Revolution - graphics wise

Oh god, F-Zero with 29 other people via Wi-Fi would be orgasmic. Yeah as I said it's the gameplay that really counts, I know that, I'm just interested in the power of the machine in this respect. I mean I havn't heard much talk about it. I know why, but, yeah, you get my drift.

While I played my friends 360, it was boring, more like the game Fight Night Round 3 was. No matter how great the graphics were, it was just moving close, slugging, repeat.

I had much more fun playing the "inferior" PS2 with Soul Calibur III.

New graphics may have that wow appeal for 10 minutes, but you'll become used to it eventually.

Hopefully the next gen will have a four player Soul Calibur.

Also, as has been mentioned before - the Revo won't have a 6800ultra because that is made by nVidia, the guys working on the PS3.

On a completely unrelated note.... I love the Black advert!

Very un-Nintendo style and original for a games advert, but a type of advert for a game I've been waiting to see for a while. Put some maturity into adverts. Bang bang bang liscenes real players and silly slogans don't do it for me.

To be honest i doubt even if the graphics were far behind the competition it would make much difference, i mean people should buy games for gameplay not for graphics.

Although lately buying games for the great graphics has become quite the trend in the gaming market as of today, quite a couple of games got through and sold well due to graphics.

I mean who here still plays the retro games? i sure do i still enjoy them, so why would it matter too much if the graphics weren't so great to the competition? i don't think so, as long as people have an open mind about it.

The only thing i do hate hearing is how everyone is like (that generally prefers Microsoft or Sony consoles) "oh the revolution will be crap, it's graphics aren't even good and it's has a controller like a tv remote" and then they continue to say how stupid the idea of a controller like that is etc... and then they say something along the lines of i hate nintendo and you'd never see my playing on it's consoles, and then someone brings DS in and their like woah and loves it. If they love that surely they could like the revolution, i just wish other gamers than prefer other consoles would have an open mind in my school.

To be honest i doubt even if the graphics were far behind the competition it would make much difference, i mean people should buy games for gameplay not for graphics.

Key word there is should, bottom line is first impression is looks and better looking games will invariably sell better.

This is what Revo games will look like:

I think you can all agree, that isn't TOO far behind PS3/360.

True the marketting will be better, and first impressions are everything, but you don't need the graphics to be as advanced as the xbox 360 or ps3 are.

It'll probably do mode 7 a lot better than the PS3, and I bet sprite rotation is easier.

It will have to do Mode 7 or theres no Snes classics!

This is what Revo games will look like:

Not far behind the 360 at all...

Better than nothing ^_^

Key word there is should, bottom line is first impression is looks and better looking games will invariably sell better.

I can prove you wrong with two letters.

D S

The handheld market is different and seems to work in reverse. The weaker console does better than the more powerful.

But look at the charts, the "best looking" games go to the top.

The handheld market is different and seems to work in reverse.

I think that if you're not playing in HD then really you won't notice any difference, but of course we don't actually know because Nintendo haven't revealed any specs yet!

The handheld market is different and seems to work in reverse. The weaker console does better than the more powerful.

*cough*PS1/2*cough*

ps1 yes but ps2 no after ps1 was released and they saw how good and they liked sony and when the second one was released they were automatically convinced it was going to be great.

Huh? The PS2 was still weaker than both GC and Xbox and did well. Thats all i'm talking about.

PS1 was in some ways the most powerful of its generation. It had the best polygon capacity, although Saturn had best 2d and N64 had best textures.

PS1 was in some ways the most powerful of its generation. It had the best polygon capacity, although Saturn had best 2d and N64 had best textures.

LOL

The truth is, the PSone was the least powerful of the bunch. It couldn't render more polygons than everyone else. The only reason anyone thinks that it could it because A; Sony always release the THEORETICAL performance of it's machines (the PSone was no exception, it started the trend), and B; The Saturn was such a bitch to develop for.

