Billy Idol
Legend
well said...as Insomniac claryfied, 60 fps is not fairly taken into account and thus is worthless!...and just think about how a solid(!) 60 fps MW2 would look like compared to the actual retail version...
Underappreciated: Extras and Graphical features that might not be worth the effort.
- Thread starter Dr. Nick
- Start date
FM3 and MW2 show you can get 60Hz (or close) and not look butt ugly.
Don't blame that one on 60Hz
But yes, for developers struggling to get parity adding an extra level of complexity in 60Hz could be a killer in terms of IQ.
If you think Dante's Inferno is the best a game can look this gen while hitting 60fps you need to get a little bit more perspective.
sure in an ideal world u want SSAO (or better yet true AO) HDR, unified light as well as the kitchen sink etc but these all come at a cost
i.e. implementing feature X stops you having feature Y
the topic of this thread is Graphical features that might not be worth the effort.
SSAO is about the thing that impacts rendering performance the most
http://bbs.pczilla.net/viewthread.php?action=printable&tid=4517
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said like that (as a 1d numbe)r it doesnt seem that different 12.5%. but in fact with a screen u see in 2d dimensions thus 720p is 25% more pixels
not to mention the 2xAA
I just typed 'halo3 hdr' into google (+ choose the image that saiz 'the HDR is EPIC') on the first page
http://www.gamespot.com/pages/forums/show_msgs.php?topic_id=26463862
if I wanted to pick out some bad lighting I could of choosen far worse images on that page
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As it should! You can have great technical graphics and the game can still be butt ugly and a bore to see. Remember Brute Force on the original Xbox? It had some gorgeous graphics with crappy art direction and it made the game completely boring to look at.
I do believe art wins over the technical side always in my mind. The reasons are being is that bad art draws gamers out of the game, while good/great art can immerse the gamer into the world a lot better. Effects and technical graphics have their place of course and they should complement the art style of the game to make it even better. I know this forum is all about technical aspect of graphics but we're just a select few out of the millions of gamers out there.
Graphics matter all right, it's just the art side of it is much more noticeable than the technical aspects.
Actually, I agree. If anything, I'd like to see this reasoning used to find more collaborations with artists from outside videogames (sorta like THQ has done with Joe Mad). But this is B3D; if people stop trying to do fancier stuff tech-wise, this place would become much less interesting. (Plus, we have a ratio of, what, 1 artist for about a dozen graphics developers?)
I feel the same. Maybe cause it doesn't have good shadows to match?
edit: also in reference to the OP "The Show" is also 1080P and running 60fps(or close to?)
I think this is no different from movies in that aspect. Just watch any "making of" from any recent movie and you'll be surprised how much effort was put into really small details that are there for a few seconds and many people will not even notice. I was surprised by the amount of CGI in Zodiac, for example. Or, if you want to go back in time a bit, watch 2001 and see how detailed every part of the Discovery is.
In my opinion a lot of these developers implement certain features because they are passionate about what they do and pay a lot of attention to the smallest things, some of them will be appreciated by the players while other will only be noticed by people who rip apart every frame (Beyond3D forum members)
In my opinion a lot of these developers implement certain features because they are passionate about what they do and pay a lot of attention to the smallest things, some of them will be appreciated by the players while other will only be noticed by people who rip apart every frame (Beyond3D forum members
)This goes on a game to game basis for me. Then there is the fact that what some games pull off, others sacrifice for. Its not impossible to have SSAO, HDR, HD res and AA now is it? You just have to pick which does your game more justice when working with the 360 or work hard to get them all working with the ps3.
Oh... one thing might be 60 fps. Many games do well without it. My latest bit of concern is GoW3 aiming for 60fps. There is talk that it might end up looking better than KZ2 and UC2 even with that framerate target but at a steady 30fps imagine the eye candy.
OT... just had to add this comment from that thread
Oh... one thing might be 60 fps. Many games do well without it. My latest bit of concern is GoW3 aiming for 60fps. There is talk that it might end up looking better than KZ2 and UC2 even with that framerate target but at a steady 30fps imagine the eye candy.
I just typed 'halo3 hdr' into google (+ choose the image that saiz 'the HDR is EPIC') on the first page
http://www.gamespot.com/pages/forums/show_msgs.php?topic_id=26463862
if I wanted to pick out some bad lighting I could of choosen far worse images on that page
OT... just had to add this comment from that thread
Never said that.
FM3 and MW2 show you can get 60Hz (or close) and not look butt ugly.
Don't blame that one on 60Hz
FM3 is very "meh" IMHO.
The point made by Dante's Inferno is the following: given a fixed hardware, art team, budget, and schedule, you sacrifice a lot by going to 60 fps, and people will notice.
