Honestly, as much as I love great graphics, I have higher hopes the physics in Skyrim. I'm sure there will be graphical leaps, but I want to see some really good environmental, cloth, and soft body interactions in Skyrim. If they can get really good animations combined with top of the line physics (Euphoria and DMM is probably asking too much), I would be a happy man. I would love to see my sword deflect off or stick in objects rather than phase through them. I would love to see arrows stick in or bounce off objects depending on material. And I would love great effects for the powerful spells in the game like blowing around the environment and enemies.

I love detailed graphics as much as the net guy, but I love AI, game play, sandboxing, and modding even more.

Call of Juarez - Bound in Blood was the prequel and it came out in 2009.

I totally agree your second statement, an engine is useless without the programmers and artists.

People here dont understand that its not because people make a pretty looking engine that its a good engine. what we need is an engine that doesnt take much GPU and RAM usage and those videos show nothing about that

No it couldn't do tessellation like what you see in DX11 games and demos. The APi 360 uses is not advanced enough nor is its tessellation unit which is several generations behind modern tessellators. Its too slow to add lots of triangles, even if it could Xenos's ability of geometry per clock would choke it. 360's tessellator is used best for things like what Halo Reach did. The tessellator rendered geometry that the camera wasn't looking at. This geometry was then handed over to the system when the camera moved to see it. This way you save system resources when needing to draw geometry but not looking at it. Skyrim could certainly do this. Also I'm willing to bet if one were willing they could get some form of basic software tessellation running on the PS3 Cell.
But in short the main reason the 360's tessellator hasn't been used much is that its too slow for pretty much any job you'd give a tessellator. With a few exceptions like Halo Reach.

Thats what most engines have as a top priority. Look at ID tech 5 using hardly any VRAM due to megatexture. Or Cryengine 3 having the living daylights optimized out of it. Crysis 2 will run on something as old as a Gefroce 6800! It will also use up to 8 CPU threads. Thats some pretty good optimization there.

Actually that's exactly what they show.
Great engines that focus on great graphics and such, must be optimized a lot to even allow great graphics to be played smoothly. How do you think Crytek pulled it off?

I've read some NVIDIA guy's article on the CryEngine 2. He said it's about as optimized it can get. Every code as clean and neat as possible.
The connection between GPU and RAM usage and a game engine is really really big.

could you link me that article please

What i meant is that people come here with videos of an Engine but theres absolutely nothing to show us the performance of the engine other than a pretty video. it could be running on an nVidia TESLA as far as we know.

I don't remember where I read it. But when I became interested in how awesome Crysis looked I googled a lot about its engine and read about it.
Only thing I remember is that it was a NVIDIA guy and that he said CryEngine 2 was very well engineered.
I found this article: http://www.incrysis.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=559

That's not the article that I read originally, but it's somewhat close I guess. They praise the engine, at least

This is really no news though... you can figure out that yourself when playing the game. If the gamebryo engine would try and do the same graphics Crysis do, our computers would surely burn

haha yeah, though maby not if bungies method of tessellating objects off screen, then having them ready to be properly rendered when you look at them was implemented

Not really familiar with that...
All I know is tha tessellation looks awesome and is something I definitely want
And if tessellation is "too much" for Bethesda to do, then I'd like Parallax Occlusion Mapping (2nd best option instead of tessellation I think), as seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcAsJdo7dME

I thought like you for a long time, but having in mind how good and amazing games can still be released on both PC and consoles, I realized that maybe consoles also do their part in the gaming community. How? Forcing developers to FULLY use the avaliable technology, and forcing them to extract their full potential, instead of jumping and ignoring features.

...although I also think it'd be time to jump to an XBOX that is DX-11 enabled. Tessellation is just too good to ignore it.



It's not about being "too much" for Bethesda, but XBOX360 not supporting DX11 Tessellation, being DX9 hardware. And probably the PS3 also doesn't support it.

Sadly it's a cutting-edge PC technology, for now.

Yes, but then Bethesda should add tessellation to PC only, so that those who want to enjoy awesome graphics really can.

yeah, why should all pc users (the ones who made bethesda into what it is mind you) suffer because mainstream console users (80% of them, baring the console users who are actually into TES game, like those on the fourms =]) are running 6 year old software??

then again, metro 2033 plays fine on console, and yet is one of the most graphically advanced pc games, so that gives me hope.

