My changing view of next generation consoles technology.

[XpiderMX]

I started playing the Uncharted series again to lead up to The Last of Us in graphical quality (so I don't constantly keep poking my eyes out at older games) but man, we've come a LONG way. Nathan Drake in Uncharted 1 looks like a shiny stick dude with no skin textures!

IMO U3 looks better than TLoU, but I like TLoU more.

 

[Billy Idol]

IMO U3 looks better than TLoU, but I like TLoU more.

Never, imo! The lightning in tlou is a sensation and the best I've played on consoles. Textures are the same. Animation is much better in tlou, way less warping. IQ is the same. Detail is insane, levels are bigger. TLoU is a clear evolution of U3 imo. Only thing U3 is better is framerate. You may prefer the flashy colorful artstyle of U3 though...but here I even prefer the style of TLoU and hope that U4 will be more of this!

 

[James Car]

...Also, photorealism falls apart really quickly by itself without comparable physics and animation to back it up.

Yessir indeed.

Interactivity, Animation, AI, and Physics are all very important as well. In some cases, I'd say more important. For some genres, these things would likely be more important.

Bottom line is all of these things take compute power. Some can be faked with more ram and pre-computing to store comprehensive lists to hide some compute limits. Others can't be faked.

The more compute the better the interactive experience can be.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

This is a dead-end (or rather, completely open-ended) thread like Nesh's views on next-gen. To prevent B3D becoming a blog site, I think we should stick primarily to news and answering questions.