Grooveriding
Diamond Member
Saying KZ2 has graphics even close to the league of Crysis maxed out is laughable. Consoles look horrible in comparison to anything on the PC, and the console's idea of 'AA' is a sorry joke.
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One of the benefits of fixed hardware is that the devs know what to crank and what not to crank. The end result is that it looks awesome with little bits of shit thrown in.
PC is the opposite. Fallout 3 has so many options that it's just ridiculous. I know that if I crank the settings, the game runs horrible, so I take the easy route and turn off things when I either don't understand what it does or don't care what it does. Shadows? Disabled. Water effects? Disabled. Draw distance? I don't know what kind of performance hit they cause, so I turned them completely down until I found that it caused major pop-up problems. Now "actor", "object", and "item" are maximum and everything else is minimum draw distance. Textures are still high because I like high res textures. I disabled specular and a few other lighting effects.
Now the question is "given my system specs, did I do it right?". I really don't know. I don't know what kind of effects cause big performance hits, so I just dick around with a few things and hope it works. The above settings for Fallout 3 seem to work really good, but I don't know if they're the best settings. When they made that game for Xbox and PS3, they tested the hell out of it to figure out exactly which settings should be on or off to give the best performance and appearance for that specific hardware configuration.
edit
The complaints about Crysis come from people who turn the "shader" up. My 8800GTX can run that game at maximum settings except the shader. Turning shader from medium to very high cuts the frame rate in half.
frythecpuofbender
Member
Regarding FALLOUT 3:
I'd rather have the options to make it look better than PS3 and XBOX360 than to have everything forced to MEDIUM so that it looks exactly like the console versions.
Sure sometimes the ADVANCED GRAPHICS options in games can be a bit overwhelming at first, but there are lots of tweak guides out there that have comparisons what setting corresponds to e.g. PS3 quality level.
I agree that it would be easier to just have a "PS3 level" slider there.
Regarding Crysis performance:
Well Crysis is the most shader intensive game there is. Your 8800GTX has 128 shaders I think, a GTX 260 has 216, so that would nearly double the performance right there.
I had a 8800GTS with 112 shaders and played Crysis on 1440x900 on everything HIGH with the XP VERY HIGH tweaks and got 35-40 fps in SP and 50 fps in MP.
When I upgraded to a GTX260, I started to play in 1680x1050.
zerocool84
Lifer
I wouldn't say horrible but there is a large difference. Also comparing smaller textures on a console to the larger textures on a PC is too different as well.
Experience has taught me that 99% of the time it's best to turn off anything related to shadows and reflections, but some of this stuff is new and I don't really understand it. I don't really know what shaders are or what kind of performance hit is involved. I sort of know what specular lighting is, but I can't describe it to you nor can I estimate how it affects performance. When my frame rate is not perfect, I end up turning these weird things off because I can't honestly say I know whether or not they are worth the performance hit. It's hard to look at a picture and say "this picture lacks shaders" or "the specular in this is horrible". Even when looking at side by side screenshots, I need to look really close to see what the difference is. Even then that's not a fair comparison since lots of things need to be seen in motion to truly understand; HDR is the best example of this (things change color as you look at it from different angles).
My point is that people often come to the conclusion that computer games have unreasonable hardware requirements because the games have so many weird settings and we don't know what is causing the massive lag. The game developers are not people like you or me. They know exactly why it's lagging and they know what to turn off. This is why Fallout 3 can still look amazing on an Xbox 360; all they did was turn off maybe 1 or 2 features that cause the majority of all lag.
Let's try a thought experiment. Let's say you buy Fallout 3 and you know absolutely nothing about video quality settings. You're using an old 7950GT video card which exceeds the game's requirements, but is nowhere near top of the line. At high settings, the game runs like shit. What do you? Being that you know absolutely nothing, you put it to medium settings. The game still runs like shit. You set it to low and now the game is playable but looks worse than Doom 3 which came out 4 years ago. Your conclusion would be that this game is horrible and it's poorly programmed and that PC games have stupid requirements.
