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[JordanN]

There use to be screenshots on the internet that did a detail comparison of Twilight Princess vs Skyward Sword. Maybe they're lost to time now or my memory of them was different.
But this was the best I could find.

The Wii's extra strength did help improve some things but otherwise, it was still just Gamecube++ visuals.

If I wanted to expect a bigger difference, I would have liked to see visuals in the Wii U tech demo.

This is what a next gen Zelda would have looked like.

 

[Romulus]

Hell Switch BOTW doesn't even look as good as that Wii U tech demo does it?

 

[JordanN]

Hell Switch BOTW doesn't even look as good as that Wii U tech demo does it?

Different artstyles.

Technically, there's no reason Nintendo couldn't make a game like that, since even that screenshot of Zelda doesn't even look better than the best PS3 games.

 

[nkarafo]

That's tech demos for you. Heavily scripted, controlled and focused.

 

[JordanN]

That's tech demos for you. Heavily scripted, controlled and focused.

Nintendo's tech demos are pretty modest.

The Wii U tech demo of Zelda wasn't even the best looking game back in 2011. As pointed out, God of War 3 before it is looks just as good, if not better.

 

[V4skunk]

I've heard you want more of them wireframes

Try to find a game on Gamecube that pushes this amount of polys on screen,

Hint: you won't.

IMO Splinter Cell games shows exactly the difference between Xbox and other consoles. Xbox version had way superior shadows thanks to shadow buffers tech build into xbox GPU and because they couldnt emulate these detiled shadows with good results they have use much inferior shadows on GC and PS2. Xbox had shaders and they have use it on many textures to add realism and depth and they were force to make compromises on GC and PS2 versions. Finally thanks to HDD and more RAM on xbox they could build much bigger and more detailed levels.


That one from 2002? You should know the best looking xbox games werent even out yet. On the other hand Romulus have linked thread from 2012 where one develoer who worked on all 3 consoles has said GC wasnt a polygon pushing beast like you try to suggest, in fact according to him it was the opposite because GC could do max 10 million polygons in real gaming scenario. Later on people even suggested "factor 5" 20 million polygon claims was a marketing fairy tale.


On CRT or small 720p LCD Riddick looks great at 480p, but at larger screen you have to sit far from the screen to really enjoy picture quality.

Xbox version runs at dynamic 480p, but there is PC version however, so you can run Riddick in 720p and higher resolutions.

More screenshots in the spoiler

Spoiler: more screenshots

Splinter Cell 3 at 720p

But some games like for example Far Cry 1 looks like a totally different game on PC, unfortunately not every xbox game was ported to PC

Multiplats are not a judge of system power. Never have been.
I have also never denyed xbox gpu power and diretcx gfx effects like normal mapping etc.. This was the reason why multiplats were better on xbox, the graphical effects were ready to go from direct library, no hard work or time to add. Where as the GC and Ps2 had to have graphical effects coded up from scratch, very time consuming and expensive.

To the other guy on about poly count! Either way if GC only pulled 14 million polygons a second, that is still more than xbox is capable of with its 8-12 million.

 

[Romulus]

To the other guy on about poly count! Either way if GC only pulled 14 million polygons a second, that is still more than xbox is capable of with its 8-12 million.

There's no proof of either, even if some exclusive dev came out an said some Xbox game was pushing 25 million, there's no reason to believe that either. It's not like an fps counter or pixel counters were we know for sure, they're just saying things. Means nothing.

Even metrics like resolution(which we can count) are exaggerated(4K!), so something that has absolutely zero means of counting like millions of polygons, is even less realistic. Nothing about anything he says adds up.

 

[DGrayson]

Since when have multiplats been a measure of a consoles power? Lol just lol.
Edit: Check my post history to my links to the 2004-5 arstechnica console war. Read the entire threads.
Rogue Leader 21 million polygons a second in real time, in game.
You idiots do not have a clue.

Refrain from calling people idiots in a friendly thread about near 20 year old systems.

