.

I feel that Gears of War Judgement is sadly forgotten. What the studio managed to push out of UE3 and the Xbox 360 shortly before the Xbox One/Playstation 4 was released was amazing.

Complitely agree. Many people was impressed with Gears 3 but many haven't pleyed JUdgement. But Judgement was even better in terms of graphics and also story in that game was great and truly for those who like Gears series.

Halo 4 is a title that I'm graphically at conflict with. Yeah the lighting, for the generation, looked great, but overall too much was sacrificed in order to achieve it (such as weapons and enemies despawing insanely fast).

Graphics in Halo 4 was overal better than in Halo Reach, but in my opinion textures was better in Halo Reach. IN Halo Combat Evolved Anniversary Edition textures also was better and in that game was one of the best particles in all games of 7th generation. Sparks then you shoot to wall bounced multiple times and bounces wasn't pre calculated, there was phisics callculations for particles bouncing. But as I said graphics in Halo 4 was overal better.

I've always defended Call of Duty games as very technically impressive and underrated in terms of what they achieve at a 60fps target, but in no way did it ever achieve the constant 'wow, holy crap' moments that I would have in BF3(on X360 at the time myself). Even at half the framerate and limited to 24 players, I still would crown DICE as technical magicians of the time. It was just unreal what games like Battlefield 3 were doing on that hardware.

I can tell what in my opinion graphics in BF3 was better than in BF4 on 360. IN BF4 there was less objects on screen, a little bit lower resolution textures. Maybe that was because of better phisics and more destructions. As for Call of Duty complitely agree. I was impressed with each game, because they always were great for year they released and run in 69 fps. Also there was a lot of great moments in each game.

It was claimed that one installment of Forza (I forget the number) used tesselation on car geometry. But I never saw any actual evidence, or confirmarion that it used the HW tesselation features or something else.

I heard the same, but that info is very doubtful.

 

[Nesh]

I heard the same, but that info is very doubtful.

I believe GT6 also marketed a form of tesselation

 

[Liandry]

I believe GT6 also marketed a form of tesselation

I heard that also, but this is also very doubtful. Only if that was done on Cell. I don't know if Cell could do tesselation.

Great what people respond to this thread, I knew that will be interesting for a lot of people. Anyone please share more your opinions.
Also I would like to remind of tho more games. Metro Last Light was amazing and in my opinion was on on level with top Microsoft, Sony and multiplatform games with top graphics. Other game is Alien Isolation. In that game was best level of details, but I think because of small indoor locations.

 

[function]

I believe that Halo 3 used tessellation for the water on maps with seas. I remember thinking it looked great. Halo 3 in general was super impressive for 2007 IMO, despite ugly human character models and the odd occasion where lighting broke down.

My overall take for most impressive graphics of the generation, like milk's, is GTA 5. It ran great on both the 360 and PS3, with 360 probably taking the edge if you used two hdds to stream the game from (how I played it, and certainly not representative of the general case). I think that scale and movement are perfectly fine things to judge graphics on as they are as much a part of a games visual showing as screenshots.

There were lots impressive games for both systems though. PS3 struggled initially but caught up very effectively as Cell was effectively leveraged to support the somewhat aged, none unified shader GPU.

 

[cheapchips]

I'm going to pick a 360 title everyone will agree on...Crackdown!

The very long draw distances with the detail mip maps up close made the world feel... solid?

And the window shader and clouds were nice too.

And the cell shaded character turned out to fit very nicely in that world.

Clearly a thread winner.

 

[davis.anthony]

While 360 had a hardware tessellator the reality was it was too slow to use in a game in any abundant way which is why the amount games that used it you could count on one hand.

AMD's first generation PC GPU DX11 tessellation performance on was abysmal so I could only imagine how bad 360's was given then the 4 year difference in release time.

Cell on on the other hand was awesome when it came to doing funky things with geometry.

 

[milk]

GDC on Tessellation used on Halo Wars for XB360:

And here is a user capture of GT on PS3 doing its own kind of tesselation magic. This one is, of course, done in software by the cell, and might follow completely different rules to those of DX11 style tessellation...

 

[milk]

Scale is a little different from graphics. I can't say GTA 5 when held under a microscope has much better graphics than other games that came out at the tail end of the gen. As far as scale goes definitely along with Skyrim and RDR its very impressive

Well, scale and sadboxy-ness impose a lot more performance costs and complications, so it makes every achievemnts much more impressive. But it trully is hard to weight scope vs. detail.

