PGR 3 - Pictures and Framebuffer Discussion

[Shifty Geezer]

http://www.xboxyde.com/leech_1813_en.html

It's overexposed, but when he drives across the Brooklyn Bridge the second time you get a nice view of both the bridgework and a wide view of the city at the same time.

60 megs is a bit rich for me, but I think I've seen something similar. A drive through NYC across the bridge, including views across into the city. Yes, they looked more detailed. If we take those as having substantial geometry, it just seems a bit odd they haven't gone to town on the trees too. They look very much to me like the standard 'several leaf textured planes attached to a trunk' model, and the blandness of the texturing makes the trees stand out as very artificial. Considering how good everything else is and how well it all looks together, including the people which normally look out of place, why settle for such weak trees?

Well I just checked Speedtree.com to see a comparison. PGR3 isn't listed as using Speedtree though it is the official foliage creation tool. All the examples there look pretty bland too IMO. Maybe it's just not a great engine? (How many realtime tree engines are there...) They all look rather illustration-y though. It works okay in Gothic III and Oblivion but they seem out of place in a photorealistic style PGR3. They also suffer from obvious repeated textures. That's what I noticed about PGR3. In these Speedtree pics each branch is made of lots of repetitions of the same small textures, and annoyingly human's are very quick to notice patterns. I'm thinking now the main reason the trees in PGR3 don't look so hot is the system used isn't. Hopefully it won't be long before we get some better procedural mixing up of foliage...

Edit : http://www.speedtree.com/tree_browser/browser.htm Follow this for examples of trees including polycounts. They're using lots of triangles. Just not using them very well

 

[Shogmaster]

Is it just me or does the dials in the 1024x600 version seem a bit thinner than a circle? I think the 1280x720 version makes the dials more circular.

edit: I just checked it with Photoshop, and I think I'm right. I wan't sure before since no monitor is going to be perfectly proportional (especially CRT like mine running none 4:3 resolution like 1280x1024), but after making a perfect circle in Photoshop onto the JPEG, it looks like if the take his 1024x600 shot and skew it into 1280x720, the dials become closer to what Photoshop's showing me as a true circle.

Here's the 1024x600 image blown up 2X via nearest neighbor in PS, then I made a true circle (with oval selection tool, you hold down Shift and Alt before you drag) close to the dial size a s possible, filled it in with translucent red, and then cropped the area in question.

Of course the gauges could originally meant to be a bit oval....

 

[expletive]

For what it's worth, 1280x750 is exact same ratio as 1024x600.

The mystery thickens.....

Why would they render in 1024x600 and not 1024x576? 1024x576 would be a perfect 16:9 resolution and scale to 720p with much less of a chance of artifacts/unwanted graphical byproducts. Doesnt really make sense, the added scaling problems for 24 extra vertical pixrels?

 

[Powderkeg]

60 megs is a bit rich for me, but I think I've seen something similar. A drive through NYC across the bridge, including views across into the city. Yes, they looked more detailed. If we take those as having substantial geometry, it just seems a bit odd they haven't gone to town on the trees too.

Well, in all fairness the screenshots that started this thread are from Nurburgring, where you could literally have thousands of trees on screen at once.

But I would swear the trees at the same track in Forza look much better.

 

[Gek54]

I agree. Seems like Nurgurgring was a last ditch effort. The grass textures....

 

[hadareud]

The grass textures....

With the motion blur, how do you make out the grass textures???

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I agree. Seems like Nurgurgring was a last ditch effort. The grass textures....

I guess it kinda makes sense. This is supposed to be a city racer isn't it? So an open racecourse would likely have been an extra, rather than part of the full design from the very beginning, and the resources given over to accurately portraying the racetrack would be less than those given over to capturing the cities.

 

[Gek54]

With the motion blur, how do you make out the grass textures???

With blur how do you make out anything?

I think they said most people never got to experience the Ring PGR2 becuase they never got far enough to unlock it. I guess with that in mind they didnt need to put as much effort into it as the city tracks. That and probably time contraints are the result of those Ring shots if infact those are from the final build. I kind of like the trees in a yoshi story kind of way, kind of dissapointing but I got GT4 and Forza if want a more serious Ring experience.

 

[Gek54]

I guess it kinda makes sense. This is supposed to be a city racer isn't it?

True, thats my focus on the game anyways. Powersliding the 90 degree turns is what PGR is all about isnt it?

 

[one]

http://www.xboxfront.de/screenshots-727-1657-Project_Gotham_Racing_3.html

Check out the res on these screens from the original poster. 1280x750, these are obviously framebuffer grabs, what gives?

1280x750 is larger than 720p

 

[_phil_]

ok so going nextgen is a jump from static-blurry textures to motion-blurry textures.

 

[Bill]

I wonder why all this talk of graphics?

 

[Farid]

Reminder:

I wonder why all this talk of graphics?