 

[Deleted member 740922]

This thread.........it's like they're remastering console wars

 

[Romulus]

It's kinda sad that the mods have had to step in a couple of times for name calling, at least twice. These folks are likely 30+ years old to be fans of these machines

Otherwise, its been a fun, interesting discussion and I've learned alot, especially on the Dreamcast side. Super capable and fascinating machine for its time.

 

[pawel86ck]

Multiplats are not a judge of system power. Never have been.
I have also never denyed xbox gpu power and diretcx gfx effects like normal mapping etc.. This was the reason why multiplats were better on xbox, the graphical effects were ready to go from direct library, no hard work or time to add. Where as the GC and Ps2 had to have graphical effects coded up from scratch, very time consuming and expensive.

To the other guy on about poly count! Either way if GC only pulled 14 million polygons a second, that is still more than xbox is capable of with its 8-12 million.

Here you can read interesting quotes

Was GC more or less powerful than PS2? *spawn

I have had a hunch or gut feeling Wii U wouldn't be even as powerful as PS360 practically all along. Usually I would state I believed it would be ~30% more powerful, but I always had that hunch. My hunches are often right and later I wish I'd listened to them. So yes, I believe the report. My...

forum.beyond3d.com

You could get pretty good initial performance out of GC, but usually that was pretty much it, no amount of dicking around would get you more polygons or more pixels.

You might get prettier pixels out of a gamecube than a PS2, but usually only because you couldn't be bothered trying to figure out have to make the PS2 produce the better imagery.

Xbox was basically underutilized because no one could be bothered.

On GameCube the biggest issue is it was just had pathetic triangle throughput, the 10M polygons per second (I don't remember the real number) assumes you never clip or light anything.
GameCube was DX7 class hardware for the most part, albeit a more fully featured version than ever shipped in a PC. The GPU just wasn't very fast.
As I said it's real benefit was the memory architecture and I still feel it was over engineered.
On the whole it wasn't a bad machine, but I wouldn't have said it was "more powerful than PS2)

GC was compared to PS2, no xbox and that guy has worked on all 3 consoles. He said 10M polygons was a max on GC, and it's very interesting number, because it reflects what Nintendo themselve said about their console (6-12 Million polygons/sec in real game)

he spent time butting his head against the hardware during actual professional game development. I think that's far more insightful than something off a spec sheet, or even better (worse), a PR claim or something like it given to the none technical gaming press. I think it's odd the way you dismiss what he says pretty much out of hand - unless I'm underestimating your experience and your CPU poly clipping for the Cube was loads better than his.

It's very fair argument, PR statement VS opinion of developer who actually worked on all 3 consoles.

Technical specifications aside after playing these Xbox. GC, PS2 games lately, I think polygon wise xbox wasnt that much better in real games in that particular area, but thanks to DX8 features in Xbox GPU, shadow buffers, more RAM and HDD developers were able to develop bigger games with many new effects at the same time, and that made a huge difference. For example metroid prime 2, this game looks similar to xbox games polygon wise, but without DX8 features low polygon count wasnt masked like on xbox games like Riddick, and because GC had less RAM and no HDD texture quality had to be limited. But I have to say I havent played GC games on real hardware and 480i CRT, but I think at such low resulution these GC games should look good because low resolution just hide polygon imperfections, and textures looks much sharper too. On emulatur in HD or higher resolutions however you can easily see imperfections.

 

[Journey]

Multiplats are not a judge of system power. Never have been.
I have also never denyed xbox gpu power and diretcx gfx effects like normal mapping etc.. This was the reason why multiplats were better on xbox, the graphical effects were ready to go from direct library, no hard work or time to add. Where as the GC and Ps2 had to have graphical effects coded up from scratch, very time consuming and expensive.

Review your history, more often than not, the PS2 was the lead platform for multiplats leading to games being ported to Xbox and having it just brute force it's way through the code, and it was so much more powerful that despite the engines being built for the PS2, developers still had the headroom to add higher res textures and improved framerate as we saw with even the more difficult open world games like Grand Theft Auto 3.

