Maybe it would be an idea to actually use in-game shots in your comparison.
Consoles that provide(d) the best performance increase from 1stgen to last gen titles
- Thread starter Butta
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No mipmap equals "war of the ants", creppy to say atleast. But many games for PS2 uses mipmaps.
Bigus Dickus
Regular
Colecovision
PS2 no doubt about it!
Ace Combat, Jak series, Ratchet and Clank series, Silent Hill series, FF series, Metal Gear series, Dragon Quest 8, God of War 1 and 2, Tekken 5 etc..etc..
And I can't believe no one here mention Gran Turismo 4!. GT4 is, without a doubt, the best looking racer last generation!
And let not forget Shadow of the Colossus
Ace Combat, Jak series, Ratchet and Clank series, Silent Hill series, FF series, Metal Gear series, Dragon Quest 8, God of War 1 and 2, Tekken 5 etc..etc..
And I can't believe no one here mention Gran Turismo 4!. GT4 is, without a doubt, the best looking racer last generation!
And let not forget Shadow of the Colossus
How are you defining better looking? By IQ, or by how detailed and whatnot the character models are? if by the first, the DC was probably the best of the previous generation. If by the second, the PS2 easily beats the DC.
Edit: Didn't look at the date of the post I quoted. >.<
When I got the Dreamcast I had never seen visuals jump in looks like that before. And I too think the Dreamcast looked better than most PS2 games(The Dreamcast's textures almost always looked better to me). The only thing that disappointed me about it was how loud the GD-ROM drive was. It sounded like my toy RC car.
Edit: Oh I misunderstood what the thread is about. An improvement within a console and not between consoles. In that case it would be the PS2 for me. God of War and Shadow of the Colossus really squeezed a lot out of the system.
Edit: Oh I misunderstood what the thread is about. An improvement within a console and not between consoles. In that case it would be the PS2 for me. God of War and Shadow of the Colossus really squeezed a lot out of the system.
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The date shouldn't matter, Metal Gear Solid 2 walloped the DC in everything except texture quality, but including overall visual quality.
For that matter, Shenmue wasn't the shining example of DC graphics. Sure, it had great art design, an incredible amount of assets (huge budget), and very detailed, intricate design, but many textures were point filtered and the framerate was subpar. Not to mention polygon counts that while high for DC, are almost ridiculously low for anyone who isn't a main character. (not that that is unusual for games) The environments weren't exactly high in polygon count either, though the game was still an incredible looking game.
Oh, and I wouldn't downright say the DC had better IQ...
http://www.fort90.com/journal/?p=249
Scroll down on this page and take a look at Yakuza on Ps2 compared to Shenmue 2 on DC.
Edit: Boy, this mentioning of Shenmue 2 really makes me yearn for a shenmue 3, even more epic than the first two. Are there any other games out there that are produced on the same scale as shenmue was?
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Betanumerical
Veteran
SNES.
First Gen.
]
Last Gen.
First Gen.
Last Gen.
That is just upscaling though, it doesn't change the way the game is rendered.
By generation I was using the more traditional definition when using the word in the context of consoles: referring to the entire block of years a console is the latest in the company's line.
In other words, from 1999-2005 in this case.
Also, isn't the mipmapping problem the PS2 has hard to show off on screenshots? Every 3d PS2 game i've played since i got a TV with S-Video has had that, and I've had that TV for two years, close to three.
Please excuse me while I rattle on a while about Shenmue and the system it ran on.
MGS2 looked amazing to be sure, but there were DC games that beat it in terms of texture filtering (not just texture detail) and most DC games had a 640 x 480 progressive output mode or 640 x 480 with a flicker filter (at very worst matching MGS2s output).
Shenmue's frame rate was solid 30fps 95% of the time - pretty good by todays standards! Interstingly, most of the slowdown occured when the game was streaming data in. Shenmue 2 had this sorted, and the only serious frame-slaughter I can remember occured when multiple layers of transparency were used in a cutscene.
It's worth remembering that many of the assets for Shenmue 1 and 2 were created in 1997 and 1998, before the system came out, and in some cases before they'd ever got their hands on the hardware and learned how to tune assets to take advantage of it. They could have looked an awful lot better if it'd all been made when AM2 were actually familiar with the system. Why very early DC stuff like the Shenmues, House of the Dead 2 and Bass fishing sometimes shunned bilinear filtering I can't quite work out. Maybe they thought sharper looked better? Mip-map avoidance I can just about understand, even if it was sometimes the wrong call.
I think the game looks "low polygon" even by DC standards (key characters being the exception). The general townsfolk are practically1950's sci-fi robots with (not always great) textures stretched over them. I think a lot of this comes down to, again, when the assets were made. Skilled, dedicated staff who were inexperienced at making assets for hardware they may not have propperly known yet.
