The best graphics engine on current consoles?

[Nick Laslett]

I love this kind of topic, especially the juicy technical details.

I only have a PS2, so can't comment on other platforms. Althought over on the RLLMUK forum, a reputable developer (John Pickford) who has shipped many games, says that Z:TWW runs at 60fps. I never played the game, but I trust this guy's opinion.

Anyway back to PS2 game engines.

I'm more impressed by free roaming streaming engines that you find in games like Jak2 and Primal.

The levels in MGS2 were very small with a lot of loading in between rooms. Just like Return of the King. These games are graphically very impressive on the PS2, but the play area is so small. At least Rotk has a lot of enemies on screen at once, MGS doesn't even have that.

With fighting games, again the fixed camera and lack of characters does little to impress me.

The same with GT3, you're just driving down a spray painted tunnel, you would expect the scenery to look nice. I use the first person view so it doesn't even have to render my vehicle. Althought the artwork was not as good, Burnout 2 technically impresses me a lot more than GT3. It runs in Prog Scan for a start. It seems to render a lot more polygons, have more effects and the AI is not scripted. GT3 just has much better art.

The Baldur's Gate engine was impressive for the crisp visuals on an interlaced display, but again it had a very restricted camera view. The way it would remember where all the dead bodies were for a whole level was very impressive.

Here is what gets me excited about a game engine:
1. Free camera
2. Prog Scan
3. 60 fps
4. Level Streaming
5. AI
6. Interactive environments (you know, things you can shoot and smash!)
7. Number of characters on screen
8. Number of Polygons/Texture Quality
9. Lighting
10. Visual Effects

The game that comes closet to matching that list is Jak2, but it does fall down on interactive environment. Primal is only 30fps and also lacks an interactive environment. BGark Alliance has the interaction but lacks a lot of other things. MGS2, has interaction in spades but also lacks a lot of things.

A combination of the level streaming and flexible camera found in Jak 2 + the interactivity, AI and special effects found in the MGS's engine would seem like perfection to me.

Hopefully MGS3 will delivery something near to this.

 

[VNZ]

Althought over on the RLLMUK forum, a reputable developer (John Pickford) who has shipped many games, says that Z:TWW runs at 60fps. I never played the game, but I trust this guy's opinion.

Well, you shouldn't! Zelda: TWW runs at 30fps. "In two frames" as we once put it.

There's loads of amazing things in this world, I'll list two of them:

1) People who can't see the difference between 60 and 30 fps. Instantly. With their own eyes.

2) People who can't, but think they can, and have bad enough manners to throw all kinds of wrong numbers around them like freakin' salarymen. Incredibly, this individual even tries to pull it off with authority...

 

[Johnny Awesome]

It's true. Zelda: WW is only 30 fps.

Personally I think that we should have this discussion on a platform by platform basis.

Gamecube: Starfox Adventures, Metroid Prime, and Rogue Squadron 2.

Xbox: Ninja Gaiden, Halo in single-player because of draw distance AI and physics, Panzer Dragoon Orta, Splinter Cell PT, Rallisport Challenge.

PS2: GT3, MGS2, ZoE2, Jak 2.

 

[Folken]

GT4 Prologue (big improvement in texture quality)
Onimusha 3 (nice lighting and water effects)

 

[Squeak]

Althought over on the RLLMUK forum, a reputable developer (John Pickford) who has shipped many games, says that Z:TWW runs at 60fps. I never played the game, but I trust this guy's opinion.

Well, you shouldn't! Zelda: TWW runs at 30fps. "In two frames" as we once put it.

I just PMed Pickford on the ?fps issue, and he confirmed that it runs at 30fps. :?
Strange, because I too vaguely remember him saying something about 60fps (can't find the thread). He says that at E3 though, it ran at 60fps.

I have got to say it's the smoothest 30fps I have ever seen!.
What is that "In two frames", and "frame/camera interpolation" stuff you talk about? Sounds interesting.

