This is a great shout.
Virtua Fighter at launch was 240i at 30fps.
Virtua Fighter 2 looked significantly better and jumped up to a 'high resolution' 480i at a perfect 60fps. Dreamy.
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Biggest leap graphically from a dev during a single gen?
- Thread starter wafflebrain
- Start date
This is a great shout.
Virtua Fighter at launch was 240i at 30fps.
Virtua Fighter 2 looked significantly better and jumped up to a 'high resolution' 480i at a perfect 60fps. Dreamy.
Got you covered with this image I've created a long time ago (first and last rows are from a late NES game and early PS1 game):
Thanks, it's great :)
That bring a lot of good memories too !
Huh, I never knew that, never even noticed those Halo 3 details. In the end Halo 4 still comes off as an incredible upgrade, I guess it's post-effect trickery or something, I think it was among the top games on 360 when it comes to visuals, it's only downside was the framerate.It's an interesting progression. Halo 4 is much more richly-detailed and has a vastly more refined appearance, but a lot of compromization was involved.
For instance, Halo 4 creates more headroom for the quality of static stuff by minimizing the amount of vibrant gameplay-related dynamic effects. When it comes to stuff like explosions, Halo Reach uses a much heavier sprawl of particulars and transparent layers; and although Halo 3's full-resolution transparencies and dual backbuffer severely limit transparency fillrate, the game's investments do pay some dividends. For example, the extreme HDR depth allows the game to do this by merely drawing a single texture layer:
Similarly, the quality of dynamic lighting was paired way back. Halo 4 uses huge numbers of small diffuse-only point lights (this is very cheap to do deferred), but this is just about all it uses for gameplay-related effects. The game aggressively avoids using large lights or lights with specular reflections. It also avoids spotlights: the obvious example of this is the omission of a flashlight mechanism like existed in all prior Halo campaigns, but even things like vehicle headlights are actually rendered as point lights that float in front of a vehicle. This ends up looking flat-out bizarre when driving a tank on rough terrain in Halo 4, as you can watch the pointlights that make up the headlighting bobbing in and out of the ground.
This isn't just a compromise compared with Halo Reach or Halo 3, it's a compromise even if we're comparing it to Halo 1 on the original Xbox. Halo 1 has many large light sources, most prominent light sources cast specular reflections, and the game uses very large spotlights for the flashlight or vehicle headlights. Halo 1 is able to use large high-quality light sources to highlight important gameplay events (such as the location of a plasma grenade), and the specularity really helps to sell the game's lighting and materials:
Stuff like these sorts of lights, or the different use of transparencies, adds a lot of vibrancy and expressiveness in motion that Halo 4 sorely lacks.
There are a lot of other subtleties, like how Halo 3's ambitious lighting model allows it to use very complex mid-glossy materials without suffering from the hazy rim lighting that plagues Halo 4 (and that even plagues a lot of eighth-gen games). The Order 1886 is a notable example of a game which doesn't have this issue... and it's a game where the developers directly referenced Halo 3's lighting system as an inspiration for their approach to indirect specular lighting.
A great example of fine-tuning visual trickery for the use case. Loads of areas in RSC2 look silly if you stop and look around, like how forests are often just a row or two of trees backed by a tree-textured wall.
At the end of the day though, I don't really have a strong visual preference for one game over the other. RSC1's clean and clear style has its own appeal for me, especially on the snow courses. They're certainly both incredible games.
One thing where RSC1 has a big edge over RSC2 though... switching between 60fps gameplay and 30fps replays is bullshit.
This is a great shout.
Virtua Fighter at launch was 240i at 30fps.
Virtua Fighter 2 looked significantly better and jumped up to a 'high resolution' 480i at a perfect 60fps. Dreamy.
Still super annoyed I couldn't get an arcade perfect port of Virtua Fighter 1. Still hoping Sega Ages comes through on Switch
Oh yeah, good point - I thought Crystal was GBC only but no, you can still play it on the OG Game Boy. What an acomplishment!
Our brain covers up a lot of these visual/technical flaws within our memory of playing these old games. Going back and checking old games side by side with new ones can show how little we actually observed them while playing and most of the little details we remember are misconducts of our memories by the brain over time. Funny how it works!
Capcom. Megaman 9 to basically anything they made on the PS360.
( Yeah, that's not the spirit of the question at all. :P )
( Yeah, that's not the spirit of the question at all. :P )
Crystal's GBC only. Gold and Silver were playable on both GB and GBC. I think the only graphical difference between G/S and Crystal were that Pokémon had 3–5 frames of encounter animation in Crystal, but we're static in G/S
I think it would be interesting to also look at performance of a given title. It is easy to improve graphics while absolutely tanking performance, something which was quite common towards the end of last Gen.
This. I recall CT to this day and think they were way ahead of their time in shadow and lighting.
Oh, yeah, as I thought originally, but then I saw a pic of a Crystal GB/GBC cart like G/S had (with the small dent at the top) but you're right, it was a fake
This was my answer. Though, like many things, I think a lot of this is owed to art direction.
