WiiGeePeeYou (Hollywood) what IS it ?

[Corwin_B]

Nothing that hasn't been said before. But since you apparently haven't been reading, I'll repeat it all:

1. Paying that much money and working that long for a 50% overclock and not being able to get final silicon to developers until a month or two ago is ridiculous.

Apart from some PR comments quoting something like 1 billion dollars, we don't exactly know how much money exactly was invested into Hollywood/Flipper dev. If they really invested 3 times the money ATI took to develop Xenos, and only have the current lineup to show, then something seriously went wrong. Also, I've offered an alternative theory in this very thread that Hollywood could have started as an ambitious project, but that the DS success coupled with the early launch of 360 and the will to have full BC and a very small machine could have the initial design seriously scaled back or scratched.

BTW, devs had actual 360 HW for what ? Two months before launch ? and the launch still included Kameo and PGR3 among other things.

2. A few launch titles are already going significantly beyond what Gamecube was doing, more than a 50% overclock would account for, specifically Excite Truck, Sonic, and Madden. For example, in Madden, you've got bloom lighting, fur-shaded grass, depth of field, some sorta perspective warping, high-contrast lighting, "shadow bleeding," 60fps, 480p, and widescreen. I don't think a few extra megahertz is enough to account for that, and this from a developer that never put any Cube-specific features in a single game.

Please drop the "50% overclock" line. This figure is only brought up by stupid trolls who laughed on the "XBox 1.5" comment and moved it to GC. My own guesstimate would be double the pipelines and 50% extra clockspeed for Hollywood, which would bring it to 3 times the raw fillrate. Perhaps a 2nd TEV and more texture cache. Those would be nice additions, but without any modification to the basic pipeline.

3. At least a few developers when specifically asked in interviews about "Gamecube 1.5" have denied it. No developer has said it's just an overclocked Flipper when given the opportunity.

See earlier. The "GC 1.5" is actually two things : a) a stupid troll and b) a strawman brought up by people trying to demonstrate the hidden power of the Wii. See ? If it's more than a 50% O/C, then it's obviously a brand new architecture with hidden features that no game currently exposes ! Believe !

While no developer said "it's just an O/C Flipper" (because it probably isn't, and because even if it were this would count as an NDA breach), you can infer from dev quotes that :
1) the architecture is extremely similar, if not identical, to Flipper (including the recent "Turbocharge GC" comment by people who actually know a thing or two about developping for GC)
2) the raw stats are over the original XBox
3) there are some effects an XBox can do that Hollywood can't (which is not exactly encouraging)

An ATI rep said he thinks launch titles are just "scratching the surface."

Doesn't prove anything in the absence of actually reliable specs. What does he mean, "launch titles" ? I'm pretty certain that Wii will have better-looking games than Elebits and Far Cry. It should even have better looking titles than Zelda TP and RE4. Doesn't mean Hollywood as anything features-wise and IQ-wise over Flipper.

The most negative reliable remark we've got is that it's based on Flipper architecture. But you could just as well say that Geforce4 MX is based on Geforce2, which is based on Geforce 256AV, and none of those are simple overclocks.

Oh, the "simple overclock" strawman appears again. Once more, nobody who is genuinely interested into this debate and not looking for trolling believes it's a straight 50% O/C. Most people believe, though, that the basic rendering pipeline of the Flipper was ported straight to Hollywood, with everything that means for featureset and Image Quality : no advanced FSAA / AF, no HDR, advanced effects needing a lot of coding to go through TEV, ugly 24bits color.

Thus I have completely plausible reason to believe that Hollywood is an evolution of the Flipper chipset, and neither a simple overclock/die shrink nor a less-powerful version of a truly 'next-gen' architecture.

To keep it simple : what do you think are the evolutions between Hollywood and Flipper (if there are any) without taking into account pure rendering power (ie number of pipelines and clockspeed), and based on what do you think those evolutions exist.

 

[fearsomepirate]

Stuff

I wasn't responding to you. I was responding to Dr Evil, who said

No offense to anybody, but based on the footage of different Wii games it's very hard for me not to think that it's just Gamecube with higher clocks.