Does it makes sense for a game like Enter the Matrix to be running 1920 x 1080 at 60fps when it runs at 640 x 480 at 30fps on PS2 and GameCube? Xbox was like 1/4th the installed base, so there was no incentive to using the extra power to add texture quality or other enhancements, the easy way was to run it at high res and high framerate.

Xbox was considerably more powerful in all the ways that mattered, so much so that despite being underutilized, games still blew the socks off the PS2 and even Gamecube that launched beside it.

 

[K.N.W.]

Here, some Ghost Hunter PS2 direct capture screenshots:

The game features highly detailed character models, dynamic flashlight lighting ans shadows, progressive resolution, god rays and good textures too! I'm going to upload some flashlight screenshots later.

 

[Esppiral]

Ghost Hunter along Primal have absolutely insane graphics for a ps2 game, highly underrated both of them, specially Ghost Hunter, that games pull some incredible effects on screen. And I agree Image quality wise is among the best on the ps2, although those screens you posted are from PCSX2

 

[K.N.W.]

Ghost Hunter along Primal have absolutely insane graphics for a ps2 game, highly underrated both of them, specially Ghost Hunter, that games pull some incredible effects on screen. And I agree Image quality wise is among the best on the ps2, although those screens you posted are from PCSX2

Nope, those are my screens I've just captured on my PS2.

 

[Esppiral]

Nice then, I know the game has superior image quality specially compared to most Ps2 titles, I am so used to low res, blurry and jagged ps2 captures that I forgot how good this one looks.

 

[K.N.W.]

Nice then, I know the game has superior image quality specially compared to most Ps2 titles, I am so used to low res, blurry and jagged ps2 captures that I forgot how good this one looks.

You may have played it in interlaced mode, the screenshots look crisp also due to progressive mode.

 

[Romulus]

You may have played it in interlaced mode, the screenshots look crisp also due to progressive mode.

I watched a little bit of gameplay, it convinces me that the machine is slightly more capable than I thought.

 

[Alexios]

Indoor levels in that game look way too plain and boxy with few detail objects in them. Guess they spent all the polycount on the characters. Some outdoor level I saw looked nicer overall. Maybe others fared better, I just skimmed some videos.

 

[K.N.W.]

Shadow of the Colossus PS2 direct screenshots.

 

[Neo_GAF]

I dont know if anyone remembers this, but i think it was 02/03s christmas, when nintendo totally forgot to launch any games and instead they only showed a few upcoming games for next year. This year the xbox overtook the race between gc and xb. It was a shame of nintendo not releasing any good games. I remember them showing the crystal chronicles game but with no release date. During blackfriday and before Christmas...

 

[K.N.W.]

More SOTC screens,

 

[Romulus]

SOTC is an incredible game and one of my favorites, in some ways it holds up well, but the image quality is just so bad for some reason in the original. The framerate wasn't great either.

 

[K.N.W.]

SOTC is an incredible game and one of my favorites, in some ways it holds up well, but the image quality is just so bad for some reason in the original. The framerate wasn't great either.

While taking the screens, I renamed it "More than hurts the eyes: The game".

 

[Esppiral]

Framerate in shadow of the colossus can go as low as 10 fps

 

[K.N.W.]

Beyond: Good and Evil PS2 Screenshots.

Spoiler: More Screenshots

Framerate in shadow of the colossus can go as low as 10 fps

They made such a great game that they had to get at least a nominee for the "Most Aggravating Framerate" award by gamespot xD

 

[Chozofication_]

Here you can read interesting quotes

Was GC more or less powerful than PS2? *spawn

I have had a hunch or gut feeling Wii U wouldn't be even as powerful as PS360 practically all along. Usually I would state I believed it would be ~30% more powerful, but I always had that hunch. My hunches are often right and later I wish I'd listened to them. So yes, I believe the report. My...

forum.beyond3d.com

GC was compared to PS2, no xbox and that guy has worked on all 3 consoles. He said 10M polygons was a max on GC, and it's very interesting number, because it reflects what Nintendo themselve said about their console (6-12 Million polygons/sec in real game)


It's very fair argument, PR statement VS opinion of developer who actually worked on all 3 consoles.

