What's with trees this generation?

Those trees are fine in general but most of you see in the video are the trunks. I meant initially the trees where the leaves look lush and rich in details and overlap each other.
　
This got me to try playing a little more of Alaskan Adventures. The Yukon Delta map is pretty easy to play after a couple of minutes you launch the game if you play adventure mode.
　
It's quite obvious the game -a game from 2006- is a direct port of the mythical PlayStation 2 console.
　
If you think overdraw was bad, you should get a load of this. . . .
　
The game smells of PS2 everywhere you look at. There is an extremely thick and lush grass-covered land all over the place, it's filled with overdraw everywhere.
　
Then the place where the console has trouble to run at full framerate -I think this game has an unlocked framerate, sometimes it runs at what seems 60 fps, while other times it crawls now and then- is a spot where there are dozens of leafless trees forming a very intricate skeleton of branches, loads of them.
　
They are completely dried pine branches, some thicker and then there are others that emerge from them whose thickness is lower, which have again more branches forming on them, so there are like hundreds of little leafless branches on each tree, in a area heavily populated with them, and they don't have imposters or anything, they are rendered at the same quality whenever you look at them.
　
So yeah, there are like thousands of branches overlapping each other and the console has a hard time rendering it, but I can see why it made it to the PS2, and then to the X360 unaltered.
　
I can't describe it perfectly and the Youtube videos of that stage I have watched are from the PC version, which doesn't look remotely similar to the consoles version, I wonder why.

Now, that's a good one.

zed, I remember you sharing that photo time ago in a different thread. The second picture is my favourite, the leaves implementation looks quite convincing and real.

TheWretched, some parts of the presentation, when the trees don't have leaves remind me of the trees in the Yukon Delta from Alaskan Adventures.

Billy, trees in Crysis look okay, but I rather prefer the Far Cry 2 implementation because they react to physics in a per-pixel style.

Ruskie, I have still yet to see Crysis 3 in motion on the PS3 and X360, or the WiiU when it comes out.

Shifty; Yeah, well, we need more raytracing in gaming. I have yet to see one game featuring it. There's a possibility it may exist in another universe somewhere, but I am not sure where. Because I didn't see it in real time to date.

Laa-Yosh, the slight breeze swing is what I defined as pixels coming and going when I looked at the trees. The pixels are still there but it looks like there is something floating between all those hundreds of branches, like a graphical effect -the so called overdraw?-.

mikiex, as sebbi pointed out already, they use a special kind of LOD in RDR. It seems bugged sometimes. I have seen a few totally 2D transparent trees that looked like made of plastic in the distance.

warb, I didn't play Alan Wake, but I love nice trees.

Prophecy2K, hehe. Please, just... Forget it.

Almighty, I would love to see tesselation used in the future for whatever developers might need it, but it seems to be a no go this generation.

Ethatron & milk; all what you say sounds very interesting. Wish I could add something. I'd love giving a weighty opinion, but for this... I don't think I have any.

 

Developers said that's the case for all vegetation and foliage count, including trees. But they also use an impostor system, a technique which is similar to the one used in Halo Reach.

For Far Cry 1 they probably used 2D trees that look fine in the distance, except when you get close to them and realize that they are always facing you wherever you move. Like they say, in those cases you can't see the forest from the trees.

This happened to me in Battlefield 3 as of late, in the Kargh Island map. There are many 2D trees in the mountains, I was moving there on foot and it was the same effect used in Rage.

It could be a bug given the fact that there are other trees in the map and they look good when you are nearby, but I don't think so.

The map has a few design deficiencies, or it could be a bug, like something weird I found in the map, where one of those trees top -half of it, which makes it even look more weird- "comes out" and looks completely fused together with a concrete bunker.

 

Talking of modern optimizations, one of the games I mentioned in the original post of this thread is Alaskan Adventures, one of my favourite games of the X360 generation. And yes, the framerate literally sent to console to its knees and the game crawled in the Yukon Delta area on the Xbox 360.

Now the game is backwards compatible on the Xbox One and I gotta play it again and try, to see if there is any improvement. The game literally run at like 2 fps in that area for prolonged times once you looked at the dense trees.