I think that the T&L engine has been upgraded, mainly based on the improved lighting we've seen. Most notable is the high-contrast lighting seen in Madden and Metroid 3. While the lighting is almost all vertex, it looks smoother than what we saw on Cube with less banding. The lighting difference between Zelda and Metroid is noticable. Either they're doing some post-processing or the T&L is beefier. I'm going to guess that the TMU (aka TEV) has been upgraded as well. This is based on the reflections we've seen in Excite Truck and the water effects in both Excite Truck and Sonic. And all the effects like depth of field, refractions, motion blur, etc were done via indirect texturing on Cube. I'm seeing a lot more of this at fast framerates in 480p on Wii, more than I think would correspond to merely overclocking. I'm going to guess that the TMU is just more sophisticated than its Flipper incarnation. Corroborating evidence is Nintendo's cube mapping patent. While they may never implement it in a game, a couple people here have confirmed that Flipper lacks the featureset to do the coordinate lookups necessary for cube-mapping, and at least one major engine supports cube maps only on Xbox and uses sphere maps for its Cube and PS2 incarnations. I realize Nintendo could be patenting something they never plan to use, but it's more plausible if they were at least adding cube map support to Hollywood. Also, check out the flashlight in Necro-Nesia:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olT_mxczzUk

So basically, I'm expecting a TMU and T&L upgrade. Possibly they removed the restriction on the dot products so that arbitrary normal maps can be processed instead of just environment-mapped bump mapping, but I'm not holding my breath, especially seeing current screens. I'm also not banking on full-on pixel shaders for doing per-pixel lighting on an entire scene. Maybe they replaced the T&L with true vertex shaders--a couple guys here said that there are an awful lot of polygonal characters in the crowd in Mario Strikers 2 for them to all be skinned by the CPU.

 

[Urian]

Do you remember the VSA-100 from 3Dfx?

It was the chip for the Voodoo4 and Voodoo5 series and it was designed around the expanded version of Glide, it was more powerful than the original Voodoo Graphics and made around the same API.

I believe that the most logical thing in this case is that Hollywood is just a new GPU adapted to the expanded graphical API.

 

[Kaotik]

It's been a long, long time, but IIRC some ATI rep said once that he can't really comment on the console chips, but that they would both be at least "dx9 level technology"

 

[Fox5]

Corroborating evidence is Nintendo's cube mapping patent. While they may never implement it in a game, a couple people here have confirmed that Flipper lacks the featureset to do the coordinate lookups necessary for cube-mapping, and at least one major engine supports cube maps only on Xbox and uses sphere maps for its Cube and PS2 incarnations. I realize Nintendo could be patenting something they never plan to use, but it's more plausible if they were at least adding cube map support to Hollywood. Also, check out the flashlight in Necro-Nesia:

I think Wave Race on the Cube made use of cube-maps, through a software technique. I believe hearing that Luigi's Mansion used the cpu for much of its lighting effects as well, so the cube's cpu had a decent amount of power behind it provided the effects were extremely localized or pretty much the only thing going on in the scene.

 

[Acert93]

Person 2: But Xbox 360 launch titles looked like Xbox games with a few more normal maps and higher-res textures.

There were games on X360 launch lineup that says otherwise like Kameo, and we had seen footage of games like Gears of War and Oblivion long before the launch, where is this amazing footage of upcoming Wii-titles that takes advantage of these hidden uber-features that you wishfully think exists?

I was getting ready for a reply when I saw that Dr. Evil already beat me.

Anyone who looks at Kameo, PGR3, etc and says they look just like Xbox titles with more normal maps and higher resolution textures either hasn't played the games or doesn't know what they are looking at.

Kameo shows off some nice parallax occlusion mapping, HDR, nice DOF, hundreds of thousands of particles on screen at one time, excellent water effects, thousands of characters on screen at once during large battle, huge draw distance, etc. And that is at a 3x increase in pixels (whereas Wii is hitting the same 480p target as the GCN). And Kameo is an upgrade of an Xbox1 title, yet even the side by side shots Rare showed off demonstrated that Kameo 360 had a lot of effects that were not just higher-detailed Xbox1 features or "just out of reach" type effects, but totally blew them away. Examples:

http://media.xbox360.ign.com/media/490/490038/img_2794894.html
http://media.xbox360.ign.com/media/490/490038/img_3114405.html
http://media.xbox360.ign.com/media/490/490038/img_3114407.html
http://media.xbox360.ign.com/media/490/490038/img_2794895.html
http://media.xbox360.ign.com/media/490/490038/img_3114411.html
http://media.xbox360.ign.com/media/490/490038/img_2794897.html
http://media.xbox360.ign.com/media/490/490038/img_2794907.html
http://media.xbox360.ign.com/media/490/490038/img_2794902.html