Technical specifications aside after playing these Xbox. GC, PS2 games lately, I think polygon wise xbox wasnt that much better in real games in that particular area, but thanks to DX8 features in Xbox GPU, shadow buffers, more RAM and HDD developers were able to develop bigger games with many new effects at the same time, and that made a huge difference. For example metroid prime 2, this game looks similar to xbox games polygon wise, but without DX8 features low polygon count wasnt masked like on xbox games like Riddick, and because GC had less RAM and no HDD texture quality had to be limited. But I have to say I havent played GC games on real hardware and 480i CRT, but I think at such low resulution these GC games should look good because low resolution just hide polygon imperfections, and textures looks much sharper too. On emulatur in HD or higher resolutions however you can easily see imperfections.

Having used to post on b3d for years ; those guys were far from impartial.

Erp as his forum name was, from what i could tell did not have the best outlook of Nintendo given how his team's relationship with them was on n64 game development.

His valid point on the cube as far as i can tell was it was the worst out of the 3 at geometry transformation I.e. clipping polygons or morphing geometry but in terms of static geometry the cube was quite powerful. Also, that the cubes low latency 1tsram was a bit overkill given the large amount of CPU cache at hand.

A single pool of 48mbs of higher bandwidth ddr would have better served cube but that's hindsight.

 

[polybius80]

Blood Money on PS2 was damn impressive, i've expected that it would be chopped up to eleven, god how I was wrong, its the same game with almost intact graphics. Of course it was actually a project born for the sixth generation that got a 360 version, but it had the most detailed visuals i've seen on the console, even the reload animations had the weapons magazine to be detached and inserted a new one.



RE4 was the game with the best graphics hands down on GC, the thing was that developers almost never used its full potential, compared to the Xbox were many games just had a resolution bump and a better framerate, althrough some had actually a vast amount of upgrade such as the Ubisoft titles, the Gamecube was the opposite, it either ran equal or worse than the PS2 version overall, NFS Most Wanted and Splinter Cell Double Agent are examples, they lack the extra effects and have worse textures.

there are ports that are even worst, like gun






other are very interesting like harry potter and the chamber of secrets, they did a different version for ps2 with a different art style with more emphasis in light and color but terrible loadings, the scenes have similar desgin, other games in the series like the prisoner of azkaban are more like traditional ports where they just port assets

 

[Naglafar]

Are there any direct captures of BLACK? I think that was probably the best the PS2 every did graphically. It still didn't touch riddick but I remember being really impressed with it when it came out on my friends PS2.

 

[Naglafar]

Shadow of the Colossus PS2 direct screenshots.

There cant be people that think that looks good in 2019 are there? I can appreciate the art direction but the graphics from a technical level are terrible. Look at them jaggies.

 

[Chozofication_]

I don't think shadow was ever impressive. If it ran smoothly sure, but 20fps or worse in a largely 60fps generation?

The ps4 remake looks and runs great though.

 

[Panajev2001a]

I don't think shadow was ever impressive. If it ran smoothly sure, but 20fps or worse in a largely 60fps generation?

The ps4 remake looks and runs great though.

You are also going orders of magnitude more in terms of performance and memory available.

For its time, for the kind of HW it was running on, and for the size of the team working on it... I think it pushes quite advanced rendering techniques (fur, IK on such huge monsters, A.I., faux HDR tonemapping, bloom lighting, etc...) and has exceptional animations. Despite sometimes the framerate tanking quite a bit, there is a reason or multiple ones why it is still a fond memory for many.

Rendering paper: http://jeremyawon.info/sotcss/making_of_sotc/making_of_sotc.html

 

[pawel86ck]

Having used to post on b3d for years ; those guys were far from impartial.

