The LAST GEN console capabilities thread.

[swaaye]

Cube's biggest problem (and Wii's) is that darned banding caused by the hardware's inability to run at a high enough color depth... The Cube games (and Wii Zelda) have an annoying tendency to have swimming, aliased textures too (perhaps bad mip mapping).

Wii Zelda has both loads of color banding and texture aliasing. Rather disgusting, IMO....

I was under the impression that Cube only has super-sampled AA and that it can only use it under a lower resolution? I'm not really sure anymore though...

 

[fearsomepirate]

It's not just bad mip-mapping, it's no mip-mapping. RE4 doesn't use it, either. I don't remember banding in Zelda on the order of Prince of Persia, but there is the distinct possibility that I just have faulty memory. It depends on what's causing the banding, too. Low framebuffer depth isn't the only cause of banding. For example, the optic lens in the Xbox version of Pandora Tomorrow had pretty bad banding because of the low precision of the pixel shaders. PoP and RE4 were definitely running at low precision, too. You could especially tell in PoP the way the color bands in the texture would flicker as you'd look around.

This may just be perception, but I've always had the distinct impression that Western studios care more about image quality than Japanese studios.

 

[Fafalada]

PS2's main limitation in visual quality was the size of its eDRAM and lack of native texture compression

I always disagreed with the latter, reality is that perceptual differences between S3TC and 4bit texture on SDTV screen are nothing that casual observer will ever notice (unless you hold zoomed in photos of both for them next to one another), and S3TC vs 8bit will be a wash for just about everyone.
You should remember that 2x2VQ was generally perceived as parity to S3TC even though actual results fall between 4 and 8bit (I'm comparing raw fidelity, not sizes).
Anyway, texture resolution was a problem early on as result of eDram, but that was rectified many times over as people stopped using the bus in all the wrong ways, and since then textures were limited by size of total memory (or disc streaming speeds in some cases), like on every other machine.

The texture LOD sampling on the other hand DID hurt to PS2 visuals very obviously and across the board(except in Japan, where all software shuns aliasing free mipmaps), and never went away.

This may just be perception, but I've always had the distinct impression that Western studios care more about image quality than Japanese studios.

Over the years I became pretty convinced it's not less care, but a completely different standards for what constitutes good IQ. Especially given personal experiences where I had people ask me to reduce anti-aliasing/mipmapping to make things look 'sharper'.

 

[Arwin]

Over the years I became pretty convinced it's not less care, but a completely different standards for what constitutes good IQ. Especially given personal experiences where I had people ask me to reduce anti-aliasing/mipmapping to make things look 'sharper'.

I've seen this same thing all over the place. I think there's some truth in it also. Games like Gran Turismo looking so vibrant on an SD tv is partly due to no full screen AA and very selective use of I think transparancy effects and such to make things go in or out of focus. Only when you get a TV that is extremely precise in displaying pixels do you start benefitting from AA enough - up to that point, AA tends to give you a 'where are my glasses' effect, and on the original Xbox it seemed to affect colors even, just everything looked more washed out. Didn't the original Xbox always have pixel AA on, like GeForce3?

 

[fearsomepirate]

I always disagreed with the latter, reality is that perceptual differences between S3TC and 4bit texture on SDTV screen

Quite to the contrary, I noticed the significant difference in texture quality between quite a few cross-platform and exclusive games before I even knew what S3TC was, and the same holds for a number of exclusives. It was hard for me to put my finger on what exactly it was at the time, but most things with PS2 roots looked pretty muddy. Fact is, a texture with only 16 colors just doesn't look very good, and it really affects IQ when you're not using lots of them in clever ways, which is true of most games. I'm sure you could point out a handful of amazing-looking PS2 games where 4-bit textures are used in the most brilliant way possible to disguise their intrinsically low color gradients, but in my experience, that's largely not the case.

Also, the sparkle on grass textures really bothers me in GT4 on an SDTV. Maybe if you plug your PS2 in through your antenna jack, you don't notice.

 

[DeadlyNinja]

Wait, since the Xbox is made by MS, does that mean porting PC games to the Xbox is easier (and we certainly saw quite a few) due to it using directx?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Yes. That and the fact XB hardware was just a PC, including an x86 CPU.

 

[Hazuki Ryu]

It's interesting that Dreamcast is actually part of that generation. At least according to the Wikipedia folk. I'd always kinda thought of Dreamcast as its own little generation.

I always wondered why so many games looked alot better on Dreamcast than on ps2, Dreamcast is suppoused to be less powerful right?

