Wii never maxed out?

[lilbroex]

Mr Puggsly said:

lilbroex said:

Mr Puggsly said:

lilbroex said:

tonymarraffa said:
Amazing!!! It's sad though I also think that the Dreamcast, Xbox, and the Saturn wern't maxed out either.

The Dreamcast was maxed out with Shenmue

The Saturn was technically also maxed out with Shenmue as far as its polygonated games were

The Xbox was maxed with Ninja Gaiden Black, Riddick, Half-Life 2 and Doom 3

 

We don't know if those consoles maxed out on those games mentioned. We just know those were some of the most visually impressive games on the platforms.

Dreamcast inparticular was discontinued around 2002 so I don't think we ever saw its true potential. Its not like we saw PS2's true potential in 2002.

That may possibly be true with other consoles but not with the Dreamcast. Yu Suzuki had the devs do things that had never been done before in gaming ever with Shenmue. Some of those things were not even thought to be technically possible for the system like the stretching and bending of the phone cord in Shenmue 2 that was used only once.

Yu Suzuki made them get as much out of the system towards his intended ideal design as they could. Not all could be done, but they pushed it as close as they could.

Doom3 and Half-life 2 had to be reuilt slightly for the Xbox because it was not strong enough to handle the straight versions of the games. They reoptimzed the games to get them on the Xbox 1 as accurately as they possibly could. Lighting, shadows, normal mapping and physics on a level that was never seen on a console before were implemented. You tell that Doom 3 hit the max of the Xbox 1 by the frame rate.

Regardless of what Yu Suzuki said, that was 2002. As time goes on Developers often find new technices to get more out of hardware. The best looking PS2 games were released around 2005-2007. There were claims PS3 and 360 peaked years ago, yet the bar keeps getting raised. So saying the Dreamcast was maxed out in its short life is wrong in my opinion.

Frame rate is no real indication of a console hitting its full potential. For example, Mass Effect 1 on the 360 has a terrible frame rate and even gets choppy. Yet Mass Effect 2 has improved visuals and a smooth frame rate. Same story with Call of Duty 2 and its successors or Oblivion and Skyrim. Many assumed the poor performance was due to the limited capabilities of the hardware, but that was clearly wrong.

I didn't say what Suzuki said. I said what he "did". This was found by actual fans. Modders and hackers have looked at the code and what not themselves. I have looked it over as well. A different technique is just that. Different.

Everything has a limit. There is a maximum potential limit to op code as well. I know this because I have programmed assembly. You cannot get more defnite and optimized than that. Most older consoles like the NES used assembly level programming so when it was maxed, it was maxed. There is no ifs or buts about it. Different techniques can do different things but that does not push the system any further. It just does something different with the alotted resources.

Frame rate makes a hell of a lot  of difference but that in itself would take to long to explain. This is wordy enough.

How good something looks is now and forever a matter of opinion, not a matter of technical capability. Crysis 2 has better graphics than Crysis 1, but Crysis 1 is having to undergo heavy downgrades to run on the consoles because it is too much for them. There is far more to graphics and capability than how shiny and big the picture is or how pleasing it is to the eye.

The same with Oblivion and Skyrim. They are two different designs under the hood. Skyrim has better graphics, but it did it at the cost of the variety and variability in the graphics that was seen in Oblivion. They didn't really get more out of the system. They just did different things with the resources. instead of spreading the resource use out, they focused detail into single objects and and limited the amount that was there at any given time. 

In the case of Rogue Squadron(the topic example) it shows that developers have neither used up all of the resources nor polished their designs. To my knowledge their is not a single we game that pushed 14 million polygons on screen at one time, far be it 20 million at 60 FPS like in Rebel Strike on the Gamecube