Composer looks the best I think, kind of Crysis 2-like in places.
Digital Foundry -- Halo 4 Tech Analysis
- Thread starter adamsapple
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I just think in most console games the difference is negligible in jaggies. None of them are powerful enough to provide a solution that eliminates enough aliasing for it to be worthwhile IMO. I play on a Panasonic plasma and have a PC as well which runs most games at 1080p and 4xAA (which is where you can really get a completely jaggie free image).
Right. And just to clear things up I just referring to the technical aspect of the engines or the amount of effects it coukd sustain and a locked framerate. I love U3 but the IQ fucks everything up. Its an impressive engine but it sucks the image is so jagged out.
not_so_special
Banned
well that maybe the case but i found uc2 very clean compared to other games,uc3 on the other hand
but this whole discussion its a nonsense,these games,all of them look awesome,maybe in old and started playing games with shit like pong and realise how good games look these days
Don't need to look I have the game.
This thread has taught me that gifs grossly misrepresent what games actually look like while being played.
I own and have played every game being thrown around in here, and God of War 3 and Halo 4 to me, stand at the top of the hill without challenge. Mainly because I don't see the trickery being used like Killzone 2 does, for example. I prefer the higher poly count in Killzone 3 anyway.
Uncharted keeps being thrown around, but Uncharted mainly looks great in its cut scenes. In actual gameplay, all 3 UC games have eye cutting jaggies.
In the end, Halo 4 is doing stuff it shouldn't be doing on such ancient hardware.
Can't wait to see what 343 pull off on the new hardware.
I own and have played every game being thrown around in here, and God of War 3 and Halo 4 to me, stand at the top of the hill without challenge. Mainly because I don't see the trickery being used like Killzone 2 does, for example. I prefer the higher poly count in Killzone 3 anyway.
Uncharted keeps being thrown around, but Uncharted mainly looks great in its cut scenes. In actual gameplay, all 3 UC games have eye cutting jaggies.
In the end, Halo 4 is doing stuff it shouldn't be doing on such ancient hardware.
Can't wait to see what 343 pull off on the new hardware.
higherARC05
Banned
WOW Seeing Laskey in the cutscene, then seeing him in-game was amazing. The character model is so detailed and matches nathan drakes. And it's not even the main character in the game!
Angelus Errare
Banned
Weird, I play almost all my games with SGSSAA with no problem.
And I make pretty screenshots.
HollovVpo1nt
Banned
Reiko said:
Is that beeing played on PC or something? Gears 3 looks like a 60fps game in that video.
Nah. It's on 360.
There are 60fps bullshot Gears 3 videos floating around on the Internet.
You've got to be kidding me. I need to stay out of this thread before my forehead becomes sore.
Yeah lol. The in-game Lasky model looks good though. *Not direct feed
Got something on his nose
Yeah lol. The in-game Lasky model looks good though. *Not direct feed
Got something on his nose
In a Halo game. Wow.
higherARC05
Banned
Yeah lol. The in-game Lasky model looks good though. *Not direct feed
Got something on his nose
Def shows the high quality I was talking about.
You really have to see it in-game though. There's shaders that you can't see on pic that makes the pores for the face when you really zoom in. Really detailed.
Show off Laskey's side view and see the detail of the little hairs on his neck and his sideburns. His eyebrows are really hairy too lol
Yeah lol. The in-game Lasky model looks good though. *Not direct feed
Got something on his nose
One of the best looking levels in H4.Its funny seeing people coming into the thread throwing around shit like "blurry" and "washed out" to describe the way it looks when the pics and gifs posted dont look that way at all, even those dont do justice to how good it looks on my tv.
Are your games at a consistent 60 fps with SGSSAA?
Yeah lol. The in-game Lasky model looks good though. *Not direct feed
Got something on his nose
Small and/ or downsampled image. Come on. Any larger, you'd see just how low res the textures are and how much aliasing there is. Then again, I guess they wanted a cleaner, minimalistic look and not have the everything be muddied with up with overly detailed textures. Still, a "less is more" and clean look is easily diminished without proper AA.
But yeah, 343 did blow Bungie out of the water when it comes to poly counts. Halo 3's models were just embarrassing.
How's that sand taste?
TUROK
Member
Well, this thread has now devolved into people throwing around technobabble.
Out of all the ignorant statements, this is probably my favorite:
Even funnier, a similar statement had already been addressed as incorrect only a few posts behind this one.
Out of all the ignorant statements, this is probably my favorite:
Even funnier, a similar statement had already been addressed as incorrect only a few posts behind this one.
Trickster
Member
I can't help but feel you haven't played the game if you feel there's a lot of aliasing in Halo 4. The game actually uses AA, unlike some of the other games being mentioned in here.
The pictures XtremeXpider posted earlier in the topic are what the game looks like, and there really isn't a lot of aliasing.
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=44172890&postcount=880
That's how pretty much all of his posts regarding Halo 4 are. My favorite ones are when he invents new words to describe the graphics.
"High frequency mapping" all over dat Chief Armor.
The_Hitcher89
Member
I've quite enjoyed it. A lot of interesting (to me at least) things have come out, even if it was in the midst (and partially because of) fanboy bickering
TUROK
Member
He means high-frequency detail textures. People typically just call them detail textures. They're a relatively small texture (typically greyscale) that is tiled over a diffuse texture, giving the appearance of very detailed scratch and scuff marks.
It's obvious he's just parroting what he reads elsewhere, especially considering Halo 3, ODST, and Reach all used detail textures heavily.
Based on pics from the above links, I have to say, imo GOW3 looks considerably better than the others. Though I'm not sure what I'd pick as the best looking based on what I've actually played myself. They do different things well.
