Nice GOW/MGS4 Compare

you've already made up your mind without seeing 1 second of gameplay?

Like I said people believe whatever they want to be true.

Still 9 threads later, you guys still refuse to discuss the graphics on a technical level, why are you in this thread?

To prevent people from comparing them? To remind us the animation is better in MGS? To make your case that they shouldn't be compared statically? PLEASE.

 

This thread reminds me of when people kept posting this picture to prove that the Dreamcast was as powerful as the PS2.

 

Because comparing graphics on a "technical level" shouldn't be limited to screenshots, as I explained in my last reply if you had bothered to read it. Animation, framerate and all factors are as closely tied to an objective conclusion as are the details in the screenshots. You can't compare one game to another simply based on a few textures off a static screenshot. It's the whole picture that's important, one that you are repeatedly ignoring.

 

The thread was about the shots. I went further when i said the tech in the MOVIE (not the shot) is not that mindblowing. How larger you want me to see that picture?

I agreee, but you seem not to care about what i said in my post. I mentioned the GOW framerate thing. Btw, on how many levels it is possible to fall flat framerate-wise?

That only means the artist who rigged the skeleton and the animator who cleaned up/extended the mocap data is good. Nothing special techwise. Self-shadowing is a given with shadowmapping. All this is just a logical extension of todays tech, with more resources. More bones, more taps of shadows.

Skinning is more demanding. But i fail to see how it simulates anything, the bone animation is stored. However, the real game could feature some real physics simulation of these things, now that would be a whole different topic. But as of now, allow me the luxury of doubt - i think the animation is stored. And once again: shadows got nothing to do with it.

Same thing. You render things into the shadowbuffer, and compare distances when drawing the receiver surface. No difference.

All the points you brought up are either void (shadows), or more related to content-creation. (This last one is only true if the bone animation is not affected by physical constraints in real-time - if it is, then i was wrong.) So where is the obvious technical superiority?


On the other hand: GOW has the _worst_ nextgen particle stuff i've seen. It's amazing that with tools like that, they cant manage to hire someone to do at least decent effects.

 

gow is not in the same league as MGS4. assessing the game footage from the perspective of a professional artist (for the past 10 years) - the games do not compare. MGS4 is a far more impressive visual feat. light quality, animation, etc.

gow is pretty, but all the footage using the U3 tech is very nice. MGS4 is simply beyond it though. i can only think it is brand loyalty blindness that would inform the other opinion.

looking closely, MGS4 has the more complex models, textures, animation, facial complexity, atmosphere, realistic lighting and beautiful soft shadows... are not these the graphical criteria we need to be looking at? MGS4 is w/o a doubt the more impressive in these areas. moving beyond these criteria can only lead to ambiguity. no one can say for sure how each game will play or what level of physics or a.i. will be present - clearly, these things are not related to the graphical comparison anyway!

gow is a sweet looking game. it looks like HL2 mixed with the normal mapping/bump mapping and lighting effects in Halo2. it looks very good. it is not however, as excellent as MGS4. i don’t think many games will be.

gow has a punchy look. gow's looks are like an arcade game vs. MGS4 looking more like a simulation. gow looks very nice but it lacks the subtle quality of MGS4. those subtle things standout very clear to the trained eye.


p.s. have you seen the 13mb/4 sec. clip of HD (1080p) footage from the MGS4 triler? wow. in that HD clip you can even see the pours in snake's skin. very sweet.

 

Even the UE3 ps3 engine vid suffered from the same problem with the models, though I've been unable to find a high quality vid of it as of late. From what I recall the characters detail looked textury rather than geometrical when moving, and when they got close to the camera(You can see this effect in scenes within the GoW HD-trailer over at gearsofwar.com). It's probably their approach at modelling characters. I've been complaining about it since the UE3 engine was unveiled.

Not only do many of the details look textury while moving, but parts of the characters' armors appear to clip/go through each other while moving(can even be seen in the original pic in this thread.).

