Support NeoGAF

[dampflokfreund]

GAF,

currently I'm playing Monster Hunter 4 and I'm really enjoying it. It is so much fun! But aside of that, I also really noticed that the graphics in MH4U are pretty amazing for the 3DS. Sure, there are some low res textures like usual for Monster Hunter, but beside of that the monsters are looking gorgeous (with high res textures on New 3DS) and the most important thing is that there are some impressive techniques in use for a handheld ABSENT from Monster Hunter Tri for the Wii.

Let me explain you why.

1. Improved lighting including use of bloom and various shaders

If we compare the lighting to MH Tri, its kind of flat in comparison lacking various of the techniques in Monster Hunter 4.

These images are a example of the advanced lighting that is used in Monster Hunter 4. Let's compare it to the Wii.

As you can see, the lighting is dramatically enhanced on the 3DS, allowing for a more dynamic lighting and richer colors. That's quite impressive.

Also, the games takes good usage of bloom especially noticeable when looking to the sky, that was also not the case in MH Wii.

2. DOF

The game features a Depth of Field effect in cutscenes for a richer camera effect.

I was pretty impressed by this, it comes close to something you would see on the Wii U or even PS4. Also here, a good usage of bloom. Of course this effect also wasn't used in Monster Hunter 3 Tri.

3. Shadows and self shadowing.

Every monster and character in this game has its own shadow casted by the sun and self shadowing, something that was also absent from the Wii. Also, enviroment objects also have a static shadow.

self shadowing

compared to the Wii:

Notice that there are no shadows at all, or black circles. Also self shadowing is absent in Mh Tri.

4. Better looking monsters.

The textures on the New 3DS are looking more detailed and sharp than anything I have seen in MH Tri

Note that every screen is purely ingame graphics. There is no visual hit from these cutscenes to gameplay besides of Depth of Field, also if you turn on 3D mode it will disable Anti Aliasing.

What's your opinion on this? The 3DS surely has a more modern GPU and MH4 uses many of its fixed functions, which may be why the game looks better than Tri.

On the other hand, Xenoblade 3DS looks worse than the Wii. Maybe only ports will look worse because fixed functions are harder to use there?

It will be interesting to see how much, especially the New 3DS, has in store graphically. The 3DS is not as weak as many have thought, and of course screenshots are looking worse than the game on the actual console.

 

[GhostTrick]

More recent doesn't mean more powerful !
The reason 3DS has better effects is become it's newer. It can do things that Wii's technology didn't allowed. BUT ! You also have to take horsepower into account.

I doubt you could run a game like Metroid Prime 3, F-Zero GX or even Skyward Sword and Mario Galaxy on 3DS.

Basically, your thread should be called:
"3DS is newer and use shaders because of more modern GPU than Wii."

 

[Hasney]

"3DS is newer and use shaders because of more modern GPU than Wii."

Yup, it's hard to say which has more grunt since we can't like for like benchmark them.

 

[Domstercool]

More recent doesn't mean more powerful !
The reason 3DS has better effects is become it's newer. It can do things that Wii's technology didn't allowed. BUT ! You also have to take horsepower into account.

I doubt you could run a game like Metroid Prime 3, F-Zero GX or even Skyward Sword and Mario Galaxy on 3DS.

Basically, your thread should be called:
"3DS is newer and use shaders because of more modern GPU than Wii."

Mario Galaxy's backgrounds are just space, so I don't see why this couldn't be brought to 3DS with some model changes/textures. If Xenoblade can run on it, I think Galaxy can.

 

[Ratrat]

Does it look that much better that MH4? because that game looked like ass.

 

[Sorceror12]

The GPU is much better in the 3ds than the Wii. Pretty much why you see the things you do in comparison to on the Wii.

 

[GhostTrick]

Mario Galaxy's backgrounds are just space, so I don't see why this couldn't be brought to 3DS with some model changes/textures. If Xenoblade can run on it, I think Galaxy can.

