Tech Differences between Switch and 7th Gen (PS3/360) Games

GuardHei

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It's always interesting for me to check out Switch games, especially exclusives or the ones treating NS as the primary platform for development. Limited by the handheld form, switch has a quite weaker power compared to the others. Usually say the portable performance is slightly higher than ps3 and the docked performance roughly doubles (not super accurate as we know the memory bandwidth is not improved as much). Yet the hardware feature level is roughly on-par with 8th gen consoles (dx12 level gpu features). This kinda means any graphic improvements we seen on switch games mainly come from the advance of rendering technologies, and I'm wondering what are some techs that are not commonly seen in PS3/360 era?

I'm gonna start off a feature list:
1. PBR materials:
Definitely the source of the biggest visual improvement (and quite frankly, modern mobile games benefit a lot from it as well). Doesn't require too much more performance, but makes the materials' surface properties look closer to real world. Nintendo's 1st/2nd party games are really good at authoring high quality PBR materials, e.g. Mario Odyssey (improved a lot from 3d World), Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (XCX was still non-PBR), Mario Kart/Party/Sports Games. This is definitely doable on 7th gen consoles (Remember Me and some cross-gen CoD titles?), but I feel most materials are not well authored as the artists were not very familiar with the concept? It might also be the limitation of bandwidth if they want to squeeze all the PBR parameters into the GBuffer if using deferred rendering, and the texture fetching cost due due to the high quality IBL.

2. Screen space reflection:
This feature is still quite rare to see on switch... but at least I can easily point out several: Bowser's fury, water bodies in all 3 Xenoblade games, Shrines & divine beasts in Breath of the Wild (yes there is a close SSR implementation), Kirby's Dream Buffet, Luigi's Mansion 3, the upcoming Pikmin 4, and even third party games including Monster Hunter Rise, Ark Survival Envolved (the infamous port), and I'm surprised to discover the port of five nights at freddy's security breach also has floor SSR implemented.
The only 7th gen game I know that has SSR is Crysis 3, which has a super close range SSR on its water body.
A big reason is probably due to the invention of screen space planar reflection, which largely eliminates the bandwidth heavy raymarching, so games like Bowser's fury can even run crisp clean SSR@60fps. Other than that, most SSR implementations are low res and limited ranges. I don't really see any roughness based nor HiZ based (so infinite distance) implementations so far.

3. Volumetric fogs & clouds/Raymarch godrays
I honestly don't know any 7th gen games that employ these effects. Most of the time the godrays are screen space radial blur so they don't exist if the light source is occluded from screen. This is still quite expensive on switch, but at least we can see some games utilized them: BOTW seems to have raymarched godrays, Xenoblade games still have screen space godrays but the far clouds are all volumetric based (which was super impressive when I first saw them).

4. Screen space ambient occlusion
There are quite a few 7th gen games use SSAO. Crysis being the most famous one, then I can recall Homefront and maybe Battlefield games also used them. This is more commonly seen in switch games, and usually has better implementation (some look like HBAO, and the SSAO in Xenoblade really covers a large distance instead of a dark sillouette).
Some games like The Last of Us has a capsule based AO implementaiton, which some UE4 games on switch also have them (surprisingly No More Heroes 3 and the port of FF7: Core Crysis remake)

5. Realtime GI?
TLOU uses reflective shadowmap for the flashlight and that's all I know. Most other games seem to utilize baked probe interpolation. As a comparsion, Breath of the Wild has a realtime updated cubemap that offers both specular and diffuse GI. Crysis remakes have a coarse SVOGI for static objects. Then I don't really know any other switch games that try to simulate realtime GI other than pre-baked solutions or only skyboxes.

6. Screen space contact shadow
Xenoblade 2 uses ss contact shadows in realtime cutscenes (gotta say XC2 is quite a tech impressive game for switch). Don't know about others.

7. Lighting path
Deferred rendering became popular approaching the end of PS3 era, but many still chose to do Forward probably due to memory bandwidth concerns. Switch games seem to follow the same trend given the limited lpddr3 memory. Most 60fps games are not using full deferred rendering path. E.g. Mario Odyssey and Metroid Prime Remastered all uses Forward rendering and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe seems to be light prepass. It's interesting to see Monster Hunter Rise also chose to do forward rendering for whatever reason.
The ones who use deferred lighting target a lower resolution & framerate (like Xenoblade games), or do not adapt a fully PBR material system to reduce the GBuffer size (Breath of the Wild for example). (but there's the special case of Pokemon Legend of Arceus and Scarlet & Violet which use full PBR deferred path but I don't see a reason why... seriously why)

