Digital Foundry Retro Discussion [2016 - 2017]

You should try it in an emulator. The rom comes with the shareware levels. He even recently improved it with slightly higher resolution and performance.

 

Strict graphical improvement from one game in a series to the next is hardly ever a hard rule.

Even when systems get replaced by systems that most people call "better", there are often particular cases or respects in which the old system has benefits.
Like, the lighting system in games like the original Doom is in some respects very crude compared to later lightmap approaches; it's only able to apply flat light levels across big chunks of geometry, and can't handle stuff like the smooth radiosity gradients that a lightmap bake gives you. But it trivially and efficiently allows for, say, sharp hard environmental shadows.

But oftentimes things just plain get downgraded. A lot of the "improvement" that happens across a generation is developers deciding which things to prioritize, and which things to slash.
Sometimes this can even persist across generational leaps. Halo 5 almost certainly doesn't have a system analogous to Halo 3's "area specular", since objects in the game suffer from tons of anomalous rim lighting.

Changing game design can also have a huge effect on what you can and can't get away with.
Even weird stuff like tweaks to camera acceleration and whatnot can have a big impact. It's amazing what FFXIII gets away with just because it has a camera that's very difficult to parallax without rotation; there's tons and tons of giant pre-rendered cutout background objects, which would be very obvious if it wasn't so hard to stop the camera from swooping to align with your movement direction. (Probably a big part of why FFXIII-2 "has worse graphics.")

Developers usually try to make each new game get perceived as "more graphically impressive/modern/whatever" than the last, but whether that works out in any given case is ultimately subjective...

I'm not very familiar with their functional constraints, but at the very least there'd be a performance cost associated with them.

 

It's a technical marvel:

 

It didn't have 720p, but supported 16:9 properly.

 

I remember playing this at a friends house. It was outstandingly awesome in every way. A perfect game

 

Yep. It's insanely good.

MD still had a lot in the tank at the end of the generation - at least in terms of performing effects on the CPU . Pity that the M-CD wasn't properly supported and the 32X took focus away from the core system towards the end of its life.

 

it makes me wonder why such port was not made at the time? they made it for the SNES and complained about the Nintendo restrictions...

 

very few games supported 720p on the xbox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Xbox_games_with_alternate_display_modes
Ninja Gaiden would have benefited a lot from it, the thing I remember negative about it (apart from being to difficult for me) is that it had a lot of aliasing, but the rest was very impressive, so it would probably be to demanding for 720p,
maybe it runs at 720p on the 360 BC?!

 

360 BC didn't change res, but they did add MSAA. Ninja Gaiden and DOA2U might have been 2xMSAA.

 

Would it have been 4x? Xenos does 4x per rop and it wouldn't have to tile nor would bandwidth be an issue.

 

That's just what I remember seeing when I last played.

 

Halo: CE 4xMSAA


Ninja Gaiden Black 2xMSAA

 

Weird. I wonder what the performance bottleneck would be if Xenos could do 4x MSAA per rop, and shouldn't have been fillrate or memory bandwidth bound.

 

Although I agree to a large extend to what you say, I believe that in the case of Tekken Tag vs the rest of the Tekken games on PS2 it had obvious overall graphical advantage minus the artistic aspect which is of course more subjective but can improve the visual appeal. Maybe the game design prohibited from replicating the lighting, materials etc. But it is still a different case compared to other titles where shift in priorities produced significant and unquestionable improvements in areas that more than compensated for the reduction or luck of other graphical features.
The case is also much more interesting with Tekken Tag because it overall produced effects and detail that were generally not thought possible or reproduced by any other game on the PS2 across its lifespan and that was one of the first games on the console.
The idea I get from the particular title is that Namco tried "unconventional" ways due to lack of tools and experimented with various effects because the capabilities of the console were not fully understood and standardized. IFIRC Namco did say they were challenged a lot with TTT in old interviews trying to figure out how the console worked
At a later point Namco maybe abandoned using the same approach as it consumed too much time and money

 

hm... the simplest rationale would be if the game already used MSAA on Xbox, and they didn't want to interfere with the engine emulation at all or....... maybe the renderer was doing something else that required more buffers simultaneously. There'd be no reason not to try to maximize usage of the 10MB space.