It's full potential was almost never ever realised. The Saturn is in fact, more powerful than the PSone. The 'Shenmue Saturn' video is testament to this, as are a handful of released Saturn games. In general, though, even if you look at bog Standard Saturn titles, you can see that the graphics are much less 'warpy' than their PSone cousins.

Note I said capacity.
It could do more polygons, but it was difficult to extract the full amount. The textures on PS1 were awful, but then again its hard to judge exactly as the N64 had the benefit of Cartridge loading, which made it easier to stream more varied textures.

And PS1 was certainly more capable at 3d than the Saturn, although the warp effect was a pain in the ass on many games. I recall it was particularly bad on Destruction Derby 2.

But yes, the Saturn was technically a more powerful machine, especially at 2d. Just a shame that they got the number of sides in a polygon wrong, and didnt make a more coherent chipset that would have allowed programmers to take full advantage of what lied beneath it.

Warp effect?

Yeah.
Where the floor appears to warp when it gets to the bottom of the screen, ruining the 3d effect.

Note I said capacity.
It could do more polygons, but it was difficult to extract the full amount.

No it wasn't, dude. No offence, but you don't seem to understand computer hardware, specifically graphical output at all. The PSone could NOT render more 3D than the Saturn could. The fact that it commonly did, is completely attributable to the Saturn's over-complex architecture, and nothing to do with the PSone being being able to render more 3D. Look at a few in-house SEGA games to see what I'm talking about.

Better yet, Google 'Shenmue Saturn' and watch the video. It's a video showing the unreleased Saturn version of Shenmue, which was later scrapped in favour of a Dreamcast version. In the video, you are treated to real-time footage of Saturn Shenmue which, if you watch it, is pretty fucking amazing. Note that the footage is of an un-released, un-finished game. Had it been finished, you could expect it to look even better.

The Saturn was actually superior to the PSone, even in terms of 3D. It was just never realised by most development teams, who struggled to wrap their code (and their brains) around the Saturn hardware. This became evident in early games, as the PSone versions commonly came off better. This lead to the PSone becoming more popular.

This situation worsened as time went on. As the PSone took dominance, and the Saturn lagged behind, fewer and fewer Saturn games where actually made for the Saturn, but were instead, sloppily ported to the machine. This meant that alot of Saturn games started to look like a very pale shadow of the PSone version.

The fact remains, the Saturn is capable of rendering more 3D than the PSone, and is superior in pretty much every way. It just wasn't designed very well, and nobody but SEGA could get great 3D results from the machine. Well, almost nobody. The Saturn version of 3D Realms' Duke Nukem 3D is vastly superior to it's PSone counterpart. Also, Quake saw a Saturn release, yet id (the game's creator), time and again, said that it could not be done on PSone.*

Yes, if you look at spec sheets, the PSone is 'able' to render more polygons per second than both the Saturn and the N64. The latter should be an obvious clue that this is nonsense. Sony (and Microsoft) base their spec sheets on THEORHETICAL information. Specifically (in relation to this argument), they run simple polygon demos through their lovely new hardware to come up with their polygon per second figure.

A polygon demo is a piece of software that only asks the machine to render as many polys as it can, nothing else. An actual game isn't just pure polygons, is it? It's textures, AI, sound, control, and all the rest of it. All of these things eat up alot of system performance. Therefore, the system can not devote itself to rendering polygons, as it can when a simple polygon demo is run on it.

Thus, you shouldn't pay too much heed to Sony's spec sheets, even with the PSone. SEGA and Nintendo have always released 'real-world' data for their spec sheets. What this means, is that they have run complicated graphical tests through their machine, which take into account all of the conditions that games run under. Thus, their findings are infinitely more accurate.

Ever wondered why Dreamcast games don't look ten times more jagged than PS2 games, even though the Dreamcast is only capable of 6 million polys pers second max, while the PS2 is 'capable' of 60 million+? I rest my case.