If you were to put games in distinct categories though (like weight classes in combat sports) we could divide them in order of technical complexity created by scope/scale/freedom like this:

-2D games (mostly hand-crafted art);
-Fighting games;
-2.5D platformers and top down games (3d graphis with very constrained/predictable cameras);
-Free roam linear 3D games and racers;
-Open World games;
-Free roam Space Sims;
-Roy (full simulation of the universe in VR)

In GTAV's category, it pulls no punches in terms of abition while still having asset detail at least in the same league if not better than many games that are trying to do less.

GTA has fully explorable world, no well masked invisible walls, seamless interior/exterior integration, full dinamic ToD and weather with realistic sun shadow tragectories, and it lets you both walk at a slow pace throught that world right close to everything but also fly through it at speed (real strain on streaming).

While on foot the world is highly interactive: many NPCs with high quality animations and phyics (for the time) and many physically simulated 3D objects. But you can also fly high enough that you can see the entire map on screen at once, and fall back down at reasonable speed without a hitch from the game and relatively discrete LOD transitions.

It tacled both Interior and exterior Urban environments, Forests, Farms, Deserts, Mountains, Rivers, Under Water etc... It does all of them very servicibly, and no city that gen looks as plausible and rich in its execution as Los Santos (no building fucking repeats ever)

I have deep respects fot Rockstars achievements there.

 

[eastmen]

I always thought Ryse looked amazing and it was a launch title

Here it is on the xbox one

and here it is maxed out on a rtx 4090 and ryzen 7 5800x

Also quantum break

xbox one

and a ryzen 9 7950x with rtx 4090

I'd love a sequel to both.

edit - just reread the title and I'm an idiot lol

For xbox 360 I have to nominate Viva pinata

 

[tuna]

I would say the most impressive PS3 game is GT6. The stereoscopic 3D mode looks worse than GT5, but everything else is great.

 

[Jupiter]

On the PlayStation 3 I found Killzone 2, Uncharted 2, Crysis 2, Crysis 3, RDR, GTA IV and GTA V to be the most impressive technically. However, some of the games listed were too ambitious for the hardware and therefore were unpolished. Visually, I found Killzone 2 better than Killzone 3. I also found Uncharted 2 in 2009 more impressive than Uncharted 3 in 2011. Beyond Two Souls also looked very good in some areas.

On the Xbox 360 the RockStar and Crytek games were superior.

The graphics cards of this generation were technically rather backward. Many of the features that Crysis 1 had didn't come until the release of the PlayStation 4.

 

[Nesh]

Btw did someone mention Killzone 2? That game was simply amazing. 3 was also impressive but the color palette was strange and lack of muzzle flash kind of ruined it.

 

[Nesh]

GDC on Tessellation used on Halo Wars for XB360:

And here is a user capture of GT on PS3 doing its own kind of tesselation magic. This one is, of course, done in software by the cell, and might follow completely different rules to those of DX11 style tessellation...

Thats a very strange application. It is rather slow and is evident on cylindrical objects. The trailer of GT6 marketed tesselation on the body as well and I am not sure if that is available at the final product.
In addition I wonder if it is also available during gameplay and how fast it is calculated there if yes

 

[milk]

I'm going to pick a 360 title everyone will agree on...Crackdown!

The very long draw distances with the detail mip maps up close made the world feel... solid?

And the window shader and cloud were nice too.

And the cell shaded character turned out to fit very nicely in that world.

Clearly a thread winner.

And they did it all without the POWAH OF TEH CLOUD, nor any secret blitter!

 

[dobwal]

I always thought Ryse looked amazing and it was a launch title

Here it is on the xbox one

and here it is maxed out on a rtx 4090 and ryzen 7 5800x

Also quantum break

xbox one

and a ryzen 9 7950x with rtx 4090

I'd love a sequel to both.

edit - just reread the title and I'm an idiot lol

For xbox 360 I have to nominate Viva pinata

I would very much like for them to remake this title or release of Ryse 2. To me, it was an underrated game.

 

[trinibwoy]

I would very much like for them to remake this title or release of Ryse 2. To me, it was an underrated game.

It was fun but really wasn’t much of a game. Very cookie cutter gameplay and very short. Pretty though.

 

[dobwal]

It was fun but really wasn’t much of a game. Very cookie cutter gameplay and very short. Pretty though.

Sometimes that all a game needs to be. Everything doesn't need to be a sprawling open world with dozens of mechanics.