Kameo is also a good benchmark for Wii in many ways. Kameo was an Xbox1 title that was converted to an Xbox 360 title about 12 months before launch. Rare was working with Radeon 9800s and then X800s on Dual G5s at first, and in June/July moved over to underclocked Xenon and Xenos.

In a nutshell: Kameo was an Xbox1 game upgraded over 12 months and only had a couple months before Gold to port and clean up on hardware even remotely similar to the finished product.

Yet even under those conditions Kameo demonstrates a ton of features and effects that could not be obtained on NV2A, even at 2x the clock speed.

Person 2: But Xbox 360 launch titles looked like Xbox games with a few more normal maps and higher-res textures.

And that is the problem with your parallel: The premise of your dialogue doesn't resemble reality.

No one has said Wii titles won't get better over time. But thus far very little has been shown to demonstrate that Hollywood is significantly more than Flipper with some tweaks (better T&L?), faster GPU clock (more "pixel" processors?), and more/faster memory. The leaks and the games shown resemble approximately what we could expect from faster, tweaked hardware. But nothing even remotely approximates, at this time, say R300 class graphics at 480p.

Obviously no one at this time can absolutely state that Hollywood doesn't have special sauce. For all we know all the current software could be GCN software running on the Backwards compatibility pathways overclocked and there is a sweet, vibrant modern GPU tucked away that requires complete re-write to take advantage of it.

But that is conjecture. What we do know is we haven't seen anything in the DX9 class of rendering, and that is 4 year old standard now.

And if that conjecture was true, you wonder why no games are making a Kameo Xbox1 => Kameo 360 style jump. If the best people can offer as proof "more percieved geometry" then that says a lot. But who knows, I am still holding out that self shadows and other effects seen in the RS renders at first are still tucked away in the hardware... somewhere. At this point is seems it is what Matt indicated (with obligitory tweaks and refinements of course, and quite possibly some beefing), and there may be some special sauce. But logic says this:

If there was DX9 class hardware in there we would be seeing some DX9 engines ported for launch (there are a ton of them with good workflow tools laying around). So these sort of arguements go both ways. Of course Nintendo could clear this all up, and I expect most gamers would be excited to get, say, R300 or 6600GT class hardware at 480p. That would absolutely rock IMO. I hope it is inside there... says a lot that we have to use the word "hope" as none of the software gives us that!

So basically, I'm expecting a TMU and T&L upgrade. Possibly they removed the restriction on the dot products so that arbitrary normal maps can be processed instead of just environment-mapped bump mapping, but I'm not holding my breath, especially seeing current screens. I'm also not banking on full-on pixel shaders for doing per-pixel lighting on an entire scene. Maybe they replaced the T&L with true vertex shaders--a couple guys here said that there are an awful lot of polygonal characters in the crowd in Mario Strikers 2 for them to all be skinned by the CPU.

I think that is about what I was expecting, which imo falls under a tweaked Flipper, overclocked. So maybe not everyone is so far apart on this one

 

[fearsomepirate]

And that is the problem with your parallel: The premise of your dialogue doesn't resemble reality.

Except that was the point of my parallel. Wii titles are as much capable of running on Flipper with a few extra clock cycles as X360 launch titles are running on a DX8 chipset with a few more pixel pipes. And when I bring that up, people do exactly what's been going on here. They're saying "Uhh, well I guess Flipper really did have the featureset to do all that stuff; we just never saw it because it didn't have enough RAM or clock cycles."

I've never argued for Flipper being an R300 class processor, nor have I defended anyone who has. Don't impute other people's opinions to me. I don't even interact with the other Nintendo fans around here because they largely don't know what they're talking about, except for probably darkblu. I've been pretty consistent since we've seen the first screens that Hollywood is almost certainly an evolution of Flipper rather than either a mere 50% overclock as some know-it-alls have been saying, or a secret DX9-class part being vastly underused as some head-in-the-clouds dreamers have been saying.