That's basically what this thread is about, isn't it? The OP incorrectly but understandably assumed that Crysis needs the most ridiculous hardware to run properly, but it's really just the shader that does that. If you turn down the shader, Crysis is actually a very smooth game with very reasonable hardware requirements. For the above example of playing Fallout 3 on a 7950GT, the game doesn't need to look like shit to run properly. My friend plays it with a 7950GT and it looks fine if the settings are adjusted correctly. What are the settings? Texture resolution is high, every other setting is set to minimum or off. For your viewing pleasure, I took 2 screenshots of Fallout 3 running at those exact settings.
shooting a car
looking at a building
I should state again that the settings in those screenshots work great on a GeForce 7950GT, which is just a little bit better than what a PS3 or Xbox 360 has. PC games don't have crazy requirements, but it can take a lot of work to figure out how to make it look good without needing top of the line hardware. If you had an Xbox 360, it would look about as good as that picture using almost the same hardware, but it wouldn't need any dicking around.
taltamir
Lifer
So true... there is also the fact that consoles are simply not fixed hardware. there are MANY different console generations, with completely different hardware. the three major revisions in xbox saw a die shrink, and then a second die shrink in which two of the chips were merged, the PS2 had what... 14 revisions?
They are all simply equivalent in performance, like how the 8800GT was a performance equivalent but different in design and construction.
BenSkywalker
Diamond Member
Absolutely, I was just pointing out that despite what many people think, WoW is actually a rather brutal system killer at this point.
It's the exclusives I'm talking about. Given that we know the ports easily run much faster on the PC, why aren't PC exclusive games looking easily superior to the console exclusives? Honestly, the fact that I have to use Crysis, a game that came out in '07, as a comparison speaks quite poorly about the state of PC engine utilization by itself.
Contrast in particular a TNT1 hooked up to a high quality CRT will simply obliterate quad SLI or Crossfire setups on a LCD, that is what I was getting at.
What I am getting at is due to the direction the PC market went, exclusively moving with LCD technology, they can not compete with higher end console setups in terms of color or contrast. Yes, you can hook a PC up to a plasma, although that removes pixel density advantages that help mask a lot of issues with PC visuals.
Crysis made a huge profit.
Geometric LOD adjustments popping up all over the screen, clearly visible and distracting foliage draw in and very obvious LOD adjustments there, heavy utilization of alpha textures with occlusion culling to give the impression of dense screen population- all over the place in Crysis. Not knocking them in the least, that's how you handle an engine of that complexity(except the geometry LOD issue, that really does look like absolute ass).
It really isn't. The above mentioned points along with overdone IK(200lb guys don't go flailing when shot by a 7.62mm round), inferior weapon models, and a less robust particle system is where I see KZ2 showing clear advantages over Crysis. Crysis has its' own elements where I think it has a clear overall advantage, but when taken as a whole- I see them as pretty much a wash.
GT4 ran on what is roughly equal to a ~300MHZ P4 and souped up Voodoo1- you will not find anything within a couple generations worth of progress on the PC that can compete with it using comparable hardware.
When has Carmack ever cared about being friendly on a political basis to the platforms he is supporting or not? If you won't take Carmack's word for it, I really don't know what to say. Play GTA4 on a PC with a 256MB 7900GT and 256MB system RAM and see how it does, maybe that would drive home the point?
It's the PC exclusives I'm talking about. Hell, lately it seems like most of the better looking PC games are ports, why aren't the PC exclusive titles dominating?
In a nutshell, yes 🙂
No, I was stating that it needed insane hardware to run with comparable quality to KZ2. I'm rather well versed in what it takes to run games hardware wise 🙂
Yikes- that is an.... interesting perspective.
They are identical on a functional basis, down to the bit of code that can be moved across any given bus at any given time. Check out how Cell's 'cache' works, devs use assembly level code to move data via DMA for vector based calcs, desptie multiple die shrinks any changes to performance would break code(it isn't just Cell, consoles in general use the same development approach).
