Wii's Monster Hunter 3 graphics.

[ken_masters]

This game puts the Wii's graphics level on the edge of this Nintendo's desktop console generation.

What u think about that?

See this trailer and make your mouth water!!

And another one.

 

[TheWretched]

Hmm... I say it does look better than FFXII, but not by much... and, actually, the GC was supposed to have better looking games than the PS2, so... Yeah... this should be a pinnacle, graphics wise, for the Wii...

but why make another thread for this game HERE?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Unless someone has something technical to contribute, this'll get locked.

 

[Gitaroo]

I actually played it a bit, the fake hdr they did with the sky is very impressive, and the sun light under water is also very impressive. But overall, if you see other games that use the MT frame work engine on next gen consoles, its still very very far behind. It isnt much better than games like say Onimusha 3 beside much less jaggies and better lighting. I would say the downgrade won't be as huge as cutting down from a next gen console to PSP when they make MHP3

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Comparing Wii to PS360 is unfair. How does this game compare to other Wii titles? The video was too blurry to tell IQ, but textures and shaders looked very good and models suitably detailed, although with the limited amount of objects on screen that's to be expected. The shdows are decidedly retro though, with a big circular contact shadow that doesn't work for the larger creatures. I'm a bit surprised at this given other games from last gen managed proper cast shadows. I guess hard shadows could have been deemed out of place. Is there any colour dithering or are they rendering with 24bit colour?

 

[DeadlyNinja]

I saw the game and I'm unimpressed by the tech. Other than light maps and large monsters, it's barely pushing the Wii from what I saw. The water is still flat, the shadows are non-existent. Isn't EMBM practically free on the Wii? Capcom couldn't be bothered to use that? I think Resident Evil 4 and Rebel Strike still looks better than this game.

Is there any colour dithering or are they rendering with 24bit colour?

You know, now that you mention it, I saw some emulator footage of the game running at 720p and I still see this horrible looking blur all over the screen. Remember, this is from an emulator, and it doesn't have the color limit like the actual console. I'll try and find those pics again to show you. I don't think it's dithering, but it's ugly. At first, I thought it was the small screens that have this grain all over the place, but it shows up as a blur on Dolphin.

Edit - found the image.

http://i39.tinypic.com/2cf8sx1.jpg

 

[Shifty Geezer]

That looks like a post-process effect to me to create a dreamy atmosphere. It'd be achieved blending a blurred copy of the rendered buffer over the top as a sort of soft focus.

 

[DeadlyNinja]

Yeah, but it still looks ugly IMO.

There was an "Iwata Asks" interview where he says the Zelda team feels intimidated by what the MH3 team was able to push visually, and I think that's bull. MH3 doesn't even stand toe to toe with Mario Galaxy. The textures are top notch in MH3, though.

 

[Gitaroo]

I didn't get very far in the game, but only thing I really like about the graphic is the lighting effect. Compare to the other wii games, I guess I can only say its very polish and it has the very unique monster hunter art style if you like it. I think they use EMBM on the water effect like Mario Sunshine, so far the only impressive part of the graphics that catch me eyes is the sky and the lighting. It reminds me when I first play Farcry 1 with the HDR when you look up in the sky it will glow and slowly dim down. They did a very good job capturing the HDR feel. Other than that, creatures texture are pretty much PS2 quality, nothing really exciting to do a tech analysis on. And about the screenshot from the dolphin emulator, its actually screwed up, the game doesn't have the same amount of bloom, it looks much more natural when you play it on wii.

 

[DeadlyNinja]

I was watching another water video on youtube and I noticed they did use environment maps for the water.

Other than that, creatures texture are pretty much PS2 quality, nothing really exciting to do a tech analysis on.

Really? You mean they're low res or low color? I actually like the textures. They're very detailed from what I can see. It's really the only other impressive (if actually using all the RAM is considered impressive) part of the visuals.

Anyone notice a lot of developers are kinda bullshitting their way through Wii visuals? When World At War was first unveiled for the Wii, I saw the screens and they looked like garbage. All the sites though, claimed it was a visually stunning game. So much so that I made a statement on my blog apologizing for calling out the visuals. When the final product actually hit the shelves... it looked like garbage. Now Square-Enix is claiming their FFCC: Crystal Bearers is pushing the Wii when it's maybe slightly above PS2 quality.

BTW, Shifty Geezer, if people want to continue discussing, maybe you can consider merging this thread with the other thread I created for discussing impressive Wii tech? Not that this game has any impressive tech to speak of.

 

[Gitaroo]

on the creatures, low res. when you are up close, its very very low res.

 

[TheWretched]

The setting and "artstyle" is pretty much 1:1 FFXII, so comparing it with that is quite viable.

And MH3 is by no means a low budget game too (well FFXII was probably the most expensive PS2 game, with its four years or what in development).

And, in my opinion, this looked only slightly better. But, FFXII is one of the more impressive PS2 games of the latter half of PS2s cycle and the Wii is still pretty much "untapped" (although all GC knowledge should apply too, so pushing the metal should've happened quite early too) for what it's worth. But since the Wii is supposed to be 2 GCs duct taped together, it looks quite bland. I mean, as I said earlier, the GC was faster than the PS2, and now the Wii is twice as fast... it should produce MUCH better graphics than this. Especially for a game, that will surely sell several million units in Japan alone (see the PSP titles).

