Xbox 360 Beta Kits in Action

[croc hunter2]

I would have thought that the assets at this stage of development (for launch games) would have been pretty much finalised. And these assets should have been aimed at the final hw spec not the alpha or beta kit spec.

Things that should improve - the framerate, lighting, AI and possibly IQ but not the art to any great extent.

 

[chachi]

I would have thought that the assets at this stage of development (for launch games) would have been pretty much finalised. And these assets should have been aimed at the final hw spec not the alpha or beta kit spec.

Things that should improve - the framerate, lighting, AI and possibly IQ but not the art to any great extent.

You can't target some hardware abstract when you're showing the game on different hardware unless you do what Sony did and render scenes out frame by frame and then stitch them together to create a trailer and just show movies.

Now that developers have actual hardware (or a better approximation anyway) they can adjust model poly counts, lighting, and scene complexity for the actual GPU and start optimizing code for the processor it has to run on.

 

[BTOA]

I would have thought that the assets at this stage of development (for launch games) would have been pretty much finalised. And these assets should have been aimed at the final hw spec not the alpha or beta kit spec.

Things that should improve - the framerate, lighting, AI and possibly IQ but not the art to any great extent.

You can't target some hardware abstract when you're showing the game on different hardware unless you do what Sony did and render scenes out frame by frame and then stitch them together to create a trailer and just show movies.

Now that developers have actual hardware (or a better approximation anyway) they can adjust model poly counts, lighting, and scene complexity for the actual GPU and start optimizing code for the processor it has to run on.

Sony and the PS3 developers are showing us what next gen should and will look like. How is that so wrong of them to target such quality exactly?

btw, Sony's development kit actually has hardware that are similar to what will be in the final hardware, while MS's are a hit and miss.

 

[BenQ]

I don't understand this whole Apha kit vs. Beta kit nonesense.

It's asthough some people expected games graphics to magically get better moving from an alpha kit to a beta kit..... but why would they? I can see the framerate improving, but not the graphics.

When it comes to the screenshots that the devs are releasing, there's absolutely nothing that the Beta kit can render than the alpha kit couldn't.

If you do see a difference in graphics, it's more likely that the graphics have simply improved as development time passed, and not the Beta kit "magically" making the graphcics any better.

 

[croc hunter2]

chachi, i understand that to show running games you can't target a hardware spec. but i think i prefer what Ninja Theory have done and target what they want and show that rather than show a moving target in terms of look.

So what if people can't play pre-alpha games. At the moment all the devs are doing are giving people a bad impression with ugly games, that move like shit etc. Put out playable demos when you are ready. Before that throw out movies etc

Your mileage may vary.

 

[Rockster]

I don't understand this whole Apha kit vs. Beta kit nonesense.

HDR+SM3.0 - Alpha no and Beta yes. It won't happen magically but a lot more is possible/feasible now with the Beta kits. Obviously the same code won't/shouldn't look any different. I definitely don't get that expectation. Windows looks sooo much better now that I upgraded my CPU and GPU?

 

[SanGreal]

What I don't understand is all the screenshots released without any anti-aliasing considering its a requirement in final games

I understand E3, where most games were shown realtime and thus had to run at playable framerates, but that doesn't excuse the crappy screenshots/videos which should represent the final target.

 

[bbot]

Of course there won't be much of a graphics-wise difference. Both alpha and beta kits are using d3d 9.0 video cards. Beta kits video are only slightly more advanced (directx 9c) than alpha kit video cards.

 

[SanGreal]

Of course there won't be much of a graphics-wise difference. Both alpha and beta kits are using d3d 9.0 video cards. Beta kits video are only slightly more advanced (directx 9c) than alpha kit video cards.

not really.

Not to mention the performance differences between the two, allowing for more polygons, AA, effects, etc.

Beta kits aren't capable of magically recreating a game's art assets, but they are certainly capable of putting out far better visuals than the alpha kits (in realtime).

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Not to mention the performance differences between the two, allowing for more polygons, AA, effects, etc.

More poly's won't help, unless the art department remodels eery single asset!

I think what people are wanting to see are smooth frame rates, which should come with an instamatic upgrade of GPU if it was targetted successfully, and the free AA. There's were some nasty jaggies going down at E3 that really messed up the next-gen impression. A switch to Xenos should see an instant AA improvement.