BFG10K
Lifer
What resolution does Killzone 2 actually render at? I'm not talking about the output resolution - which is often meaningless since many PS3/360 titles upscale from lower than 720p ? but rather the internal render resolution.
As for console games, in general the PC beats them hands-down, and we?ve seen this time & time again: http://www.gamespot.com/features/6202552/index.html
Hmm, I seem to remember the Crytek devs saying Crysis won?t be on consoles because they don?t have enough power to run it.
As for console games, in general the PC beats them hands-down, and we?ve seen this time & time again: http://www.gamespot.com/features/6202552/index.html
BenSkywalker
Diamond Member
1280x720 unless you are using a display that can only run 1080i/p(which honestly, I didn't know existed) at which point it renders 960x1080- scaling causes issues with the game.
Crysis code base would never run on the consoles, they take a completely different approach to utilize their resources to peak effectiveness. Hell, I don't think the consoles could load the insanely bloated code base for the menu system in Crysis(measuring RAM useage on my PC it wouldn't). Consoles use far more procedural based approaches then PCs to reduce memory utilization. For the PS3, they also are threaded far more heavily then PC games(only use two cores on Cell and you are going to have major performance issues).
Where I'm coming from, if the console exclusive games can approach the end visual quality with significantly lower resources why aren't the PC exclusive titles significantly outpacing the console exclusives?
Those are ports, and most of the differences they list come down to simply using more RAM and fillrate/bandwidth. From their GTA4 comments-
A 1GB vid card can't load maximum quality textures still, and honestly BFG- you think the textures in GTA4 are what you would call good? We have seen games that use significantly less resources that look much, much better then GTA4 even on the texturing front. That is the point I'm getting at. With the amount of raw power we have available on PCs, we should be looking at visuals in game that are at least a generation beyond what is available on consoles. Instead, we are given the option to increase resolution/AA and maybe use even larger textures and that is it. While it is true those are all very real advantages PCs have, where they absolutely obliterate the consoles is in shader power, and we aren't seeing that utilized effectively at all in any of the PC exclusive games(save Crysis, which is coming up on two years old).
Edit- BTW- Kick ass job on the IQ comparison article, very thorough and very nicely done- kills any of the IQ 'comparisons' I've seen at any of the major sites 🙂
BFG10K
Lifer
Has this actually been confirmed by the developer? Again, there are a huge amount of PS3/360 games that claim "720p" but actually run far lower.
But let's assume it is 720p. That would mean the 1280x1024 Crysis benchmarks you linked to have ~42 % pixels than Killzone 2.
Does Killzone have the same draw distances as Crysis?
Does Killzone have the same level of vegetation as Crysis?
Does a typical Killzone scene render 1 million polygons like Crysis?
Also I checked a few screenshots:
http://au.pc.ign.com/dor/objec...85.html?page=mediaFull
http://au.ps3.ign.com/dor/obje...84.html?page=mediaFull
I know still screenshots don?t always do a game justice, but those Killzone screenshots look absolutely woeful. I?ve seen better graphics from a Quake 1 source port running high resolution textures.
Ports, as in console games ported to the PC? Yes, in most cases.
That?s the point - the PC still comes out ahead despite running sub-optimal code originally designed for consoles.
That, and larger draw distances, which is a big one. You?ll repeatedly see such comparisons mentioning the PC can see things the consoles aren?t even rendering.
Thanks. We don?t always agree (in fact we almost never do), but I still value your opinion. 🙂
BenSkywalker
Diamond Member
Yes, that's the only reason I know about the odd scaling issue. I'd imagine that would create some fairly ugly aliasing on TVs that have the limitation where they can't handle 720p too, but I don't think I've seen a TV that can't scale that resolution.
16x10 numbers. I would have linked 800x600, but 12x10 is the lowest they have. Not a lot of scaling going on.
For the first two no, but neither would really fit in what the game does. It's more like Gears in terms of level design etc. As far as polys per frame, KZ2 may be a bit higher then Crysis honestly.