 

[fearsomepirate]

Anti-aliasing/image filtering and high-color textures were much easier to implement on the Dreamcast than the PS2. And IIRC, DC games pretty much all rendered to a 640x480 buffer, so you didn't get that grainy look associated with field rendering, which quite a few PS2 games used. However, if you go back and compare, especially as PS2 development progressed you'll notice DC games don't have nearly as many polygons as PS2 titles. Especially compare Soul Calibur I and III.

Oh, and just a note...why do people say Sands of Time on Gamecube doesn't have have light bloom? Is light bloom something other than that glowy, hazy white effect around windows and on things in direct light? I always thought light bloom made things look similar to this:

I was playing SoT last night, and this kind of effect is all over the place. Is light bloom something else?

 

[Oblivion]

Quick question since this is a last gen. console thread, but will there be a point soon where it wouldn't be cost effective for Nintendo to use the type of hardware that they have in the Wii? I've heard some say that GDDR3 (however you spell it) RAM is dropping at a faster rate than GDDR2 or previous versions. So by all rights, Wii 2, even if Nintendo didn't want it to be, should be significantly better than what it's currently capable of, right?

 

[Arwin]

Quick question since this is a last gen. console thread, but will there be a point soon where it wouldn't be cost effective for Nintendo to use the type of hardware that they have in the Wii? I've heard some say that GDDR3 (however you spell it) RAM is dropping at a faster rate than GDDR2 or previous versions. So by all rights, Wii 2, even if Nintendo didn't want it to be, should be significantly better than what it's currently capable of, right?

I came across this bit in a thread on ps2dev.org recently

Thanks to tmbinc, we could see that, currently, homebrew on 360 can expect, at least, 3.900.000 v/f at 60 fps with minimal shader (no lighting, just simple texture projection) and 3.100.000 v/f at 60 fps with gouraud lighting (1 source). The same kind of performance loss has been seen with other gpu's even if they are slower (xb1 -330.000-, ps2 -250.000-).

 

[Oblivion]

I came across this bit in a thread on ps2dev.org recently

Sorry, I don't think I quite understand what you're gettin at.

 

[Megadrive1988]

I always wondered why so many games looked alot better on Dreamcast than on ps2, Dreamcast is suppoused to be less powerful right?

PS2 is much more powerful than Dreamcast overall.
However, Dreamcast has some rendering features in hardware that PS2 does not have.
this gives many DC games better image quality that early PS2 games.

Also, DC has more memory dedicated specifically to graphics. even though PS2 has more total memory.

 

[Mobius1aic]

PS2 really needed more RAM from the get go and the Cube especially really needed it since that 16 MBs of "external" RAM I hear was pretty much useless since it was so slow outside of DVD drive buffering. It makes me wonder how feasible Far Cry could've been had the GC not been so limited by it's RAM.

 

[Hazuki Ryu]

PS2 is much more powerful than Dreamcast overall.

How much more powerful is that? Have you guys tryed quake 3 arena dc version and ps2 version? dreamcast looked so much better with higher screen resolution and even higher texture resolution playstation 2 supported 6 players vs 4 on dreamcast though.
Still many late ps2 games had a very low resolution like ico.

 

[I.S.T.]

How much more powerful is that? Have you guys tryed quake 3 arena dc version and ps2 version? dreamcast looked so much better with higher screen resolution and even higher texture resolution playstation 2 supported 6 players vs 4 on dreamcast though.
Still many late ps2 games had a very low resolution like ico.

By powerful, they mean polygon pushing power and stuff like that. The DC was also easier to develop for as well.

ICO was not a late PS2 game. It was one of the first, in fact, released two or so years into the system's lifespan.

If you want a good idea of what the PS2 can really do, look at God of War, Resident Evil 4(and it's a port!)and Devil May Cry 3. There are surely others I cannot think of right now.

 

[Arwin]

How much more powerful is that? Have you guys tryed quake 3 arena dc version and ps2 version? dreamcast looked so much better with higher screen resolution and even higher texture resolution playstation 2 supported 6 players vs 4 on dreamcast though.
Still many late ps2 games had a very low resolution like ico.

Surprise surprise, the PS2 versions of these games often were direct ports of the Dreamcast version, so for obvious reasons I don't think you can reliably use them to say a lot about the hardware.

 

[Hazuki Ryu]

ICO was not a late PS2 game. It was one of the first, in fact, released two or so years into the system's lifespan.

Thought ICO was released later anyway you guys made your points.

 

[fearsomepirate]

As I said before, compare Soul Calibur III to Soul Calibur. The gap is huge.

 

[Hazuki Ryu]

I never saw sould calibur III but i have soul calibur II for xbox wich is considerably better than ps2 version runs at native 720p and the gap isnt huge specially if you take into account that the dreamcast version was relased so long ago