Prey demo on Xbox Live Marketplace

[kyleb]

My comment actually wan't even sarcastic. I was serious because I hear many, many more of the drawbacks posted than the benefits and wonder at what point it becomes pointless to have a console compared to a PC (if you can afford it and enjoy tweeking).

Only at the point where the games you want to play are avalable on both but better on the latter, which means in practice there is generally plenty of reason to own both consoles and PCs.

I don't know why some people can't respect the fact that some us might not find ports to be the best metric of the capabilities of a system...

And I don't know where you got the idea that anyone was suggesting otherwise.

 

[Lysander]

Even if they were photos from a camera, that wouldn't change the fact that the 360 isn't rendering any light bloom
.

So, how would you describe lighting effect on this video?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VB12IgUT4sU

 

[swaaye]

I'm willing to bet it's partly caused by the devs having probs adapting the Doom3 engine to that XCPU thinger. It's not like it's at all multithreaded by nature. And we know that if an engine is not optimized for that CPU that it will perform like a P3.

I played thru the demo. It's very jaggy and the framerate is quite spotty. It definitely looks and runs better on my Opteron 165 / X850 XT. And I was running 1920x1200 2X AA 8X AF. The framerate was similar to 360, whatever res the game was running on my SDTV setup.

Ya know what? Prey on 360 felt like Doom3 on Xbox. Same kinda feel. I was impressed with the Xbox running Doom3. I am not impressed with how 360 runs Prey. It's passable, but with that hyped hardware one would expect it to be pegged at 60 fps.

 

[kyleb]

So, how would you describe lighting effect on this video?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VB12IgUT4sU

I'd descibe that as what it is, different effects in a different part of the game rather than the lights above the bar which was being spoke of.

 

[RancidLunchmeat]

For starters... What the hell?

How do these discussions continue to take place? They all remind me of the 'Xbox/360 doesn't have any exclusives because they're all just PC ports'

SO? Does anybody, anywhere, believe that developers are making games for guys that spend $1000 every year upgrading their PC and think these people are also going to buy the console version of the game?

No.

Console games are for console gamers, people who either don't have pc's or who don't have PCs that are good enough to run the games.

If a game runs "fine" on your PC, then there's simply no reason to buy it for the console because more than not it will run worse. (Unless it's a "backwards" port like maybe Halo2 or something)

Ok.... With my console/pc port rant out of the way, let me just provide input on this particular subject by saying that this game looks like ass.

Comparing this to RS: Las Vegas, or Viva Pinata or Lost Planet, or Gears... I mean.. you have to ask yourself 'are they serious?'.

It looks like a game you'd rent for your 360 while you waited for some other title to come out. Or buy and then sell after two weeks. I keep hearing people say they aren't impressed at all with the 360 games (and trailers) so far and for the most part, I think they're nuts.

But Prey? It sure does look like an Xbox game.

I certainly wouldn't put it on any 'must have' lists. More like 'will play if somebody loans it to me' list.

 

[Dot50Cal]

Some comparisons I just made. Its not 100% fair obviously, as I dont have a 360 devkit to get perfect screenshots, but it is through component so its fairly accurate. They look essentially the same besides AA and AF levels. I have Prey PC on max quality with 4X AA and 16X AF.

 

[Dot50Cal]

The rest, since someone has saw fit to only allow four images per post

 

[kyleb]

Does anybody, anywhere, believe that developers are making games for guys that spend $1000 every year upgrading their PC and think these people are also going to buy the console version of the game?

I don't see anyone here suggesting that; but all the same I am suppressed they didn't manage to even get my 360 to keep up with how well my PC, which hasn't been upgraded in nearly two years and didn't put nearly $1000 into it even back then, runs the game.

 

[RobertR1]

The lack of AA is painful. Also the character models look worse. AF, I can't really tell.

 

[kyleb]

They look essentially the same besides AA and AF levels.

Some of the texture resolutions take are notably lower as well, the label on the hand-dryer in your second comparison pics being an obvious example.

 

[Dot50Cal]

Some of the texture resolutions take are notably lower as well, the label on the hand-dryer in your second comparison pics being an obvious example.

