Actual truly impressive Xbox 360 graphics

[Jason Cross]

behold, the community update for PGR3:

http://www.bizarreonline.net/index.php?action=fullnews&showcomments=1&id=32

not too shabby!

[Dave Long]

As noted at GAF today when those shots went up... wake me when we see these things running in real-time on the hardware with cars on the road and whatever frame rate it can muster. That shot is perfectly positioned to show you... nothing to do with auto racing!

--Dave

[stusser]

Nothing to do with the xbox360 per se, not that many polygons, just incredibly high resolution textures. Those screenshots speak more for the developer than the hardware. Gorgeous though.

[Ben Sones]

They have shown gameplay videos that look that good. I mean, I guess we'll see how it looks on the final hardware, but the PGR games have always looked damn impressive, and that's on hardware that's five years old. I find it pretty easy to believe that PGR3 will actually look like that.

[Dave Long]

They have shown gameplay videos that look that good. I mean, I guess we'll see how it looks on the final hardware, but the PGR games have always looked damn impressive, and that's on hardware that's five years old. I find it pretty easy to believe that PGR3 will actually look like that.

Graaaaggggghhhh!!! It's not five years old! Xbox isn't even officially FOUR yet!

--Dave

[Wholly Schmidt]

They have shown gameplay videos that look that good. I mean, I guess we'll see how it looks on the final hardware, but the PGR games have always looked damn impressive, and that's on hardware that's five years old. I find it pretty easy to believe that PGR3 will actually look like that.
I've only seen the one E3 video, and never seen confirmation or indication one way or the other as to it being gameplay. Are there more videos out there somewhere?

[Ben Sones]

Graaaaggggghhhh!!! It's not five years old! Xbox isn't even officially FOUR yet!


The hardware was around before the retail launch. It's not like they tossed in the fastest components they could find on launch day. But despite your intense consernation, I don't see how the substance of my comment is any different even if you feel the unstoppable need to replace "five years old" with "four years old."

I've only seen the one E3 video, and never seen confirmation or indication one way or the other as to it being gameplay. Are there more videos out there somewhere?

At the E3 MTV presentation, Microsoft said that the footage was all gameplay.

[Dave Long]

Look, to consumers, the Xbox came out Christmas of 2001. That's it's "birthday" for lack of a better word. There's no spin anyone can apply that can make that hard date in November of that year into anything but the day the Xbox debuted and that is the system's age. Period. By constantly making it seem "older" as you and Jason do all the time, you completely skew the reality of just how soon this new system is being released by comparison with EVERY game console generation change before... like... ever.

So yeah, I'm being a prick about it, but I think it's a very big deal because they have effectively ended support for the current box in less than four years. Conker is all that's left. That's almost the same amount of time Sega sold Sega Saturn. Think about that for awhile.

Even if you were to go by say, E3 of 2001 or something, then you're going to have to use E3 of 2005 as the first appearance of Xbox 360. That's still a measly four years for the first Xbox. It's really shitty for people who have purchased the system in the last year and a half when it became affordable to the masses.

--Dave

[Ben Sones]

Look, to consumers, the Xbox came out Christmas of 2001. That's it's "birthday" for lack of a better word. There's no spin anyone can apply that can make that hard date in November of that year into anything but the day the Xbox debuted and that is the system's age. Period. By constantly making it seem "older" as you and Jason do all the time, you completely skew the reality of just how soon this new system is being released by comparison with EVERY game console generation change before... like... ever.

Holy nuclear non-sequiturs, Batman! What the hell thread are you participating in? We weren't talking about how long the Xbox was on the market, or how old the console is in the eyes of consumers, or how long this console has been on the market compared to other generations. That's just a made-up conversation that you were, I have to assume, having with yourself in your own head. Last I checked, we were just discussing how likely it is that the new Xbox can pull off graphics that look like that screenshot (or the PGR3 videos floating around out there). Based on how good the current PGR games look on hardware that's been around for five years, I'm just saying that it seems very likely. I'm sorry if the five years thing personally offends you or something; if it makes you feel better, I'll pretend that I didn't really buy a 733MHz Pentium in 2000.