If the best people can offer as proof "more percieved geometry" then that says a lot.

So you're deliberately ignoring my list of special effects seen in already in Madden Wii. You should probably add "high color" to that list (never seen bloom and high color at the same time on Gamecube; the PoP games have very pronounced banding). Suit yourself.

But logic says this:

Who are you arguing against? Ooh-Videogames? Because you're certainly not arguing against anything I've said.

My logic is simpler:

1. We barely even know what Flipper was capable of, since a grand total of about 4 studios ever gave a crap.

2. A few Wii-exclusive titles have already displayed an increase in number and complexity of effects, image quality, scene geometry, and framerate not attributable to a mere overclock.

3. ATI's spent quite a bit of time on this GPU, and a couple folks in a place to know have explicitly said it's not just an overclocked Flipper.

4. First generation titles on any console have never given us the full picture of a console's capabilities. Some consoles had a lot of untapped potential , others had less, but none were exhausted at launch.

5. Devkits were just OC'd Gamecubes until rather recently, and once we heard about final kits shipping out, we saw the graphical quality of a few Wii titles accelerate noticably.

Therefore,

1. Changes have been made to the Flipper components while doubtlessly keeping the overall architectural paradigm the same.

2. As we have not nearly enough information to deduce what those changes are, we ought to wait until the second generation of titles before making a lot of really solid statements about what's not in Wii's GPU.

Basically, I think it's foolish for people to talk in detail about Wii's GPU like we've got all kinds of solid information. All we know is it's based on Flipper, but it's not just an overclock. The wise thing to do would be to wait until we have enough information to draw solid conclusions.

 

[darkblu]

I think Wave Race on the Cube made use of cube-maps, through a software technique.

cube mapping is fairly heavy with its dynamic flow control needed at pixel level for deciding which of the cube sides you'll be addressing; i strongly doubt anything on the cube ever used cube mapping.

I believe hearing that Luigi's Mansion used the cpu for much of its lighting effects as well, so the cube's cpu had a decent amount of power behind it provided the effects were extremely localized or pretty much the only thing going on in the scene.

i'd guess the gekko was not a bad unit to do exotic lighting/assist the XF, given its vector extensions, as long as you kept that per vertex.

 

[darkblu]

Anyone who looks at Kameo, PGR3, etc and says they look just like Xbox titles with more normal maps and higher resolution textures either hasn't played the games or doesn't know what they are looking at.

huh? of course they look like xbox titles with more cpu clocks to burn, more normal maps, higher res textures, and a fast local framebuffer, for crying out loud!

Kameo shows off some nice parallax occlusion mapping, HDR, nice DOF, hundreds of thousands of particles on screen at one time, excellent water effects, thousands of characters on screen at once during large battle, huge draw distance, etc.

basically all quantitative advancements of things already seen on the 'box. which i think was fearsome's point, wasn't it?

And that is at a 3x increase in pixels (whereas Wii is hitting the same 480p target as the GCN). And Kameo is an upgrade of an Xbox1 title, yet even the side by side shots Rare showed off demonstrated that Kameo 360 had a lot of effects that were not just higher-detailed Xbox1 features or "just out of reach" type effects, but totally blew them away.

totally blew them away? as in 'those were never seen in a xbox title'? - i don't think so.

Kameo is also a good benchmark for Wii in many ways. Kameo was an Xbox1 title that was converted to an Xbox 360 title about 12 months before launch. Rare was working with [my highlight] Radeon 9800s and then X800s on Dual G5s at first, and in June/July moved over to underclocked Xenon and Xenos.

In a nutshell: Kameo was an Xbox1 game upgraded over 12 months and only had a couple months before Gold to port and clean up on hardware even remotely similar to the finished product.