Erp as his forum name was, from what i could tell did not have the best outlook of Nintendo given how his team's relationship with them was on n64 game development.

His valid point on the cube as far as i can tell was it was the worst out of the 3 at geometry transformation I.e. clipping polygons or morphing geometry but in terms of static geometry the cube was quite powerful. Also, that the cubes low latency 1tsram was a bit overkill given the large amount of CPU cache at hand.

A single pool of 48mbs of higher bandwidth ddr would have better served cube but that's hindsight.

To be honest I dont care how many million polygons Rogue Leader can display on GC, game looks very good and thats the most important thing. But it's very strange why this particular game used bump mapping everywhere, while pretty much every other game either didnt used it, or rarely used it. Especially Metroid Prime would look much better with bump mapping, it would mask texture imperfections (but maybe these textures looked much better on CRT, even PSX games looks sharp on CRT and these games had low resolution textures).

 

[Chozofication_]

To be honest I dont care how many million polygons Rogue Leader can display on GC, game looks very good and thats the most important thing. But it's very strange why this particular game used bump mapping everywhere, while pretty much every other game either didnt used it, or rarely used it. Especially Metroid Prime would look much better with bump mapping, it would mask texture imperfections (but maybe these textures looked much better on CRT, even PSX games looks sharp on CRT and these games had low resolution textures).

I think you are correct with your crt comment. We may be able to hone in on poor textures now, but cube was built with that old display technology in mind.

However, in motion we arent staring at textures 5 inches away and that's another reason why prime 1 and 2 look great in motion, and sometimes not in shots.

They certainly do not look like ps2 games. Compared to the best of all genres on cube and Xbox, prime wasn't among the best of the best, but it was still impressive.

One thing i will say about prime 2 is the arm cannon skins (for when you change ammo type and your arm glows) always looked rough to me, but that's my only gripe.

 

[Romulus]

My opinion of ps2 is changing a little, a few days ago I wouldn't thave thought the Prime games would run on PS2, but there's no doubt in my mind they would now, especially seeing things like Jak3 with huge worlds and 60fps. Give Nintendo 2 -3years with that hardware and they would absolutely make it happen. But not a port. Custom build. I see nothing it's doing out of the question, especially how it only renders small areas with the doors.

 

[K.N.W.]

There cant be people that think that looks good in 2019 are there? I can appreciate the art direction but the graphics from a technical level are terrible. Look at them j


aggies.

My intent was to show something pixelated and really messed up.... I like PS1 style graphics

Are there any direct captures of BLACK? I think that was probably the best the PS2 every did graphically. It still didn't touch riddick but I remember being really impressed with it when it came out on my friends PS2.

I heard you!

other are very interesting like harry potter and the chamber of secrets, they did a different version for ps2 with a different art style with more emphasis in light and color but terrible loadings

Not only, even if the ps2 does have a lower polycount, it has a bit more objectes in the scenes, I'll try to make some comparison screens later.
Even the first Harry Potter on PS2 has different lighting than Xbox. For example, on the Microsoft machine, charging the Flipendo will emit a green light that correctly blends and fades away in the outer sections of the emitted area, meanwhile on the Sony's side, you get a more colorful light, that doesn't smoothly blend on the borders. But, guess what, the ps2 version ends up looking less realistic and flat, but more vibrant and cartoonish, which doesn't really look bad (that's what Sony meant when they said Ps2 could reach "animated movie" level of graphics).
Even the complete lack of texture filtering makes details in the distance stand out better compared to the results achieved by the low levels of anisotropic filtering on Xbox, on ps2 Hogwarts really comes (pixelatedly) alive . This could be a case where PS2's limitations produced graphics that better suited the game, too bad that everything is hindered by low framerates and a nice touch of jaggies, meanwhile on Xbox you get better controls, framerate, resolution and textures. (Hacking the PS2 game to run in 480P mode is feasibly, since framerate are is low that it doesn't make much difference).