AS for MGS4, some said they saw it on G4 direct feed and it was running at 60fps, dunnoh if that's true(we need confirmation), but if it turns out to be so, there's no denying the very real possibility of it looking as good on final h/w which is more powerful.

 

Both games are comparable technically. The polygon counts look to be slightly higher in the MGS4 guy and the textures are somewhat sharper in GOW. Anyone saying that they are not comparable is wearing ****** glasses. Animation is not comparable since the MGS4 was a scripted cutscene. It's better compared to the Ruby real-time demo IMO. Microsoft need to learn that they need to "fudge" it in order to compete with Sony's hype.

 

exactly.

 

GOW is not a Microsoft game, it's an Epic game.
If you want to comparegames that are "fudging it Sony style" see the games Microsoft and first parties are making, versus games made by Sony and first parties.

Konami and Kojima is fudging Konami style, Epic is fudging Epic style.
True both companies are at the same time promoting the respective platforms (references of "Cell" on MGS4 trailer for example being the most blatant exampple), but first of all they're just promoting their own games.
Sony and Microsoft naturally are happy to show the results if they're as impressive as they are.

The fudging between companies is mostly happening on these fanboards.

 

Amazing just amazing. The MGS4 realtime trailer looked great, and it looks like the PS3 will have some great looking games.

What is even more amazing, and overlooked a lot, is many game sites and fans on both systems are comparing actual "real time in-game video" of Gears of War with a real time PS3 trailer. Man graphics for the next gen have come a long way. I would have never expected real in-game graphics to compare with cutscene graphics so early in the game.

It also appears the Unified shader technology of ATI/MS works pretty well.

 

Reptile;

Brilliant reptile, so you managed to state your opinion to just about every example I brought up about the MGS trailer, yet you still failed to point out what GOW is doing that makes you feel they're in the same league.

*hint* I didn't ask for your opinion if it was technically impressive or not - I was asking for cut and dry examples of what the GOW is doing that is making you believe it is competing on a technical level with what we've seen from the MGS trailer.

I really think you're mistakenly arguing with the wrong person here: I'm not the one that implied MGS is god, the best engine and what not - I'm merely arguing that MGS4 from a visual/technical point-of-view is more impressive than GOW (that's what the topic is about). That includes everything from framerate right up to the complex models and lighting/shadowing. Hell, I wasn't even arguing the engine at all - this is purely a debate on a comparing the visual representation of two games on two different platforms.

I don't see what so limited to content creation about the demanding nature of processing shadows, complex character models that interact with those shadows, the lighting, the wind effects. I'm not denying that the artist deserves a lot of credit, but that obviously isn't the argument - the point is that every single thing you are putting down to content creation is infact using performance adding to the overall impressiveness of what we've seen in MGS (and beyond that, just isn't apparent in the GOW to that level).

Contrary to all evidence, you are still holding on to the claim "Technically, i stand by my opinion, it's not better." - so please, define what you mean by "technically better"? Or are you simply arguing that all the effects used in MGS are also found in GOW and thus they're in the same league?

If it is that, then dare I say you're arguing something very different than all the others in here (and the one that started this topic). The whole point in this argument was to prove that GOW is equally "next-gen" and impressive as MGS4 from a technical point-of-view - one I don't agree with given that the things shown in MGS4 (eventhough it might be in GOW to some extend) is simply not in the same league when you start to factor every single thing from animation to framerate to post-processing to the shadowing/lighing and complexity of the various character models and faces. These things are just not there in the GOW, no matter how hard you look into static screens.


BTW; It just occured to me that it's luckily the GOW stuff is all at night - makes it pretty hard to examine every single texture in there too, but you can be rest assured, there are flaws in every game and GOW is no exception. If GOW would be in clear daylight, I think we wouldn't even be arguing such a moot point.

 

QFT.

I assume that people are not ready to compare them is because of the loyalty associated with MGS series where as GoW is the first of its kind.