Yet even under those conditions Kameo demonstrates a ton of features and effects that could not be obtained on NV2A, even at 2x the clock speed.

your point being? of course given that rare had hw with more or less the same featureset and peformance they could achieve what they did on xenos. now you need to point out which is the hw with similar featureset and performance to hollywood that was available to devs all along and you'd actually have a point. oh wait, we don't know what was tweaked and changed in hollywood vs flipper, so we can't back up such a point now, can we? it takes for hollywood to have over flipper something as minor as cube mapping and all of a sudden a whole new set of rendition fx will be available which previously were not.

and i think it's about time we added the 'expected dx9-level featureset' argument to the group of the '50% clock upgrade' strawman, as appropriately identified by Corwin_B.

 

[Fox5]

Well, certainly I'm not the only one who has thought Wave Race had cube mapping...
http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showpost.php?p=173341&postcount=144

Of course, wave race looked merely decent for a gamecube game at launch and pretty low end now, and I think only the racers and certain limited scene objects (generally things that could change throughout the level, but not the static level geometry) showed up in the cube maps. The 'cube maps' also appeared to be 1/2 or 1/4 the res of the actual game.

Edit:
N/M, looking through old forum posts (which I evidently took part in), it seems that it was decided years ago that wave race isn't using cube mapping, but approximating the technique instead. I don't think it was conclusively decided, but it's more likely that's what NST did.

 

[Acert93]

huh? of course they look like xbox titles with more cpu clocks to burn, more normal maps, higher res textures, and a fast local framebuffer, for crying out loud!

Thanks for adding to all those extra details to my quote of fearsome, proving my very point. They were not just high res textures and a few more normal maps.

basically all quantitative advancements of things already seen on the 'box. which i think was fearsome's point, wasn't it?

No, his exact statement can be found in my quote. In his little "disagreement" between two arguementors he puts forth the commonly mimicked position that launch titles looked like Xbox games with "better normal maps and higher resolution textures" which is NOT the case.

totally blew them away? as in 'those were never seen in a xbox title'? - i don't think so.

I pointed out a number of features in Kameo alone, so feel free to demonstrate all of those in a Xbox1 title. You can start with the POM, particle system, and geometry instancing (grass, thousands of characters on screen) in an Xbox1 game and I can let my imagination add "a few more normal maps and high resolution textures".

your point being?

I know it is difficult to understand my point when you cannot accurately quote what I just said, so please re-read it and you may understand what I said the 2nd time through.

and i think it's about time we added the 'expected dx9-level featureset' argument to the group of the '50% clock upgrade' strawman, as appropriately identified by Corwin_B.

Ironically it was ATI/Nintendo who first set out the expectation of DX9 featureset many, many moons ago. And as pointed out last week, at the price Nintendo is asking for Wii that is completely feasible in regards to expectatied performance and features. But I digress as I don't think we will see such out of Wii.

That said, I have not stated an expectation for DX9 level graphics (nothing indicates it is in there; nice surprise if it is, but total Niny-fanboi if you are expecting it/argueing for it) nor have I stated that it is a mere 50% overclock, so I wonder who you are pointing your comments at. I actually agree with Fearsomepirate in general...

But on the other hand I think many of you are demonstrating far too much special pleading in your arguements. To summerize what I have seen in a number of posts, "We see something tweaked/added BEYOND a 50% Flipper overclock, and ATI said it was only scratching the surface, and therefor..."

Which is the point: Obviously (and to repeat so you cannot miss it: obvliously) Hollywood is not a only a Flipper overclock as evidenced by some features showing up in games; yet conversely the graphics thus far don't indicate they are anywhere near approaching the performance/features of a $100 retail GPU. And I would interject on that level: That is dissappointing, both on technical merits and my expectations as a consumer. Of course you may disagree, which is fine. Again, note the distictions between dissappointment at Nintendo not carrying through on plans for a DX9 level GPU (especially at the Wii price) versus saying "it is only overclocked Flipper".

The what-ifs can go on forever, which is really what the bulk of this thread has become: More what-ifs with a lack of anything substantial (as you both point out).

 

[Fafalada]

cube mapping is fairly heavy with its dynamic flow control needed at pixel level for deciding which of the cube sides you'll be addressing

If you insisted on emulating it (for whaver reason) it would cost one addional dependant lookup.
That said - if all you're doing is reflection/refraction - it's far simpler(and cheaper) to update your cubemap, then remap the 6 textures to a sphere map and use that as your refl./refr. map instead.
It's most likely what Waverace used as well (as did a number of PS2 games).