 

[Dane]

there are ports that are even worst, like gun






other are very interesting like harry potter and the chamber of secrets, they did a different version for ps2 with a different art style with more emphasis in light and color but terrible loadings, the scenes have similar desgin, other games in the series like the prisoner of azkaban are more like traditional ports where they just port assets

Baldur's Gate Deadly Alliance on Gamecube missed the water effects and textures were on lower resolution.




And the fact the sequel wouldn't be released on Gamecube made me remember one thing, apparently even if the Gamecube was just slighty behind the Xbox on sales, it was the console where third party sold way less.

 

[Chozofication_]

Baldur's Gate Deadly Alliance on Gamecube missed the water effects and textures were on lower resolution.




And the fact the sequel wouldn't be released on Gamecube made me remember one thing, apparently even if the Gamecube was just slighty behind the Xbox on sales, it was the console where third party sold way less.

Re4 has awesome water ripples.

 

[polybius80]

Re4 has awesome water ripples.

ripples are a very interesting case of study for game programming, AFAIK, GC takes care of all geometry on CPU, it send vertex data to GPU for render like OpenGL "immediate mode", the problem is that to make the ripples you have to modify the height of the vertex, is not a straight "take this data and render" you need to run a sine function on Y axis of each vertex with a variable that will change on your main loop each frame you can do that to a single water tile and just copy over and over to fill a lake or the sea that for the small waves and use a similar algorithm to modify the surface for the ripples on all water tiles depending where the character touch the surface on top of that , in modern OpenGL(and DX) you run this on a vertex shader program but on GC you run this on a CPU so it takes CPU time, while PS2 have the VU1 for that kind of work and Xbox have vertex pipes, back then( and for PS3) there was vertex pipes for vertex operations and pixel pipes of pixel/fragment operations now we use unified shaders like stream processors on PS4 and Xbox one that can run vertex or shader programs



there are many developers that expressed the GC lacking vertex processing power, this doesn't mean GC cant make the ripples, it means it can run into performance problems if you do too much vertex operations and other things require CPU time, again AFAIK I am not a GC developer, dreamcast(and n64, ps1 and saturn) also had this kind of problem, that and memory space problems forced devs to use basic shapes to build 3d models so they can use traslate operations instead of modifying vertex for animation or saving vertex positions

its weird to look a for the time high poly count model using this technique

this is for dreamcast, , a 4k+ triangles model is still a very respectable size in many games specially indies it has a lot of detail and normal maps techniques improve it a lot, the problem is that this technique ruins lot of detail, on PS1 games like crash bandicoot were very notable for using other techniques for their models instead but games that used other techniques or vertex modification was uncommon

for comparison this is for N64, we can see the huge improvement in polycounts

 

[polybius80]

Even the complete lack of texture filtering makes details in the distance stand out better compared to the results achieved by the low levels of anisotropic filtering on Xbox, on ps2 Hogwarts really comes (pixelatedly) alive . This could be a case where PS2's limitations produced graphics that better suited the game

this is a very interesting thing you mention, I dont think they are using anisotropic filtering looks more like common mip maps problems, PS2 can do lot of interesting effects with its fill rate and how it interacts with textures and framebuffer effects, its very flexible system but this flexibility require good ideas to use it


here is a presentations with more information about how was used by tri-ACE

Practical Implementation of SH Lighting and HDR Rendering on PlayStation 2" GDC 2005

http://research.tri-ace.com/Data/Practical%20Implementation%20of%20SH%20Lighting%20and%20HDR%20Rendering%20Full-Length.ppt

 

