Wii's Monster Hunter 3 graphics.

[almighty]

That's officially the first wii game to impress me graphical, some of the monsters have awesome design aswel

 

[DRS]

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.

Indirect texturing is the base for per pixel operations (i.e. you could implement emboss bump mapping without it, but it would be a non preferred implementation taking an extra tev stage), so that's not surprising.

As for the killzone 2 shaders, could you please post me a link to that article? I'm interested in effects other than normal mapping now. Are the effects you mention post effects (i.e. execute in a fixed time) or also per poly?

 

[fearsomepirate]

There's no bump mapping of any kind in Metroid Prime. However, here's are a couple of screens of MP2 from the pre-indirect texturing Dolphin beta:

That's what a game looks like when there really isn't anything going on! Or, if you like, see if you can find comparison videos of RE4 on the PS2 and GC. While the differences are subtle, they are also many, showing again how many different things can be going on in a seemingly "simple" game.

The KZ2 article was in the big KZ2 thread here on the forum. Search for it; you should find it I think in "Console Technology." The main thing I remember was that the game draws something like 6 frames and blends them in order to get the lighting and the "gritty" look.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Yes, there's often lots going on that isn't clearly noticed. Laa-Yosh has spoken of creating 8+ texture layers for what the layman sees as colour+bumps+shiny bits.

 

[DeadlyNinja]

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.

Whoa, chill, man. I was only curious. I don't claim to be the expert authority on anything, but I'm only judging it by what I've learned to see and what I've seen from other GC/Wii games.

 

[Mobius1aic]

From the videos I've seen, the water in the New Play Control! version of Metroid Prime 1 I think uses an EMBM shader, though It's difficult to tell thanks to crappy youtube video playback. I've always wondered how much more the devs could pull out if they went the 30 fps route instead of 60. MP3 was an excellent looking game, that as far as I could see, had no bump mapping of any kind. The lighting I guess seemed to be their main focus. But god I wish they could use a better texture filter...........

 

[Gitaroo]

I remember MP1 has very very little EMBM. I cant remember how much MP3 use it/