Bioshock Graphics

Graphically Bioshock did not impress me at all.

 

The DX10 version improves graphical IQ quite a bit but still the textures are to low-res. That is the thing that breaks it for me. Kinda wish they had not created the textures in much higher res for the PC.

 

Yeah like ErnstH said, that article is out of date, the new one clearly shows all the improvements I mentioned including the pretty siginificant differences in the water ripples.

However even those screen shots are no substitute for experiencing the differences in motion. Especially the shadows which distort badly at the edges under DX9 when in motion but retain a proper shape under DX10. Screenshots can't show that.

 

Hmm... They put Merlot in the STRANGEST-looking bottles down in Arcadia!

 

I followed the link with the updated article ( thanks ErnstH )and i have to say that the most "worthy to mention" improvement is their physically reactive water (the effect with the ripples).
The funny thing here is that what they are doing with the ripples in the dx10 version , RARE did it with Kameo before 2 years.
So i can't understand why 2K Boston didn't implement it in the 360 version of Bioshock since the water is an important element of this game .


You can see the effect in the second part of this video:





and here is the mathematically correct water of Rare:





Also Bungie does something similar in HALO3.




Anyway, hopefully they will implement it in the future and they will deliver it with the next patch

 

The character models in Bioshock are really disappointing if you look at them from a realism standpoint. But I realized rather quickly that the models aren't supposed to look like real humans and are definitely done in an artistic style. Similar to the environment I suppose.

Otherwise I thought the game was visually pretty good. The environment especially had a lot of great detail. It was obvious in some spots that they were fighting RAM usage. This is probably something we are going to be stuck with in many games because the consoles are horribly restrictive and most games must run on those consoles these days. And, of course, older PCs and cheap PCs.

I thought the polycount was pretty low in some spots too though. Lots of things that should've been round were very obviously not.

The water was ackward at times too. Right in the beginning when you're in one of the connecting tubes and it begins to flood and the water is gushing in but none is accumulating. I thought that was a dumb scene. Especially right at the beginning of the game and after I heard Levine say water got tons of attention for realism. Heh.

I also wonder just the engine was. Was it UE3 or a hybrid UE2/3? Graphically, I think a modified UE2 engine could certainly produce what the game did.

One of the most disappointing graphical aspects is the 30 Hz object animations. Things look really strange when you're pulling 60 fps or so and things are flying through the air in an almost slow-motion way.

 

BG: DA on PS2 (and I presume the port to XB) had a water effect as good as that, if not even better! The wake in the DX10 Bioshock doesn't look at all convincing. It just goes to show that technical accomplishment and hardware performance need good artistry to make the most of them.

 

But are we talking about true 3D ripples/waves in 3D (with a mesh that is 3D to) or about a shader effect that makes it look 3D but is actually flat?

Otherwise I rember Geforce2 techdemos with true 3D water with physics and also some other old games, PC and console.

But if true 3D waves/ripples in Bioshock then I understand that it may have been removed from the console version(s?) due to perfomance reasons becouse of the scope of water use and if it has true realistic complex physics to.

 

Rage, or rather, id Tech 5 is going to help in this a lot. Textures won't require as much memory yet the final image will look better - the only possible problem is that the engine seams rather streamlined compared to all the graphical features of Crysis, for example. But good artists can compensate for that.

 

Outcast had some pretty nice water effects.

 

Nice, although quite simple. What a really outstanding game that was... I've replayed it recently, still kicks ass.

 

Its probably just a result of how they chose to implement the water making it difficult to allow ripples with DX9 level hardware.

I doubt anything will be changed in a patch since they already took the time to implement it in DX10 and thus there is no reason not to implement it in DX9/360 if it were a simple matter.

That Halo 3 water looks pretty cool so perhaps the argument can be made that Bioshock simply has a bad water implementation for DX9 level hardware. Still looks great though.

 

Perhaps, but it still looks a whole lot better than the sprites of the DX9 version!

 

This is the most detailed bit i can find.

So personally i still blame low res textures on the origonal 2.5/Vengeance engine which itself never had what we would call high res textures in any game using it. Its not like they switched to UE3 ~1yr before release and re-did everything.

 

Definitely. Hydrophobia promises outstanding water. Also we're told to expect great things from Fable 2's water, if only someone 'round here knew a little more about that...

Although 'best water' was such a last-gen metric! Why haven't we got a 'best fluid dynamic physically correct flame implementation' metric?

 

Texture resolution is not related to the engine at all. This is - pardon me - b******t.

Texture resolution depends on the amount of memory that the developer wishes to allocate for it, and how the artists make use of it (amount of tiling/repeating, detail textures, different texture channels per material etc etc).

And frankly, from what I've seen, there's absolutely no problem with Bioshock's textures.

 

For the most part you are right. But there are some very obviously low-resolution textures in the game on some objects. Like unreadable blurry telephones, for example. Sure they may be of low importance, but it does tell you that they were budgeting their texture memory usage.

 

Again, limited resources mean compromises... until we'll see virtualized textures (id tech 5) in every game, but I'd say that'll take at least 2-3 years.

And I think we shouldn't start a contest of which game has the most low-res textures.

 

That would be a real bloodbath.

I am very impressed by photos posted by groper. I am quite busy with other games now (playing Relic RTSes and Okami) and I'll probably want to keep up with new releases in OCtober and November (Halo3, Mass Effect and Assassin's Creed), but this one will be the game that will make my Christmast this year

 

Absolutely. Perfect textures just aren't likely on a 512MB console, unless the devs are making compromises elsewhere. Complaints against blurry textures seem misplaced to me. Unless the game is extra, extra dire in that respect, or extra good in its textures, doesn't seem worth mentioning to me. Saying 'look, there's blurry textures' is kinda like saying 'look, there's polygonal models in this game' and 'look, they're using light sources to illuminate this game'