Screen grab of the nextgen Madden football.

[N00b]

Well, I don't want to spoil the party, but if this is Console Next Gen then Console Next Gen looks suspiciously like PC Current Gen to me. :?

There is nothing in that shoots that my venerable old 9700 PRO could not handle.

As for the anti-aliasing: I don't think it is genuine. In my opinion they took a screenshot rendered at HD resolution (1280x720) with ordinary 4x or 6x FSAA and scaled it down to 720x405. Voilà, no jaggies.

 

[Iron Tiger]

Sorry if I'm going to repeat myself but..
In the shot we have seen so far AA is PERFECT (imho), it can't be a realtime shot!
Unless next generation consoles are far better in AA than current hw..

It may not just be AA, but whatever post processing they applied to get the blooming from the specular highlights. A little blur filter to squash what remaining jaggies were left after heavy AA. If you've got a DX9 ATi video card and the Catalyst Control Center, turn AA all the way up, and run a blur SmartShader and you'll see what I mean. Prince of Persia is also pretty low on jaggies because of the post processing haze.

 

[DuckThor Evil]

As for the anti-aliasing: I don't think it is genuine. In my opinion they took a screenshot rendered at HD resolution (1280x720) with ordinary 4x or 6x FSAA and scaled it down to 720x405. Voilà, no jaggies.

How does scaling down a picture remove jaggies?

 

[Iron Tiger]

As for the anti-aliasing: I don't think it is genuine. In my opinion they took a screenshot rendered at HD resolution (1280x720) with ordinary 4x or 6x FSAA and scaled it down to 720x405. Voilà, no jaggies.

How does scaling down a picture remove jaggies?

Super-sampling antialiasing (SSAA) is essentially rendering the scene at a high resolution and scaling it down to screen resolution. Not only can it reduce jaggies by blending contrasting pixels into an averaged pixel, but it makes textures appear sharper than with multisampling (which is more widely used today for performance reasons).

 

[Megadrive1988]

What is your assesment?

admittedly looks very good. looks next-gen, and believably realtime, not CG

 

[MechanizedDeath]

All the pics look realtime to me. I don't know if they've been post-processed or if they're just concept renders, but they look like what I expect to get from the next gen. I don't see why EA would need to lie about this. They are clearly the only game in town, so what is there to fear? PEACE.

 

[Acert93]

I wonder if the jersey has some "cloth simulation" or if it is pre-crumpled. The pic looks good, but I think we are at the point where little things (clothing, smooth animation, interactivity with the environment) will be the major things breaking the realism.

As for the PS3 comment, good point. The PS3 GPU and X2 GPU look to be on the same process. Visually we probably (probably) wont see more difference than between the PS2 and Xbox. I think where the PS3 may have an advantage is CELL. If CELL can make things animate better and allow programmers to throw a ton of resources at cloth simulation and the like then the ingame experience could be more different than just the still shot renders would indicate.

 

[Vaan]

I wonder if the jersey has some "cloth simulation" or if it is pre-crumpled

In case it has that cloth simulation enabled, programming it for every player on the field, with their own weight and clothes must have caused some headache to the coders

 

[Iron Tiger]

But if the PS3's GPU has no vertex shader functionality, that's a considerable amount of die space freed up that could be utilized for more pixel shader functions or even embedded memory.

 

[Ooh-videogames]

This should add to the excitement, I'm starting to have my doubts about it being realtime.

 

[Paul]

It's real time no doubt about it.... 360 launch title...

 

[Acert93]

This should add to the excitement, I'm starting to have my doubts about it being realtime.

That looks blocky :? The Center looks horrid. It is muddy and really blocky. And you can see the polys on the torso/hips of McNabb. The reflection in the helmet looks far too clean for a snow game--and why is there no snow on the ground? The face/helmet are very detailed though. If they are saving polys on the players to make them move more fluid, to add more detail to the environment (i.e. non-flat crowd), and because you are zoomed out 99% of the time while playing that is a fair trade off.

Besides the poly count, the textures/lighting/effects look really good, but about par what I expect for next gen. If this most recent pic is what we can expect from the graphics ingame I think it shows less of a jump from last gen than from the PS/N64 to the PS2/Xbox/GCN. This looks good, no doubt... but it still looks like a game and not a movie. The players look more real, but are still far from real. In some ways these shots tell us there is a far way to go to get photorealistic people in games.

Btw, it was announced that McNabb is the 2006 cover athlete.

 

[Kill_Jade]

dont you think you are prematurely judging what next-gen games will look like based on one game and a few screens?

 

[rabidrabbit]

The right arm on that looks this gen

These pics are not movie quality, but that's not to be expected from a first gen next gen game.

Apart from the extremely high image quality of these PR shots, these are believable next gen launch game shots. The meshes aren't ridiculously dense, most of the polygon detail has obvioulsy gone to the face/helmet area. I don't think there is any cloth simulation in those players, but the wrinkles in the clothes are "pre baked" (displacement mapping?)

There would be little visual advantage in making a full clothes simulation as they don't wear capes, scarfs, long skirts, dresses... flowing clothing.
If you look at their crotch area... those "cat whiskers" in their trousers, you won't see much animation in that area as the players are mostly running and you can make the cloth animation believable just by making a couple of different displacement maps.

heh, those pics would look quite a bit more dull without the snow particles.

 

[Fafalada]

heh, those pics would look quite a bit more dull without the snow particles.

Hang on... that's supposed to be SNOW? ...

Frankly until I just read this - the thought had never entered my head - I was completely convinced they were some kind of rose petals or confetti being thrown around

 

[rabidrabbit]

This gen:

Compared to those next gen shots..... :?

 

[pahcman]

amazing! simply. cant wait for progression of further xenon games!

 

[wco81]

Don't assume things will get a lot better than these pics, if they are real time renders.

Remember, EA has been assailed for using the same engine for Madden for 5 years.

Without competition, the conventional wisdom is that there would be even less reason for them to make radical changes within the same generation.

 

[Pete]

Don't underestimate the power of the dark side--I mean, pervasive lighting and shadowing. The texture quality in those Fever shots is nice, but the lighting in the EA shots looks "next-gen," IMO.

n00b, how much does that "current gen" PC cost, and how much do you think an Xbox 360 can sell for and still be considered a console? Well, the price argument may be getting weaker, as you can put together a pretty sweet system for around $500. But Xbox360's CPUs and GPU looks to be superior to anything on the PC side ATM--just going by the leaked/PR-approved specs.

 

[N00b]

n00b, how much does that "current gen" PC cost, and how much do you think an Xbox 360 can sell for and still be considered a console? Well, the price argument may be getting weaker, as you can put together a pretty sweet system for around $500. But Xbox360's CPUs and GPU looks to be superior to anything on the PC side ATM--just going by the leaked/PR-approved specs.

You are absolutely right about the price. NextGen consoles will deliver better performance than current high-end PCs for a fraction of the price. However these particular shoots do not look very next gen to me (considering next gen hardware is supposed to be more powerful than current gen pcs). Unless the depth-of-field effect, which can be seen best in the third shoot, is realtime.