8. Antialising & upscaling
7th gen games mostly use different forms of MSAA and MLAA from my memories. I guess it did the job as the shading alias was not too big a deal at the time. I read somewhere that Halo 4 actually implemented TAA but I don't know if the console version also had it (same question for Crysis 3).
Switch games are more interesting? Nintendo is know for hating AA, and only BoTW seems to have a low quality FXAA implementation when docked. But TAA is quite common on Switch: again xenoblade games, many UE4 ports and other 8th gen ports). Though TAA looks quite blurry at low resolution, and honestly the extensive texture fetching of a high quality TAA is also quite expensive to run on Switch.
In addition some switch games also try to use some form of temporal upscaling methods. Mario Odyssey looks like jittering between 2 half-res images in handheld mode; Xenoblade Chronicle 3 implemented a 4x checkboard rendering (2x from temporal, 2x from spatial) adding on top of the low res FXAA. I don't think any 7th gen games tried to do this?


Wondering any other tech comparsions/differences are there? Also plz correct me if anything from the list is wrong. Would love to know more fancy tricks from 7th gen games.
 
PBR was actually used on 360/PS3.

There where quite a lot or early games that used Deferred rendering like KZ2.

A lot of PC games from that era had pretty much all of those effects.

Crysis 2007 and Stalker Clear Sky can pretty much tick all of those points.
 
PBR was actually used on 360/PS3.

There where quite a lot or early games that used Deferred rendering like KZ2.

A lot of PC games from that era had pretty much all of those effects.

Crysis 2007 and Stalker Clear Sky can pretty much tick all of those points.
Which ones? The 360 AFAIR had issues with deferred renderers.
Going through my PS360 games, PBR is kind of broken.

One game that still boggles my mind as it mimics PBR at a time where PBR didnt exist, is Tekken Tag Tournament. No other game mimics materials as good as this game during that generation and it is one of the reasons why it achieved its convincing CG look back in the day.
All other Tekken games, including Tekken 6 and TTT2 fall flat in terms of materials and thats a generation after.
 
Which ones? The 360 AFAIR had issues with deferred renderers.
Going through my PS360 games, PBR is kind of broken.

One game that still boggles my mind as it mimics PBR at a time where PBR didnt exist, is Tekken Tag Tournament. No other game mimics materials as good as this game during that generation and it is one of the reasons why it achieved its convincing CG look back in the day.
All other Tekken games, including Tekken 6 and TTT2 fall flat in terms of materials and thats a generation after.

I'm sure Remember me from Capcom was one of the first PBR games and was on P360.

 
I'm sure Remember me from Capcom was one of the first PBR games and was on P360.

Yeah that one exchibits convincing materials and hence why it looks much better than most games in that era.
It seems to be one of the exceptions though
 
PBR was actually used on 360/PS3.

There where quite a lot or early games that used Deferred rendering like KZ2.

A lot of PC games from that era had pretty much all of those effects.

Crysis 2007 and Stalker Clear Sky can pretty much tick all of those points.
Any other games used PBR other than Remember Me and the CoDs? I did recall RM as this was probably the first game that brought the concept into the game industry?
But ya for the last point I was more talking about console techs. I know most of the screen space technologies listed above came from the ps3/360 era so it's no surprise for PC to have them all.
 
There where quite a lot or early games that used Deferred rendering like KZ2.
For early deferred the Shrek on Xbox1 is widely recognized as first commerical deferred title.

Uncharted 1-3 were tiled deferred renderers.

Battlefield 3 was tiled deferred as well, they also did runtime virtual texturing on ground.
 
Yeah that one exchibits convincing materials and hence why it looks much better than most games in that era.
It seems to be one of the exceptions though

Remember Me looked great for its time. It got mediocre reviews but I thought it was decent. I don’t think any other game of that era claiming to use PBR looked nearly as good.
 
Any other games used PBR other than Remember Me and the CoDs? I did recall RM as this was probably the first game that brought the concept into the game industry?
But ya for the last point I was more talking about console techs. I know most of the screen space technologies listed above came from the ps3/360 era so it's no surprise for PC to have them all.

Metal Gear Solid V. Kojima productions is largely responsable for "evangelizing" PBR rendering to the games i dustry, but also very importantly, art production preactices.

Grant Turismo 6, I believe was also PBR on PS3.

Also, I never had any confirmation of GTAV, but I always suspectd they managed to aproximate some sort of poor-man's PBR given the surprisingly consistent look of the game under many different light conditions and scene types.
 
Metal Gear Solid V. Kojima productions is largely responsable for "evangelizing" PBR rendering to the games i dustry, but also very importantly, art production preactices.

Grant Turismo 6, I believe was also PBR on PS3.

Also, I never had any confirmation of GTAV, but I always suspectd they managed to aproximate some sort of poor-man's PBR given the surprisingly consistent look of the game under many different light conditions and scene types.
From the frame capture yes it is definitely PBR as you can read here: https://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2015/11/02/gta-v-graphics-study/
It's interesting to see that they even store fresnel intensity inside the gbuffer.
 
