Digital Foundry Retro Discussion [2021]

I wish we had better footage

 

Thats what I meant with architected on PS3. I thought that was the lead platform.

 

Shrek already did show that deferred renderer was quite feasible for xbox, Dead Space was pretty much perfect use case for it. (Small enclosed areas, many small lights etc.)

 

Quake 1, 2 & 3 have been published on gamepass PC.



I purchased the Matrox G400 Max back in the day 'cos of Quake 3.

Quake III was released when I bought the Voodoo 3 2000 PCI and the game was the reason I decided to buy the Matrox G400 Max AGP, because I had seen a comparison of the Voodoo 3 vs Matrox G400, in which the image quality of Quake 3 was much better on the Matrox G400, since it's a 32-bit color depth graphics. while the Voodoo 3 2000 PCI is 16bits color. This is the image that made me buy the Matrox G400. The sky and the fire in 32 bits color depth looked perfect, without colour banding.



However, the same image on the Voodoo 3 2000 PCI showed a lot of colour banding, which was featured in the PC magazines at the time. I haven't found the original comparison shot of the Voodoo 3 2000 PCI showing the heavy colour banding, but... you can see it in screengrabs of the Voodoo 3.



Despite buying the GPU to play the game, I never purchased Quake 3, just because I didnt have the money, sigh. Still, I was a very happy Matrox G400 owner, despite most games supporting Glide.

 

As a Voodoo 3 owner at the time, I loved tweaking things both in the settings and in .ini files. You could tweak the gamma and saturation in a way that hid much of the color banding, and use bilinear filtering with mipmap dithering to get close to trilinear image quality with bilinear speed. I don't remember everything I did but I do think I had almost as much fun tweaking Quake 3 as I did playing it.

 

This! me and my friends we were quake psycho fans, and almost exclusively played quake (1,2,3) all the time. We carried pcs to each other houses and had lan partys. Everyone had their own cfg files on each other machines. When we took turn to play you just executed console -> exec my.cfg and bam all my setting loaded. Quake console was something else. You could tweak anything! Good times.

 

I stuck with that Voodoo 3 way longer than I should have. But, it was just so fast for the resolution I was gaming at back then, and it's feature set sort of made it even faster, at the expense of image quality. The limited color pallet helped save bandwidth. The texture size limit saved on VRAM. All of it's shortcomings weren't really presented in a way that made it feel like I was getting an inferior experience because the framerates were high enough. Until, of course, they weren't. But I rode that card through 3 builds, starting with a K6-2 400 all the way up through a 1.2GHz Athlon, I think. It might have been 4 systems I had that in. Also, I played a bunch of Unreal Tournament back then, and a Voodoo 3 was great for that game.

 

yes, the Voodoo 3 performed so well. It wasn't that great at DirectX and whenever I could I preferred to use the Matrox G400 Max, which had better image quality.

However, it never came close to the Voodoo 3 performance wise, on most games. In fact, much to my dismay, I ended up playing most games on the Voodoo 3 and use it as my main GPU.

My Voodoo 3 was the Voodoo 3 2000 PCI, while my Matrox G400 was an AGP card. However, hardware conflicts -IRQ issues- were common when connecting both at the same time and I had to settle with the Voodoo 3 for the most part.

If a game supported Glide, and also DirectX, the DirectX -which was Matrox G400 forte- version could never come close -at least on the Matrox-, performance wise, compared to Glide.

 

this guy recently featured in a Digital Foundry video, and clearly a great programmer/developer -from what I could discern from his videos- has been part of the team that ported Quake to modern standards on consoles and PC.



I am currently playing the PC version -gamepass PC- at 165fps. It's imo the best Quake game to date and one that never bored me. When I completed it several times many years ago, the Reaper bot (an AI made by Steven Polge, iirc) kept me hooked, some mutiplayer games were so fun. Also there was one map with a tower were bots didnt climb -it had an elevator- and I could be camping there for long periods of time.

Camping wasn't a shame

 

btw, the Quake 1 port is just perfect -though I miss a Raytracing version, maybe some day-, but Quake 2 port is not as good.

Odd resolutions -nVidia recommends 1600x1200-, black horizontal bars, limited to 60fps, and something as indispensable as quick save/quick load is nowhere to be found -maybe I am missing something?-

 

I love how the game looks. The old visuals with the resolution upgrade, new effects and motion blur give it a stylized aesthetics.
It makes it appealing. It is a testament of the art

In general I love this guy's videos.

 

Also completely new dlc created by machine games is fantastic!

 

I'm surprised how much I like the motion blur in Quake. It really gives the game an uber-smooth presentation. I would have assumed it would be the same as some of the other Nightdive releases I've played, and the motion blur in those games wasn't as good.

 

on which version? I've never been a fan of motion blur -currently playing the game at 165fps, but if it looks fine, well...-. Btw I like the new SSAO.

haven't tried the new content yet, but I am surprised at the fact that I am remembering all the levels very, very well.

 

PC. I played it on my desktop vsync'd @144hz, and on my laptop at 60hz. The motion blur looked great on both. It's not overbearing, just adds a bit of smoothness to the motion.

 

About the only thing I wish they changed in the Quake remaster would be to make the shambler furry.

 

you're into furry then?

new DF Retro Video featuring one of the best series ever.

My favourite is the F-Zero: Maximum Velocity, followed by the SNES version and then F-Zero GX. I tried Climax but only a few minutes so maybe it can become my favourite.

F-Zero Maximum Velocity is almost impossible to beat, imho. The gameplay is soooooooo perfect and so tight. A new machine is truly meaningful and not just "another toy in my garage". Just like the very best Ridge Racer games in that sense.

As a F-Zero the perfect gameplay and the smooth way you advance in the campaign, has never been beaten by any game of the series. The SNES version is good 'cos of the nostalgia, but F-Zero MV is in an entire different league.

The ships in the original F-Zero are totally unbalanced.

I have hundreds of hours in the original F-Zero and the Golden Fox is unplayable in master difficulty level. You won't win a single race. It's okay until hard, but even on hard, meh. No speed, little energy.., it's horrible.

The best overall vehicle is the pink one, the Fire Stingray. If you accelerate it at the beginning so someone hits you from behind, you are in for a treat, nobody is going to catch you afterwards.

Great, but it's slow acceleration makes it impossible to win any race in the Fire Field tracks on Master.

To see the true ending (master difficulty, it's a top view of the track), the best vehicle is the Blue Falcon, because it's very balanced.

The green vehicle (can't recalln its name now) might be okay but I always went with the pink and the blue one on master.

All I learnt from F-Zero Climax I learnt it from this video, gotta give it a try someday and see how good it is. I doubt it's going to be as good as F-Zero MV -that game is the pinnacle of gameplay perfection and the perfect pace of advancement in a campaign-

 

I have the most fond FZero memories playing X with friends during college. GZ is a thing of beauty though. John's video really makes me wish I still has my Gamecube.

 

I m sure its a fun game. But what I always found as a step back in the series is that tracks are nainly constructed by very very long lines and the visual variety in a track is limited. Compare that to Wipeout where there are a lot more turns and sharper turns, there is a lot more variety in the design of each track, and the weapons add a huge strategic element. It makes me wonder why the FZ series didnt evolve much even though its such an old franchise