Yeah, those screenshots are bad, these are better but still scaled. One of the downsides to doing direct comparisons is we can't do a framebuffer dump on consoles 🙁
The only port that I can think of that was honestly designed for consoles from the start is the original Splinter Cell, and that still has better visuals on the original XBox then on a 4870x2. If a title is going to be running on both the consoles then it isn't going to heavily optimized for either of them, they are VERY different beasts and have considerable differences in how they should be optimized(PS3 is a poly monster, 360 has free AA etc).
In cross platform titles absolutely. Check out something like GT5P and the draw distance is quite solid on the console side(for miles).
Edit-
While I don't agree with that assertion, in terms of rendering styles GT5P is actually closer to the way Crysis renders then KZ2. Link.
nitromullet
Diamond Member
I've already agreed that consoles do make better use of what hardware they have, it stands to reason that they do. However, you made the point that a console game can (and does) offer the same or equivalent visuals as the top PC game. You can twist it anyway you want to, but they don't. My point is that they aren't quite as powerful in relationship to PCs as their makers and the developers would have you believe.
You already know the answer to this. It's because consoles drive game development now.
frythecpuofbender
Member
Crysis normally shovels more than 1.75 million polys per screen. Even the MP levels have that much.
Regarding Fallout 3 and screenshots showing specularity or shaders:
That's the thing: Screenshots DON'T show a specular highlight or pixelshaders very good.
Parallax Occlusion mapping or reflections only come to life if you walk by an object.
Oh yeah and those KZ2 shots aren't screenshots. They come from the fake realtime trailer from 2005 which they had to admit was prerendered target render quality. They never achieved this.
Regarding Fallout 3 and screenshots showing specularity or shaders:
That's the thing: Screenshots DON'T show a specular highlight or pixelshaders very good.
Parallax Occlusion mapping or reflections only come to life if you walk by an object.
Oh yeah and those KZ2 shots aren't screenshots. They come from the fake realtime trailer from 2005 which they had to admit was prerendered target render quality. They never achieved this.
Right, but its not really pushing graphics card sales, which again, kills about half the PC sales demographic off the top.
I don't disagree PC exclusives are lacking. I agree that the majority of games with high quality visuals nowadays tend to be console ports. We've already touched on that a bit with many PC pioneers like Carmack and Sweeney, and more recently Yertli stating they plan to focus on console development going forward. The financial considerations of producing a high visual quality PC exclusive simply don't make sense anymore. I'd say Nitro put it pretty well, there aren't PC devs anymore, there's just game devs.
But none of that makes my point any less valid, that a PC version of a console port will always look vastly superior than the console version. To me that's still a huge advantage for the PC even if we have to wait 5-6 months for the port, or not get some exclusives at all (MGS, Halo 3, GoW2, KZ2 etc).
I'd disagree, especially if the image on the CRT was a low contrast image and the image on the LCD was a high contrast image.
I'm not really following what you're saying here. PC games still look fantastic on CRTs and Plasmas, there wasn't some dramatic shift that changed that with LCDs.
Anyways, my point was that the PC versions are going to produce better colors than the console versions, so given the same output, the PC version will look superior on the same display. I'd also go as far to say the PC would look better on the LCD than the console would on the plasma due to the inferior quality of the output.
Only after a huge influx in hardware to satisfy its incredible hardware requirements with the release of the 8800GT and 3870. Crysis sold <100k units before Christmas (considering only $300-$600 G80s could run it well, this wasn't surprising), both of those mainstream parts were released in November for $200-$300, sold like crazy over the holidays and ultimately translated into sales for Crysis hitting 1,000,000 at the end of January. I think Crysis may ultimately become the de facto case study for why PC exclusives that rely on high visual production values simply don't make sense anymore.
Again, what are you basing this on? The canned fly-by demo? That certainly does show excessive texture pop-in and blatant LOD adjustments, especially given the default texture streaming settings but that's certainly not reflective of actual gameplay as you'll never move that fast at such a wide FOV to cause such pop-in. Its much less noticeable in actual gameplay and all the base world geometry is still there. For example, if you're running along and see a clear skyline, you won't suddenly see a mountain pop up out of nowhere (or through the fog in KZ2) once it reaches whatever set view/occlusion distance for distant objects. You also won't see low-res 2D mock-ups or distant impostors like you see in many games.
