No they didnt. Where you getting your facts from? Im guessing you think lighting = volumetric lighting and polygons = tesselation?

Have you even built a "Game engine?"
I have. Although, it is pretty crude and not capable of allot of advanced 3D effects.

Now. Dynamic Lighting in Unreal 99:


The config file also allows you to enable volumetric lighting:






Some education on "Volumetric Lighting".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volumetric_lighting
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crepuscular_rays
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_volume

Also, Halo Life 2 which uses the Source engine (Debuted in the Xbox/Playstation 2/Gamecube era.) which in turn is based on Gold Source which in turn is based on the origional Quake 1 engine also had Volumetric lighting.
See here: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Lighting

Interested to see how you claim this isn't valid, like the Tessellation. (Which is valid.)
However, the end result and the source of this argument is that games in the late 90's did indeed have Tessellation and Volumetric Lighting, to argue otherwise will be humorous with all the proof laid out in front of you in pure black and white. (And pretty pictures.)
I can find more proof if you wan't me to continue.

And sorry MTZehvor for hijacking your debate. :P

Yes, they did.  I remember being fascinated with the effect in Unreal and experimenting with it myself in Open GL/Direct X when I was learning 3D graphics programming.

<- programmer

One of the first rooms you enter in Unreal has spherical volume lighting, and Quake 3 had similar with fog volumes.  Ray tracing vertices or fog maps to surfaces from the eye through an arbitrary convex volume (mostly spheres to keep performance acceptable back then) to determine line segment length through the light/fog volume, and attenuating for distance from center of the volume, to set the color/alpha intensity then rendering an additional pass to any surface in or behind the fog volume.

Unreal's technique is a little more refined.  IIRC Quake 3 just used tessellated vertices and vertex shading while Unreal actually used low res view dependant fog textures similar to light maps that were raytaced per pixel per frame then applied with multi texture or an additional rendering pass with blending enabled. It came out much smoother than Quake 3 which suffered from mach banding and tessellation issues since it was per vertex.

View dependent real time volumetric lighting is a VERY old effect.  I was absolutely fascinated by it in the 90s.

Okay you win this one so credit where its due, so i'll just revise what I say to a next gen engine has to run dx11, tesselation thats expected at such levels rather than the bad ati thing, and has real time global illumination while showing a significant increase in particle effects over 7th gen games, all at 30 fps, 1080p. That seem fair?

You can't just lump game engine generations in with a Direct X version because the Playstation 4 and Wii U simply don't use that API.
They do however share a common hardware feature set that happens to be compatible with the Direct X 11 feature set.

The problem is that, whenever a new generation is launched, Game Developers don't exactly throw out the old engine and drop in a shiny new game engine, it's more or less an evolutionary improvement with each new iterative release, most game engines will support multiple API's too like Direct X 9, 10 and 11 and OpenGL all at the same time.
That's also compounded by the fact that whilst consoles will be stuck with a Direct X 11-level hardware feature set, the PC will move on to the likes of Direct X 12 and beyond and engines will end up supporting that too.

So would it be fair to say a next gen engine is one that supports the majority of features found within the DX11 api? With regard to pcs i would say that they are seeing the end of the 8th gen as they can kick out almost anything at over 60fps at 1080p. 

And sorry MTZehvor for hijacking your debate. :P

You need not apologize to me. I'm personally amazed you got him to admit that he was wrong about anything, ever.

It would be fair to say that from a feature set perspective.

As for framerates and resolution, consoles now are only starting to get games at full 1080P and 60fps. (Though, even that's not guarenteed even on the Playstation 4).
Whilst the PC is already moving to 4k and 120/144fps.
I'm personally running at higher than 4k resolutions, have been for a few years now, so I was already beating next generation while there were only rumours floating around.