I don't have a capture device for direct feed, so that's what you get. Anyone with one can post em. And there's not much aliasing. There's some, especially some of the Forerunner stuff, but its not that bad.
It's not that far from the truth. And every title will or should aim to only render what is only on screen. Most big titles do use software culling methods.
Halo 4 included. If you spin the camera fast enough in the rainforest you can see parts of the geometry on the sides of the screen incorrectly culled leaving a white background.
UE3 uses several methods of software culling too.
Yeah I got what he was going for, it was just humorous to me that he tends to throw around a lot of technobabble without really knowing what any of it means.
And then when he compared Lasky's model to Nathan Drake's I almost spit my drink all over my keyboard.
I finished the game, and I thought it did look good. It has really nice lighting and some nice texturing at times. I feel like the scale/scope of levels felt very different compared to Reach and I felt like there was less variety in the visuals overall. The image was very clean, which I liked, except that FXAA rears its ugly head in places and stuff just looks blurry.
I kinda think Mass Effect 3 made a better overall visual impression. The animation was poor but the game looked really nice.
I kinda think Mass Effect 3 made a better overall visual impression. The animation was poor but the game looked really nice.
TUROK
Member
That's still very incorrect.
Viewing frustum culling is culling everything not in a camera's viewpoint, but extremely few games use it because it isn't viable for a lot of games, so the notion that games should aim to use this method of culling is incredibly ignorant.
Console games especially need to keep draw calls under a certain number, so in a game where camera control is given to the player, viewing frustum culling is not desirable... Unless it's a very simplistic game.
I think this is part of the confusion. Some people seem to classify a game as "clean" looking while at the same time looking blurry. In my mind being clean encompasses having a sharp detailed image. To both be clean and blurry is contradictory - at least for my definition of clean.
Frustrum culling is used in UE3, Frostbite 2, Uncharted, and Cryengine 3. Hardly simple engines.
I'm not saying they happened simultaneously. I think the darker, indoor scenes look pretty good, and then the brighter, outdoor scenes blur a lot for me. There's one scene in particular on the top of a big ship that just looks terrible to me despite a very neat skybox and some cool lighting effects.
I think most people would identify something "sharp" (that is, jaggy) as unclean. Lots of people are really into blur now (look at the people talking about the "cg look").
I think most people would identify something "sharp" (that is, jaggy) as unclean. Lots of people are really into blur now (look at the people talking about the "cg look").
It's not like Halo 4 doesn't have any jaggies though. There's a difference between intentional blur and blur that is a side effect of the AA solution being used. The blur in Halo 4 is most definitely not the type that people seem to think gives a game a "CG look".
TUROK
Member
I'm well aware, but these games do not use it in the sense that EVERYTHING outside of the viewing area is not being rendered, like you initially implied. These games use it for simple objects (particles, sprites, multiple objects that can be sorted into a single draw call) in conjunction with other culling methods.
Any way you cut it, none of these games are not rendering everything outside the viewpoint.
Peterthumpa
Member
Yep, that's because this blur is called motion blur. The blur that people here keep talking about is a result of the FXAA implementation.
AA methods aside, this is the best looking game on the 360,period.
Are you going by your PC standards or console? There's really nothing wrong with most of the textures in the game by console standards. Sure you can spot blurry textures here and there but you can do the same in any console game, even other graphical standouts. Filtering is another area that could be improved, probably resulting in the blurry impression some may have, but again that's quite common for console titles.
To be fair the majority of the people here are doing the same for other games as well.
I thought frustum calling was common, even the Dreamcast did it. Unless I'm mistaken, draw calls are something you have to watch on the PC more than the consoles.
Most presentations don't specify that fustum culling is used for one specific type of object.
For Cryengine 3 it's used for every part of the scene: http://freesdk.crydev.net/display/SDKDOC4/Culling+Explained
For Uncharted it's not specified: http://www.naughtydog.com/docs/Naughty-Dog-GDC08-UNCHARTED-Tech.pdf
For UE3 it's applied to each primitive: http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/VisibilityCulling.html
For Frostbite 2 it, uh..goes over my head: http://publications.dice.se/attachments/CullingTheBattlefield.pdf
Anyway this is way off topic.
TUROK
Member
For certain objects, sure, but I can't recall of any that use it for literally everything outside the player viewpoint.
You have to worry about draw calls on every platform, but on PC's it was especially problematic because older API's (DX9 and DX10) still used single threaded draw calls. I think DX11 has helped at least partially remedy the problem, but I'm not too sure.
Your PC isn't running with 512MB of RAM
Console GPUs have something like 12 texture unites while modern PC graphics cards have a couple hundred.
I'm sorry, but "great IQ" and "FXAA" are not synonymous at all. Some areas in Halo 4 look smeared to all hell because of its FXAA usage, which is a shame as the game looks pretty great most of the time. The lack of Anisotropic Filtering (which compounds the FXAA issues, imo) and the LOD problems are pretty annoying too.
Texture filtering is done on the GPU, though.
Texture filtering is done on the GPU, though.
True. But still these consoles are ancient.
Yeah lol. The in-game Lasky model looks good though. *Not direct feed
Got something on his nose
I thought R2 also had good models with great SS, I took these offscreen a long time ago but they look just as good direct feed:
AltogetherAndrews
Banned
You haven't actually played through Uncharted 2, have you?
IHaveCandy
Banned
I think you guys have to go replay GOW3 and UC3 Halo 4 looks great, but it still isn't in that territory. Ascension is looking even more ridiculous.
For me UC2 blows UC3 out of the water with the latter feeling rushed and looking rough in a number of places. UC2 was one of those rare games where you stop to look around and admire the visuals very often.
nhlducks35
Member
Yeah lol. The in-game Lasky model looks good though. *Not direct feed
Got something on his nose
Never forget