 

[Teasy]

There have been plenty of developer comments echoed in this thread, including ones from Factor 5, Epic, and Crytek. You are relying solely on wishful thinking here, with no evidence to support your hopes. So let's hear it from you then. What do you think is inside the Wii? PowerVR Series 4?

As I said, none of the comments from developers claim only a 50% overclocked GC with more memory. Not Factor 5, Epic, Crytek or any you just mentioned. So if you want to talk about lack of evidence or wishful thinking look no further then yourself.

What do I think is inside Wii?, I don't know, that's why I'm not claiming to know what's in it, unlike you. So to sum up, stop trying to shift the focus to me and post the developer quotes that you claim prove your point, because as yet I haven't seen them.

 

[fearsomepirate]

Thanks for adding to all those extra details to my quote of fearsome, proving my very point. They were not just high res textures and a few more normal maps.

If you're not paying close attention to detail, which you have repeatedly refused to with Wii, more than a few X360 games looked pretty much like Xbox games with a handful of extra effects and some higher-resolution assets. More than a few people, even IGN editors, said that Condemned and other games looked just like Xbox games when running 480p. The 2 or 3 Wii games that appear to be making use of the hardware aren't as big a leap over the Cube games as the 2 or 3 premium 360 launch games are over the Xbox, but they're still significant enough that the "overclocked Flipper" talk really just needs to stop.

 

[DuckThor Evil]

As I said, none of the comments from developers claim only a 50% overclocked GC with more memory.

Whether it's 50% clock increase or something else that puts it 2-3x over gamecube is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. It's still in that league where it's fairly accurate to call it spiced up Camecube or overclocked etc.

I don't really understand why people like fearsomepirate want's to make such a big deal about it.

 

[Teasy]

Whether it's 50% clock increase or something else that puts it 2-3x over gamecube is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. It's still in that league where it's fairly accurate to call it spiced up Camecube or overclocked etc.

I don't really understand why people like fearsomepirate want's to make such a big deal about it.

But it certainly is relivant when some people here are saying specifically that they believe it is 50% overclocked with nothing else added.

 

[Corwin_B]

So basically, I'm expecting a TMU and T&L upgrade. Possibly they removed the restriction on the dot products so that arbitrary normal maps can be processed instead of just environment-mapped bump mapping, but I'm not holding my breath, especially seeing current screens. I'm also not banking on full-on pixel shaders for doing per-pixel lighting on an entire scene. Maybe they replaced the T&L with true vertex shaders--a couple guys here said that there are an awful lot of polygonal characters in the crowd in Mario Strikers 2 for them to all be skinned by the CPU.

Ok, fair enough. My expectations are a bit under that, but we shall see. I mean, full specs have to leak out at some time, don't they ?

 

[darkblu]

Thanks for adding to all those extra details to my quote of fearsome, proving my very point. They were not just high res textures and a few more normal maps.

and here i thought your point was that some xbox360 launch games demonstrated individual techniques never seen on an xbox.. oh, silly me.

I pointed out a number of features in Kameo alone, so feel free to demonstrate all of those in a Xbox1 title.

in one xbox title? was that your point all along? - that they were reqular techniques but used all together in one title? - if so then i concur - there's possibly not a single xbox title that uses all those techniques. at least not in this amount.

You can start with the POM, particle system, and geometry instancing (grass, thousands of characters on screen) in an Xbox1 game and I can let my imagination add "a few more normal maps and high resolution textures".

and you can start by reading what nick burton said about kameo in an IGN interview:

IGN: In what ways does Kameo take advantage of the Xbox 360's powerful engine?

Nick Burton: We always wanted to have crowd scenes in Kameo and started to do some experiments with the Xbox 1 and figured we could get maybe 100 or so NPCs. Once we moved onto the Xbox 360 we thought, "Let's try something that will slow it down, how about 1,000? Ran fine, no problem whatsoever! How about 3,000? Still fine!" Then we thought we had better try it with something more taxing than a test level so we put them on the Battle Field level which was all parallax and normal mapped, had a huge draw distance and lots of special effects like volumetric smoke; it still ran fine. In the released game we had something like 3000-plus NPCs because more than that was hard to choreograph, but the 360 can do much more. At one point during debug we found that each of the NPCs in one scene were being drawn 4 times by mistake, that's 12,000 being drawn and still no sign of slowdown.