[Chozofication_]

ripples are a very interesting case of study for game programming, AFAIK, GC takes care of all geometry on CPU, it send vertex data to GPU for render like OpenGL "immediate mode", the problem is that to make the ripples you have to modify the height of the vertex, is not a straight "take this data and render" you need to run a sine function on Y axis of each vertex with a variable that will change on your main loop each frame you can do that to a single water tile and just copy over and over to fill a lake or the sea that for the small waves and use a similar algorithm to modify the surface for the ripples on all water tiles depending where the character touch the surface on top of that , in modern OpenGL(and DX) you run this on a vertex shader program but on GC you run this on a CPU so it takes CPU time, while PS2 have the VU1 for that kind of work and Xbox have vertex pipes, back then( and for PS3) there was vertex pipes for vertex operations and pixel pipes of pixel/fragment operations now we use unified shaders like stream processors on PS4 and Xbox one that can run vertex or shader programs



there are many developers that expressed the GC lacking vertex processing power, this doesn't mean GC cant make the ripples, it means it can run into performance problems if you do too much vertex operations and other things require CPU time, again AFAIK I am not a GC developer, dreamcast(and n64, ps1 and saturn) also had this kind of problem, that and memory space problems forced devs to use basic shapes to build 3d models so they can use traslate operations instead of modifying vertex for animation or saving vertex positions

its weird to look a for the time high poly count model using this technique

this is for dreamcast, , a 4k+ triangles model is still a very respectable size in many games specially indies it has a lot of detail and normal maps techniques improve it a lot, the problem is that this technique ruins lot of detail, on PS1 games like crash bandicoot were very notable for using other techniques for their models instead but games that used other techniques or vertex modification was uncommon

for comparison this is for N64, we can see the huge improvement in polycounts

Yep this was what I was saying in my post where I said Gamecube was worst at clipping geometry or morphing polygon meshes when compared to ps2 or xbox. I was more or less saying that baldurs gate on the gamecube isn't really a good representation for rippling water on the cube ; Re4 exists.

But this is probably the reason gamecube got a really good version of burnout 2, but not 3 due to all the car deformation added in. The cpu would've needed to pick up the slack, but I suppose there just wasn't enough. This comes from a post of a burnout 3 dev that's floating around out there.

 

[Rbk_3]

I first got the Gamecube in early 2002 with Madden 2002 and Crazy Taxi. Later that summer I got a PS2 after I got my first job so I could play GTA III, and the following summer in 2003 I got an Xbox and sold the Gamecube. I later picked up a Gamecube again for RE4.

OG Xbox was a great machine at it's time:

- Supported High Def
- Supported true 5.1 sound through optical (the others used Dolby Prologic)
- Had integrated network support

If someone decided to mod it, it opened a lot of possibilities including XBMC which was a great app that lay the foundations to many media features that we take for granted today and weren't available at the time even on dedicated media devices.

It was a great machine techwise and was a great first effort.

I had a PS2 and it had my favourite games (for example MGS2 and MGS3) but it was technically inferior.

Never had a GC because the games it had didn't seem to be worth it.

Man, I remember getting my first HDTV in 2005 and was pumped to play MVP Baseball 05 in HD but it ran so god awful it was unplayable. There were very few games that ran in HD, and even very few that had a 16:9 mode so having a wide screen HDTV sucked as you either had to letter box it or play with the image stretched out.

 

[K.N.W.]

this is a very interesting thing you mention, I dont think they are using anisotropic filtering looks more like common mip maps problems, PS2 can do lot of interesting effects with its fill rate and how it interacts with textures and framebuffer effects, its very flexible system but this flexibility require good ideas to use it


here is a presentations with more information about how was used by tri-ACE

Practical Implementation of SH Lighting and HDR Rendering on PlayStation 2" GDC 2005

http://research.tri-ace.com/Data/Practical%20Implementation%20of%20SH%20Lighting%20and%20HDR%20Rendering%20Full-Length.ppt

Thank you, I'll read it soon Yeah PS2 it's missing Mip Mapping due to the lack of memory, and the result is pixelated texture. I just called it texture filtering to make the post easier to read and understand for everyone ;D

 

[TaySan]

OG Xbox was so nice for mulitplat games at the time. It was amazing how we managed to get Doom 3, Half Life 2 and Splinter Cel CT on it.

