I don't see how people her claim this is trolling, I mean Rod was quoted saying those things, geez talk about the sensitive 360 fanbots.

gengka said: according to kojima, the improvement of graphics in video games will go as far as this generation ends. there wont b any drastic improvements next gen because there is a limit of how much human's eyes can c and ears can hear. so it will not surprise me if the "wow" graphic factor of ps3 and 360 start to slow down in a few years time

 

There has been a steady decline in noticeable improvements with each generation since 3D games were first created in the early 1990s ... It is likely that the diminishing returns will continue in the next generation, and the scale of visual improvement after 5 or 6 years will be similar to what we saw as an improvement after 24 months of development on early graphics cards.

This (however) doesn't mean we're even close to the limit on how much the human eye can see though ... Pre-rendered movies require (roughly) 1,000 times the processing power of realtime graphics, and the level of graphical improvement from 1998 to 2008 has been dramatic and visually obvious. Realistically, it probably won't be for another 2 decades before we are approaching the limit of what the eye can see from real-time graphics.

Now, whether people will care about visual improvements is another matter all together ... Inspite of what some people may think, most people play games as a form of escapism and may not see "Realism" in graphics, audio or physics as being all that important towards their enjoyment of games.

HappySqurriel said: Now, whether people will care about visual improvements is another matter all together ... Inspite of what some people may think, most people play games as a form of escapism and may not see "Realism" in graphics, audio or physics as being all that important towards their enjoyment of games.

Indeed!!!

I suppose the question should be "when are graphics good enough?"

Do the graphics need to be better than say MGS4 to make a better game?

I feel that it's sad that we've hit this generation and the most important thing still seems to be graphics. Although it only seems to be used as a stick to beat the "enemy" with.

Personally I think the graphics are good enough and would like to see the developers spend more time on the other parts of the games that make games good.

 

Every time i read post of rock on i think ps3 has a magical power over him.. go buy some games and play more.. Sony love your money, not to you..

It was already claimed by Epic the 360's limits had already been reached with the original Gears of War. Of course that wasn't true as there are more efficient approaches to re-write the Unreal game engine (which are especially beneficial to the PS3).

The GPU is probably strained towards very near its limits with Gears 2, this due to tiling issues which has been perfected. The Xenon can't help the GPU that much, already launch titles tapped a vast majority of all 3 core resources, by now the game engines are more efficient in tapping the last bits of Xenon performance, much more can't be expected.

Yes, I think Gears 2 will be about as good as it going to get on the 360 for this sort of game, I expected much more from Halo 3 considering it was the most high profile first party exclusive with an enormous budget and many years of development time on a relatively easy to tap into configuration, I think Gears 2 will be much better but will easily be bettered by PS3 games.

He actually said if you read the article that they are reaching the upper level but in no way is it maxed out(like people are hinting at here lol gear2 looks better than gears1 anyone with a good tv atleast a little eye site and half a brain can see that). He even says how there is room to grow and games that will be coming out later will look "killer". The 360 has been on the market for 3 years give or take its no supprise that devs should be able to start getting more out of the 360 machine and that for me is cool if I can have games that are hitting the top mark graphic department everytime sooner. Its funny how people will twist what is said or take it out of context to make one console lok bad and a nother look better. I think people cant be all that into there consoles though I mean I think they do it just for kicks no one can be that sad.

MikeB said: It was already claimed by Epic the 360's limits had already been reached with the original Gears of War. Of course that wasn't true as there are more efficient approaches to re-write the Unreal game engine (which are especially beneficial to the PS3). It obviously wasn't... The GPU is probably strained towards very near its limits with Gears 2, this due to tiling issues which has been perfected. The Xenon can't help the GPU that much, already launch titles tapped a vast majority of all 3 core resources, by now the game engines are more efficient in tapping the last bits of Xenon performance, much more can't be expected. You are speculating. Furthermore multicore development is still in its infancy so its a big statement to call the Xenon 100% tapped out. Yes, I think Gears 2 will be about as good as it going to get on the 360 for this sort of game, I expected much more from Halo 3 considering it was the most high profile first party exclusive with an enormous budget and many years of development time on a relatively easy to tap into configuration, I think Gears 2 will be much better but will easily be bettered by PS3 games. Considering Halo 3 went for a funky light engine that required the game to be rendered at 60FPS the game outside of the lighting was pretty good too. Furthermore when you say easily, I hope you're talking about games with budgets under 20 million right? Because MGS4 and Killzone 2 both had development budgets between 2 and 3 times greater than Gears of War 2.

 

 

@ drpunk

Graphics are a very important part of a game, only less important than gameplay. Better graphics are always better (we are very visually orientated beings), just like better audio, better controls, etc.

I do think I view graphics in a much broader sense than many other people, having a more complex/impressive game world I also see as being related, destructible environments, advanced physics, etc all can make a game look more visually pleasing and add a lot to the gaming experience.

Of course artistic talent is more important, a more capable system and advanced game engines allow for far more artistic and game design freedom, but if you have a bad game design and bad artistic design, resolution, animation quality, audio quality, anti-aliasing, etc, etc all become rather irrelevant.

Combine artistic and game design talent with very advanced technology, then more capable technology IMO translates into far more potential than combined with very limited technology.

obieslut said: Rock_on_2008 said: I wonder which game will end up pushing X360 to its graphics limit? it will be a game that was ps3 exclusive. that gets released on the 360 about a year later. thats what i think, with slighly downgraded graphics of course.   when this happens though, thats when you 100% know that the console has reached its limits

 

Haha I will laugh if this actually becomes the case...but as far as I know the PS3 and 360 are neck and neck as far as graphics go...the PS3 can deffinitly handle more things going on at the same time though.

@ Squilliam

Why are you talking in past tense? The Unreal engine can be heavily adapted to tap into more processors. But the best used approaches in doing so are more beneficial to the PS3 architecture, yet beneficial to both platforms (more so to PCs sporting more cores).

For the Unreal engine on the PS3 to significantly outperform its 360 version only more stuff needs to be ported over to the Cell's SPEs (tapping into more processors than the 360 has cores available).



Not really the case, look at the game engine design of 360 launch titles and CPU cycle usage. There are some important bottlenecks relating to shared system RAM bandwidth and shared L2 cache between all three cores (relevant to talk about if looking at theoretical peak performance).



First of all the lighting engine isn't really that impressive, secondly the game is rendering 30 FPS and slows down towards lower FPS in parts of the game.



Technically. The game budgets aren't entirely invested into technology advances, developing supreme game assets, hiring good actors, hiring game designers, hiring audio professionals, etc cost the bulk of the money.

Actually having only a small team of very talented coders usually yield far greater technical advancements than a huge team of mediocre talented programmers.

Once you gain advancements developers can share knowledge and even code with other developers, it will only improve for the PS3 over time (it will also become cheaper).