The consoles are very much capable at HD, but yes it’s harder to do. Whoopy - developing is hard. And I don’t understand how the “prettier” game is dumber - the amount of work ND put into the game and how they proved everything you’re saying wrong, shows how undumb they are.

Yes developers do things differently, but at the end of the day, one developer is doing it right and the other is doing it wrong. If the Spu’s aren’t being used, or old fashioned coding is still being used then of course you’re going to have problems.

these consoles are more suited for standard definition gaming, and i bet you that if people still care enough to figure it out there will be sub hd graphics stories till death of these consoles.

memory is a limitation, and instead of delivering next generation leaps in actual game play or even convenience all the consoles power is focused on delivering hd graphics which means we get stupid games we already played with a new shine.

you can sugar coat the console manufacture poor engineering decisions and a rush to hd as an oh the developers should just make it work mentality if you like however im going to have to say the prettier the game the dumber it is and ill throw your uncharted example back at you.

P-sheen

sounds like a disturbing shampoo advert catch phrase….

hey at least I didn’t call you P-steen :P

Well if you can call me “Pat” I can call you mad :)

David: The article you posted is out of date and has since been proven inaccurate - at least, it has since been shown to be one man’s opinion, full of presumptions. As for Sub-HD games, there are just as many on the 360 as on the PS3. What song were you singing when Halo 3 came out of the sub-HD closet?

LC: Everything you say is all very well and perfect for taking the heat off of developers, but you’ve already been proven wrong. Yes 512mb makes it extremely hard for HD graphics and high-res textures - but it’s already been done. As David said, look to Gears of War and Gears of War 2, look to Gran Turismo 5: Prologue, and look to Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. As for the latter, it even puts PC games to shame with its high-res textures and holds its own on many other levels (eg. water and lighting). In fact, if you’re looking for the best looking games of 2007, Crysis would be top and Uncharted wouldn’t be far behind. You’re going to see many developers reach these heights on both consoles, and it is down to them to code well, get the support from other developers/console manufactures, and money.

As far as memory is concerned, on the 360 it’s all about tiling, and on the PS3 it’s about getting everything into as small bits as possible - this is the time of multi processing and so the PS3’s Cell will be used for graphics (and has been already). This is the difference between Naughty Dog’s PS3 engine and Free Radical’s. HD graphics with high-res textures is possible, and even FR will get there this generation.

I do really suggest you to play Uncharted (it will blow you away, especially the textures which you don’t seem to think are possible), and when Gears of War 2 comes out, I suggest you play that too.

Madpuppy and LC: I wish you both the very best ;)

you can’t do that on a console so they have to compress textures, use lower resolution and often cache or dump and reload data.

that’s one reason why we see so much pop-in in consoles games because that data is always being streamed in.

and the rsx is supposedly less powerful then the 7800gtx. like i said before even with powerful hardware memory is an issue which were seeing here, there trying to use the latest techniques to deliver the latest and greatest visuals on 5 year old graphic technology with a very limited memory pool so things get cut or scaled back to make them fit.

games on console are only coded to work more efficiently then pc’s because they have to in order to make these games run with the limited resources available.

and maybe I am a bit of a hardware elitist but games like oblivion on a beefy machine with 2 gigs of ram fast processor and a 7800gtx was not that great for games like oblivion.

take a number of high end games like flight simulator X, company of heroes and crysis simply wouldn’t run on console hardware without being fleeced.

the information is out there and i posted links to it, the memory might be faster but its still being used up for high resolution textures. below are the quotes.

” The RAM bandwidth of Xbox 360 GPU is almost equal to RADEON X1600 XT and shared with CPU by UMA.

Without the eDRAM pixel processor doing 4xMSAA, the fillrate of the GPU core itself is 4 billion texel/sec and almost equal to GeForce 7600 GT.

While the Xbox 360 has a 3.5 times broader bandwidth than the original Xbox, 720p pixels require a 3 times broader memory bandwidth. It leaves only 0.5 times headroom which is insufficient for multiple texture lookups by complex shaders.”

“Since textures are stored in the shared 512MB RAM, regardless of the eDRAM size or use of tile rendering, texture lookup consumes the shared memory bandwidth. Normal mapping and shadow mapping require many texture lookups.”

he just might be “the one” :P

I didn’t say that at all. Re-read my comment.

forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=30197

theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2005/08/31/playstation-3-gpu-slightly-less-powerful-than–geforce-7800

round 4

ding! ding! ding!
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Thanks LC for the information.

.corsairmemory.com/_appnotes/AN804_Gaming_Performance_Analysis.pdf

a pdf showing a number of the latest pc games all using more than a gigabyte of physical ram. more ram means higher textures and higher resolutions while maintaining/improving framerate’s and load times.

the discovery of sub-hd games on both ps3 and 360 as well as issues with other games including the ones you mention having frame rate issues, texture pop-in, frequent or long/annoying load times proves 512MB of ram is not enough.

further games that have pc counter parts to there console version have higher resolution textures and playable resolutions, better performance and use significantly more ram because its generally available.

Saying that delivering the same performance of a pc games on a console with such limiting specs is ridiculous.

but hey if you think you can make haze better then the developers then… or no, I want to see you fit crysis on the 360 without crippling it, after all you wont have all those resource hogs in the background using up your precious 512MB of ram.

many pc games are using more and more memory and we expect them to do the same thing on a console with a measly 512MB of shared ram.

anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2453

The PS3 is more powerful in imagination land, the 360 is more powerful in reality. That’s pretty much how it’s turned out so far.

But if you want the nitty-gritty, here’s a great article on the subject: http://dpad.gotfrag.com/portal/story/35372/?spage=1

And yeah, I DO care about things like this. When console manufacturers start talking about their new HD consoles with HD games with their HD graphics.. Then I go out and buy an HDTV to fully enjoy them, then games like this come out that are barely above SD.. consider me irked.

Especially since that was the BS-line we were fed about the new $60 price tags, because making these new HD games (with their HD graphics, etc etc) cost more money.

Madpuppy: Many people can tell the difference between sub-HD and HD. And Haze controls can be changed to almost any set-up you’d like.

Andrew: I think the opporative word is “Pre-launch” and “hype” - is that really relevant now? They also tend to push their first party’s to reach 720p - they have no control over third party’s. What about “1080p” being on every Xbox 360 game box? Surely that’s false advertising also.

Darren: Agreed, good on Derek for being honest. Still, I think developers shouldn’t rely on dropping the resolution.

If a game looks and plays great then that is all that should matter. But please Microsoft and Sony - put your dogs back on their leashes and stop making these stupid FullHD / ProHD statements about how your competitor is failing. You both excel at what you do.