*Yes, I'm aware that Quake II made it to the PSone in it's twilight years. However, Quake II is a completely different game, the PSone version of which is fucking awful, and not even comparable to other versions.

The difference with the original Quake, is that the game's then designers refused to release a ruined version of their game for PSone. It seems that Quake II had a different development team (but still within id), who weren't so scrupulous.

The textures on PS1 were awful, but then again its hard to judge exactly as the N64 had the benefit of Cartridge loading, which made it easier to stream more varied textures.

Well, you're on the right kind of track, there, but you're still not right. Yes, the N64's cartridge system was far superior to it's peers' various CD-Drives, in terms of loading. However, N64 cartridges held but a fraction of the amount of data that PSone/Saturn CD's held. This was very detrimental to things like textures, sound, and Full Motion Video (which was only seen towards the end of the machine's life, through advanced compression techniques).

While the N64 hardware was capable of displaying much higher quality textures than the PSone (and Saturn, to a lesser extent), thanks to it's higher video memory, the extremely low data-storage-capacity of the cartridge media that the games came on, meant that, while the textures could be greater quality, their couldn't be very many of them. As time went on, when catridges with higher capacities, and advanced compression techniques were introduced, this problem became less apparent.

However, if you look at some early N64 games, you can see what I'm talking about. Designers had to be very careful. While the hardware was capable of some dazzling things, the storage media wasn't up to scratch for the task. It's no good designing elaborate, high-quality textures, if it you can't fit them all on the cart. In many early games, what you actually got was PSone-quality textures, that have merely been put through bi-linear filtering (smoothing).

That's why alot of earlier N64 games that, while geometrically smoother than games on other systems, they tended to look very bland and repetitive. Body Harvest is a nice example. In terms of 3D, I doubt the PSone could have handled it. However, I swear ALL the grass is the same 4foot-square texture, repeated over and over again. Many other N64 games fit this description, also.

As I said before, as time passed, this became less of a problem, due to Nintendo's reluctent release of higher-capacity carts (and due to some heroic feats of compression, and general coding genius by various development studios). Also, the Expansion Pak played no small part in defeating the 'Blurry N64ishness' of earlier titles.

Why does Perfect Dark look three times as good as GoldenEye? Yes, it's game-engine is more refined, and it's able to throw around a few more polygons, but the reason is due mostly to more varied, higher-res textures, afforded by the bigger cart, better compression techniques, and the Expansion Pak. In fact, a better example is Majora's Mask.

The game-engine in Majora's Mask is not much refined from OoT's, it is, but only a little (certainly not to the same astronomical level of Perfect Dark Vs GoldenEye). It's not displaying a great deal more polygons. Generally speaking, the geometry in Majora's Mask is nearly equivalent to that of OoT. What makes everything look so much more vibrant, is the greater variety, of higher-quality textures on display. I'd love to have seen a re-released OoT, taking advantage of the Expansion Pak, but that's for another thread.

And PS1 was certainly more capable at 3d than the Saturn, although the warp effect was a pain in the ass on many games. I recall it was particularly bad on Destruction Derby 2.

It wasn't, man. It was easier to get something (in terms of 3D) out of the PSone, than it was to get the exact same thing out of the Saturn, but the Saturn was capable of more.

But yes, the Saturn was technically a more powerful machine, especially at 2d.

It's interesting to note that the stock Saturn had as much RAM as an un-Exapanded N64, and the Saturn with the RAM cartridge had as much RAM as an N64 with the Expansion Pak installed! Cripes! Although, the N64's RAM configuration was undoubtedly more efficiant.

Just a shame that they got the number of sides in a polygon wrong, and didnt make a more coherent chipset that would have allowed programmers to take full advantage of what lied beneath it.

That's the interesting thing, you see. The Saturn didn't technically render any polygons AT ALL. Thing is, the Saturn's 3D capabilities were designed around using Quads (basically a square, not a triangle like Polygons). In fact, the Saturn was optimised for, and meant to use Quads for 3D rendering.