Also, you can significantly reduce any such texture or LOD pop-in by running the 64-bit binaries and using console commands to disable texture streaming and enabling texture precache for each level. Of course this will increase hardware requirements, but that just stresses the advantage PCs have with scalability.
Honestly, how can you even compare the resource management and view distance of Crysis to KZ2? You might as well compare a shooter that's completely indoors based on those screenshots. Not only does KZ2 rely heavily on limited view distance, it looks to be completely linear/funneled in design meaning it has a clear advantage when it comes to predictive rendering and caching.
1) Refers to physics, I don't disagree that software ragdoll effects are largely overdone but they could certainly be worst. Its fully destructible environments and use of physics elsewhere are arguably the best done in software on any gaming platform.
2) Again, I don't see it, and I know you know the difference between art direction/style vs. visual quality so I guess we disagree.
3) Impossible for me to tell without seeing live footage, but I can see already KZ2 makes heavy use of fog and smoke to mask and populate the scene. I guess the real question is if rendering particles for smoke and fog is more expensive than rendering all the detail you'd expect to see more than 30m in front of you. As for other particle effects, I found explosions, fire and smoke to all be extremely well done in Crysis and you've already made comments about Crysis' water being superior to KZ2. Perhaps the most impressive particle effects were the surface water effects on the carrier flight deck, which I've only seen surpassed in the Cryostasis demo.
frythecpuofbender
Member
There is no texture pop-in in CRYSIS whatsoever.
You can disable texture streaming in the console and pray that you have 640MB+ videoram. Every distant mountain then has the highest quality textures and there is virutally no fps loss if you have the VRAM to hold the textures.
I wish the Unreal 3 engine would have this. The popping in U3 games is horrendous and unnecessary for PC ports.
You can disable texture streaming in the console and pray that you have 640MB+ videoram. Every distant mountain then has the highest quality textures and there is virutally no fps loss if you have the VRAM to hold the textures.
I wish the Unreal 3 engine would have this. The popping in U3 games is horrendous and unnecessary for PC ports.
I think he was referring to geometry and texture pop-in and mipmap LOD transitions for smaller objects, like rocks, clusters of foliage, etc. You can see this in the fly-by benchmark and it is glaringly obvious, but not indicative of gameplay at all.
But ya disabling streaming and enabling level precache reduces it further. Another thing people don't seem to realize is that Crysis actually uses more memory in DX9 than DX10, about 2x as much, but often run DX9 for improved performance or because they're stuck with XP. That basically limits them to 32-bit memory addressing, which means texture swapping and streaming is even more necessary and noticeable as a result. In comparison, I've seen Crysis 64 use ~3.5GB and push total system commit to 5GB+.
But ya disabling streaming and enabling level precache reduces it further. Another thing people don't seem to realize is that Crysis actually uses more memory in DX9 than DX10, about 2x as much, but often run DX9 for improved performance or because they're stuck with XP. That basically limits them to 32-bit memory addressing, which means texture swapping and streaming is even more necessary and noticeable as a result. In comparison, I've seen Crysis 64 use ~3.5GB and push total system commit to 5GB+.
BenSkywalker
Diamond Member
And why do you think it doesn't?
Crytek engine running good on the consoles? 😉
You used always so I have to call you out on that one, Splinter Cell- Original XBox>4870x2.
Identical images of course.
Why do you think this? It isn't an issue that I have ever really had lengthy discussions about but consoles on a properly calibrated quality display obliterate the best current PC monitors by a rather huge margin- it really, truly, is not close. In theory PCs should be able to be comparable hooked up via HDMI, but IME they still fall well short. This honestly doesn't make a huge difference overall, but I haven't seen them as remotely close.
That 100K was in the US and still represents $5Million in revenue, European sales numbers were higher.