 

[Chozofication_]

You are also going orders of magnitude more in terms of performance and memory available.

For its time, for the kind of HW it was running on, and for the size of the team working on it... I think it pushes quite advanced rendering techniques (fur, IK on such huge monsters, A.I., faux HDR tonemapping, bloom lighting, etc...) and has exceptional animations. Despite sometimes the framerate tanking quite a bit, there is a reason or multiple ones why it is still a fond memory for many.

Rendering paper: http://jeremyawon.info/sotcss/making_of_sotc/making_of_sotc.html

The scale was impressive but all the other techniques were done in other games, with higher quality modeling, at much higher framerates. Wander himself looks very blocky and the horse as well, but yeah the colossi were impressive.

Considering there isn't anything in the way of geometry deformation I think it would've been a much better game on the cube. Or Xbox. The game deserved better than 20fps or worse

 

[Panajev2001a]

The scale was impressive but all the other techniques were done in other games, with higher quality modeling, at much higher framerates. Wander himself looks very blocky and the horse as well, but yeah the colossi were impressive.

Considering there isn't anything in the way of geometry deformation I think it would've been a much better game on the cube. Or Xbox. The game deserved better than 20fps or worse

You need to take into account HW it is running on and the budget behind it too, as well as doing those rendering techniques at such scale: size matters . If I saw my Apple Watch rendering SotC as is in real-time at similar framerate in 2019, I would be utterly amazed for example.

I did not have too many issues with Wander and the Horse, part of it was stylistic too, also because of how well they are animated and how they control. This game raised the bar on horse riding animation sequences for sure and we will have to disagree on the fact that SotC broke new ground rendering wise, especially on PS2, as I remain unconvinced nor see evidence otherwise to be frank.

How many PS2 and GCN games we’re performing those visual tricks before SotC came out? ICO in 2001 pulled some similar rendering techniques, but not at this scale.

 

[Chozofication_]

You need to take into account HW it is running on and the budget behind it too. I did not have too many issues with Wander and the Horse, part of it was stylistic too, also because of how well they are animated and how they control. This game raised the bar on horse riding animation sequences for sure and we will have to disagree on the fact that SotC broke new ground rendering wise, especially on PS2, as I remain unconvinced nor see evidence otherwise to be frank.

How many PS2 and GCN games we’re performing those visual tricks before SotC came out? ICO in 2001 pulled some similar rendering techniques, but not at this scale.

I mean bloom was in quite a few games, star fox in 2002 had fur, better modeling than wander and 60fps. I don't like in this thread that we are pretending ps2 and cube are on the same playing field instead of cube and Xbox.

Im not saying the visuals weren't impressive overall, but with the frame rate it's just like well yeah no wonder they were able to do those things. The game controls like absolute crap, the animations are exaggerated at expense on gameplay and the frame rate compounds the issue. Ps3 felt even worse, they messed something in the code.

I'm truly glad bluepoint salvaged the game on ps4 as i couldnt play it before.

Even the horse animations weren't really better than twilight princess.

 

[Tesseract]

sotc def broke new ground with inverse kinematics / portal lod rendering / hdr (simulant) / memory cache

 

[Chozofication_]

sotc def broke new ground with inverse kinematics / portal lod rendering / hdr (simulant) / memory cache

It wasn't at ALL the first game using lods or clever loading...

Wind waker uses inverse kinematics, I think, but I'm betting there are others. It was probably the most impressive example though given the size of the enemies

 

[SonGoku]

This is what a next gen Zelda would have looked like.

I remember Nintendo fans hyping this demo way back, claiming that the final released games always surpassed the tech demo visuals
Im not even sure a PS4 can pull these visuals in a game

Hell Switch BOTW doesn't even look as good as that Wii U tech demo does it?

nope

doesn't even look better than the best PS3 games.

This shot looks awful, i know theres closeup shots were gow3 looks better but thats limited to scripted boss battles not free roaming games like Zelda
The IQ and DoF looks a step above anything on PS3,