Selnors Graphics prediction Alan Wake review thread.

[MikeB]

@ NightAntilli

I thought you would stop?

he things that are the largest in a game are textures and sound (and if you do pre-rendered videos, those as well).

Agreed.

The rest, like lighting, filtering, AA, post processing, physics, anything that makes a game actually look good, is basically instructions aka code

You mean apart from textures and geometry data, right? Or you think such data is useless?

Luckily the PS3 is much more powerful for processing code than the XBox 360.

If Alan Wake was across 3 DVDs, the only thing they could've improved were the videos.

I don't think that would be a good idea, the pre-rendered videos show much higher detail levels and better lighting than in-game. If you would up these differences even more, the experience get less seamless.

And I don't agree, with more capacity the XBox 360 is powerful enough to include higher quality assets (with equal varierty) and then instead opt for 720 with x2 AA as that would start to make sense. Alan Wake runs in Sub-HD, but the truth is many PS3/360 multi-platform games which render in 720p could also have been done in Sub-HD without gamers noticing and instead opt using these resources elsewhere as the asset quality isn't high enough.

GTA IV is a good example. It looks better on the PS3, this due to better lighting, less pop-ins and better post-process filtering probably due to the RSX havin 8 more TMUs, each with twice the texture cache as on the 360. The assets aren't of high enough quality to matter enough to run in 720p or 640p. Actually the dithering on the 360 is pretty awful in that game.

360:


PS3:


360 fanboys made a big deal of the PS3 version rendering in 640p, but it's at best bittersweet if you look at the end result objectively.

Seriously, space is not a real issue here

It seems to be only a secret amongst 360 fans...

Rockstar (GTA IV):

"with Blu-ray, you've got plenty of storage, whereas on Xbox 360 there's no guarantee of a hard-drive and you're working with the DVD format. Does that create limitations?" His answer? "Yep.""

Carmack (Rage):

"We would love to set the thing up where it filled one Blu-ray disc versus three DVDs, which is about the right mix, but the game just…we can’t cut it into a third like that,” he said. “We can cut it into two pieces. We’ve got two large wastelands on there. We just couldn’t make an arbitary cut." (BTW, even a single layer Blu-Ray disc can hold well more data than three dual layer 6.8 GB 360 DVDs than what Carmack claims here)

Takeuchi (Lost Planet 2):
"This time, truly, the content that was cut was significant. We had so much content that we wanted to add this time. It ended up being a battle against disc space."

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