Resident Evil 4 on Xbox

[Blade]

I'm finally playing RE4, about 4 hours in.

Could the game be done on Xbox? Easily. Well, not that it's ugly or anything.. it's arguably the most brilliantly rendered title available on consoles today. (dreary as all hell, but realistic and very, very polished)

Still, the Xbox could do it at 30fps. The Xbox could do Fable, which is not too far removed from RE4 in graphical intensity.

 

[Teasy]

Only 4 hours? You've got a long way to go and the games going to get a lot better looking

 

[see colon]

No, it wouldn't since Capcom charges extra costs.

huh? you lost me. how would capcom charge itself extra to port a game from ps2 to xbox.

 

[Blade]

Yeah, it's supposed to be around 20-25 hours.. right? Something like that.

I'm in Chapter 1-3, right before the lake monster.

 

[AlNom]

No, it wouldn't since Capcom charges extra costs.

huh? you lost me. how would capcom charge itself extra to port a game from ps2 to xbox.

He meant for online features I think.

 

[see colon]

i've seen no charges. but then again, i only played it a bit at a friends house, and they mentioned no charges. still, i fail to see how capcom wanting to make a bit of money per month from online players would be an issue. doesn't PSO on xbox have a monthly fee?

or, capcom could port RE:O to xbox and add some extra content, like an extra chapter or two, only unlockable or available to those who pay for the upgrade.

 

[Ooh-videogames]

Yeah, it's supposed to be around 20-25 hours.. right? Something like that.

I'm in Chapter 1-3, right before the lake monster.

You haven't seen anything yet, you'll probably clock in more hours from just looking at the scenery. Just wait until you beaten the lake monster.

 

[Ooh-videogames]

What I mean is that, it isn't doing anything amazing in terms of textures, geometry, shaders and animation relative to what we have seen on xbox already. It may have a very efficent use of them but on the hardware side of things there isn't anything that really stands out as not being possible on xbox. If you can show me something then I will take that back but I have yet to see it. This isn't a cheap shot at GC it's just that I don't think it is doing anything that the xbox can't handle.

This post been eating at me for some reason, so a thought came to mind. Its strange this comment it is, although understandable somewhat, but why is there no other game on the market that look like RE4?

I haven't seen that looks like RE4, i'm not talking about art. I'm talking about textures, geometry, and shaders. Why would anybody that Xbox be impressed by this title, if theres titles on the console that look like it techincally?

I believe the Xbox could produce whats in RE4 with no problem, but is there a title thats comparable, not from what I have seen.

 

[Sonic]

Resident Evil 4 is a beautiful game graphically. It's a little darker in colors compared to another game I've played on Xbox that I believe beats it graphically. Of course I will admit there must have been sharp differences ijn the actual contrast of the TV's.

Ninja Gaiden looks better than RE4 in my book, but not by much.

 

[PC-Engine]

IMO NG looks good but not better, just different. Most of what I've seen in NG is reflections, specular stuff, and high resolution textures. The environments in NG are pretty simple. The environments in RE4 are fairly dense.

 

[Ooh-videogames]

IMO NG looks good but not better, just different. Most of what I've seen in NG is reflections, specular stuff, and high resolution textures. The environments in NG are pretty simple. The environments in RE4 are fairly dense.

I concur.

 

[Tysan]

RE4 is not about textures, is about polygon count and lighting, RE4 lighting is IMO the best one this gen.

I remember reading somewhere that GC can do 8 hardware lights while Xbox can do 4, making lighting more efficient in GC. [Correct me if Im wrong, no problem]

For example MGS3 vs. RE4, if theres something that really makes RE4 models (aside from poly count) look better is lighting, MGS3 models seem sort of 'flat' in comparison.

Still, the Xbox could do it at 30fps. The Xbox could do Fable, which is not too far removed from RE4 in graphical intensity.

Ummm, IMHO RE4 looks so much better than Fable, Fable looks good but its not a graphical masterpiece.