When the Xbox went on sale, or how old consumers think it is, or whether Microsoft is shorting this generation is not merely besides the point--it's not even tangentially related to the conversation.

So yeah, I'm being a prick about it

Well, so long as you know, I guess.

Edit: speeling

[Jose Liz]

They have shown gameplay videos that look that good. I mean, I guess we'll see how it looks on the final hardware, but the PGR games have always looked damn impressive, and that's on hardware that's five years old. I find it pretty easy to believe that PGR3 will actually look like that.

I'm with you on this. The series has always looked great, and I don't see how these screenshots present an unrealistic standard for the game to look.

Now, I wonder how many of these tracks and cars they can get in the game, because as stusser noted, it's mostly texture work. A DVD only goes so far.

[Jason Cross]

At the E3 MTV presentation, Microsoft said that the footage was all gameplay.

Not 100% true. There were 1 or 2 rendered bits in there.

The PGR3 trailer from E3 was rendered (and pretty obviously so, with the way they had the funky lights going over the cars, the car "shooting" like out of a gun, etc.).

Shortly after that, they did a video for some MTV special in Europe or something, and that video was entirely produced with in-game footage running on real hardware. There are three screenshots from it on that bizzare creations site, but they haven't released the video online.

As for my original post: if you read the dev update that goes along with those shots, it's pretty impressive. I mean, if you're familiar with PGR at all, you know how the backgrounds are kinda detailed at first blush but fall all apart when you stop at look at them still. They look neat from behind the wheel at 180MPH. But these shots from new york are taken from the actual 360 hardware, just pointing the camera at the side with the devkit in flyby mode and taking the pic. If that's the level of detail they're rendering the city at, I think it's pretty remarkable. It's LOADS more detailed than PGR2. Seems pretty much next-gen to me, which has been the problem with so many other 360 screenshots - they just didn't seem like THAT big a leap.

[TomChick]

When the Xbox went on sale, or how old consumers think it is, or whether Microsoft is shorting this generation is not merely besides the point--it's not even tangentially related to the conversation.

Well, when you call it five years old, it's worth noting that you're off by 20%. Since it's a point of contention for a lot of people that the Xbox has such a short lifespan, I'm not surprised that someone would want to correct you. There are plenty of things to pick on Dave Long about, but I hardly think that's one of them! :)

Anyway, as for the PGR3 screenshots, yeah, yeah, pretty, whatever. Wake me when they've got a game to show.

-Tom

[Jazar]

Wake me when they've got a game to show.

One that's not a racing or sports game at that.

[Ben Sones]

Well, when you call it five years old, it's worth noting that you're off by 20%. Since it's a point of contention for a lot of people that the Xbox has such a short lifespan, I'm not surprised that someone would want to correct you.

Look, all I said is that the existing PGR games look as good as they do on hardware that's been around for five years. And that's true--that statement is off by 0%, regardless of when the Xbox launched at retail. I said nothing about how short the Xbox's retail lifespan has been... for what it's worth I agree--obviously it's been very short. But that's not even what we were talking about here, and Dave unloaded on me like he's been walking around with that argument on a hair trigger, just waiting to throw it in someone's face. The fact that he had to pretend that I was saying something other than what I said in order to throw it in mine annoyed me.

[Ben Sones]

Shortly after that, they did a video for some MTV special in Europe or something, and that video was entirely produced with in-game footage running on real hardware. There are three screenshots from it on that bizzare creations site, but they haven't released the video online.

Yeah, that's the one I'm talking about. The site (http://www.xboxcore.com/gaming_news/633.html) I saw those shots on said they showed that video at E3 as well, but maybe they're mistaken. Either way, they're pretty impressive.

[Jamie]

<snip>

Even if you were to go by say, E3 of 2001 or something, then you're going to have to use E3 of 2005 as the first appearance of Xbox 360. That's still a measly four years for the first Xbox. It's really shitty for people who have purchased the system in the last year and a half when it became affordable to the masses.