This is the part that backs up my whole post. You see, most developers had already been using Polygons (or 'triangles') for years, and had become accustomed at how to use them. Most developers didn't embrace Quads, and demanded that SEGA adapt the Saturn SDK to accompany polygons. SEGA bowed to this pressure, naturally. That is where Saturn games truly suffered. Most Saturn games are force-rendered in polygons. Given that the machine is made to render Quads, it's hardly suprising that it's polygon performance isn't up to scratch, as it was never really meant to render them at all.

The best looking Saturn games, which are rendered using Quads (Shenmue Saturn can undoubtedly be counted among these), are head-and-shoulders (graphically) above anything I've ever seen on PSone. Ever.

I should say, at this point, that I'm not a PSone hater of any kind. Not at all. As is conceptually, and by design, the greatest console of it's generation. Arguably the greatest ever. I mean, it delivered to both the consumer and the developer exactly what they wanted. I mean, if you think about it, you can't actually do any better than that.

Back in it's heyday, you never really heard any developers complaining about the PSone's hardware, and you certainly didn't get any major complaints about the games from consumers. In fact, the only complaint that was ever levelled at the PSone, as far as I can remember, was by Capcom. They were dissapointed with the machine's 2D performance, and felt that were ignoring 2D games. That's it.

This was not really a problem for the PSone. It was at a time when no-one really cared about 2D games at all. Everyone wanted 3D. More and more 3D. Which brings me back to what I said before- giving the developer and consumer exactly what they want. The original PlayStation was conceptually perfect, and delivered to the market at the perfect time, riding the wave of the 3D revolution, and creating the videogames industry we all know today.

Like it or not, things wouldn't be the way they are now, without the PlayStation. There'd be no multi-million dollar gaming epics, no casual gamers, and there certainly wouldn't be like, three or more dedicated gaming stores in your local highstreet. In fact, you'd be lucky to have one.

It's all about giving the consumer and developer what they want, and not being over-ambitious with impractical features/capabilities. SEGA learned a hard lesson with the Saturn. It's no good making a console that's more powerful than the competition, if most of your games look half as good.

SEGA didn't make the same mistake with Dreamcast (they made a whole load of different ones!). I can remember at least three interviews with games industry big shots, not long after SEGA ceased hardware production, lamenting the loss of the Dreamcast, because it was such a fucking lovely console to make games for. Two of those interviews went on to curse the horridness of the PS2 architecture in the very next paragraph.

Now that Sony have created a dominant brand, they can be abit more stubborn. They can make developers bow to their demands, instead of fighting to win them, like they would of had to back in 1995. You can see it in the next-generation. Nintendo are striving for an extremely developer-friendly console, as are Microsoft, to a lesser extent (MS are straddling a very fine line between developer-friendly, and raw power).

Sony, on the other hand, don't have to. They are where it's at. I mean, come on, look at the PS3's design. Just look at it. From a conceptual and design point-of-view, it's a fucking joke. A seven-core CPU? Sorry, aseven-core CPU which doesn't have on-board syncronization, to keep itself in time with itself? LOL. Sony's RD Dept. have clearly been on crack since '95. And fair play to them. They did the right thing, and delivered the perfect console at the right time, and now they are the boss.

"Ju don't lak PS3? Well fuk ju! Don't fucking make PS3 games, ju fucking prick! See if we care! Don't come crying to us when ju go into liquidation, and ju're bought by EA..." - Sony

[/fucking annoying geeky nerd, who's shit with girls, and people in general, has no friends, and always finds himself confined in his own locker, with his underwear stuck up his arse...]

See, I'm a veritable fountain of knowledge. Especially when it comes to anything SEGA-related. Which is why I'm the Supreme Overlord of Sega Army

( Edited on 06.03.2006 03:42 by Oni )

Nice post

Although, what makes companies use architecture that is so complex? Especially when rival companies do it easily.