*spin-off* Art vs Tech... and stuff.

[Beef Stallmer]

Oh pshaw.. I just want a gears trilogy remastering in 2016. (or at the very least, bringing 1 and 2 up to date with 3's lighting).

So, hypothetically; if they re-baked the gears 1 levels to use the fake GI, would you think that gears 1 had the best graphics? (artistically speaking now that the artwork would not be kept back by the "old" lighting)

 

[Kameradschaft]

So, hypothetically; if they re-baked the gears 1 levels to use the fake GI, would you think that gears 1 had the best graphics? (artistically speaking now that the artwork would not be kept back by the "old" lighting)

At first you said "gears 1 has the best 360 graphics possible" and now it's all about the art? either way you wanna spin it technically Gears 2 and especially Gears 3 (lightmass alone) both destroy the first game - art is debatable but saying that Gears 1 was more impressive than Gears 2 and that Gears 3 may surpass the first game is laughable.

BTW I'm more than happy to see you guys responding to the invite for some Gears 3 MP/Horde/Arcade mode SP awesomeness - I'll send the proper friend requests when the time comes...I have Al's, BRiT's and KageMaru's GTs, of course everyone else who is interested is always welcome to learn to cuss in Greek. ^_^

 

[assurdum]

So, hypothetically; if they re-baked the gears 1 levels to use the fake GI, would you think that gears 1 had the best graphics? (artistically speaking now that the artwork would not be kept back by the "old" lighting)

What did you said could even count for the others sequel in coming, like unchy 3...any game is a mixed of art & tech

 

[ultragpu]

Gears 1 is a much darker and grittier game in comparison so naturally you feel that it has more atmosphere and it's easy to look pass the graphical flaws in that sense. But the lighting in Gears 1&2 are clearly almost a generation behind the 3rd or most of modern games.

 

[kagemaru]

Oh, we'll certainly be playing a metric ton of Gears 3 campaign and horde once it hits...

Great, I need to add you guys to my friends list soon. Need to clear out some spots first since I'm full and I don't play with many people on my list.

Gears 2 to me at least, had a lot more low resolution textures, overall it did not have the same quality and polish as the first game.
above all: to me artistically, nothing tops the first gears. The second one is more brown as opposed to gray/green, and brown is not my favorite color so there you go

Spin it any way you like but this isn't true at all. Gears 2 had a lot more color than Gears 1. You had the grays of the hospital, browns/reds/oranges of the forest onslaught, white/brown/gray of the mountain village, blues/greens of the first caves, and so on. The only area where I can understand your complaint of too much brown would be the queen's underground palace area, but that's only one section of the game.

Textures aren't an issue either since they are comparable to the quality in Gears 1 while the levels were expanded in size.

People were ignorant to the improvements done to UE3 then, just like they are now.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Characters in Gears 2 were evidently re-done and their texture resolution (or texture space utilization) increased noticeably. I even remember posting comparison screenshots somewhere about this.

 

[AlNom]

Yeah, it was pretty noticeable to me just when I first loaded it up. The lancer was redone, of course.

That said, I do recall slightly higher res textures used in the original Gears 2 SP demonstration (on the driller), particularly the blue lights on Marcus's shoulders being sharper.

 

[Beef Stallmer]

Gears 1 is a much darker and grittier game in comparison so naturally you feel that it has more atmosphere and it's easy to look pass the graphical flaws in that sense. But the lighting in Gears 1&2 are clearly almost a generation behind the 3rd or most of modern games.

This.

Also, I just remembered; I played Gears 1 start to finish on an FW 900 CRT (which is probably the best screen ever made, regardless of technology). I played Gears2 on an LCD.
I can imagine playing 1 on an LCD could mean that the game was washed out as f-, as this is how I felt about the second game. Wish I never gotten rid of the CRT (also deadspace, a really dark game, would have been so much better on it)

 

[Lucid_Dreamer]

But he said that "gears 1 has the best 360 graphics possible" ...

From a technical aspect or artistic? Would baked and static techniques fall under technical or artistic?