One other thing I wanted to talk about with you guys, is how Metroid Prime Remake for Switch is often praised as one of the best looking games on switch, despite it being very modest with the rendering features and techniques it chose to make use of compared to PS360 games that were considered technical showcases. It's an excelent case-study on trade-offs.

Most of the lighting on Metroid Prime Remake is static. The environments use lightmaps almost exclusively, while the characters seem to be shaded by some type of image-based probe system. They made no attempt to implement fancy screen-space reflections, nor planar reflections of any kind and even the SS ambient occlusion seems to be very discrete.

They completely avoided the problem of unified shadows. Characters simply cast decal-style shadows of their silhouette (rendered in real time) PS2 style. They darken whatever they are cast onto uniformily, even in dark areas (double shadowing) Characters receive zero self-shadowing. The env. shadows are baked into the env. lightmaps and the game makes no atempt to cast detailed shadows into dynamic objects.

The one thing that is high-end compared to most PS360 era games it employs is a very competent HDR PBR pipeline. That seems to offuscate us from all the other things the game lacks. I find that fascinating.

What are your thoughts?
 
One other thing I wanted to talk about with you guys, is how Metroid Prime Remake for Switch is often praised as one of the best looking games on switch, despite it being very modest with the rendering features and techniques it chose to make use of compared to PS360 games that were considered technical showcases. It's an excelent case-study on trade-offs.

Most of the lighting on Metroid Prime Remake is static. The environments use lightmaps almost exclusively, while the characters seem to be shaded by some type of image-based probe system. They made no attempt to implement fancy screen-space reflections, nor planar reflections of any kind and even the SS ambient occlusion seems to be very discrete.

They completely avoided the problem of unified shadows. Characters simply cast decal-style shadows of their silhouette (rendered in real time) PS2 style. They darken whatever they are cast onto uniformily, even in dark areas (double shadowing) Characters receive zero self-shadowing. The env. shadows are baked into the env. lightmaps and the game makes no atempt to cast detailed shadows into dynamic objects.

The one thing that is high-end compared to most PS360 era games it employs is a very competent HDR PBR pipeline. That seems to offuscate us from all the other things the game lacks. I find that fascinating.

What are your thoughts?
Finally someone has the same thought as me! I'm honestly so disappointed by the tech (not the overall visuals), it's almost mobile game level. The ps2 style shadow projection is really ugly when Ridley flew over the icey zone, where you could see shadows from different body parts overlap with each other. I didn't expect they don't even bother to use shadowmap.
Sure it could be for the sake of a flawless 60fps, but then all the other tech sacrifices make it feel not worthy it -- like how the resolution isn't even native but 900p with no AA.
It also kinda hurts the gameplay feeling -- the purely baked GI solution makes certain areas too dark; and the simple forward lighting system doesn't allow energy beams to light up the surrondings, which sometimes make it hard to navigate in dark hallways.
 
Metal Gear Solid V. Kojima productions is largely responsable for "evangelizing" PBR rendering to the games i dustry, but also very importantly, art production preactices.

Grant Turismo 6, I believe was also PBR on PS3.

Also, I never had any confirmation of GTAV, but I always suspectd they managed to aproximate some sort of poor-man's PBR given the surprisingly consistent look of the game under many different light conditions and scene types.
Tri-Ace also had quite an impact as they released some awesome research back at the day.
 
One other thing I wanted to talk about with you guys, is how Metroid Prime Remake for Switch is often praised as one of the best looking games on switch, despite it being very modest with the rendering features and techniques it chose to make use of compared to PS360 games that were considered technical showcases. It's an excelent case-study on trade-offs.

Most of the lighting on Metroid Prime Remake is static. The environments use lightmaps almost exclusively, while the characters seem to be shaded by some type of image-based probe system. They made no attempt to implement fancy screen-space reflections, nor planar reflections of any kind and even the SS ambient occlusion seems to be very discrete.

They completely avoided the problem of unified shadows. Characters simply cast decal-style shadows of their silhouette (rendered in real time) PS2 style. They darken whatever they are cast onto uniformily, even in dark areas (double shadowing) Characters receive zero self-shadowing. The env. shadows are baked into the env. lightmaps and the game makes no atempt to cast detailed shadows into dynamic objects.

The one thing that is high-end compared to most PS360 era games it employs is a very competent HDR PBR pipeline. That seems to offuscate us from all the other things the game lacks. I find that fascinating.

What are your thoughts?
So interestingly, I think Halo 4 follows a similar visual lineage and tech lineage, and looks much better actually than the new Metroid Prime.
 
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