I'm surprise no one has posted this comparison yet
I cant believe people really defend some of halo 3 looks compare to this
might not be the best example but still i think it gets my point across
"Might not be the best example" is quite an understatement. Even people who defend Halo 3 don't tend to argue that the human models are particularly high-fidelity and well-produced, and it's very widely agreed that Halo 3's Hood model is hilariously appalling. Most of Halo 3s character modeling looks more or less okay, at least within the game's overall visual makeup.
It's a cherry picked and extraordinarily non-exhaustive comparison of the visuals in Halo's 3 and 4.
No the TAA was not awful you are exaggerating it
Yeah, I'm always a little surprised at how much crap the TAA gets. The technique doesn't constantly inaccurately mix and cause ghosting, it checks the motion buffer and turns blending off if there's significant movement. It has some issues with figuring out motion on dynamic objects that have complex animations, which especially becomes an issue when you have your camera static while watching characters run around.
In the general run of play, there's not a whole lot of ghosting. It's actually pretty easy to tell that the AA is turning off in motion, which IMO is almost a larger issue. For people who especially dislike the sort of blur caused by the wide quincunx blending pattern, that's also perhaps a larger issue; when it's active Reach's AA produces extremely smooth and consistent results, but they
are a bit soft.
I am sure if FXAA was around when Reach came out we'd have seen that implemented in the game instead.
TAA was arguably overambitious in seventh-gen games, though ironically it's being used by most of the eighth-gen graphical heavy-hitters being praised for good image quality. Those games have somewhat better motion tracking, and reproject pixels from the previous frame to avoid having to turn off AA in motion (though in general they only do this to a point, I've noticed a very Reach-like supersampling-turns-off effect in Second Son when you switch from a slow pan to a medium-speed pan).
Halo Reach also had the two buffer HDR setup from Halo 3 (the visual gain you get from this outweighs any visual gain from going 720p if you were to trade off one for another as was the case with all four Halo games last gen)
Actually,
Reach uses a single 7e3 (7 bits mantissa/3 bits exponent) floating point final color buffer. It doesn't give as much depth and Halo 3's format, and as a whole I get the sense that Reach isn't targeted at nailing the extremely high-contrast imagery that Halo 3 can excel with.
Reach had objectively more particles effects on screen and they were also more persistent and physics based like Killzone 2 and I think they were also full resolution
Bungie's SIGGRAPH 2013 graphics presentation says that they used a combination of fullres and halfres blending in Reach.
it also had more foliage and they were not static like Halo 4.
Halo 4 has some animated foliage as well, though Reach does seem to use more foliage. Halo 3 goes the extra step of having some plants which react to being bumped into by people and vehicles.
Lastly water shader in Reach were not a downgrade but an upgrade from Halo 3, yes it was not as interactive but it was not a downgrade in terms of shader.
I would tend to strongly disagree. Reach's water looks better pretty much only in terms of geometry LOD; Halo 3's water makes drops in tessellation a tad noticeable. And that's at best a partial victory, since Reach has quite a bit of water which seems to support very little to no geometric animation.
All of the water in Halo 3 that you can walk up to supports a geometric wave response to things, environmental specular that is correctly handled based on environmental shadowing, and special diffuse and specular response to dynamic lights to fake stuff like underwater light scattering. Reach is regularly trading those things off (particularly the last bit; I'm not sure that there's any water in Reach that responds to dynamic lights at all).
Halo 4 is worse than Halo 3 in terms of shaders and worse than Halo Reach in terms of interactivity.
Not quite. Halo 4's water at least fairly consistently responds to objects, which isn't true of all the water in Reach. Though overall I'd probably still tend to take Reach's water in a heartbeat. Might depend on which water and how it's being used, as Reach is very inconsistent about it.
a volumetric lighting system
What in particular are you referring to?
(but lacked the HDR of Reach).
It would be really interesting to know what sort of HDR depth Halo 4 can handle. Whatever it is, it's clearly not good enough for the scenes the game uses; Halo 4's bloom especially is obviously blowing out left and right.
Plus a very stylistic look, more so than any other Halo game
Really? I thought Halo 4 had an extremely realistic overall visual style. CE/3/ODST especially seem extremely stylized by comparison.