The Shenmue 1 head demos (actually head+torso +environment) were made after most of the rest of the game (for E3 1999 iirc), and show a clear progression from most of the rest of the game (even taking into account the "tech demo" nature of them).
Shenmue 2 had pretty bad IQ (awful texture aliasing), and that's an awful screenshot of the game! The DC would clearly never match the PS2's polygon counts or framebuffer effects, but given a few years would have seen stuff that blew Shenmue away (especially given a similar budget).
I remember that SimonF was disappointed that no-one ever used the DC's dot3 bumpmapping (which he said was certainly fast enough to use), and that very little used its shadow volumes (that were bolted onto Shenmue 2 btw, and gave a nice effect of shadows shifting through the day).
Yeah, sad that Sega has let the franchise fizzle out pathetically.
I think it's getting reasonably common to see games on the scale of Shenmue now. Jade Empire and Oblivion spring to mind as examples of where we can get to now. Of course, budgets and teams are commonly much bigger than in the late 90's now, and tools make producing far more detailed assets far easier. With the vision, the budget and the staff you could do a quite incredible Shenmue 3 that was a big step beyond the old ones.
Won't happen though.
MGS2 looked amazing to be sure, but there were DC games that beat it in terms of texture filtering (not just texture detail) and most DC games had a 640 x 480 progressive output mode or 640 x 480 with a flicker filter (at very worst matching MGS2s output).
Shenmue's frame rate was solid 30fps 95% of the time - pretty good by todays standards! Interstingly, most of the slowdown occured when the game was streaming data in. Shenmue 2 had this sorted, and the only serious frame-slaughter I can remember occured when multiple layers of transparency were used in a cutscene.
It's worth remembering that many of the assets for Shenmue 1 and 2 were created in 1997 and 1998, before the system came out, and in some cases before they'd ever got their hands on the hardware and learned how to tune assets to take advantage of it. They could have looked an awful lot better if it'd all been made when AM2 were actually familiar with the system. Why very early DC stuff like the Shenmues, House of the Dead 2 and Bass fishing sometimes shunned bilinear filtering I can't quite work out. Maybe they thought sharper looked better? Mip-map avoidance I can just about understand, even if it was sometimes the wrong call.
I think the game looks "low polygon" even by DC standards (key characters being the exception). The general townsfolk are practically1950's sci-fi robots with (not always great) textures stretched over them. I think a lot of this comes down to, again, when the assets were made. Skilled, dedicated staff who were inexperienced at making assets for hardware they may not have propperly known yet.
The Shenmue 1 head demos (actually head+torso +environment) were made after most of the rest of the game (for E3 1999 iirc), and show a clear progression from most of the rest of the game (even taking into account the "tech demo" nature of them).
Shenmue 2 had pretty bad IQ (awful texture aliasing), and that's an awful screenshot of the game! The DC would clearly never match the PS2's polygon counts or framebuffer effects, but given a few years would have seen stuff that blew Shenmue away (especially given a similar budget).
I remember that SimonF was disappointed that no-one ever used the DC's dot3 bumpmapping (which he said was certainly fast enough to use), and that very little used its shadow volumes (that were bolted onto Shenmue 2 btw, and gave a nice effect of shadows shifting through the day).
Yeah, sad that Sega has let the franchise fizzle out pathetically.
I think it's getting reasonably common to see games on the scale of Shenmue now. Jade Empire and Oblivion spring to mind as examples of where we can get to now. Of course, budgets and teams are commonly much bigger than in the late 90's now, and tools make producing far more detailed assets far easier. With the vision, the budget and the staff you could do a quite incredible Shenmue 3 that was a big step beyond the old ones.
Won't happen though.
I really have to contest about shenmue having a good framerate. The first one was ok with only occasional slow down, but I remember the 2nd one being loaded with it.
And Jade Empire is an RPG so I don't really consider it in the same field as shenmue (epic, vast rpgs have been around for a while but I think they have a different 'feel' than shenmue) and oblivion barely had a story and while vast, I don't know if I'd call it detailed. The characters in the game barely mattered and there was little interaction with the environment.
And Jade Empire is an RPG so I don't really consider it in the same field as shenmue (epic, vast rpgs have been around for a while but I think they have a different 'feel' than shenmue) and oblivion barely had a story and while vast, I don't know if I'd call it detailed. The characters in the game barely mattered and there was little interaction with the environment.