Care to name the last 5 PC games that turned more then $20 million in profit? It isn't easy 😉
Walking close to the hills is enough- I'm a sniper style player as much as possible in Crysis, I stay off the roads as much as possible, you constantly see the geometric LOD issues popping up on both hills and even the larger rocks.
When does this ever happen in KZ2? Which level? I'll load it up and take a look, but I certainly didn't see anything resembling that in game.
Hehe, that is rather amusing. What would you call the foliage? Crysis uses 2D mock ups more then any game I am aware of in the history of gaming. Sure, it looks decent, but don't try and pass it off as something it isn't 🙂
Crysis fails to pull it off seamlessly, KZ2 doesn't. That is a rather important distinction. Come to think of it, I'm not recalling any sort of geometric LOD issues with GT5P either which does have comparable draw distances to Crysis, likely just down to superior resource management again. Oh, and comparing resource management- the menu in Crysis chews up more RAM then any of the consoles have- it isn't like its' hard to figure out it may not be the most streamlined piece of software in the world 😉
The physics in Crysis are OK, but very, very limited in scope. Try to knock down a tree and see what happens, heh. They have certain objects that are flagged to be destrctible in a somewhat more realistic fashion then most others, but it really isn't one of the strengths of the game at all.
That comes across as rather amusing, I know you haven't played it yet- but the fog and smoke isn't there until the battle starts, it is one of the most impressive elements of KZ2 actually. How the dust and smoke gradually start building up all around during the battle(although it dies down fairly quickly if it doesn't keep getting stirred up). This is one area where I think KZ2 rather thoroughly spanks Crysis. Once the battle dies down, you can easily see into the distance without issue.
KZ2 does them better- in some cases FAR better. One thing you may find some people lamenting is the flamethrower in KZ2, until you compare it to an actual flamethrower(which brings home how unrealistic the rest of the games are in that aspect).
Yes, and easily so.
So you have never seen the game running then- good to know 🙂
taltamir
Lifer
An exclusive means that they are paying a percent cut of every sale to MS / Sony (it is why it costs 60$ instead of 50$ per game) BUT... they also get bribed to begin with to MAKE it an exclusive.
It might also mean their parent company / CEO is retarded and thinks piracy will destroy them if they make a PC game instead of a console one.
So... the exclusives tend to be the most anticipated games which get partially funded by companies like MS and Sony who have very deep pockets and can afford proper playtesting and code optimizations.
And what black sorcery prevents them from doing the same on a PC?
taltamir
Lifer
Console: n. An overpriced, DRM laden, OS restricted, outdated, undercooled PC... Whose manufacturers pay developers to make products for (exclusives)... and then charge an extra fee on each sale to recoup that cost.
There are no PC exclusives because there is no single company that owns "PCs" and pays developers to MAKE exclusives in return for 10$ on every sale.
There are no PC exclusives because there is no single company that owns "PCs" and pays developers to MAKE exclusives in return for 10$ on every sale.
nitromullet
Diamond Member
novasatori
Diamond Member
this whole thread must be a joke
I already knew which was better but after looking at the IGN screens it just confirms and is so plainly obvious that kz2 on screen complexity is no where near that of Crysis/Warhead, and all the kz2 screens feel claustrophobic in comparison
http://pcmedia.ign.com/pc/imag...-20080909014054185.jpg
vs
http://ps3media.ign.com/ps3/im...-20090129014112294.jpg
warhead shot is only 1280x800 too, not even 1920x1200, but anyways KZ2 gun looks nice aesthetically, and has some nice cinematic/shader effects
I already knew which was better but after looking at the IGN screens it just confirms and is so plainly obvious that kz2 on screen complexity is no where near that of Crysis/Warhead, and all the kz2 screens feel claustrophobic in comparison
http://pcmedia.ign.com/pc/imag...-20080909014054185.jpg
vs
http://ps3media.ign.com/ps3/im...-20090129014112294.jpg
warhead shot is only 1280x800 too, not even 1920x1200, but anyways KZ2 gun looks nice aesthetically, and has some nice cinematic/shader effects
Actually I said none that I know of earlier but since you specified 4870X2 I'm going to assume there's some glaring render error you're referring to. Or its locked at 480i or whatever the original XBox version was locked to on the PC port, and yes I did have the original SC on the XBox.
