



The system's full specs have leaked -- supposedly










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RE: Nintendo sucks
By TSS on 6/15/2011 11:00:38 AM , Rating: 2
John carmack i'll trust on code but not on beauty. They've admitted themselves when quake live was being developed that quake 3 didn't look as awesome as it could have - they where so busy innovating the code that they didn't bother looking at stuff like light placements (the lighting in quake live is vastly different). And Rage - ID's new title - really doesn't look that good. I wasn't very impressed during the first tech demo's of the engine but now that the game still isn't out and the UE4 tech demo is.... well it looks stale.

IMO that also shows the real culprit why games don't look as good as the hardware can make it look. Development overhead. If it was carmack coding Rage it would've been out years ago. The problem is the game is too big for just him to code, and others aren't quite the genius he is unfortunately.

It was shown with i belive Doom for the iphone. ID software said it couldn't be done - it would take a team of coders a month and that would cost too much. John Carmack then did it by himself in a weekend.

While he remains that genius, all games these days are made by that team of coders. Thus limiting the potential of the game from the start.

Aside from all that, it's a fact most games are console ports these days. Since their developped for the consoles most models have lower polycounts which cannot be changed unless the entire models, skin and animations are redone (in the worst case). Developers consider this too little bang for the buck these days so they pick the easyest route: Textures are made at double the console resolution and scaled back 50% for the consoles while the original is used for the PC. This also works because consoles have an abysmal small amount of memory (512mb total for the PS3 texture and system RAM, my 2 year old PC is sporting 6gb system and 1gb texture RAM). But because of this same reason even double the resolution looks ugly on PC's because they can handle 4 times the resolution by now and on selective props even 8 times the resolution.

Stuff like more vegitation, more physics, more debris, better looking models, more background stuff going on is all left out, even though PC's can handle it.

Not to mention games are being redesigned so consoles can handle them. Prime example, crysis 2. It looks worse then crysis 1 because consoles can't even handle crysis 1. It's not an open world, rather a huge corridor, and the jungle vegitation of crysis 1 IMO looks alot better then the urban enviroments of crysis 2.

So i'm sorry but on this one it's the developers themselves.

RE: Nintendo sucks
By someguy123 on 6/15/2011 4:17:13 PM , Rating: 2
I don't know what conventions you've been to but the engine looks amazing. You have a problem with the drab artstyle, not the engine itself. The same could be said about games based around ID4. ID made the decision to design their games tinted brown and "dirty". The engine is capable of much more.

The UE4 tech demo is merely a demo. If you look up the original UE3 photos and original tech demo attached (before the public demos) it looked about as good as UE4 in character rendering. The same could be said about the alpha build of unreal tournament 3.

I don't agree with people's assessment that PC has 10 times the bloat, but there are overhead problems, as well as having to deal with scaling for various builds compared to single hardware spec. When it comes to brute force and just dumping massive textures on objects, you end up with aliasing issues like the witcher 2, which relies on FSAA to be cleaned. Looking at crysis, their vegetation looks great, but there are a lot of texture problems and indoor areas don't look nearly as good as the replicated vegetation. Even an engine like cryengine 2 relying heavily on sheer processing power needs to cut corners. To be honest, I still think uncharted 2 is the best looking game regardless of platform, though obviously it's limited in resolution.