Hey Dave,

I bought my XBOX about 10 months ago and have revelled in scooping up the dirt cheap games that I missed 2-3 years ago (NBA Street Vol. 2 is a truly addictive game that I got recently, absolutely love it!). Next are the Splinter Cell games (only halfway through the first one!) and then I'll try Ninja Gaiden again... I'm totally happy with my purchase and the amount of gaming "bang for my buck" is going to be staggering.

Go ahead and release the Xbox 360, MS... That'll just make the Xbox games that I've missed even cheaper (Jamie feels a pang of guilt for saying this given his occupation) ... :?

[Jamie]

As for my original post: if you read the dev update that goes along with those shots, it's pretty impressive. I mean, if you're familiar with PGR at all, you know how the backgrounds are kinda detailed at first blush but fall all apart when you stop at look at them still. They look neat from behind the wheel at 180MPH. But these shots from new york are taken from the actual 360 hardware, just pointing the camera at the side with the devkit in flyby mode and taking the pic. If that's the level of detail they're rendering the city at, I think it's pretty remarkable. It's LOADS more detailed than PGR2. Seems pretty much next-gen to me, which has been the problem with so many other 360 screenshots - they just didn't seem like THAT big a leap.

Did I mention that all game developers are going out of business? The level of manhours required to generate content (i.e. models, textures, animations, particle effects, etc.) let alone the programming necessary to integrate it all is the truly REMARKABLE part of these next batch of consoles...

Unless a game sells 500,000 copies on any of these next-gen consoles (which is a very small portion of the market that can achieve that level of performance) the dev/publisher will have no chance of recouping the costs necessary to generate THAT (http://www.gamespot.com/xbox360/action/gearsofwar/screens.html?page=2)!

I just don't see how they're going to do it... <shakes head and weeps> :cry:

Sorry for the tangent
(well, it's somewhat related to the original PGR3 post, I suppose, in respect to the production levels/quality... so I'm not too out of line).

[TomChick]

Look, all I said is that the existing PGR games look as good as they do on hardware that's been around for five years. And that's true--that statement is off by 0%, regardless of when the Xbox launched at retail.

You know better than that, Ben. So if you were an editor and one of your writers wrote that in an article, you wouldn't correct it?

I didn't think so... :)

-Tom

[TriggerHappy]

<snip>

Even if you were to go by say, E3 of 2001 or something, then you're going to have to use E3 of 2005 as the first appearance of Xbox 360. That's still a measly four years for the first Xbox. It's really shitty for people who have purchased the system in the last year and a half when it became affordable to the masses.

Hey Dave,

I bought my XBOX about 10 months ago and have revelled in scooping up the dirt cheap games that I missed 2-3 years ago (NBA Street Vol. 2 is a truly addictive game that I got recently, absolutely love it!). Next are the Splinter Cell games (only halfway through the first one!) and then I'll try Ninja Gaiden again... I'm totally happy with my purchase and the amount of gaming "bang for my buck" is going to be staggering.

Go ahead and release the Xbox 360, MS... That'll just make the Xbox games that I've missed even cheaper (Jamie feels a pang of guilt for saying this given his occupation) ... :?

I'm in the same boat, got my Xbox a couple months back, getting titles like Mechassault, Voodoo Vince, Crimson Skies for 10 bucks each.

[RickH]

First party titles not named Halo were hardly the driving force for an Xbox purchace anyway. Lots of 3rd party stuff looking its best, that's the Xbox sales driver.

And why not replace the Xbox when it's pretty clear that there's no way the price point can go lower than $150? I've heard that MS isn't even taking anymore chip shipments from Nvidia, so the Xboxes in the channel right now are the only ones that will ever be available. Sure hope that backward-compatibility-emulation-bleem thing works out for them.

[Ben Sones]

You know better than that, Ben. So if you were an editor and one of your writers wrote that in an article, you wouldn't correct it?


Not if the point was clear. And I clarified my point for Dave before he went off on his rant. Though honestly, I felt it was pretty clear to begin with, given the topic of discussion.

To put it another way, if someone launched a new console tomorrow with the same hardware as the current Xbox, would I be out of line to say that the hardware is five years old?