Mario 3D Land, which was smaller scale, ran at 30FPS.
Mario Galaxy ran at 60FPS.

Xenoblade has been brought but with lower res textures, slightly lower polycount and more importantly, lesser draw distance.

 

[Bomber Bob]

what's MH4 internal render res?

 

[Doczu]

Well i was waiting when this topic would return from the dead (with the release of the n3DS to be specific).

I'll try to make it short - GPU has some great features that the Wii one does not have (shaders), but the poly output surely isn't at the same level. If i'm correct, the Pica clocked at what it is could theoretically output around 20 milion poly's, around the Gamecube level in 2D. Of course all games are made with 3D in mind so you can't push it to that limit (i don't know if you have to divide it in half). The Wii can output around 30 milion poly's, so...
More memory.
Shit CPU compared to the Wii one. So any game that is CPU heavy will surely take a hit.

But let someone smarter do the typing. I'm sure i made a couple mistakes.

 

[GhostTrick]

what's MH4 internal render res?

400x240. 3DS Native res.

 

[……forgetit]

Mario 3D Land, which was smaller scale, ran at 30FPS.
Mario Galaxy ran at 60FPS.

Xenoblade has been brought but with lower res textures, slightly lower polycount and more importantly, lesser draw distance.

I thought impressions said they fixed the draw distance issue? That said Galaxy isn't nearly as intensive as Xenoblade. You could definitely port it to new 3DS with less consetions than Xenoblade.

 

[Domstercool]

Mario 3D Land, which was smaller scale, ran at 30FPS.
Mario Galaxy ran at 60FPS.

Xenoblade has been brought but with lower res textures, slightly lower polycount and more importantly, lesser draw distance.

You didn't specify running exactly the same, just if it could run it.

 

[Wolf Akela]

Those images reminded me why I hated MH3's graphics so much. They're all so yellow / blurry / bloom.

 

[Sorceror12]

Mario 3D Land, which was smaller scale, ran at 30FPS.
Mario Galaxy ran at 60FPS.

Xenoblade has been brought but with lower res textures, slightly lower polycount and more importantly, lesser draw distance.

According to this article, the draw distance has not been diminished.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-02-24-how-xenoblade-chronicles-scales-down-to-the-3ds

 

[Tom_Cody]

No.

MH4U is just using shaders and other effects that weren't common in Wii games.

 

[GhostTrick]

According to this article, the draw distance has not been diminished.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-02-24-how-xenoblade-chronicles-scales-down-to-the-3ds

From the look of their own videos, it did.

You didn't specify running exactly the same, just if it could run it.

Well, the point of the thread is that N3DS is more powerfull than Wii
So to me, it meant running the game without compromises
Of course you could make Mario Galaxy at 30FPS

 

[samn]

It's got more features (like shaders) but less grunt.

 

[rjc571]

The New 3DS uses the same GPU as the original 3DS. It has 2 more CPU cores but the Wii's CPU is still much more powerful.

 

[patientx]

I also palyed the demo recently and the game is also on the way. If they can improve game this much from one game to another on the 3ds, think about what kind of imrpovements a not rushed wiiu version get ?

 

[dampflokfreund]

More recent doesn't mean more powerful !
The reason 3DS has better effects is become it's newer. It can do things that Wii's technology didn't allowed. BUT ! You also have to take horsepower into account.

I doubt you could run a game like Metroid Prime 3, F-Zero GX or even Skyward Sword and Mario Galaxy on 3DS.

Basically, your thread should be called:
"3DS is newer and use shaders because of more modern GPU than Wii."

I thought about that as well, but if it makes games look better then why not call it more powerful in general? After all, that's what performance does, increase visuals and FPS.

 

[TheCongressman1]

Not really, but it does remind me of how sad I am that they didn't port MH4 to Wii U like they did with MH3U.

 

[SomedayTheFire]

I thought about that as well, but if it makes games look better then why not call it more powerful in general? After all, that's what performance does, increase visuals and FPS.

Because it's not more powerful?

