lostinblue
Banned
With posts as huge ass as mine I find it surprising that I'm apparently not explaining myself.
I'm doing so all the time; repeatedly.
See, the Mario Sunshine model wasn't complex at all; but going just under 1500 polygons was still a choice - and that was my point. There's no such thing as generational thresholds for polycounts, Mario Sunshine had a low poly main character model for it's gen, it wasn't "somewhere between N64 and GC".
And did you even read my post? No need to tell me about RE4 Leon Kennedy model when I stated PS2/GC/Xbox character model polygonal detail record was Billy Coen on Resident Evil 0, sitting at 25.000 polygons counting the handgun. Another corridor'ish GC game from Capcom, P.N.03 managed to push ~14.000 on Vanessa Z. Schneider. We could go on, but there's no point; I fully know what GC was capable of and pulled, thank you.
Mario Sunshine though, had very little "water physics" by the modern definition of that, and even less "open world" going on (you could see neighbour areas on each level, but you couldn't go there; you were stranded on levels, like on, say, Mario 64). It was simply a choice like any other, and yes, I bet more development time and they could have pulled the 60 fps original target framerate (and the 1500 polygon decision was no doubt tied to it). Mario Galaxy though is 60 fps and still has a character model 3.6 times more detailed; they used part of the extra overhead and optimization to go further on the model because it benefitted from it. Again, it's a balancing act; it's doesn't look *half* as good as Leon from RE4 at 5000 polygons despite the fact Leon has 10.000 polygons going on. no. They're different.
Same can be said for every single character model in existence, being used on a different game and under a different artistic direction; they have different needs.
My point is: If they wanted to go higher they could (at limit, coming at the price of toning something else down), but they didn't. And lots of Wii U games won't go higher not because they can't but because they don't need to.
You're turning it backwards. I never said you should expect a 4x geometry increase over anything; and I didn't because I won't. The fact you're expecting something along those lines from me amazes me, did you even read what I said up until now?
What I said goes along the lines of software is a sum of all parts, hence with whatever extra overhead I have, I can invest it all in something, hence I could make a point in quadrupling character model polycount over the PS3/X360 since I have a more overhead - but the point is: why should I? Asset detail balance varies, but usually levels take a lot more geometry than the character model.
Quadrupling the whole games geometry 4-fold? hell no, lol. But I don't even see why you should seeing it's still 720p and current gen is NOT really geometry starved and that's the real reason nobody talks about polygons anymore (hence you making the point that a perfectly rounded looking game doesn't really "surpass" PS3 geometry) - Polygon starvation only happened this gen (save lousy rendering engine/tech) in the cases it opted to forgo it for more normal and displace maps over polygon throughput and that's a tendency that lessened throughout the generation too (Gears of War 1, 2 and 3 being poster childs of that "evolution/balance/re-evaluation").
And even if they could 4-fold it I can imagine some developers would simply forgo variable LOD before they dreamed of going higher.
That's it, I'm officially quitting this discussion; that has been discussed to hell and back before, the reasons for it were well discussed and I'm not willing to go there with someone as certain of everything as yourself.
Very different architectures, up to now you had paradigm shifts but mostly linear evolutions going on; every new part would surpass the older part in everything tenfold. Such generational leaps are out of stock these days, and this generation cpu architectures were a complex dead end branch of evolution; hence Wii U and other platforms are straying away from it; that means code written for them, and optimized for years for them is gonna suffer heavily, it's that einstein quote, fish don't climb tree's, but you can conclude they're dumb from that; in fact it's pretty dumb to conclude just that.
Even XBone and PS4 CPU's are barely meeting not surpassing those cpu's GFlop performance despite the fact they have more logical cores going on (Xenon's 3 cores match XBone 8 core GFlop rating); Wii U cpu can certainly do more (not a testament to it's quality, just how inefficient current gen cpu's were), just not the same way, the fact there was a lack of balance on them this gen though, made it so that devs adjusted and heavily optimized code for those strengths; optimization that needs to be undone for Wii U, XBone and PS4 ports. XBone, PS4 ports could suffer too, they probably just won't because unlike with the Wii developers will actually have a team of more than 3 people doing said conversions; as well as more time, budget and willingness too; the extra overhead might help a little too, but it doesn't tell the whole story.
I also think mentioning Darksiders 2, a game made under such kind of pressure and lack of results is really ill intentioned on your part; proves nothing. Launch titles in general too, but that one in particular should be disregarded completely for obvious reasons.
Said changes to architecture though are all things you can't really measure, and I can understand them not being all that obvious.
There's one good example though, PS2 vs XBOX 1; Xbox next to PS2 was a behemoth but it caved in hard to run Metal Gear Solid 2 PS2 port, do you know why? PS2 CPU had 6.2 GFlops to it, GPU outputted 0 GFlops, Xbox was more regular design, so CPU outputted less than 2 GFlops and GPU did all the rest resulting in a way more balanced platform. But Metal Gear Solid 2 attempted to do things like running the rain from the CPU, a GFlop demanding kind of code too.
And the platform didn't have that overhead there but elsewhere, so performance was really bad - simple really (and you had idiots saying Xbox was less capable than PS2 due to that); but truth is you'd have to rewrite and repurpose all that code into somewhere else. That would be a load of work for the team though, hence they didn't bother.
Same is true for Wii U versus X360/PS3 code; in a universal way too. In regards to how much better they could manage had minimum resources not been a reality, I dunno. But exclusives are showing a bit of overhead so you have to assume it's really there - I'm not pointing towards Mario 3D World, whatever it's doing it's hard to judge for me at this point (but I'll hammer away that the PS2 quote is very out of place still).
Software written for X360/PS3 is Wii U's behemoth, it's better off running a PC or XBone/PS4 downport; but that proves nothing other than the CPU being a very different beast.
Developers are trying to present a generational leap because they believe that sells hardware/software; but our point has been that you have current gen character models eligible for the highest budget next gen production, and nothing's gonna humiliate, say... The Last of Us.
Generational leaps are becoming harder and harder to present.
Nintendo is no different, hence we're seeing an effort to go past what's expected on PS3/X360, them and their associates are the only ones making such effort on their platform though; and said improvement will be halved against other upcoming platforms.