[TomChick]

Ben, you're being obstuse because you got busted for making a mistake. So rather than admit it, you're bending yourself into verbal pretzels and trying to deflect the issue onto Dave Long.

Okay, you want to call the Xbox five years old? Are you sure it was only in development for a year, because I kind of doubt that's the case? Maybe it's actually six or more years old? How old is the new GeForce card that came out last week? Can we start calling the PS3 the current generation, since there are already people working with it? Don't we now need to revise our estimations of how old Dreamcasts and N64s are by going back and considering when they were conceived rather than when they were created?

Don't be silly. We date hardware based on when it's released into the market. That's just the way it's done.

-Tom

[Tom Ohle]

To get back to whether these shots look good or not... I think they look great! :)

[Jose Liz]

Don't be silly. We date hardware based on when it's released into the market. That's just the way it's done.

That's exactly what he's doing. He mentioned the hardware has been released for five years. The actual hardware, that was released to retail, not the Xbox. He never claimed "on a machine that's five years old."

It's silly to claim that the PS3 is starting now because I can't go to Best Buy and buy a Cell processor. In 2000, it was possible to buy a 733 Mhz Pentium processor.

[Rywill]

The mistake you're making, Tom, is buying Dave's reinterpretation of what Ben said. Ben didn't say the XBox was five years old or released five years ago. He said the hardware inside an XBox is five years old. In other words, that you could buy the stuff in an XBox at retail a year before the XBox was released, so the hardware is five years old even if it was repackaged into an XBox four years ago. Not that the XBox was in development five years, not that we should measure hardware age based on its development time rather than release date, none of that nonsensical junk you're putting in his mouth.

Put another way, are you saying that because I can go buy a 2.8GHz Celeron today, the Celeron chip is only one day old?

[Jamie]

Wow, you "print/media guys" are really about getting it right... :shock:

Well, to cite the other thread (http://www.quartertothree.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=19948) and its Anandtech review of the original XBox (http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2461&p=2).

Specs:
It featured a 733MHz Pentium III processor with a 128KB L2 cache, paired up with a modified version of NVIDIA's nForce chipset (modified to support Intel's Pentium III bus instead of the Athlon XP it was designed for). The nForce chipset featured an integrated GPU, codenamed the NV2A, offering performance very similar to that of a GeForce3. The system had a 5X PC DVD drive and an 8GB IDE hard drive, and all of the controllers interfaced to the console using USB cables with a proprietary connector.However old "all of that stuff" is... I think that's what he meant (release date or not, that hardware has a certain "vintage" does it not?)

[Wholly Schmidt]

Don't be silly. We date hardware based on when it's released into the market. That's just the way it's done.

That's exactly what he's doing. He mentioned the hardware has been released for five years. The actual hardware, that was released to retail, not the Xbox. He never claimed "on a machine that's five years old."

It's silly to claim that the PS3 is starting now because I can't go to Best Buy and buy a Cell processor. In 2000, it was possible to buy a 733 Mhz Pentium processor.
Ben, I think you lose by default when Jose jumps to your aid.

[TomChick]

Fair enough, I suppose, but I think it's obtuse to interpret the "hardware" comment as being about the components and not the actual system. I suppose it's an out if you really want one.

But Wholly's right that once Jose Liz gets involved, we can immediately all agree on one thing: Freddie Prinze Jr. is, like, totally hot.

-Tom

[Rywill]

No argument there.

[Jose Liz]

Ben, Jose, Rywill: 1

Tom, Dave: 0

[Hanzii]

Fair enough, I suppose, but I think it's obtuse to interpret the "hardware" comment as being about the components and not the actual system. I suppose it's an out if you really want one.

I'm not a native speaker, and even I understood what Ben was saying the first time around. Its really obtuse to think, that Ben wouldn't have used a word like "system" or "console", if he meant that and not the hardware the xbox consisted of.

[TomChick]

Whatever. Words like 'hardware', 'system', and 'console' are used interchangeably. A console system is hardware, whereas the games you run on it are software.