Maybe not on xbox or PS2

It would be quite an achievement to do it on PS2 seeing that GS has no dependant texture reads.

Even if we totally disregard framerate, is it possible to do dependant texturering/EMBM with any number of passes, or by using LUTs or other tricks, but without the aid of dedicated hardware?

 

[Fox5]

http://www.nintendofrost.com/Gamecube/r_zelda_windwaker.htm

All of this goes on at a constant 30 frames-per-second. I never once experienced a dip in the framerate, and even with tons of enemies on-screen, there was never a hitch or a clip, making this world all the more seamless.

There we go, Wind Waker is 30 fps. I still just think that unlike most 30 fps games(like halo and super mario sunshine) the framerate never falters, whereas super mario sunshine dips a little and halo dips a lot, and they probably rarely reach a full 30 fps. And maybe the simpler graphics of wind waker help hide the transitions as you rotate the camera?

BTW, 30 fps and 60 fps is like night and day....unfortunately it's one of those things that is a hard compromise for me on my computer..I like to turn all settings on high, I like having anti aliasing and anisotropic filtering, but I also like 60 fps(or higher preferrably), but there's no way I can have all, in recent games, except in like the indoor maps in ut2004. Plus, it's hard to decide what to drop, my gamecube has shown it can do shadows with ease at 60 fps, why can't my radeon 9700 pro?
And Luigi's Mansion made me sad because the scenes where he turned the doorknob were almost beautiful at 60 fps, and then the game dropped down to 30.

 

[VNZ]

What is that "In two frames", and "frame/camera interpolation" stuff you talk about? Sounds interesting.

It's not that interesting, really...

One frame is the time interval between two VBlanks. So, if our game loop manages to do everything it's supposed to in "one frame", we have accomplished "full framerate" (60/50fps on PAL and NTSC, respectively). If it doesn't, and we chose to cap the updates to every second VBlank, the routine/game is said to "run in two frames".

It's quite handy to avoid mentioning specific fps figures, as the focus should be to keep in sync with the target display -- not to reach some overclocker_d00desque highscore.

I don't know if the growing multiplatform/PC mentality is making this approach something of an "oldschool oddity", but it sure feels so looking at the current state of console graphics. Rock-steady framerates is much less common than it should be. Heck, it was more common in the early days of this generation.

 

[Bohdy]

One frame is the time interval between two VBlanks. So, if our game loop manages to do everything it's supposed to in "one frame", we have accomplished "full framerate" (60/50fps on PAL and NTSC, respectively). If it doesn't, and we chose to cap the updates to every second VBlank, the routine/game is said to "run in two frames".

Yes that is a good way to do it but it doesn't quite work if you are supporting progressive-scan mode, which is probably why many dev's don't ;-)

Oh and I have seen WW slow down on a few occasions; twice when its drawing ridiculous amounts of alpha blended geometry (giant wate/lava spurts), and once when I was fighting it out in the very depths of that layered dungeon with practically every enemy in the game and I was on a particular level which faced me with about 8-15 little goblins wielding torches AND there were about 6 torches scattered about the area aswell (and the rest of it was dark). Not surprising really with all of those light sources!

Also, Zone of Enders 2 is not the only game to have a silly amount of particles; doesn't anyone remember the room in WW with all that Ash flying around and changing directions?

 

[VNZ]

Yes that is a good way to do it but it doesn't quite work if you are supporting progressive-scan mode, which is probably why many dev's don't

No, you're mixing things up quite severely now.

Trying to get a bit more on topic now: Is there any engine for the current system that can interrupt the drawing (either the whole pipeline from the T&L stage, or just the rasterization) after a specific time. Model 3 and Saturn could be set to quit the display list processing at Vblank, swap buffers, and get started with the next frame (most hardware sprite systems works in comparable fashion). Properly tuned this is much preferable over tearing or dropping to 30fps.