The textures were good, and the details in the characters/monsters too, but the overall picture didn't look much more advanced than FFXII, which has probably 3 player characters on screen plus a huge endboss like Tiamat, which alone fills the whole screen.

I don't know... I guess the developers/publishers see, that graphics on Wii don't matter and thus see no need to push the hardware to the limit, like the PS2 was it its day.

 

[DeadlyNinja]

I wonder if the game is doing "real" HDR of "fake" HDR. I know a couple of Wii games claim to use it, like Sonic and the Black Knight and Cursed Mountain.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

But since the Wii is supposed to be 2 GCs duct taped together, it looks quite bland. I mean, as I said earlier, the GC was faster than the PS2, and now the Wii is twice as fast... it should produce MUCH better graphics than this.

Doubling preformance doesn't equate to 'twice as good looking'. eg. A perfect doubling of performance would allow supersampling AA and a few less jaggeis around the edges. At a glance you couldn't recognise the difference.

From the theoretical specs of Wii relative to last gen, I guess it's hard to imagine an accurate idea of what it should achieve.

 

[TheWretched]

Doubling preformance doesn't equate to 'twice as good looking'. eg. A perfect doubling of performance would allow supersampling AA and a few less jaggeis around the edges. At a glance you couldn't recognise the difference.

From the theoretical specs of Wii relative to last gen, I guess it's hard to imagine an accurate idea of what it should achieve.

I am aware of that, but it doesn't look much better... I don't expect 2 huge dragons and 6 players on screen either, but what is shown in the trailer only barely looks better than a game that is 4 years old AND was running on hardware 10 years old.

Looking at how splendid Resident Evil 4 looked on the Cube, MH3 just isn't that much more impressive. There's been more "in cycle" improvement on either PS3 or 360 compared to GC going to Wii.

 

[Squeak]

Doubling preformance doesn't equate to 'twice as good looking'. eg. A perfect doubling of performance would allow supersampling AA and a few less jaggeis around the edges. At a glance you couldn't recognise the difference.

From the theoretical specs of Wii relative to last gen, I guess it's hard to imagine an accurate idea of what it should achieve.

But the biggest factor holding the GC back, was probably texture space in main mem. The Wii mem isn't merely double, it's quadrupled.
Texture resolution is one of the, if not the, most important factors in quick/casual judgement of the technical quality of the graphics.

 

[fearsomepirate]

I think some of you saying that this or that doesn't look any better than PS2 games haven't played PS2 games in a long time, or maybe you don't know what you're looking for. I certainly notice the aliasing, full-screen dithering, low-quality textures, and low-polygon models. Of course, if I go back and play my N64 a bit, the PS2 starts looking great again!

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Edit - found the image.

http://i39.tinypic.com/2cf8sx1.jpg

Looks like the KZ2 effect. Where they purposely blurred everything to increase the perceived IQ. Reduces jaggies and all. And allows the use of lower res textures.

Looks nice, I may have to pick this up. It'll be only the second Wii game I've gotten for myself since I got the damn thing.

Regards,
SB

 

[DeadlyNinja]

I think some of you saying that this or that doesn't look any better than PS2 games haven't played PS2 games in a long time, or maybe you don't know what you're looking for. I certainly notice the aliasing, full-screen dithering, low-quality textures, and low-polygon models. Of course, if I go back and play my N64 a bit, the PS2 starts looking great again!

I don't think anyone says this doesn't look better than PS2, we just don't think it looks THAT much better. It sure as hell doesn't look better than Rebel Strike on Gamecube. It certainly doesn't come close to Mario Galaxy.

Serious question: What are we suppose to be looking for? I mean, I see the pseudo-HDR/Bloom they're using, and there's a lot of variety in the textures, but outside of that, I don't see anything impressive. They hardly bothered to use bump maps, and it doesn't seem to push more polygons than the best GC had to offer.

 

[fearsomepirate]

a) Online games tend to have less detailed graphics due to needing to keep track of other stuff (compare MP and SP in the Conduit or COD5 on Wii). So if you're going to compare it to PS2 games, try comparing it to MH2 or FFXI.

b) It's infinity times better-looking than the best-looking online Gamecube game. If you want to compare it to online Wii games, look at the MP modes in the Conduit or WaW. It looks quite nice compared to them.

c) You have no idea how many polygons are in a scene or how many per second are being drawn. We've gone through this a million times on B3D. Besides, a 50% increase in clockspeed plus extra RAM aren't going to mean going from ~100K polygons in a scen to ~1m polygons in a scene (IMO, it takes almost an order of magnitude in geometry for casual observers to really appreciate the difference--for example, RE4 PS2 vs RE4 GC, no one was complaining about a slight drop in geometric complexity). It means going from ~100K to ~150K.

d) There are a lot of effects whose names most of us don't know and you don't notice until they're gone. I myself wasn't really aware of this until I saw screens of Metroid Prime in an early version of Dolphin that didn't support indirect texturing--the difference was pretty stark. So the fact that you are unable to pick out and enumerate anything other than bloom lighting doesn't mean a thing. I'll bet you're not very good at counting light sources or detecting the various blending techniques used to make a scene look lively. There was a really eye-opening article on Killzone 2 a while ago that illustrated just how many effects there are that your average "All it's doing is normal mapping and a grain filter!" analyst doesn't notice.

e) There are various implementations of effects that require varying levels of power (fillrate, clock cycles, passes). I'll bet you can't tell by looking how much resources various implementations of bloom lighting (to name one of many examples) are consuming. I know I can't.