2nd gen Xbox360 hitting hard! Test Drive unlimited @hexus

[Tahir2]

Thanks for the new shot Shifty Geezer. AF or no AF that is the question, Horatio.. heh.
I honestly think it would be very simple for some of the people in the know on this board to get a flat out "yes" or "no" answer from the developers regarding AF being used or not.

 

[SugarCoat]

No, thats not what I said at all. I said that some of the texture blurring is coming from the fact that some of the images have motion blur on them, such as 3 of the 4 images here do have. However, the fact that the roadmarkings are not blurring into the screen would tend to suggest, on a modern title, that AF probably is being used. Here's an example of the type of differences between AF and no AF on a modern driving title:

http://www.beyond3d.com/news/images/20060416_nfs1.jpg
http://www.beyond3d.com/news/images/20060416_nfs2.jpg

beat me to it. Look, the lines flanking the median strips to either side as well as the double line in the middle of the road would be totally distorted if AF wasnt being applied. I have no idea what you people are talking about with blurry textures since the road, or any road for that matter in modern driving games, wont waste too much on pavement textures. This game is blatantly using AF. Even ATI's small AF demo within CCC which happens to be a car going down a road shows how things like the double line in a road improve or worsen with levels of AF. Those images are clearly using AF otherwise you'd see distortion on those lines from hell and back 30 feet down the road, some of those screenshots get very far down the keep the lines detail very well. Its not even a question if its using it unless you were freaking blind.

 

[Titanio]

IMO, the devs just don't care because the vast majority of the target market doesn't care.

I don't buy that. Where do you draw the line? There's lots of things devs do that "the vast majority of the target market" doesn't care about, yet they still do them. I'd even question if that'd be true if you showed people a game side by side, with and without good texture filtering. They may not be able to articulate that texture filtering is what's at issue, but they'll spot the difference between blurry and sharp texturing. It's one of the most immediately obvious improvements you can make, at least going from very poor filtering to half-way decent (e.g. bi or trilinear to 4 or 8x AF). Many games I've seen would benefit as much if not more from better filtering than better AA, IMHO.

The point might be valid if better filtering was a pain in the arse to implement, but it should be something you can toggle on and off with very little code, if you're applying it universally. I don't believe it never crossed any of these developers minds to turn on some better filtering. In fact I'd say in most cases that was tried.

I've also seen the argument made "well, PC developers rarely ever implement AF explicitly either, they leave it to the customer to decide", but I don't buy that as a decent explanation here either - PC devs do that because they're targetting a certain minimum spec, and they'll disable the likes of AA and AF before they'd increase the minimum spec, and allow the customer to make their own performance/IQ tradeoffs. In a closed box, you know what everyone is playing with, and that tradeoff is the developer's to make.

 

[Rolf N]

The green sign and the roof are two particularly bad choices for determining the amount of AF being in use here. The road sign is outright parallel to the screen ferchrissakes. AF can't make a difference for a surface that's parallel to the screen.

But what strikes me the most about these images is the total lack of consistency. The "screenshot" with the motorcycles and the AAed powerlines is very nicely rendered indeed, but the one with the green road sign? No.

The road markings don't use AF. They just turned off mipmaps! Look at the horrible aliasing in the full-res version of that image. The powerlines just disappear completely at some point. And the road texture itself is trilinear, plain and simple.

These "screenshots" are not from the same game I'm afraid.

 

[PeterT]

The road markings don't use AF. They just turned off mipmaps! Look at the horrible aliasing in the full-res version of that image.

Exactly what I was pointing at. Probably should have been more explicit

 

[superguy]

Well, I took a look at motorstorm GDC screens..certainly the background textures on the mountain in that game is horribly undefined and slodgy.


http://www.gamersreports.com/grimages/800/1143394013/2/1/gr.image.jpg

So I wonder why these next gen consoles are having trouble with the AF?

 

[overclocked]

Well, I took a look at motorstorm GDC screens..certainly the background textures on the mountain in that game is horribly undefined and slodgy.


http://www.gamersreports.com/grimages/800/1143394013/2/1/gr.image.jpg

So I wonder why these next gen consoles are having trouble with the AF?

I think from that HQ screenshot there , that looks like DOF in place with focusing on the car. I would think that otherwhise its because of a relative-low rez texturing in that demo.
But im almost 100% thats DOF/MB causing that. The devs spoke about it using DOF/MotionBlur so this is IMO not a great example of has/has not af, probably *the* worst.

 

[A176]

I think "2nd gen" should be read as "2nd round" (of games).

 

[rosman]

Test Drive interview + Gamplay :

http://www.gametrailers.com/player.php?id=10305&type=wmv

Looks really nice

 

[expletive]

Looks decent, but they NEED to turn on vsync. Its extremely distracting with the buildings breaking up as you drive by them at high speeds.