The technology of Alan Wake *spawn

Well , judging from the DOCTORED scans
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=20888839&postcount=2475

AW looks better than any console game.

However , when you look at the real screens
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=20857404&postcount=1752

then no, AW doesnt look better than RE5 let alone UC2 and GOW3.
also you can the blurriness in those shots too.

The game might look better in motion ofcourse, but note that it is a 540p game which will have to be stretched 2x on a typical HD or 720p screen
 
Well I have to change my previous statement in negative about AW & I have to admit it: 960x540p & enough tearing to me not appears a technical showcase on the 360. Not after so many years of development. This game could remains on the pc indeed.
 
Nope. That's what the screenshots look like everywhere. There's no getting around the fact that the low resolution creates a muddy image. On the plus side, in motion the lighting and particle effects are pretty cool. The fog and the moonlight through the clouds, especially. I can also imagine they thought the trade-off in resolution they made would be mitigated by the fact that you're in the dark so much you weren't likely to miss any detail in the large black patches. It's just too bad they've been passing off those really clean 720p shots for so long as in game. If they were really confidant in the choices they made we would have known what the game was really going to look like before a few weeks ago.
 
ultragpu said:
http://au.xbox360.ign.com/dor/objec...an-wake-20100504064329427.html?page=mediaFull
This is an ingame 720p shot taken from IGN, not sure how reliable their capture device is. But, if it is indicative of the final game then I am enlightened to see how badly a 540p buffer can ruin the overall visual. The textures are down right awful and the low poly placeables don't help either, really hope this is just IGN's way of capturing :(.
Click to expand...

ew...this screen shot looks gruesome :cry:
 
corduroygt said:
It depends on distance and screen size, as long as you're in the blue area, Alan Wake will look the same.
Also looking at the chart you really need to have a large HDTV or sit very close to a smaller TV/monitor to appreciate 1080p, so I think games will still not be 1080p mandatory, but I hope 720p and HDMI will be standard, as in no analog outs. SDTV should die already.

resolution_chart.png
Click to expand...

Everytime i see that Chart i want to throw the PC out of the window so it will go away.

Try to see for yourself, your result will vary. And no, you do NOT need to be able to see every pixel in order to enjoy the benefits of higher resolutions.
 
ultragpu said:
http://au.xbox360.ign.com/dor/objec...an-wake-20100504064329427.html?page=mediaFull
This is an ingame 720p shot taken from IGN, not sure how reliable their capture device is. But, if it is indicative of the final game then I am enlightened to see how badly a 540p buffer can ruin the overall visual. The textures are down right awful and the low poly placeables don't help either, really hope this is just IGN's way of capturing :(.
Click to expand...

That is definitely an incredibly ugly screenshot. Watching the vids, I never feel like it looks that bad. But maybe if I'm in the drivers seat, I'll start to notice more of the uglies. Still looking forward to playing it.
 
-tkf- said:
Everytime i see that Chart i want to throw the PC out of the window so it will go away.

Try to see for yourself, your result will vary. And no, you do NOT need to be able to see every pixel in order to enjoy the benefits of higher resolutions.
Click to expand...

I know from experience that the advantage of 720p over 480p is visible on a 32" screen at about 3 meters. And that's for movies. And just about everyone I know. So yeah, this graph doesn't seem to be right.
 
ultragpu said:
http://au.xbox360.ign.com/dor/objec...an-wake-20100504064329427.html?page=mediaFull
This is an ingame 720p shot taken from IGN, not sure how reliable their capture device is. But, if it is indicative of the final game then I am enlightened to see how badly a 540p buffer can ruin the overall visual. The textures are down right awful and the low poly placeables don't help either, really hope this is just IGN's way of capturing :(.
Click to expand...