 

[Ruskie]

From a technical aspect or artistic? Would baked fall under technical or artistic?

Gears looks bad now,however you turn it.People are still going by memory from beginning of gen.

 

[BadTB25]

From a technical aspect or artistic? Would baked and static techniques fall under technical or artistic?

How would artistic play into "best graphics possible"?
Couldn't a better technical aspect also be better artistically? You don't have to sacrifice one for the other.

I think baked and static would fall under technical imo.
Realistically, I don't see how someone would think a game released at the beginning of a generation would be the best possible on a system. Even now devs are finding ways to squeeze new techniques and better graphics out of the consoles.

 

[Beef Stallmer]

How would artistic play into "best graphics possible"?
Couldn't a better technical aspect also be better artistically? You don't have to sacrifice one for the other.

I think baked and static would fall under technical imo.
Realistically, I don't see how someone would think a game released at the beginning of a generation would be the best possible on a system. Even now devs are finding ways to squeeze new techniques and better graphics out of the consoles.

I believe the strength of the 360 hardware lies in great texture performance and a lot of normal/displacement mapping. Gears 1 to this day excels in those, and can imo be used as a benchmark.
This combined with the actual art is what elevates it above other 360 titles, for me at least.

 

[BadTB25]

I believe the strength of the 360 hardware lies in great texture performance and a lot of normal/displacement mapping. Gears 1 to this day excels in those, and can imo be used as a benchmark.
This combined with the actual art is what elevates it above other 360 titles, for me at least.

Understood, but your statement was "best graphics possible".

Nothing that was done on Gears 1 precludes from being done on future titles with improved refinement in AA, lighting, animation, etc to include having better art.

I always thought that some of the art in Gears 1 was "meh" while others were really outstanding. The car wreckage for example was crap and still is to this day.

 

[Lucid_Dreamer]

How would artistic play into "best graphics possible"?

...when playing with subjectivity, the sky is the limit. The word "best" and subjectivity go hand and hand, most times.

Couldn't a better technical aspect also be better artistically? You don't have to sacrifice one for the other.

Well, according to the latest trend around here, Everything is a trade-off. However, the devil is in the details (how much does one have to trade-off to do something). That is the scale to weigh performance differences. Of course, some people would just like to say, "it's a trade-off". The purpose of those types of statements is just to muddy the waters (smoke screen).

No, you don't have to sacrifice one for the other. It depends on what you're trying to do with what you are working with.

I think baked and static would fall under technical imo.
Realistically, I don't see how someone would think a game released at the beginning of a generation would be the best possible on a system. Even now devs are finding ways to squeeze new techniques and better graphics out of the consoles.

New techniques? Yes! More clock cycles? No! There were developers using, almost, 100% clock cycles, on 360 titles, two to three years in. I think the new techniques are, mostly, finished and they are left with baking more and more to show visual improvements.

 

[AlNom]

Trade-off doesn't mean what you think it means apparently.

. It depends on what you're trying to do with what you are working with.

And if you try to do more than what you are working with is capable of, you have to make trade-offs. If you do something differently, it's a different comparative metric. There's no fighting the limits of fillrate for instance. You can do lighting differently and get different results, but you ought to know there are trade-offs as for why Epic has chosen forward lighting vs a deferred shading setup. There are trade-offs.

This is silly.

 

[Beef Stallmer]

Trade-off doesn't mean what you think it means apparently.

And if you try to do more than what you are working with is capable of, you have to make trade-offs. If you do something differently, it's a different comparative metric. There's no fighting the limits of fillrate for instance. You can do lighting differently and get different results, but you ought to know there are trade-offs as for why Epic has chosen forward lighting vs a deferred shading setup. There are trade-offs.

This is silly.

The vertex/pixel shader setup of gears is already a trade-off; they decided to utilize the unified shaders mostly for pixel operations instead of vertex operations. This lead to the graphics being more detailed, while at the same time having less polygon detail then other games.

