Digital Foundry takes a closer look at Breath of the Wild

[DonFerrari]

curl-6 said:

GOWTLOZ said:
GTA V and BOTW can't be directly compared. GTA V's open world is filled with NPC's, buildings and traffic, something that BOTW doesn't have. Also BOTW has cel shaded graphics so a lot less details are required for it. Both have impressive physics, but PS3's CPU has more powerful and higher clocked individual cores than PS4, so it should handle BOTW's physics. BOTW is better in terms of framerate than last gen GTA V, that's the only place its better.

Also GOW 3 can run on PS3 at 45-60fps so BOTW would run on it easily. GOW 3 had incredible scale to it, some of the bosses were bigger than entire levels in some other games. Not open world, but as they are all animated that makes it more impressive and it still looks like a PS4 game on PS3.

Only the characters in Breath of the Wild are cel shaded; rock, snow, trees, pavement, water, dirt, etc all use regular textures. And rendering a world as big and detailed as BotW takes more than just CPU grunt, it also places considerable demands on RAM and GPU power, two areas where Wii U exceeds PS3 and 360.

Also, GOW3 looks as good as it does because it is highly scripted; levels are linear, the developers control the camera so they can always micro-manage exactly what's on screen at any given time, and a lot its eye candy is smoke and mirrors. It looks flashy but its not as technically demanding as an open world game like Breath of the Wild.

 

DonFerrari said:

It's possible some downgrades would be necessary, but I would bet that if in the hands of SSM or ND they would be able to produce basically the same product with those differences not being very perceptible. And a lot of games were sub 720p on PS360 so it wouldn't look out of place.

I doubt resolution would be the primary downgrade; I think the most noticeable cut would have to be level of detail. With half as much RAM, you couldn't fit as many assets into play at once, leading to a lot more pop-in.

Ok, I can agree that half the RAM could affect the LoD or the size of the world. But how much opmization and tricks would make the loss smaller is another point.