You can see some of GT's walkthrough vids and the game really looks blurry. Although i am not sure if GT is using an old TV with low contrast ratio.If you have a BRAVIA OLED or KURO then i guess all games will look good on those TVs but not everyone could afford a high end and high priced TV of that calibre .
 
larrylain said:
You can see some of GT's walkthrough vids and the game really looks blurry. Although i am not sure if GT is using an old TV with low contrast ratio.
Click to expand...
:???: They're captures from the output, not off-screen footage.
If you have a BRAVIA OLED or KURO then i guess all games will look good on those TVs but not everyone could afford a high end and high priced TV of that calibre .
Click to expand...
Who own's an OLED TV?! And AFAIK there's only one option and it's not HD.

Modhat: There's zero technical discussion going on this thread. Can people please stop discussing whether the game looks ugly or not, and instead focus on the technical aspects. eg. "Why the low-resolution textures," instead of "ugh, they're ugly".

I haven't explored the available screenshots, but what I have seen does show limited texture fidelity. Coupled with the low-res output, the whole thing feels RAM starved. Are we seeing technical limits here, or programmer limits?
 
The 360's hardware scaling is just as good as any high end TV's from my experience. It'll boil down to how picky you are really.
 
This is a part of my Alan Wake impression that I posted in the Alan Wake thread, thought it would be okay to mention it here:

The subHD resolution doesn't seem to effect it "that" much ; aliasing is surprisingly quite minimal here, shader aliasing & some aliasing on edges covered with fog/mist were probably the only cases where its obviously noticeable. Lightning,Fog & mist are great and lastly interactive foliage ! finally a console game where interactive foliage is done right. The animations for movements & facial expressions are okay at best. I must stress that the game looks extremely nice in the night sequences, switch to day sequences & the cover's blown....daytime sequences are easily the area that gets affected the most due to the low resolution.

That said the textures are really low res & specularity on metals is quite off...almost makes them look plastic.Light volumes have noisy edges, shadowing while not jagged are still poor with dithering & lots of noise/flickering and they also seem to have their LOD switch occur as soon as the player move just 3 meters from them. One thing that I'd like to mention about the lighting here is that the light volumetric are really odd in this game, most of them don't seem to create any kind of shafts if you try to block it partially with objects in environments or your playing character, till now I've seen just 1 light source in total that created shafts when I tried to partially block it.
Click to expand...
 
What about tearing? I heard on the giant bombcast that AW had its share of tearing, but the internet doesn't necessarily agree.
 
Shifty Geezer said:
I haven't explored the available screenshots, but what I have seen does show limited texture fidelity. Coupled with the low-res output, the whole thing feels RAM starved. Are we seeing technical limits here, or programmer limits?
Click to expand...

I'll cast my vote for neither, as screen shots this gen are useless. I'll suggest something totally radical, and instead suggest that people play the game at home then make some judgment calls on how it looks and why. Play the game?!? I know I know, suggesting that people actually play a game before making technical judgments is complete and utter madness, I mean who actually wants to see a game in motion anymore before throwing it under the bus as technical garbage? But I suggest people give it a try, you might be astounded by how different a game looks when it's actually played!
 
obonicus said:
What about tearing? I heard on the giant bombcast that AW had its share of tearing, but the internet doesn't necessarily agree.
Click to expand...
Yes there is tearing, it seems to tear even where there's nothing going on.
It also tears in places where there's lot of flare gas or if you have a light source with dense volume.

I think I saw a lot of noise in the texture, it has some kind of shimmering the kind which you get when the game uses bilinear filtering but the thing is, instead of being just a sort of a shimmering "line" it shimmers everywhere.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
joker454 said:
I'll cast my vote for neither, as screen shots this gen are useless....I mean who actually wants to see a game in motion anymore before throwing it under the bus as technical garbage? But I suggest people give it a try, you might be astounded by how different a game looks when it's actually played!
Click to expand...
Then the answers 'technical limitations.' You're being too sensitive here. The question is a technical one of why the limited texture and FB resolutions. If the resources are being spent elsewhere, they're being spent elsewhere. And from a technical perspective, what are Remedy doing to make it look so good in motion?
 
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