Forward lighting is chosen because the engine is probably best at/ optimized for that. The samarithan demo had some really lousy effects (even for 2010) i.e. multiple 2d 'beams' to pass for a volumetric light and more of that. This tells me that Epic is not at the top of their game anymore, and seeing as deferred engines are often more advanced/ capable of more advanced effects, my guess is that Epic simply doesn't know how to do it as well as their old rendering methods.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Epic's engine tech has never been about bleeding edge, but more about a nice set of easy to use features. And the polished content creation tools that allowed instant production mode instead of experimenting and waiting for the tool development team. You buy UE3 and your artists can start working on day 1, on real content, that's something many studios were willing to pay for.

Not to mention that the Samaritan demo is using deferred rendering as far as I understood their PDF...

 

[Ruskie]

The vertex/pixel shader setup of gears is already a trade-off; they decided to utilize the unified shaders mostly for pixel operations instead of vertex operations. This lead to the graphics being more detailed, while at the same time having less polygon detail then other games.

Forward lighting is chosen because the engine is probably best at/ optimized for that. The samarithan demo had some really lousy effects (even for 2010) i.e. multiple 2d 'beams' to pass for a volumetric light and more of that. This tells me that Epic is not at the top of their game anymore, and seeing as deferred engines are often more advanced/ capable of more advanced effects, my guess is that Epic simply doesn't know how to do it as well as their old rendering methods.

Problem is...Some of you are confusing tech and art.Good tech and hell of an art could mean game would look better in a lot of peoples eyes than hell of a tech and good art.We don't have their papers,we don't know what they utilized and what they didn't utilize,all we know is that they added bunch of stuff from Gears 1 to Gears 3 and still made game looking tons better.

Forward rendering was chosen because UE3 was done by 2004,and all Epic thought about was getting in next generation first and having best tools,they didn't give a crap about gazillion light sources.From all I'm seeing I dunno how you guys don't hype up GTA IV as technical achievement...Deferred renderer,huge,detailed open world,animations and physics second to none,24/7 time of day,every single thing in the world is dynamic...You can even break walls in lots of instances,still,I don't think alot of people would say that game looks more impressive than Gears 3,even though Gears 3 is forward renderer(its not like it matters that much) and doesn't include ~200 light sources per scene.

 

[Turok]

The vertex/pixel shader setup of gears is already a trade-off; they decided to utilize the unified shaders mostly for pixel operations instead of vertex operations. This lead to the graphics being more detailed, while at the same time having less polygon detail then other games.

http://xbox360media.ign.com/xbox360/image/article/914/914185/gears-of-war-2-20080929084139103.jpg

Umm... Even today, Gears of War 2 doesn't strike me as a game with "polygon detail" deficiencies. Lots of curved surfaces and an impressive draw distance in comparisons to its predecessor. With the naked eye, it seems like it hangs on in comparison to other games just fine.

 

[ultragpu]

Problem is...Some of you are confusing tech and art.Good tech and hell of an art could mean game would look better in a lot of peoples eyes than hell of a tech and good art.We don't have their papers,we don't know what they utilized and what they didn't utilize,all we know is that they added bunch of stuff from Gears 1 to Gears 3 and still made game looking tons better.

Forward rendering was chosen because UE3 was done by 2004,and all Epic thought about was getting in next generation first and having best tools,they didn't give a crap about gazillion light sources.From all I'm seeing I dunno how you guys don't hype up GTA IV as technical achievement...Deferred renderer,huge,detailed open world,animations and physics second to none,24/7 time of day,every single thing in the world is dynamic...You can even break walls in lots of instances,still,I don't think alot of people would say that game looks more impressive than Gears 3,even though Gears 3 is forward renderer(its not like it matters that much) and doesn't include ~200 light sources per scene.

It's probably because GTAIV isn't the best example to show off a Deferred Renderer unlike KZ, Dead space2 or BF3. I think a game that has tons of explosions, ranged projectiles, night scenes, sci fi facilities and art that are tailored towards a Deferrred Renderer works the best. Still I think GTA IV's lighting is pretty impressive but the game is plagued by tons of low res textures, low poly models, lack of post processing fx, motion blurs and cheap effects.