Still, the PC versions (that don't have some glaring issue) that scale to PC hardware put their console counterparts to shame.
But the images aren't identical, that's the whole point heh.
You still don't seem to understand my point, I'm not arguing the merits of the final output hardware, I'm arguing the quality of the source hardware. Will the colors from a SNES look as good on a Kuros compared to a PS3 on an LCD? Of course not.
What's 5 million in revenue for a game that's been in production for 3 years? Its nothing, if Crysis sold 100k units in its first 6 months Crytek might not exist today. Luckily its sales rebounded with the strong sales of hardware capable of running it well, now just imagine what it might've done if that percentage of hardware was 50 or 75% of discrete GPUs and not just the top 10-15% at the time.
Wrath, Spore, COD5, COD4 and Crysis. I'm sure it closely mirrors total sales to-date.
Again, I don't see it, but of course I use the tweaks and superior hardware available to me on the PC to reduce the likelihood of it. But as a sniper style player I'm sure you appreciate the fact you can actually see further than 30m in front of you instead of a billowing cloud of smoke. 🙂
That's the point, you'd never see it as you can't investigate distant terrain if its off the beaten cart path.
I was clearly referring to world geometry. Alpha textures for foliage are a given as there's currently no other way to create the same effect with acceptable performance. Crysis uses 2d mock-ups to enhance actual 3D terrain, unlike KZ2 which looks like a few actors on a stage full of 2D mock-ups.
Case in Point
Come to think of it, this reminds me of when people used to oooh and ahhh about how awesome space games looked compared to their terrestrial counterparts.
Crysis pulls it off seamlessly on capable hardware, and that's also a rather important distinction. Also for GT5P is there actual opportunities for geometric LOD scaling or is it just a race track surrounded by a bunch of distant, flat textures? And the comment about the Crysis menu....is that a joke? Do you really think games are only loading up what's necessary to render their menu while you're in the menu? That's crazy, if a game wasn't loading up at least the most used textures to memory while sitting in a load screen I'd wonder why it wasn't. But then again PC gamers are used to those much faster load times compared to the consoles.
Yep, but it still has more interactive objects than most games. Are those buildings destructible in KZ2?
I'm not just talking about the dynamic particle effects for volumetric fog and smoke, I'm also talking about the fog used to limit viewing distance. I see this in any of the outdoor and even some of the indoor screenshots, looks like the forecast is always "extremely hazy and overcast with low visibility" in the post-apocalyptic future. 😉
Again, I'd have to see them first-hand but I wouldn't doubt it as I found the GTA4 explosions to be very well done, even if they weren't as "accurate" as the particle effects in Crysis.
I think that was a reply to someone else, but I havent' seen it yet in action, no.
frythecpuofbender
Member
This is getting silly. KZ2 is basically a corridor shooter with crescendo events, Crysis is an open-world type game.
KZ2 has more in common with HL2 than Crysis.
And regarding the 2D mockups in Crysis foilage: Are you serious?! of course the plant leaves have no polygon depth to them, that would be insanity and contrary to real-life (where leaves are pretty much flat too). But they have underlying 3d geometry that waves with the wind, is affected by the player's movements and bends with physical contact. They even have a shader for indirect sun light affecting surrounding foilage which makes it look so real.
I found the foilage in Crysis near perfect. There was one or two tree sorts that couldn't be knocked down, but those were huge and had deep roots.
The challenge of creating the natural environments Crytek does so well is way higher then the Sci-Fi Gears of War angular settings. Maybe Crytek's next game will feature more indoors and buildings and we will have something to compare.
KZ2 has more in common with HL2 than Crysis.
