Bioshock Graphics

the fire looks good in the game at least when i played it did

 

I happen to find the splashes nice! the textures are a bit lo-res for me, but thats probably because I'm used to playing PC games. it's a fantastic-looking game!

 

the textures are especially muddy in this game quite contrary to most UE3 games. the fire looked ok to me. the lighting and water effect are quite good. not the prettiest game on either pc or 360 imo.

 

IMO it's the best looking game to grace my 360, ever.

 

The techniques they're using for graphics look rather old school but its probably the best the old school has to offer, if you exclude the fact that they overdone it with the specularity on the human models.
But again you can imagine that too many doses of Adam caused the skin of the people in Rapture to look plastic


Some photos from the teamxbox forum.

 

few more photos.

 

Its not really UE3, a modified UE2.x dominates most of the game. Its my understanding that UE3 was only applied for certain water/lighting effects.

 

Well they didn't just buy a license and port in their models and they were good to go in any event, but the fact is that Ken Levine did say they used UE3 (he used a fair bit of clarification on the subject if you want to look up the interview).

 

I think is UE3 heavily modified.
IIRC, they said that they started with UE2 but they switched to UE3 a little later.

 

best loking game on 360 (released) bar none... muddy textures... that's rich.

for any 512 meg RAM machine textures are unbelievable.

 

I think Gears of War still holds the title of best looking x360 game. *shrugs* Although I prefer Bioshock's art design.

 

I think Gears has long been surpassed. Visceral =! Graphics to me. There are a few games that do more in my opinion. Of course it's all subjective though.

 

I think that Gears was surpassed by Bioshock too. My only problem with the games grapphics is that there are parts that seem to me less polished than others. The attention to detail and lightning ranges from amazing to just good. Nevertheless an incredible game to behold.

 

My thoughts are similar. I think Gears is visually more stunning and flashy, Bioshock however does better job of creating a believable surrounding. Bioshock's graphics and sound does and excellent job on immersing player to the decaying world of Rapture, you truly feel that you are under water and that the place is falling apart here and there.

 

Water splashes are one of the biggest improvements in the DX10 PC version. Rather than the dodgy sprites that show up as water splashes in the DX9/360 version it uses 3d ripples and wakes.

 

Are water ripples and particle effects (explosions and such) the only things that're different between the DX9/X360 version and the DX10 version? I wonder if they could've done the 3D ripples on DX9 though. But yeah, BioShock is currently the best looking game for both PC and consoles, and will continue to be so, probably until Crysis or Far Cry 2 (or Duke Nukem Forever) comes out.

 

Improved shadows are also in the DX10 version as well as some subtle normal mapping improvements.

I personally prefer Gears graphics to Bioshock but think that Crysis and UT3 will beat both when they are released later this year.

 

I can't play the dx10 version but from what i have seen so far (comparison screenshots and video), both versions use a combination of 3d water and textures. I don't know but it looks to me like their differences are almost unexistent... The same with the shadows.
Here is a comparison from firingsquad.

BioShock DirectX 9 vs DirectX 10 Image Quality

 

That article is outdated, they have updated it with new results: http://firingsquad.com/hardware/bioshock_mainstream_gpu_performance/page6.asp
They had a problem switching the DX10 effects on and off, the new article does indeed show some differences.