We had a similar story with the GPU particle systems... We had a test running with a 100,000 particles being computed purely on the GPU, no CPU intervention at all. Now the Xbox 1 could do that but on the 360 they all react to the player and hit the floor and are lit, then we tried more, lots more! How about 1 milion? We aren't talking test levels or tech demos here. They are actually in the released game, and you can go and count them in the Throne Room. Most levels don't have quite that many though as only about 300,000 are normally in visible range at one time.

When thinking about the NPC and particle rendering, remember to put it into context; these are not tech demos and they represent a tiny amount of the actual graphical load Kameo puts on the Xbox 360. Each scene has hugely complex shaders on the geometry that would not have been possible on previous generation hardware, or even on the PC until recently. Almost every surface in Kameo is both normal and parallax mapped, has a detail map, is shadowed, has some global illumination and has an accurate dynamic lighting model. On top of the main model shaders, you have so many effects such as (but not all) particles, volumetric smoke and fire, instanced foliage, grass shaders, true reflections, accurate depth of field, bloom, color correction, real-time water surfaces, heat haze, and much more.

filtering out the PR talk (e.g. 'and much more', yadda, yadda), what the above says is: we added so much of the same old that no other machine (except for recent PCs) could handle that.

and aside from geometry instancing, which is nothing more than a faster way for multiplying things, i don't see i single technique in there that would not be doable on the xbox in one form or another. of course, one can argue here that quantitative advancements may lead to qualitative changes, but that would be rather sophistic in this case, IMO. had kameo demonstrated displacement mapping instead of fancy bumpmapping, and some truely clever GI approximation instead of the same old hacks, i would have been among the first to say 'wow!'. as it is now, though, kameo is far from demonstating anything technically unseen on the prev gen.

if you can see a technique on the right side of this collage not found on the left side of the same then i'll personally congratulate you.

I know it is difficult to understand my point when you cannot accurately quote what I just said, so please re-read it and you may understand what I said the 2nd time through.

huh? i quoted your whole paragraph on the subject, just split in two. i apologize if you found that offending or inappropriate in any way. if i misunderstood you, feel free to point out exactly where i did so.

The what-ifs can go on forever, which is really what the bulk of this thread has become: More what-ifs with a lack of anything substantial (as you both point out).

it may not be the most ground-breaking thread around, but it does contribute to people's knowedge/idea of hollywood. if you don't consider it useful to the least, i suggest you don't spend so much effort reading it and certainly not posting such lengthy and pointless kameo-fanisms in it.

 

[darkblu]

If you insisted on emulating it (for whaver reason) it would cost one addional dependant lookup.

well, my original point was about sw emulating it, but nevermind - your post really made me curious - how does one extra indirection solve the cross-pixel change-of-side test?

ed: doh, i'm an idiot. i should've realised what you had in mind as soon as you mentioned remapping a cubemap onto a sphere map.

That said - if all you're doing is reflection/refraction - it's far simpler(and cheaper) to update your cubemap, then remap the 6 textures to a sphere map and use that as your refl./refr. map instead.
It's most likely what Waverace used as well (as did a number of PS2 games).

yes, it was taken to some far lenghts by polyphony.

 

[fearsomepirate]

Whether it's 50% clock increase or something else that puts it 2-3x over gamecube

A 50% overclock would increase performance by no more than 50%, not 100%-200%.

I don't really understand why people like fearsomepirate want's to make such a big deal about [my incorrect use of the term "overclocked"].

Because "overclocked" is a technical term with a definite meaning. It means you took a chip and and bumped up the clock speed to make it run faster than it was before. Period. It does not mean adding or modifying the modules on the chip or in any other way changing its architecture. If you change around any processing units, memory management, instruction sets, number of vector units, or something like that, you are no longer "overclocking" a chip. "Enhanced," "spiced up," "modified," "evolved," "turbocharged," etc are all perfectly useful non-technical terms with a vague but fairly understandable meaning. You could call a 266 MHz Pentium II an "spiced up" Pentium Pro. But it is most certainly not an "overclocked" Pentium Pro.