Prey demo on Xbox Live Marketplace

I"m thrilled with the gameplay, enviroments and story, but my old 3000+ and x800xt-pe setup runs the game smoother and with notably better graphics quality. I really didn't expect such a rough port.
 
looks good to me although I'm not comparing it to the PC version, but man I get motion sickness from this.
 
Yeah, I don't mean to say it is bad looking, I aprecate the art and the real-time lighting of the Doom 3 engine rocks. Just some of the textures are notably lower resolution, the texture filtering isn't quote what I was hoping for, and the lack of AA came as a shock as well.
 
Very reminiscent of Doom 3 and Quake 4 (gooey, shiny surfaces and dark corridor crawls). Still, it looks very good, though.
 
These damn ports.. It was better than Q4 but still skipped frames and other visual issues. These games should be at 60fps.
 
It looks like that the D3 engine simply does not port well to the 360. Quake 4 was a mess and this is margainlly better. I wonder if Carmack will heavily revise the engine to be more effecient when coupled with 360's architecture since the 360 is his focus point?
 
overclocked said:
These damn ports.. It was better than Q4 but still skipped frames and other visual issues. These games should be at 60fps.
Venom had less than a year to do the port, and worked very hard on it, spreading the work across all 3 cores and relying on 'low level' code for optimisation.

I wonder if the CPU was the holdup, due its in-order nature - and perhaps performance didn't scale so well over multiple cores.

The texture resolution was reduced for space, not performance reasons, so I guess that's just an engine issue.
 
RobertR1 said:
It looks like that the D3 engine simply does not port well to the 360. Quake 4 was a mess and this is margainlly better. I wonder if Carmack will heavily revise the engine to be more effecient when coupled with 360's architecture since the 360 is his focus point?
I doubt he's actively developing the D3 codebase on 360 at all.
 
Well the 360 port of D3 was done by Vicarious Visions and Q4 by Raven. Dunno if Prey used one of those codebases or something else, though.

EDIT: wait, got it. It's Venom games studios.
 
Subtlesnake said:
The texture resolution was reduced for space, not performance reasons, so I guess that's just an engine issue.

I wonder if they are using 3Dc for normal map compression.
 
Acert93 said:
I wonder if they are using 3Dc for normal map compression.
Why would it be important?
3Dc is a qualitative format, not a quantitative one.

For Normal Maps, there's not much choice, it's either DXTC5 Texture compression, with or without the Alpha Channel tricks, 3Dc (ATI2) is an "hardwired shader trick" on DXTC5, Palletized or no compression at all.

Prey already does use DXTC5 with the Alpha channel trick, I think, so I don't imagine using 3Dc would change anything from a texture quality/quantity standpoint. It would help a bit from a Shader workload perspective, but I don't see Prey being heavy on the Xenos Shader Arrays, to begin with.
 
Subtlesnake said:
Venom had less than a year to do the port, and worked very hard on it, spreading the work across all 3 cores and relying on 'low level' code for optimisation.

I wonder if the CPU was the holdup, due its in-order nature - and perhaps performance didn't scale so well over multiple cores.

The texture resolution was reduced for space, not performance reasons, so I guess that's just an engine issue.

Well it just my opinion that Q4 to even more of a degree then Prey shoul be able to meet a 60fps. So yes bad coding even though its always the excuse but as usual claims of "solid 30fps" is BS.

Not that i care about these games more than i play the demo on PC and tested it on 360 just to se the difference.
But texrez was also very bad imo, dont know if that had something to do with the portal tech.

Played it on the PC screen 360 version and then on SD and for this game i must say that for fans of the game with SD TVs, dont pick up! On HD you atleast get cleaner graphics.
 
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czekon said:
yes if mid range PC can achieve solid 30fps why X360 can't solid 60??
wrong choice in gpu perhaps? (or do u want a more politically correct answer, ok then now the xb360 gpu is a great idea from a forward thinking perspective but its a prototype/experiment aka something u dont wanna ship, yet they have in the xb360!!! a fixed plaform, why i dont know perhaps the decision taker at ms was a gambler on crack)
we will hear lots about this over the coming years when the xb360 runs games at a lot lower frame rates than pcs/other consoles (*)

(*)dont get me wrong the xb360 gpu is still a good deal for the money, its just far from ideal; ie its a intel p4 :)
 
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