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HappySqurriel on 04 November 2012
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teigaga said:
HappySqurriel said:
teigaga said:

“So, around June of next year, there will indeed be something different around Agni’s Philosophy, which will be presented on, perhaps, different platforms than those which have been used before,” Merceron told FFDream.

Asked if that meant it wouldn’t be running on PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360, Merceron teased, “I can tell you that it will not run only on PC!”

Obviously this coincides with the expected announcement of PS4/720, Square are not a PC centric developers, the engine is obviously intended for the next gen systems and I believe the tech demo was based loosely off their specs. So we will finally see the engine running on those actuall platforms, not just a high end PC.

Realistically, the tech demo was designed to show off the kind of pretty images the engine could produce and I doubt it was designed around the PS4/XBox 720's specs ...

I could be wrong but I suspect the tech demo was rendered using a PC with multiple high end graphics cards so that everything in the scene could be at the maximum level of detail at all times; and it is unlikely that any HD consoles would match this kind of performance. This isn't to say that it will look much "worse" on Sony or Microsoft's systems, it is just that this tech demo is (probably) similar to the Ungine Heaven demo and they have presented a video at "extreme" detail that is beyond the capabilities of next generation consoles.


I would hope the video represents a likeness as the reports would indicate they they had 720/Obris Dev kits in their possesion whilst developing the demo. If none of the next gen systems can handle these visuals (not necessarily at launch), I'll be very dissapointed.


Expect to be dissapointed ... and also probably not

My personal expectations for games that are built from the ground up for next generation platforms is that the "base level" of detail on most objects is somewhere between what you would expect from a PS2/Gamecube/XBox game and what you would expect from a XBox 360/PS3 game; and probably closer to a PS2/Gamecube/XBox game. The purpose of this level of detail is to cover most of the main details of an object without wasting resources. The next level of detail will be 4 times the number of polygons as that model (roughly similar to an XBox 360/PS3 model), followed by 16 times the number of polygons as the base model, then 64 times, and finally 256 times the number of polygons as the base level model. The use of tessellation is important so that the artists don't have to model each of these levels of detail directly, they just have to define a base model and then subdivide it to the highest level of detail and model that object and a program should be able to create the correct displacement map to make it look good at all levels of detail.

What I would expect from the next generation consoles (including the Wii U) is to have the lowest level of detail for things off in the distance, the second level of detail for things that are moderately far away, the third level of detail for objects that are close up, and the fourth level of detail for examining objects closely (or for the occassional cut scene); and, of course, "off in the distance", "moderately far away", "close up", and "examining objects" will have a different meaning depending on the power each system has.

Why you would be "dissapointed" is that, if you did a wireframe comparison of what the XBox 720 and PS4 produced to this demo, I suspect that none of the consoles will come close to being able to render the kind of detail that this demo represents.

Why you "probably won't be dissapointed" is that there is diminishing returns on increasing detail, most of the difference people notice will actually come early on with only modest increases in processing power, and most people won't see one "next generation" version of the game lacking unless they look at them in side by side. While their could be an order of magnitude difference in processing power, the perceived difference could be closer to the difference in visuals between the PS2 and XBox.