With the personalities here I just have to laugh at this thread. I guess it is a good thing so we can put a kabosh on the endless stealth trolling some of you endlessly participate in, but this thread pretty much echos every exchange.
FanA: Wow, look at these smoking hot new screen shots of GameA!
FanB: Meh, I cannot put my finger on it, but GameB still looks better.
FanA: If you compare these shots [links to best shot of GameA and a horrible shot of GameB] you can see that GameA is better in X,Y, and Z. GameB really is lacking in these areas.
FanB: But the point of a car game is the car, and GameB has much better cars. I cannot put my finger on it, but the cars are a lot better. Anyone with eyes or an unbiased opinion can see this!
FanA: This shows awesome cars, but A,B,C rendering, and the backgrouns are OMGWTFBBQ awesome. I swear GameB has backgrounds from the Atari2600 version up rezed!
FanB: This shot says it all. GameB FTW! It clearly is the best racer on the market. Ever since it was released other racers have fallen short in all the important areas.
FanA: Look at this pathetic shot though, it looks like melted plastic
The the racing stinks because it doesn't have _______ features. GameA has been doing that since 1985!
FanB: That is a WIP, the current/future builds will address those short comings. It isn't fair to judge an old game. We don't know what GameB will have or look like. So all we can do is praise it--negative criticism isn't possible because we only know its awesomeness, all negativity is invalid.
FanA: But... but... it is an old build and we don't even know what the final build will look like why are we praising it? It could get downgraded by a Downgrade Grenade (TM)!
With that said, we can find good/bad shots all day long of these games. (The "next" on the of the above links was this
nasty thing just go to the ol' FM2 thread for all my links to the artifacting related to lighting in that game which looked really bad at times).
If there is going to be a proper comparison thread at B3D I would like to see it as a more technical discussion as art is subjective (but very relevant). Looking at resolutions (rendering, texture, particle systems, etc), filtering, anti-aliasing, lighting and various shadowing techniques including where soft and self shadows are applied, what AO techniques are used, artifacts in reflections and normals, HDR approaches, etc. Of course looking at the games as engines, what features and servies they provide, and the gameplay options are really important (dog Halo 3 all you want, few games offer up as many options and depth in the genre e.g., thus the engine shouldn't be pigeonholed simply to a single technical factor on screen).
A technological breakdown top-to-bottom would be more interesting than the current tit for tats. The current trend is thus: Xbox fans like Forza, Playstation fans like GT.