Shenmue certainly has a different feel, yeah. By talking about "being produced on the same scale" I thought you were talking about things like size of the word, world detail, asset detail, plot points, lines of dialog etc. I'd actually say that the environmental interaction in Oblivion is way, way greater than in Shenmue btw.
Shenmue is actually really limited in most ways by todays action-RPG standards. It still has a great feel though, and I still enjoy going through it (the first even more than the second).
In terms of improvements, I think Shenmue 2 showed that whatever you can do with your engine, if the assets stay still a lot of the impact is lost. Shenmue 2 was better at streaming NPCs in, could handle far more NPCs at once and had more sophisticated shadowing. It had less polish to its animations and cutscenes than the first though, and many assets still screamed "old".
Shenmue 2 on the Xbox proved this further - despite all sorts of filters and AA and still looking charming the game still looked distinctly "very early Dreamcast". The faster loading and the vastly improved IQ couldn't hide the game's history. When looking at consoles that improved most over their lifespan, quality of assets is something that must be considered every bit as much as polygon counts, and for this it's probably length of life of the console and artist time-served (Kung Fu, basically) that counts as much as anything.
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Hackers have managed to crack Shenmue and modify its program quite a bit. While swapping the "head demo" character models from the Passport disc into the regular game, they uncovered that those models are actually full bodied. The position of the camera in the tech demos is simply too close to the characters to be able to show their bottom halves.
The console which showed the biggest improvement within a generation was the Saturn: the progression from the first Virtua Fighter to Shenmue Saturn or NiGHTS, or from the first Panzer Dragoon to the later iterations.
The console which showed the biggest improvement within a generation was the Saturn: the progression from the first Virtua Fighter to Shenmue Saturn or NiGHTS, or from the first Panzer Dragoon to the later iterations.
Hazuki Ryu
Regular
I think it's the PS2 as well.
Judging by the latest games I played (God of War 2), It looks like it has even surpassed (graphically) most, if not all, of XBOX 1 titles (IMO)
Even that RPG Rogue Galxy, in some spots, it almost looks next gen to me
Lol are you serious about that?
It looks worse than most xbox titles to me low resolution textures endless jaggies really dont know what ur talking about
IMO, those earlier comparison shots actually confirm something for me: consoles don't improve all that much at all throughout their lifetime. There certainly was and is hype regarding new games improving drastically over their predecessors though. I think there's a placebo effect here as a result of that hype. IMO you don't really see big changes in graphics at all until you move to new hardware.
I would argue, for example, that Waverace 64 maxed out N64. It had awesome graphics, with fully interactive wave "physics", while also have an excellent frame rate. Later games may have had better graphics, but they also became less playable because you were stuck with 10 fps at times.
Gamecube is the similar. I'd say that Rogue Squadron 2 pushed that machine to the ragged edge. Sure the sequels were improved a bit, but were they really stunningly better? I don't really think so....
A longer lifetime though might make the difference more prominent. PS1 was also in a period of major 3D technological change and growth, so not only did it have a long lifetime, but it would've had the advantage of better 3D techniques at the end of its life, moreso than other consoles I'd say. Still though, I don't think it was night and day difference between earlier games and later top releases. They all still share many of the same limitations and problems.
I would argue, for example, that Waverace 64 maxed out N64. It had awesome graphics, with fully interactive wave "physics", while also have an excellent frame rate. Later games may have had better graphics, but they also became less playable because you were stuck with 10 fps at times.
Gamecube is the similar. I'd say that Rogue Squadron 2 pushed that machine to the ragged edge. Sure the sequels were improved a bit, but were they really stunningly better? I don't really think so....
A longer lifetime though might make the difference more prominent. PS1 was also in a period of major 3D technological change and growth, so not only did it have a long lifetime, but it would've had the advantage of better 3D techniques at the end of its life, moreso than other consoles I'd say. Still though, I don't think it was night and day difference between earlier games and later top releases. They all still share many of the same limitations and problems.
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Having been playing it regularly recently, I think it's a tie between the N64 and the PS2. On N64, compare Turok: Shadow of Oblivion and 007: The World is Not Enough with Turok 1 and Goldeneye. Compare Battle for Naboo with Star Fox 64, or look at Jet Force Gemini vs Shadows of the Empire. Or look at World Driver Championship vs Crusin' USA. I think the gap is as big as anything that happened on PS2.
Waverace 64 looked really good, but it also was very little other than special effects. There wasn't much geometry in the levels and very little in the way of textures. It had great water effects and lighting, but that was it. That sort of approach really doesn't work for very many games.
Waverace 64 looked really good, but it also was very little other than special effects. There wasn't much geometry in the levels and very little in the way of textures. It had great water effects and lighting, but that was it. That sort of approach really doesn't work for very many games.
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