Crysis 2 Versus Killzone 2 Screenshot Comparison

[Porcupine_I]

WereKitten said:

selnor said:

It's extremely important if a claim like KZ2 beats Crysis in technicalities is made.

And the fact that Sony or GG did not rebutle the claim at all, makes it pretrty obvious alot of tricks were used to do KZ2. We know the game already used QSAA as to not tax the system. MSAA would have had the game look better on textures but run at a snails pace.

 

So, let me understand something. Choosing the techniques you're going to use to ameliorate performance instead of screenshots is now "tricks" or something that is in any way despicable?

Let me gliss over the MSAA/QSAA thing for a while (technically KZ2 uses a MSAA technique). It's certainly true that the Crysis 2 engine, for example, will focus much more on dynamic lighting than the KZ2 engine.

The guys at Crytek are going to sell an engine. As such their agenda is to show off a wide variety of effects and to fill in what is commonly known as a feature matrix. Now let's judge their resume objectively: Crysis was the epitome of the feature matrix mentality.

It was basically: we'll cram anything we could in our engine. If you need a PC that costs $4k to run it, who cares. Sooner or later the hardware costs will go down and you'll appreciate it at your budget level. It's basically an engine where people actually got kicks out of bad performance ("look, this game is so great visually that it runs at 10fps on my setup").

Now, on consoles you can't work in the same way. The hardware is fixed and you have to optimize for it until you get your 30fps. I give the Crytek guys the benefit of the doubt as they are esteemed professionals, but their track record on their ability to squeeze excellence out of constrained resources is quite unproven right now.

It might very well be that in the end they will be able to crank out an excellent multiplatform engine for consoles that exceeds dedicated engines such as KZ2's when used in a real-world scenario. But to judge from a list of technical features and engine demo setups is very naive: what counts in the end is how all of it (graphics, streaming, AI, physics) comes together.

 

Excellent post!

Let me add to this, that, wenn Crytec showcases their Engine, they always talk to Developers. They show what it can do, and it can do a lot, but that doesn't mean you can use everything it can do on every platform all at once. You will have to find compromises according to the resources the Platform you develop for has.

and again i stress the point that any comparing is useless before we have seen a released game!