 

Yeah, whereas MGS has very nice atmospheric effects, the smoke/dust blowing in the wind adds a lot of punch to it.


Okay, now seriously, I'll try to turn this discussion to an objective comparision based purely on the technical stuff and trying to keep the subjective part out of it.

Characters. Technology wise, both engines are using simple polygon based models (no HOS to smooth out the curves, definitely no displacement mapping), and normal mapping to add further detail. Both use soft self-shadows, probably implemented through shadow buffers, on the characters, although MGS seems to have sharper shadows.

MGS spends a lot of polygons on Snake's character, which is understandable considering the amount of close-up shots in the cinematic. The actual ingame scenes will probably use a lower detailed LOD simply because you wouldn't see the details anyway.
60.000 vertices for the whole model sound pretty much right to me - you can see a few poly edges if you look hard, and some of the detail is only present in the textures. There are a few dozen individual hair strands which however fail to blend with the rest of the hairdo that's a solid piece of geometry.
Soldiers are also quite detailed with straps and pockets individually modeled, and so is the little robot with some actual hidraulic pistons modeled into it.
Texture wise, it's not that bright though. The amount of detail is a bit lacking, there are large homogeneus areas in Snake's armour and his skin is quite monochrome as well. No sign of dirt and damage on the suit, and the same goes for Otacon and the soldiers as well.
Shader wise, there is some skin shading going on, but it looks more like plastic with some glancing shine thrown in that is not affected by the shadows (that's why Snake's face has that outline someone mentioned before). The suit looks quite dull, it's actually pretty similar to Doom3/Quake4's marine armour.
Character animation seems to be standard bones and skinning, with probably some extra bones thrown in to correct the bad looking deformations (particularly on the shoulders). Working with the PS2 for so long, Kojima's character riggers should be quite experienced in this. Sorry, no muscle simulation or anything here, those technologies are far too expensive to compute even for a model with half of Snake's resolution (like the Cave Troll in the LOTR movies that was ~30.000 NURBS control vertices). The simple secondary dynamics on the head scarf were already done on this gen of consoles as well, though they add some nice movement to otherwise static shots.

GOW has a lower polygon count in the characters, although it's considerably higher than the UT2007 ones. It's probably around or above 10.000 vertices, and a lot of the detail is pushed into the normal maps extracted from some highres Zbrush digital sculpt. They probably don't plan to do super close-ups, although I don't know how many characters they can display at once (a larger number of enemies would be a good reason for this compromise, yet we haven't seen more than 10 at once).
I would actually think that one of the main difference in the look of the characters is that Epic uses Zbrush to add lots of detail to the highres geometry for the normal maps, whereas Kojima's team is just building highres models in a 3D animation package. Now, in Zbrush you can tesselate your geometry to 2-8 million polygons and sculpt each of them individually using brush-based tools; whereas in an animation package, you build a subdiv model that gets tesselated and smoothed, but no further detail is added. This explains the smoothness of the MGS character faces, and the look of Snake's armour. Just look at Otacon's face in the highres shots to see what I mean.
Textures are a lot more detailed, wear and tear and dirt are very evident (look how all the edges of the rifle are more shiny, to show that it's been used and worn down). Generally speaking, Epic's style is hyper-realistic, meaning that the amount of detail mimics real life but everything is exaggerated. The same goes for shaders: specularity is very strong, the fake subsurface scattering is almost overillluminating the skin on the characters' faces. I'd say that it looks like a Michael Bay movie, Armageddon for example. MGS on the other hand is far more stylized and has a painted look. It also effects the way the scenes are lighted - MGS is monochrome again, with low contrast and at sometimes quite flat enviroments. GOW on the other hand is exaggerated again, strong key and fill lights with high contrast in lit/shaded areas, amplified by cool/warm color variance (ie. the good old orange/blueish pair). Tehcnically, it's shadow buffers and point lights, although MGS may be using some trickery on the secondary lights. But the result does not look like HL2's bumped radiosity and ambient cube lights, though, more like Outcast's software rendered bumped characters. GOW has a small advantage in the precalculated shadows for the enviroment, but there's not such a big room for variance in lights anyway.

