Black & White vs Color + ED vs HD - Bandwidth, Memory

[ihamoitc2005]

Why not make games black & white and ED. Won't data requirement be much less and also effects be much better?

Old style adventure like Drake but older time setting would be perfect for black & white & ED, no? No need for extra draw-distance of HD, but can have amazing lighting and shadows.

Am I crazy? You tell me please.

 

[nintenho]

are you talking about uncharted? I think it has a B&W mode.

 

[AlNom]

Won't data requirement be much less and also effects be much better?

That depends on what range of black and white you want.

 

[ihamoitc2005]

Range

That depends on what range of black and white you want.

24 bit image has 8 bits for red, blue and green, no? Greyscale needs only 8 bits for one color. So, texture and all can be 1/3rd size per area. If I am correct in this, then black and white games can have 3x texture size with same data requirement! Image can be very beautiful.

Also, will this have less VRAM bandwidth use?

Am I crazy?

 

[archangelmorph]

Why not make games black & white and ED. Won't data requirement be much less and also effects be much better?

Because we left black and white TVs years ago..?

Because greyscale imaging drastically decreases your options for visual & srtistic style..

Because who wants to play a game in black & white instead of colour?

 

[Hazuki Ryu]

Lol no one would want to play black and white games.
To answer your question, yes you might be very crazy .

 

[BoardBonobo]

echrome

 

[Phil]

To be fair, I think it's an interesting question insight of what would be doable and how much more you could achieve with it...

 

[Silenti]

Actually I thought about this a while back and wondered why LA Noire hadn't considered it. If you had a period game, then B+W would be just another step to putting you into the time period.

As to popularity, I think it was Schindler's List that was Black and White and it did pretty well.

If the game interests me and the B+W is somehow fitting to the game, I would think it to be an excellent move. If one can do cell-shading, you can certainly do B+W.

 

[ihamoitc2005]

Crazy

To answer your question, yes you might be very crazy .

I have been wanting to know this for a long time. Thank you for this information.

 

[legendCNCD]

wth. I would play black & white game! It all depends how the black & white is being used and how good the game is!
From artistic point of view, I'd even play living raster game, eg. no greyscale, just b&w with rasters

 

[Scott_Arm]

There are a lot of genres of gaming that could be really interesting in black and white.

 

[Acert93]

To be fair, I think it's an interesting question insight of what would be doable and how much more you could achieve with it...

Yep. And I have seen some nice non-colored (non-albedo) shots of games and I think some look really interesting, especially with all the nice grey shading on edges and gradients. A stylized game that was greyscale could look pretty cool, and possibly do some neat lighting tricks. The possibility of saving some resources due to the smaller size of greyscale could offer some neat little boosts.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

There's Sadness on the Wii that's gone that route. As an artistic choice it has a lot of merit. Some Ambient Occlusion only images look like they could become great artistic games. However, you'd have to choose the BnW for the purpose of the game rather than to allow for technical effects! It'd be a folly to render Ratchet and Clank or Mario Galaxy in black-and-white in order to get more AA and particles! There's enough complaint about monochromatic realistic shooters in brown-o-vision, let alone BnW!

Like all games, design the game, choose an art style that'll work well with it (L.A.Noire would be a good candidate for BnW) and then leverage the benefits of that choice - Cartoon rendering would free up RAM needed for textures which you could use elsewhere. I suppose some avant garde developers who have developed a fancy renderer may want to build a game around it, but that'd be pretty risky on the whole. Sure, if someone created a raytracer and chose to do Snooker, it'd make sense, but if someone created a black-and-white AO renderer and then slapped a game into it, I wouldn't have high hopes for the outcome.

 

[Simon F]

24 bit image has 8 bits for red, blue and green, no? Greyscale needs only 8 bits for one color. So, texture and all can be 1/3rd size per area. If I am correct in this, then black and white games can have 3x texture size with same data requirement! Image can be very beautiful.
Am I crazy?

Actually, it's not that crazy. There were flight simulators that used b&w texture data with a single, overall colour. For some textures, like grass or concrete, it actually was a remarkably effective means of compressing the textures.

 

[Tisan]

Like all games, design the game, choose an art style that'll work well with it (L.A.Noire would be a good candidate for BnW)

Don't tell me L.A. Noire isn't B&W :/

 

[fearsomepirate]

Let's stick to games that actually exist...

Low saturation seems to be a more popular choice than B&W. Also, Twilight Princess' twilit sections were originally intended to be B&W, but the designers decided it made those portions of the game feel very dull.

 

[_phil_]

Concentrating all GPU ressources toward a B&W rendering engine could allow very impressive results.I'm all for.

 

[ihamoitc2005]

Impressive

Concentrating all GPU ressources toward a B&W rendering engine could allow very impressive results.I'm all for.

I think so also my friend. I will like to see what graphics we can have if a developer targets B&W 480P game. Maybe they can have 3x texture, 2.5x shader, and 16xAA! Maybe.

 

[Gubbi]

Considering how important spatial, branch and temporal coherence is to pixel shading performance these days, calculating one channel instead of three would only yield a modest boost I would guess.

Cheers