 

[Sanjay]

I hate this thread because I see the words F-Zero GX and 3DS and I can't stop dreaming about that now.

 

[bobbytkc]

explain why xenoblade looks like much worse on the 3ds then, despite running at a fraction of the resolution of a wii game.

monster hunter is a newer game. developers get more software tools and tricks to play with as they go along. that line of reasoning makes far more sense.

 

[Takuan]

It's got snazzier effects, for sure, and the monsters themselves look fantastic for the hardware, but the game's environments look dreadfully poor. In fact, a lot of the game's finer details - armor textures, especially - are difficult to make out, possibly due to the low-res screen. I feel if you took the Wii game and shrunk it to the 3DS' res, it'd look better.

Game's still a ton of fun, but I'd love to see it on stronger hardware.

 

[wrowa]

They've been updating the engine for five more years, there's no telling how a Wii version based on this tech would perform.

 

[TheCongressman1]

It's got snazzier effects, for sure, and the monsters themselves look fantastic for the hardware, but the game's environments look dreadfully poor. In fact, a lot of the game's finer details - armor textures, especially - are difficult to make out, possibly due to the low-res screen. I feel if you took the Wii game and shrunk it to the 3DS' res, it'd look better.

Game's still a ton of fun, but I'd love to see it on stronger hardware.

I believe armor textures are higher resolution, but environment textures are pretty bad looking.

The resolution on the 3DS isn't too bad for this game, but I preferred looking at MH3U on Wii U rather than 3DS by a landslide.

 

[burgerdog]

Put me in the camp that thought MH4 looked awful prior to release. Now I think the game is gorgeous on my n3DS. Hopefully Nintendo's next handheld has the power of a ps360/wii u for even better looking monster hunters.

 

[Xane]

The New 3DS is objectionally more powerful than the Wii no doubt but that's hardly the reason for the lack of shadows. My guess is that they simply never had shadows running in the engine for Tri anyway.

As for the textures - don't forget the Wii had a mere 64MB of memory (mem2) and 24MB of faster, dedicated VMEM (mem1) compared to the unified 256 of the New 3DS.

 

[GuitarAtomik]

Isn't there a more direct comparison with Xenoblade? Does that look better or worse?

 

[Sorceror12]

Apart from the halved framerate (30 on 3DS) DKCR looked pretty good compared to Wii.
http://youtu.be/nrATPNctGyQ

 

[thewhitehawk]

No, it doesn't. It just proves that that the developers were able to make more efficient use of the processing capability of the 3DS or that they have better tools/methods that allow them to do so.

If the 3DS was more powerful than the Wii than Xenoblade Chronicles wouldn't have had to be downgraded. With that said, I don't think that whatever performance gap exists between the Wii and the 3DS is very large, but they were engineered with very different concerns in mind.

If the latest Smash, as an example, was developed for the Wii also, we could a direct comparison but since it wasn't, and since only one Wii game has been ported to the 3DS so far, as far as I know, we don't have solid enough evidence to make a case for the 3DS being more powerful or not.

 

[samn]

explain why xenoblade looks like much worse on the 3ds then, despite running at a fraction of the resolution of a wii game.

Well you kinda answered this yourself...

 

[depths20XX]

Uh, you're comparing 2 different iterations of a game. Of course the newer one will look better.

 

[derwalde]

i love the game but in all honesty, it looks like sh... on my 3dsXL. never had the same thought on MH Tri.

 

[hoserx]

I think the game does look fantastic for a 3ds title. The monsters are definitely more detailed this time around, and at least on the new 3ds, the performance is fantastic. (MH3U ran pretty well on 3ds too, higher framerate than WiiU by far.)

I'm not sure that this proves anything about brute force, but it does show that the new 3ds is able to produce effects that the Wii could not.

 

[DrFurbs]

i love the game but in all honesty, it looks like sh... on my 3dsXL. never had the same thought on MH Tri.

Meh I'm due to pick this up tomorrow.. How's it run? Does it really look thay bad? I thought the PSP version was OK looking.

