OlfinBedwere said:
The main two were order-independent transparency, which produces nicer and more realistic transparency effects, and deferred shading, which is what a lot of modern-day engines employ. It's just that the former wasn't really that useful when you generally only had two texture layers going on at once, and the Dreamcast wasn't poweful enough to do much with the latter other than create some nice-looking spheres. (And I should probably have said other companies didn't incorporate them in hardware until PS4/XB1, since you probably can pull off said effects on PS3/360; you'd just have to do it in software) |
You can use Depth Peeling on the Original Xbox and Xbox 360 in order to accomplish a form of order-independent transparency by leveraging the Depth/G-buffer anyway... And was actually a requirement on the Original Xbox for the game 'Shrek' as it used Deffered Rendering.
The Original Xbox had programmable shaders and the necessary buffers, so it was capable of some impressive techniques like that.
| COKTOE said: It's very surprising to me that there are people who think the GC had better looking games than the XB. Is it an exaggeration to say that literally every multi-plat game looked better on the Xbox? I don't think it is. Even if the differences were minor, they always favored the Xbox. Some publishers would also put half assed effort, into the GC version of certain games. EA did this with Madden. I was blown away by how shoddy Madden was on the GC. |
In short the games are the proof.
Halo 2 was leveraging some impressive lighting, bump mapping, shadowing and shader effects at the time, even had depth of field.
Morrowind was a stupidly massive game with some impressive shadered water.
Ninja Gaiden Black has some impressive texture work.
The Original Xbox also had games in High Definition... So I think it's safe to say, the Xbox had the graphics edge that generation.
Although the Gamecube certainly had bang-for-buck.
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