The rest, like SM3 say, may well not change for first gen titles. Devs will continue using the assets they've got, even SM2, and not aim to hit the hardware hard. They'll more concerned at this time rewriting their existing code to avoid some of XeCPU's pitfalls, perhaps without even considering optimisations to take advantage of it. Let's say they've got a single-threaded PPC main game code. First priority is getting it to run well on XeCPU, which might mean conisdering cache and memory accesses and reworking some algorithms. Perhaps some adventurous devs are looking to move some code chunks onto other cores, and maybe one or two are looking to try to shift some of their processes onto those 128 register VMX units. But at this point with only a few months of development they've got to get the things working, so major improvement to the game over current builds may well be few and far between.

The question is, where's the AA? I haven't seen enough development shots to see if it's being included, and videos are too compressed to show AA's absence. A recent DOA screenshot definitely looked to have 2xAA. On early games using less of the hardware I'd have thought 4xAA would have been happily accomodateable.

 

[SanGreal]

More poly's won't help, unless the art department remodels eery single asset!

Well they could be less aggressive with LOD and the likes, right? (I was really just using it as an example anyway )

The question is, where's the AA?

Thats what I want to know! Anything not being shown in realtime should have AA on since it'll absolutely be in the final build (its free & required). And now that they have xenos everything realtime should too.

 

[London Geezer]

More poly's won't help, unless the art department remodels eery single asset!

And since today's games are hardly ever geometry limited, it won't even help framerate-wise... A bump in bandwidth and fillrate, copuled with a bump in shading performance would be a much better gain, these days when GPUs can already process billions of triangles per second - most of which will never be used.

The question is, where's the AA? I haven't seen enough development shots to see if it's being included, and videos are too compressed to show AA's absence. A recent DOA screenshot definitely looked to have 2xAA. On early games using less of the hardware I'd have thought 4xAA would have been happily accomodateable.

Isn't AA and all such features added at the very last moment? I don't think we should be worried about AA on X360.

 

[SanGreal]

I don't think we should be worried about AA on X360.

I don't think anyone is worried about it, but it would go a long way to improving the overall quality of the images that are coming out.

 

[Wunderchu]

A switch to Xenos should see an instant AA improvement.

AFAIK, switching to Xenos does not automatically give you AA right away ...... for example, IIRC, the R520 Ruby demo which ATI took ~1 week to port to work on Xbox 360 hardware @ E³ , did not have any AA at the time ...........

 

[London Geezer]

I don't think we should be worried about AA on X360.

I don't think anyone is worried about it, but it would go a long way to improving the overall quality of the images that are coming out.

Hence my comment on AA being the last thing to be added. Still, you'd think the devs would try to make their screens look better, i mean it's not like it's a big taboo these days when every screen released has 89213x AA applied, and try to make them pass for realtime screens.

 

[mckmas8808]

Well with all this 25 to 30 percent talk I want to see a noticeable improvement. Thats why I can't wait to see what they show at TGS. Two months time should be long enough to show something comparable to Sony's stuff.

 

[Tap In]

Well with all this 25 to 30 percent talk I want to see a noticeable improvement. Thats why I can't wait to see what they show at TGS. Two months time should be long enough to show something comparable to Sony's stuff.

what sony stuff?

let's wait to see real games on both sides before we go comparing, shall we?

 

[Platon]

Well with all this 25 to 30 percent talk I want to see a noticeable improvement. Thats why I can't wait to see what they show at TGS. Two months time should be long enough to show something comparable to Sony's stuff.

Would that be Cg and 5 fps games stitched to 60fps? ...

 

[mckmas8808]

Well with all this 25 to 30 percent talk I want to see a noticeable improvement. Thats why I can't wait to see what they show at TGS. Two months time should be long enough to show something comparable to Sony's stuff.

what sony stuff?

let's wait to see real games on both sides before we go comparing, shall we?

At the end of the day I agree with you about waiting to compare real games. But for discussions sake do you really think that games like Gundam, HS, Fight Night, Ni-oh\Dynasty Warriors (which ever one it is), and the game with the girl under the tree will look worst?

I really don't think so. Gundam was using just the PPE and a G70 with no middleware. Imagine what they can do once that utilize the SPE's, RSX, and include a Havoks or Aegia based physics engine.

My point is Bandai has never been known to be a big graphics house and looks at what they did with the "Alpha" PS3 kit. And Ninja Theory doesn't really have a huge team either. Imagine teams that created MGS, GT4, Ace Combat, and Shadow of the Colossus. See what I'm trying to say?

 

[London Geezer]

See what I'm trying to say?

That next gen games from capable developers will look gorgeous, on all consoles?