Zone of the Enders was basically Kojima Productions' PS2 tech demo and it shows, compared to its sequel and especially to Metal Gear Solid 3 it's very graphically barebones. They were very clever with the setting and character designs though, to the extent it's not actually that noticeable. The pre-rendered cutscenes are actually the ugliest part.
Yakuza was cross-gen for a while so it's maybe not fair but the leap between Ishin/Zero/Kiwami to the later games is impressive
It's mostly in the gameplay though - going into buildings seamlessly is weirdly impressive
Yakuza was cross-gen for a while so it's maybe not fair but the leap between Ishin/Zero/Kiwami to the later games is impressive
It's mostly in the gameplay though - going into buildings seamlessly is weirdly impressive
I find sidegrades interesting too. Where developers who aren't technical wizards find compromise. Felt like that with Tekken last generation. They began with Tekken 5 Dark Reserrection Online, a port of an arcade game that was built off a game meant for PS2.
Simple lighting and textures, but good resolution.
Then Tekken 6 came. Redid the character models and textures completely, plus introduced new lighting and motion blur. Notable hit to resolution though.
Then Tekken Tag Tournament 2, the compromise. Dialed back some of Tekken 6's effects, focused on brighter colored characters and art, but with flatter (and less bloomy) lighting and lower quality motion blur. Retouched a few models, sometimes for the better visually, sometimes for the worse. Came out with a better resolution though.
And I guess there was Tekken Revolution too, which tweaked a few things but was mostly based directly on TTT2.
Simple lighting and textures, but good resolution.
Then Tekken 6 came. Redid the character models and textures completely, plus introduced new lighting and motion blur. Notable hit to resolution though.
Then Tekken Tag Tournament 2, the compromise. Dialed back some of Tekken 6's effects, focused on brighter colored characters and art, but with flatter (and less bloomy) lighting and lower quality motion blur. Retouched a few models, sometimes for the better visually, sometimes for the worse. Came out with a better resolution though.
And I guess there was Tekken Revolution too, which tweaked a few things but was mostly based directly on TTT2.
I thought Tekken 1 to Tekken 3 on the original PlayStation was a pretty dramatic progression.
EDIT: Beaten by a country mile, but I stand by my contribution.
EDIT: Beaten by a country mile, but I stand by my contribution.
For sure FF4 is cheating a bit in that regard. Gotta be mentioned for a thread like this though haha.
Rockstar with GTA IV to GTA V is a huge one imo
Oblivion
Skyrim
These were the two that immediate came to mind. And I will say that Skyrim screenshot isn't even a good representation of how good that game looked.
Can't believe how bad GTAIV looked in comparison. Brown bloom low res everywhere. GTAV is a technical marvel.
I was thinking some Ubisoft game, Uncharted 1 to TLoU is a good example too.Rockstar with GTA IV to GTA V is a huge one imo
But this might be the best.
Some good picks in here tho.
Here's a picture from one of my games in 2009.
Here's a couple of pictures from one of my games in 2013:
Both games were released on the Xbox 360.
Here's a couple of pictures from one of my games in 2013:
Both games were released on the Xbox 360.
Here's a few old ones:
- Wing Commander II to Wing Commander III.
- Space Quest III to Space Quest IV
- Wing Commander II to Wing Commander III.
- Space Quest III to Space Quest IV
Though there are plenty of developers that went bonkers graphically within the NES/SNES generation, Nintendo and SquareSoft own this transition. Happy to see posters post pics of said transition.
Uncharted 1 to Last of Us (PS3)
MKX to MK11 (PS4/XBO)
GTAIV to GTAV (PS3/360)
Halo 3 to Destiny (360)
Witcher 3 to Cyberpunk 2077 (PS4/XBO)
ESIV Morrowind to ESV Skyrim (360)
Assassin's Creed to Assassin's Creed IV (PS3/360)
MKX to MK11 (PS4/XBO)
GTAIV to GTAV (PS3/360)
Halo 3 to Destiny (360)
Witcher 3 to Cyberpunk 2077 (PS4/XBO)
ESIV Morrowind to ESV Skyrim (360)
Assassin's Creed to Assassin's Creed IV (PS3/360)
OP
OP
Yeah I've always found perceived changes of the evolution of real time graphics interesting from a psychological pov, how older games that clearly do not look photo realistic were at the time touted as such. Part of this is advertising influence but still its interesting how we change our perceptions of what the gold standard is for realism through the gens.
I see thanks for the informative explanation. Regarding the dual framebuffer part, I remember that the calculations of the two framebuffer at 720P simply didn't fit in 10MB and back then most games that didn't manage to fit the framebuffer in 10MB went subHD as not many (if any) games resorted to tiling, which was something that quite a few games that released later in the gen did to keep a 720P framebuffer.
As for plasma gun, I was talking about plasma pistol.
I still think Halo 3's subtle lighting looks better and preserves texture detail better than Halo 4 where I'd often notice a white crush or close to it. Though I personally consider Reach to be the best looking one in terms of art and tech balance vs both halo 3 and Halo 4.
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ThisSquaresoft on PS1
FFVII (1997)
Vagrant Story (2000)
Was about to post this.