That too, but I was more focused on larger differences like we've seen in past PC>console ports. This one didnt suffer too much, but it seems more like its porting issues. The lack of Vsync on the 360 version really is distracting. Especially when Tommy turns his head at the sink cutscene.

 

[kyleb]

I can't say I ever saw it loose vsync on my setup, and I have a particularly strong distaste for tearing.

 

[Dot50Cal]

Ah, your right I have to retract that. It was the FPS dipping really low. My mistake. I havent spotted screen tearing yet!

 

[swaaye]

LOL. Nice to know my "prev-gen" X800 is ahead of the "next-gen" 360.

They must be hitting texture memory size limitations to need to drop the texture res as much as they did in some spots. And that lack of AA really is odd considering it's supposed to be basically free on the machine. Those two things are what stuck out to me when I played thru the demo. That and the fact that it runs worse too.

Apparently ports are not the way to show the machine's talents. No surprise there. Too bad almost all games these days are cross platform ports that can't really hone themselves to individual hardware.

 

[Hardknock]

PDZ looks much better than this game and has much higher resolution textures. I don't think we've reached texture size limitations just yet. Just a sub-par porting job.


With that said, pretty fun game. Nothing mindblowing from a gameplay standpoint but someone who's itching for a new FPS wouldn't go wrong by picking this up.

 

[Galduta]

Some comparisons I just made. Its not 100% fair obviously, as I dont have a 360 devkit to get perfect screenshots, but it is through component so its fairly accurate.

This captured of framebufer of the 360? As it is the method?

 

[Dot50Cal]

This captured of framebufer of the 360? As it is the method?

Some comparisons I just made. Its not 100% fair obviously, as I dont have a 360 devkit to get perfect screenshots, but it is through component so its fairly accurate.

 

[Tap In]

For starters... What the hell?

How do these discussions continue to take place? They all remind me of the 'Xbox/360 doesn't have any exclusives because they're all just PC ports'

SO? Does anybody, anywhere, believe that developers are making games for guys that spend $1000 every year upgrading their PC and think these people are also going to buy the console version of the game?

No.

Console games are for console gamers, people who either don't have pc's or who don't have PCs that are good enough to run the games.

If a game runs "fine" on your PC, then there's simply no reason to buy it for the console because more than not it will run worse. (Unless it's a "backwards" port like maybe Halo2 or something)

Ok.... With my console/pc port rant out of the way, let me just provide input on this particular subject by saying that this game looks like ass.

Comparing this to RS: Las Vegas, or Viva Pinata or Lost Planet, or Gears... I mean.. you have to ask yourself 'are they serious?'.

It looks like a game you'd rent for your 360 while you waited for some other title to come out. Or buy and then sell after two weeks. I keep hearing people say they aren't impressed at all with the 360 games (and trailers) so far and for the most part, I think they're nuts.
....

well said :smile:

I don't understand all the needs for the comparisons either (in the console forum).

If you have the rig to run it go buy it for PC and here is the link...http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showthread.php?t=31536

 

[DuckThor Evil]

I think that if you owned a PC for nearly two years and saw it running the game with notably better image quality and framerate as I and others have, you would be understanding of our criticism rather than blowing it off as bitching.

I have a PC P4 northwood @3.3ghz and X800(16pipes 553/608) and I always play PC-games with best settings I'm able to run, and although I can see the image quality difference, I try to focus more to the game and not for every small image errors, looking at those pictures, I'm still saying that they look pretty close, and I wouldn't drop many points for the X360 version vs Pc on graphics, if I was reviewing the game.

 

[Mintmaster]

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

That's a pretty stupid conclusion from one poor port.

Personally, I bet it's the CPU. Remember that Doom3 does stencil shadows and performs all skinning on the CPU to do silhouette extraction. If that code isn't tuned well for IOE and parallelized for multiple cores, it'll throttle everything. I personally doubt they did any such optimizations. The whole reason you buy a license to a game engine is to save the development expense of things like graphics code and optimization.

We really need to see thing developed from the ground up for consoles before you judge them.