 

[Not75Drops]

Mario 3D Land, which was smaller scale, ran at 30FPS.
Mario Galaxy ran at 60FPS.

I don't really know much about tech but I was always thought it was weird that 3D Land wasn't 60fps while Mario Kart 7, a game released only a few weeks later could since the latter seems like a more intensive game.

 

[wrowa]

Apart from the halved framerate (30 on 3DS) DKCR looked pretty good compared to Wii.
http://youtu.be/nrATPNctGyQ

Don't agree with that at all. DKCR is a real beauty, but the 3DS port had really rough graphics and horrible performance issues with constant framedrops. It's one of the very few cases where bad performance took the fun straight out of a game for me.

 

[RobotVM]

Err I still think the Wii had more power.

 

[tuffy]

Meh I'm due to pick this up tomorrow.. How's it run? Does it really look thay bad? I thought the PSP version was OK looking.

It think it looks fine. The art style in 4 Ultimate seems a bit more saturated compared to 3 Ultimate, but the environments look distinct and have enough detail to tell where you are at a glance. The framerate's also smooth on the New 3DS much of the time, in my experience.

 

[derwalde]

Meh I'm due to pick this up tomorrow.. How's it run? Does it really look thay bad? I thought the PSP version was OK looking.

dont get me wrong, the game itself is fantastic and worth buying, especially considering its an exclusive. single player runs smooth like butter, 4-player multiplayer - not so much, but its playable.

 

[DrFurbs]

I love mh and my wife already had an XL. I'm planning to play 2 player with my son over the internet. What do you reckon the fps dips down to?

 

[Takuan]

Meh I'm due to pick this up tomorrow.. How's it run? Does it really look thay bad? I thought the PSP version was OK looking.

The IQ is shit in comparison, but it's a better looking game as a whole thanks to the effects and nicer textures. For what it's worth, it doesn't affect my enjoyment of the game.

dont get me wrong, the game itself is fantastic and worth buying, especially considering its an exclusive. single player runs smooth like butter, 4-player multiplayer - not so much, but its playable.

Yeah, it really dips with 4 players on the n3DS - seems like low 20s at times, but it's usually only when a bunch of effects are going on. It's probably worse on the regular one, although how much worse is hard to say since it doesn't use the same textures.

 

[Raide]

MH4U certainly looks good for a 3DS game. They have some great additions to the games style but the hardware is still holding it back but Capcom is also holding is back on weaker hardware.

Put 40 hours in now and I love it but there is certainly room to improve but unless Nintendo show off a new DS console, I still cannot avoid the massive pixels and rough edges.

Need more Palico detail!!

 

[stuminus3]

Regardless of hardware Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate is also several iterations of the same game engine ahead of Tri.

 

[wiibomb]

dont get me wrong, the game itself is fantastic and worth buying, especially considering its an exclusive. single player runs smooth like butter, 4-player multiplayer - not so much, but its playable.

The IQ is shit in comparison, but it's a better looking game as a whole thanks to the effects and nicer textures. For what it's worth, it doesn't affect my enjoyment of the game.


Yeah, it really dips with 4 players on the n3DS - seems like low 20s at times, but it's usually only when a bunch of effects are going on. It's probably worse on the regular one, although how much worse is hard to say since it doesn't use the same textures.

on the NEW 3ds???? are you sure you are playing MH4U?? on the n3DS the game never dips below 30fps, and I see it constantly go 45+ fps

 

[Saint Gregory]

I thought MH4 looked significantly worse than MH3U on 3DS when I tired the demo on XL. Playing the full game on n3DSXL was like a night and day difference in terms of quality. It's like Capcom developed the game with the n3DS as the primary platform.

I don't think that it proves anything other than the 3DS has a more modern GPU architecture though.

 

[Haunted]

 

[wiibomb]

I still think the Wii can handle a lot better textures as well as bigger scales

and if the n3DS would have been better than the Wii, it wouldn't have needed the downgrade they are making for Xenoblade Chronicles