 

[London Geezer]

GC supports 8 hardware lights, but by the time you actually get to use them all, performance will have taken a huge hit. They're not free.
And RE4 never shows anywhere near 8 lights at any one time. It uses less lights, but very well. 8)

 

[Tysan]

GC supports 8 hardware lights, but by the time you actually get to use them all, performance will have taken a huge hit. They're not free.
And RE4 never shows anywhere near 8 lights at any one time. It uses less lights, but very well. 8)

Not that I was suggesting that it uses 8 lights, only that it could manage lighting easier than Xbox NV2A wich supports 4 hardware lights.

 

[PC-Engine]

Yeah IIRC GCN has the advantage of doing lighting and some other graphical function in parallel.

 

[London Geezer]

Yeah IIRC GCN has the advantage of doing lighting and some other graphical function in parallel.

As opposed to...? :?

It's safe to assume that lighting and "other graphical functions" have all been done more or less in parallel in all architectures for years.

 

[StefanS]

Yeah IIRC GCN has the advantage of doing lighting and some other graphical function in parallel.

As opposed to...? :?

It's safe to assume that lighting and "other graphical functions" have all been done more or less in parallel in all architectures for years.

I think he means the following:

GCN TEV:
a=f(g(x))

while NV2A pixel shaders:
a=g(x)
b=f(a)

this is at least what ERP said, in an old posting about what distinguishes the TEVs from PSs...

Anything that requires you to compute f(g(x)) where g(x) requires combiner stages to compute. and f(x) is computed as a texture lookup.

It quite honestly doesn't come up very often, but it's nice to have the flexibility

The TEV and "pixel shaders" are basically cute acronyms for what used to be called color combiners. The TEV also incorporates the Texture reading part of the pipeline.

A color combiner is in general implemented as a single logic op, in NVidia's case thats public (register combiner docs) and is of the form
A op1 B op2 C op1 D
where op1 is either Dot Product or multiply, op2 is either add or select.
As you can see by repeating this multiple times with some register manipulation between stages you can do most basic math. Pixel shaders just provide a simple consistent interface to this (and other vendors implementations).

The TEV uses a different basic combine operation which is a little more limited. However since the Texture reads can be interleaved with the combiner operations it allows you to do things that would require multipass render on NV2X.

So as an example
on NV2X I have to write


Texture Read
Texture Read
.
.

Combiner Op
Combiner Op
Combiner Op
Combiner Op
.
.
.

On Flipper I can write

Texture Read
Combiner Op
Combiner Op
Texture Read
Combiner Op
Combiner Op
Texture Read
Combiner Op
Combiner Op
.
.
.

I guess the easiest explanation is that Flipper has simpler units for combining and reading textures, but allows more complex arrangements of the units.
So if one of the texture reads is dependant on a previous combiner Op and you can't squeeze the ops into the texture addressing instructions the NV2X would require multipass to do the same thing.

http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1603&highlight=tev

EDIT: searched for quotes

 

[PC-Engine]

There was also an article at Gamasutra that described the lighting ops IIRC.

Here found it.

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20021002/sauer_01.htm

 

[AlNom]

so... it seems like it's easier to write for the NV2A, but you won't get the best performance

or... that's just how it appears in "things-to-do" (lots more with the GCN)

 

[Blade]

Tysan: RE4 may look better than Fable, or not; it's in the eye of the beholder.

I spent 14 hours finishing Fable and almost 5 hours with RE4. Both games employ a 30fps framerate (Fable's definitely being sketchier.. RE4 only "really" slowed down right after it finished loading AFAICS) and have a lot of background scenery.

What I meant by graphical intensity was how much geometry/textures were being thrown at us at once. Bowerstone, for example, has a ton of slowdown due to the sheer number of characters/houses/etc on-screen.. most of which with relatively detailed texture work.

I firmly believe that the games' graphics are comparable on paper, even if one looks better in reality.