 

[Lazy8s]

Not that SEGA's arcade games during the Model 2 and 3 era ever suffered much from unpolished framerates, but that framerate lock of Model 3 was handled very nicely. Very smooth games.

 

[Fafalada]

Trying to get a bit more on topic now: Is there any engine for the current system that can interrupt the drawing (either the whole pipeline from the T&L stage, or just the rasterization) after a specific time. Model 3 and Saturn could be set to quit the display list processing at Vblank, swap buffers, and get started with the next frame (most hardware sprite systems works in comparable fashion). Properly tuned this is much preferable over tearing or dropping to 30fps.

I am not sure about the other two systems, but it's a pretty trivial matter to do this on PS2 for the whole rendering pipeline.
The bigger problem is capping the CPU side at the same time in that fashion (and that's what is causing framerate problems far more often then the rendering anyhow) - which is nowhere near as trivial, and in some cases it's not solveable problem at all (certain processing like physics updates can't be interrupted in mid-process without breaking the game).

In other words, you could specifically architect a game to work this way, but I don't see any generic "one size fits all" solution - every application will have different set of considerations if you wanted to use this.

 

[Nick Laslett]

Althought over on the RLLMUK forum, a reputable developer (John Pickford) who has shipped many games, says that Z:TWW runs at 60fps. I never played the game, but I trust this guy's opinion.

Well, you shouldn't! Zelda: TWW runs at 30fps. "In two frames" as we once put it.

I just PMed Pickford on the ?fps issue, and he confirmed that it runs at 30fps. :?
Strange, because I too vaguely remember him saying something about 60fps (can't find the thread). He says that at E3 though, it ran at 60fps.

I have got to say it's the smoothest 30fps I have ever seen!.
What is that "In two frames", and "frame/camera interpolation" stuff you talk about? Sounds interesting.

Maybe not on xbox or PS2

It would be quite an achievement to do it on PS2 seeing that GS has no dependant texture reads.

Even if we totally disregard framerate, is it possible to do dependant texturering/EMBM with any number of passes, or by using LUTs or other tricks, but without the aid of dedicated hardware?

John is very good at assessing FPS. It was on the old Edge forum where he said that Zelda:TWW ran at 60 fps at E3.

I didn't realise they had locked it a 30fps for actual release. Oh well!

Thanks for clarifying that fact.

 

[VNZ]

The bigger problem is capping the CPU side at the same time in that fashion (and that's what is causing framerate problems far more often then the rendering anyhow) - which is nowhere near as trivial, and in some cases it's not solveable problem at all (certain processing like physics updates can't be interrupted in mid-process without breaking the game).

Granted. However, quite a percentage of the slowdowns I've encountered this gen are indeed fillrate related (ie. near-camera smoke effects). With a clever enough pipeline, you should be able slap all those sprites and the end of the drawing list (to put things bluntly), and let the engine render away until interrupted. It wouldn't solve all slowdown problems, but some of the fillrate dependent ones.

 

[Bohdy]

Yes that is a good way to do it but it doesn't quite work if you are supporting progressive-scan mode, which is probably why many dev's don't

No, you're mixing things up quite severely now.

Huh?

One frame is the time interval between two VBlanks.

The way I understand it is that this only refers running in regular interlaced mode where one frame takes two vblanks to display (odd and even fields), but since full frames are displayed at once in progressive scan mode you would have to update the framebuffer every vblank to achive full framerate rather than every other.

Can you explain where I have mixed things up?

 

[VNZ]

Ah, we only mixed up the different notions of a "frame". In any game related context I would like to think of a frame as the interval between two "game/graphic loop" updates -- regardless of how one might see it in a tv standards context.

If everyone just kept their games in good old non-interlaced lo-res, this misunderstanding (and numerous pointless forum "debates" related to the terminology) would've never happened...

 

[L_i_n_k]

There are lots of great looking games , but it has to be Ralli sport Challenge 2 (xbox). Makes the first one look pale in comparison.