The fact of the matter is that PGR2 runs on an almost four-year-old system that includes components that probably range in age from probably eight to four years. So whether Ben's 'hardware' comment was about the system or the bits that make up the system, he was off.

At any rate, hopefully Jose Liz can emend his post to also give you a point.

-Tom

[Wholly Schmidt]

Ben, Jose, Rywill: 1

Tom, Dave: 0
Land of Legends!

[Ben]

Dave's interpretation of what Ben said isn't totally unreasonable, but I'm pretty sure the sequence is as Ben said. Dave had a "generation ending ealy" comment ready to go and Ben's post was just the springboard he needed.

[TomChick]

I like how Jose insinuates his name comfortably between Ben's and Rywill's. He seems like a kid who's learned how to avoid being ditched.

-Tom

[Ben Sones]

Fair enough, I suppose, but I think it's obtuse to interpret the "hardware" comment as being about the components and not the actual system.

Out of context, I'd totally agree. But we were discussing how likely it was that PGR3 looks as good as that still shot in action, and I was merely making the point that PGR 2 and 1 look as good as they do on hardware that's been around for five years. That's strictly a comment on the metal in the box, not on when the Xbox was released. If the Xbox were released just yesterday, and I played PGR2 on it, I'd say the same thing. "Damn, that looks pretty awesome, considering that this hardware has been around for five years." It's not an "out," and I wasn't suspecting to "get called" on it because I wasn't making a statement regarding how long the Xbox has been available at retail.

It's just a surreal argument because I actually agree with Dave--the Xbox has had a pretty short lifespan, and that sort of sucks. That's just not what we were talking about when Dave burst onto the scene, guns blazing.

I like how Jose insinuates his name comfortably between Ben's and Rywill's.

That's the Jose sandwich!

Ew.

[Jose Liz]

I like how Jose insinuates his name comfortably between Ben's and Rywill's. He seems like a kid who's learned how to avoid being ditched.

-Tom

No need to take out your anger or frustration on me. I merely listed it in chronological order.

[TomChick]

I merely listed it in chronological order.

Don't you think that sort of ranking activity should get its own thread?

-Tom

[Jose Liz]

I merely listed it in chronological order.

Don't you think that sort of ranking activity should get its own thread?

-Tom

No, The only reason I made a thread for Star Wars was because I knew there were going to be a lot of responses, and I'd rather not hijack someone else's thread. Sort of what you're getting me to do now. :(

[Dave Long]

I mean, I guess we'll see how it looks on the final hardware, but the PGR games have always looked damn impressive, and that's on hardware that's five years old.

That's what Ben Sones said exactly and when you're talking about consoles, then I'm just not even thinking about what's inside of it and when that chip or whatever was introduced. Why? Because Sega Genesis ran on the same chip as the Amiga computer, but I didn't think "Oh, that Genesis is like three years old technology already!'" when it came out.

Tom got my interpretation of the sentence correct. I understand what Ben is saying, but really, we've had this discussion before here about the age of Xbox and people were grossly overestimating its lifespan. When people screw up facts like that it really bugs me.

Sorry if I was a prick. Everyone gets to be one now and then you know.

--Dave

[Rywill]

I merely listed it in chronological order.

Don't you think that sort of ranking activity should get its own thread?

-Tom

No, The only reason I made a thread for Star Wars was because I knew there were going to be a lot of responses, and I'd rather not hijack someone else's thread. Sort of what you're getting me to do now. :(
You have turned Jose Liz to the dark side.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

[Slothrop]

For me It's not the textures, it's the lighting model that makes it look so real, the same reason I thought Ico looked so good despite the mediocre textures and blocky architecture. Things just look solid when the shadows look right.

[TriggerHappy]

For me It's not the textures, it's the lighting model that makes it look so real, the same reason I thought Ico looked so good despite the mediocre textures and blocky architecture. Things just look solid when the shadows look right.

And yet :

This is how PGR3's artwork looks right now. On actual 360 hardware. Please bear in mind, however, that you're still looking at a work in progress video game, and that the final in-game effects and lighting aren't even in place yet.