Fafalada said:
Josiah said:
I think that if my GF2MX could run SH2 a regular GF2 could run SH3. but regardless, my point is that big hardware does not always equal good hardware.
SH2 PC also didn't filter shadows(and maybe lacked some other framebuffer ops but Deano would know this better) which could considerably reduce fillrate use.
Anyway, in my personal experience regular GF2 is still quite dreadfully slow with shadow volumes compared to PS2(and I also don't do any postprocessing in PC version, so it has less work to do), but granted I ran those tests in our engine, not SH's
Yep no nice filtered shadows on PC for SH2
There was just no practical way of getting access to the stencil like the PS2 and Xbox version.
IIRC that was the only thing thats majorly different on a decent video card (not GF2MX) compared to the Xbox.
Across different spec machines its goes something like this:
Low-end PC (worse case would have been a P2-600 with a Kyro2) is the worst graphically off all versions. No fancy post-processing, fewer/no fog polygons, worse lighting, no shadows and still really slow in places.
GF2MX sits here, has Hardware TnL but low fillrate.
Middle range (say 1GHz and normal GF2), would have some post-processing, some fog but still the fixed function light mode.
High end (say 1Ghz with GF3) would be capable of everything on but relatively low res (800x600 maybe). Uses vertex shaders and pixel shaders for fancy custom light models etc.
Very high end (when we released would be a GF4Ti or Radeon 9700) could have everything on up 1600x1200 (no MSAA due the post-processing though).
As you can see as soon as hardware TnL (i.e. except low end) kicks in the limiting factor becomes the video card and we were almost always fillrate limited. That may be why different people see different performance on the same video card, if you turn all the options off it will look like crap but should run well on most systems as soon as them options go on performance plummets as they eat more and more fill-rate. Shadows (as Fafalada mentioned hurts cards like GF2MX alot), we used a stencil shadow based techique which uses alot of fill-rate.
A rough comparision for SH2 the console version graphical correspond as PS2 - middle range (1Ghz with normal GF2) and Xbox - high end (1Ghz with GF3).
One thing thats also worth noting, is that we had the feeling the SH2's PS2 engine wasn't being stressed that hard on SH2. We suspect (no proof, just a feeling from the code and the levels and art) that they improved the engine while making the game (which is not unusual obviously) and that they weren't able to redo all the art, so in many places where the PC version struggles on a GF2MX to get a reasonable level of performance, the PS2 had quite a lot of slack. SH3 would seem to agree with that view.
We do know that a few areas were massively more detailed than others (the logic being they were done last/redone, so had a higher polygon budgets, etc). Indeed one major problem we encountered on the PC were that a few scenes where much harder to render at a reasonable speed. This is also noticeable in Marias 'Wish' level, the amount of polygons in these originally Xbox only areas is much higher than most of the game but that level has appeared on all 3 platforms since, so presumebly there was enough slack for the increased poly counts.