Vehicles are comparable to characters - the low res textures on the tanks have been mentioned already.

Enviroments are far more detailed and complex in GOW. The amount of geometry and specific normal maps is astounding, however, everything is static. MGS has all the smoke, dust, and debris that make it feel a lot more alive. Epic should look into atmospherics as well, one of the cool things in the original Unreal was fake volumetric fog after all.
Note that the atmospherics in MGS are 'fake' as well, that is, no true volumetrics but textured particles mostly. I hope that I'll be able to link to a nice example image sometime next week to show what I mean... anyway, textured polygons are a prefectly OK way to do these effects - the fire of the Balrog and much of the water flooding Isengard in LOTR movies were utilizing the same techniques (although they were able to use animated textures - real footage - because there wasn't any memory constraint). Spending R&D on realtime volumetrics is not justified IMHO.

DOF and motion blur are both image processing effects, currently it seems that MGS has DOF, GOW has DOF and MB. Not much to be impressed with, offline rendering has used both effects for many years now. MGS also seems to have a constant color correction process going on that creates the green-yellow tint. This also adds a lot to the cinematic-ness of the trailer.


So, to sum it up:
- similar technology in displaying geometry: normal mapped polygons
- similar technology for self-shadowing: shadow buffers
- higher quality precalculated shadows for level geometry in GOW
- MGS has more polygonal detail, GOW has more normal mapped detail (particularly in enviroments)
- smooth skinned skeletial animation for character bodies and faces (ie. more than 2 bone influences per vertex)
- background streaming of data in GOW is to be tested in practice but sounds pretty interesting
- better quality in textures in GOW
- better use of particle/atmospheric effects in MGS
- more dynamic geometry in MGS (flying debris, blowing smoke - no physical simulation required for these, simple particles)
- better use of image filtering effects in MGS
- biggest difference is art direction: GOW is hyper-real, MGS is somewhat painted but with many more 'realistic' elements implemented (particularly the atmospherics)

Practically all of the above are current generation technologies, but they haven't been utilized at the same time and to this extent in games that have been released.

I'd expect both to advance a bit until their release, MGS in particular because they've been probably working with a tight schedule for this trailer. But it will also depend on what the designers want - Kojima might be content with the current texture quality, for example, because he's more interested in the cinematic effects like atmospherics, image processing, etc. GOW would benefit a lot from adding such effects, too. It seems that Kojima has the art director with more experience or knowledge in offline CG, because they're implementing many commonly used and relatively simple offline techniques that can have a surprisingly big 'wow' effect.


And in the end, people should stop arguing about which is better, because B3D is not the forum for this - we should concentrate on the technical side of things, how they're doing it, what are they doing after all, and so on. Try to be friends like these two guys here...

 

Great post Laa Yosh very detailed analysis and I actually agree with both your technical and artistic characterizations on both games. Well done.

 

No it's the hair that has 60,000. They use thousands of polys in the moustache and the whole model is 60,000 vertices? You see on the display they show close-up of Snake's head...

 

No, you got it all wrong. MGS will focus on snake's moustache.

 

It doesn't make sense to spend 60.000 vertices on the hair - when the shoulder is still faceted...

 

nice post Laa Yosh... l like the breakdown of key elements. i agree with almost everything you wrote. i guess that as a whole i am still more impressed with what i see in the MGS4 package. although the processes used are the same or similar in both cases i think the MGS imagery is at a higher standard.

i do not have anything like your technical knowledge, but i disagree in one instance: texture quality. based on the hi res trailer hosted at ign.com i see nice light and shadow work on the environmental objects in GOW, but the actual texture detail is not that impressive.

by the way, many months of reading and this is just the second time i have posted... this is a great board.