Beyond3D Forum

 

[pipo]

 

[Nick Laslett]

Should we be worried about this resolution and framerate news?

This gen I really wanted all games to be 640x480p(448p for PS2) at 60fps.

At lot of games delivered this, even SSX a Nov 2000 PS2 launch title.

For next gen I'm looking for 1280x720p at 60fps in most AAA titles.

Am I expecting too much?

It seems to me that Bizarre have had a long time to develop PGR3. They've not been working on anything else, development would have started in Winter 2003. I know this is a launch game, but even so I would not say they had to rush.

I'm not trying to troll, but if Heavenly Sword is a PS3 launch title and it runs in 1080p at 60fps as Deano says it will, then it is a world apart from PGR3. I know they are different genres, and should not be compared. But even so it is worring that Microsoft's AAA racing launch title should be falling so far below my expectations for next gen high definition gaming.

 

[Bill]

I know, but a couple days ago everybody was telling me graphics dont matter in regards to one of my comments that we wont know how well PS3 will do till we know it's final power.

Yet there's this endless nitpicking over X360's lack of graphics.

I mean people on GAF act like MS stole something, or are making comments like "doesn't bode well for the system's power"

All this over graphics?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Should we be worried about this resolution and framerate news?

I don't think so.

It seems to me that Bizarre have had a long time to develop PGR3. They've not been working on anything else, development would have started in Winter 2003. I know this is a launch game, but even so I would not say they had to rush.

I'm not trying to troll, but if Heavenly Sword is a PS3 launch title and it runs in 1080p at 60fps as Deano says it will

We don't know if it does yet. We also don't know if it has AA (likely not as I understand it). PS3 doesn't need a predicated tiling graphics render pipeline which XB360 does but no-one's had chance to write one for launch games as the hardware hasn't been available for long enough, and HS has had the benefit of closer to final hardware for longer.

I wouldn't base ANY expectations fo the future on launch titles. Just look how much PS2 was pushed! I expect launch titles to be much nearer the systems performance than PS2 because development is a lot easier, and the principles are more straightforward on XB360 as the GPU works similar to a PC part. Only they do apparently need to setup some not-too-difficult-but-needed-non-the-less processes to get the most of XB360.

 

[Titanio]

I'm not trying to troll, but if Heavenly Sword is a PS3 launch title and it runs in 1080p at 60fps as Deano says it will

Woah there, he said no such thing. Chinese whispers, I think.

He said he'd be happy with a solid 30fps, and he certainly has not confirmed the final product will render at 1080p. In fact IIRC he said they used 1080p for the trailer because Sony asked them too.

 

[Hardknock]

Woah there, he said no such thing. Chinese whispers, I think.

He said he'd be happy with a solid 30fps, and he certainly has not confirmed the final product will render at 1080p. In fact IIRC he said they used 1080p for the trailer because Sony asked them too.

Yep and Deano also stated the game was running at only 5fps at the time and had to be sped up for the trailer. So obviously these games are worlds apart as far as development is concerned. I doubt very much that it will be a launch title(unless PS3 is coming Holiday 2006).

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Yep and Deano also stated the game was running at only 5fps at the time and had to be sped up for the trailer. So obviously these games are worlds apart as far as development is concerned. I doubt very much that it will be a launch title(unless PS3 is coming Holiday 2006).

Only that was back then. More recently Deano mentioned on this forum...

The main combat sequence of HS E3 demo was largely real-time (largely in the sense that we still have slow downs due to unoptimsied code, for example the first time an effect is triggered, we get a stall as something loads. Obviously the final version we have it pre-loaded etc.) ... The army scene was the slow bit.

Just so its absolutely clear, the main fight sequences seen in the HS E3 trailer (bar a bit of post-processing) are playable in real-time now. When you see the fight in HS, your seeing the actual in-game footage in real-time.

The graphical quality is also likely to go up quite considerable before release...

so we do have every reason to believe HS will be running at (at least I suppose) 30 fps looking as good as if not better then the E3 showing. And this is as fair a comparison as we can get with XB360 and PS3 which was what Nick Laslett was comparing PGR3 to. HS is the only title we have that we hear from the devs what state it's in. Comparing PGR3 to say MGS4 or that-game-that-shall-not-be-mentioned is comparing a real game to not-yet-a-real-game with no idea what PS3 will actually be producing. At least in HS we've seen the ingame engine (sped up for E3) and been told it's running realtime now, so can take the E3 showing as what's actually happening and will actually be running on the console. Of course this doesn't mitigate the inherent flaws in comparing one product on one system from a different dev team and different genre and comparing it to another product on another system from another dev team and a different genre, and trying to evaluate the long-term comparative system performances from each based on a few screeshots and internet movies!

Also I thought Deano said way back when HS was rendering at 720p, and Sony asked for the resolution increase. He hasn't clarified what the current version runs at.