"When is computer graphics good? When it doesn't look like computer graphics."
Speaking of personal opinions, my personal opinion was that Fable 2 was quite ugly, very low-tech, and very uneven - as if they had 100 concept paintings to match, matched them in 100 spots in the world (which looked great), and everything between this 100 spots looked like an uninspired last-gen title with more polygons.
Maybe I had time to notice these things because I hated the gameplay
I thought I was the only one who caught it but it really isn't worth pointing out anymore. You're basically going up against perceptions from 2005 that have had over 4 years to solidify into the minds of consumers. It's not cool but not worth fighting over.
Another one is detailed environments in fighting games. To someone watching it looks great but the person playing is more focused on the character models than anything else. One might take a glimpse at the environment if it is important to fight (DOA,SC2,and Tekken 6 come to mind.) but it is usually fleeting and not taking in the environments in all their glory. For the most part the effects and polygon budget that go into the characters seem more important to me. So I would say that I don't fully appreciate the effort that went into the environments in these games and think that they should spend less resources on those aspects and more on the character models.
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10mb is 10mb.... sorry.... its not untapped potential either... its just more flexibility in how hardcore a dev wants to go.
Ok yes they may be able to do it, but isn't leaving out one of those what is usually done to compensate? I still think the reason mw is always subHD is to do with the edram and wanting to get 60fps, and you have the same example with Halo 3. Reach will likely have something similar done. I thought I read at DF that Halo 3 used MDR lighting.
Its kind of like the ps3s issues with transparencies where bandwidth is the hard limit.
guess its not quite so simple
Ok yes they may be able to do it, but isn't leaving out one of those what is usually done to compensate? I still think the reason mw is always subHD is to do with the edram and wanting to get 60fps, and you have the same example with Halo 3. Reach will likely have something similar done. I thought I read at DF that Halo 3 used MDR lighting.
Its kind of like the ps3s issues with transparencies where bandwidth is the hard limit.
guess its not quite so simple
I completely disagree with that.
First, the graphics have two goals: to entertain the player during the game, and to convince a potential buyer to buy the game, via screenshots/movies; backgrounds contribute a lot to the wow factor of screenshots.
Second, fighting games IMHO are frequently played in party context, where two people play, the rest are staring at the screen; beautiful environments are improving the game for the spectators.
(Not a fighting game, but I appreciated the Bayonetta demo much more when I was watching somebody else play it, than when I played it myself. Bayonetta is less likely to be played in a party environment, so I would agree more with Dr. Nick's point about it.)
I agree with the screenshot portion but in some cases if you can use a matte painting for a great deal of the background than why not and free up some of those polygons for the character models. My point was only from the players prospective. The people playing are almost entirely focused on the 2 character models in these games.
Well, figthing game aren't exactly as taxing as other genres, and given how most of them have some interactivity with the backgrounds, it helps if the they don't look primitive.
Tekken 4 was designed with your suggestion in mind, and the whole game looked barren (aside from the balance issues). They took the hint later and T5 was one of the best looking fighters last gen.
On topic, I see SSAO and LPCM audio is mentioned. The latter is incredibly wasted though significant IMO, but it never ever gets mentioned when multiplats or even first part PS3 games are mentioned. Uncharted 2 was an incredible audio experience, as was Siren.
Bungie is one of the few devs who use a complete mathematically correct HDR workflow throughout the entire process, from content creation to rendering. A lot of other studios use various hacks and stuff but if one thing can't be denied from Halo3, it's the HDR done right.
All that's left is to make it less resource intensive, which is what Reach seems to be.
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Why do they call it MDR+HDR and why do you think its the right way to do HDR (i.e. where is the presentation detailing it)?
Someone mentioned 7.1 audio. How do you guys go about recording audio? I'd assume you take high quality recordings and 5.1 is probably minimum for a 3d game nowadays. Isn't it then just a choice of compressing this way or that, or not compressing at all from the source? Is there much more effort needed to produce 7.1?
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It's the right way because it's done with the correct math through the entire pipeline, gamma correction in textures and all.
It's called 'MDR' by DigitalFoundry because instead of rendering into a single FP16 or FP32 float buffer they render into two buffers. But HDR isn't just about the buffers, it's the entire graphics pipeline that has to be done right and that's exactly what Bungie did.
It's called 'MDR' by DigitalFoundry because instead of rendering into a single FP16 or FP32 float buffer they render into two buffers. But HDR isn't just about the buffers, it's the entire graphics pipeline that has to be done right and that's exactly what Bungie did.
Exactly!
It's basically semantics with the MDR because it's nowhere near the range of FP16. One of their presentations even refers to it as MDR, but the usage is certainly very well done as you already mentioned.
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