And regarding the 2D mockups in Crysis foilage: Are you serious?! of course the plant leaves have no polygon depth to them, that would be insanity and contrary to real-life (where leaves are pretty much flat too). But they have underlying 3d geometry that waves with the wind, is affected by the player's movements and bends with physical contact. They even have a shader for indirect sun light affecting surrounding foilage which makes it look so real.
I found the foilage in Crysis near perfect. There was one or two tree sorts that couldn't be knocked down, but those were huge and had deep roots.
The challenge of creating the natural environments Crytek does so well is way higher then the Sci-Fi Gears of War angular settings. Maybe Crytek's next game will feature more indoors and buildings and we will have something to compare.
BenSkywalker
Diamond Member
Every console game pays a percentage to Sony/MS/Nintendo, exclusive or not. As far as 'bribes'- they sometimes do get kickbacks to make a game exclusive, very often that isn't the case though(for an example, any Wii exclusive- Nin has no reason to offer kickbacks and they don't).
It would hard lock systems in a hurry except those that were exacting to the singular platform used to develop the game. And how exactly are consoles DRM laden? I have no install limits on any of my games, can freely resell them at will. As far as OS limited, I guess- I can run Linux on my PS3s if I want, and that is my only option, but since we are talking about gaming it isn't like PCs have an option other then Windows.
Random screenshots- I haven't seen Warhead in action for any length of time, so I can not compare it accurately. I was given the impression by almost everyone that Warhead was at best equal to Crysis, is this not the case? I can't comment with any level of accuracy about what Warhead is doing, trying to do so based on screenshots would be fairly ignorant of me.
Splinter Cell runs a direct to hardware routine(not exposed by DirectX or OpenGL) that enables a level of shadow detail that only ever ran on nV based shader parts. The game could have been recoded to run on DX8 or later ATi hardware easily, but nV was rather dominant at the time so they just shipped it with the specialized code in the game.
For raw color output- the high def consoles both run at 32 bit color and depending on the game with HDR too, what is the issue with the source?
That 100K units was only in the US, the game sold better in Europe. Let's say the game only sold equal though, that would have Crysis generating $10Million in revenue in one month in two territories, that isn't considered a failure to most publishers, particularly not on the PC. As far as losing potential sales- how many people only bought Crysis because of how good it looked? It was the only reason I picked it up(not that it's a bad game, but we have a whole bunch of quality shooters to chose from- it got my time because of its' visuals and I know I'm far from the only one). For the last 5 games that turned a $20 Million profit- Crysis is on your list, that came out in 2007.
As far as Crysis having a very different environment then KZ2, I would gladly compare it to a PC corridor shooter, but sadly the best the PC has to offer there currently is a port of a title for which the sequel is out on the 360 exclusively(Gears, although I haven't checked out FEAR2 yet so maybe that is better).
For the 2D mockups- what do you think is a mockup in that screenshot? And what paramaters will force geometric LOD off on Crysis? As far as load times go, my PS3 hasn't failed to load any of my games in a fraction of the time it takes my PC to load the typical title. The 360 has some issues there(not horrible, but some titles are annoying with load times), but the PS3 works quite nicely as long as you install the games. Destructible envronments- KZ2 the buildings themselves aren't, but almost everything else is(including rather large bridges and the likes).
KZ2 isn't on Earth 😉 There really aren't any wide open spaces to get good shots from, there I would be forced to fall back to GT5. The track side trees and such all appear to use actual geometry instead of 2D mockups like Crysis, but honestly without being able to interact with them it is hard to tell if they aren't just really well done 2D mockups 😛
You clip through most of the foliage, Knights of The Old Republic has foliage you don't clip through(not saying KoTOR is close to Crysis by any means, just pointing out a game that demonstrates that foliage need not be free of physical properties).
I was talking about the trees you can knock down- the 'physics' on them is a joke at best. I understand the ability to knock them down is a novelty, and honestly it doesn't approach having an impact on gameplay, was just using them to point out that the physics system in Crysis is very much like any other modern game, some objects are flagged for 'real' physics, the rest aren't.
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