...and an advanced RPG gamemode, too

Thats EXACTLY WHY i am a PC elitist. The consoles are SO a PC crippled down, that until you plug in a mouse and a keyboard in they re worth not much and offer so much less than a PC in all department. And if you plug them in you ll have a poor PC version.

I understand why they exist, and understand why people buy them, and i know not all people to use them are mind challenged with short attention span syndrome, but you people are plots out of the main curve.

Thats why i see console as one of the greatest reason as why the PC game industry has lowered all they standarts (apart GFX) - to match and reach console market limitation (At least the ones who did want to lower themselves to reach this market)- The best example of this in TES department is:
1) extreme limitation in control config in oblivion compared to Morrowind
2) Dumbed down plot and downright hand given gameplay due to broad limitation of the console user average users who complained:
- Too dificult to understand Missions
- We don t know what to do
- We walk too much
- etc.

In a way the port to console brought more cash to TES,
OTOH it made Oblivion be a console ported to PC game. Lucky us PC users they left the possibility to mod the game. Because for old timer Oblivion was a hard to swallow pill and i don t expect any better from skyrim, especially if the plot present itself as straightforwardly dumb as it seem. Dragon, there s so many dragons RPG involved already, why be one more ? Why go down streamline ?
I, for one, won t buy skyrim until i can see more than surface deep reviews, and if its crappy i ll wait for it to reach under 10 bucks , cause by the time there will be enought MODS to make the game playable, especially missions, and maybe some expansion to redeem the game, more or less what happened to Oblivion.

Rant over.. .Open chested.

Well, I wholehearthy agree (and more with my future PC upgrade which includes a GTX 580)...but I try to be optimist

Maybe even before tesselation they could give PC people the hability to program the keyboard as we wish and can and not like some badly ported gamepad program.

Sadly, Console focus on gfx and wizbang instead of trying to make interesting mind challenging games. And sadly no console won t beat PC on Tech and Programation because consoles are mainly build on outdated PC tech..
But thats a myopy of the console marketing, the proof is the WII, it has poor grafic, but the games make as much sucess as better fitted consoles.
Why ? because most companies forget that GAMES are made to be ENTRETAINING and this doesn t equal EYECANDY. This is the actuall main problem with developing companies.
Console company squeeze the old PC tech to the last bit, sure but the PC market has already moved on. Thats why apart from very short periods, Console will always lag behind PC.
The only remedy that could change it is Console market making more interesting game, more challenging inclusive to the mind, the problem that hit this proposition is the maybe wrong fact but clearly present through many evidence that console customers seems the be less "brainers" than PC in the average.
Until Console market reverse this idea, assuming its not true, console will always lag behind in all aspect in gaming.

Part of me is annoyed at the way consoles have "stolen" PC developers and enticed them to make games that either don't appeal to me at all or are not as good as they would be being PC focussed. Don't get me wrong i'm not anti-console (i have a PS3) i just get annoyed when games are held back by bad hardware choices made 5 years ago such as no/small HDDs, lack of RAM and xbox specific not making HD-DVD a part of the console. It has been nice not to have to spend as much on my PC recently though and as FO: NV proved it's possible to make a great cross platform game. The worrying thing is how long it'll be until the next-gen consoles come out. The 360 is pretty creaky now. How bad will it be in two years?

The next consoles will be even more PC like imo. The success of Steam wont have gone unnoticed and i've no doubt that MS will want to expand their download services to full games and get an even bigger chunk of the retail market. So i expect to see 1TB HDDs at a min.


Anyway. Back on topic. Far Cry 2 had a very beautiful engine that did large enviromants and dense vegetation very well. Its physics were top notch and the fire thing was amazing. Pity about the game though... That was cross platform and if Skyrim was even half as impressive i'd be happy. Just cause 2 is supposed to be very impressive as well.

Don't forget Red Dead Redemption. I'd be very happy if it looked like that, despite it being on consoles only. Games like this shows that games on consoles can still look very beautiful, and that gives me hope

The Hunter looks pretty nice as well. Watch this short video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIRwCOB-cw0
It looks really really beautiful at 0:09 in that video...
Far Cry 2 and Just Cause 2 are also games with great graphics, and you have to praise Just Cause 2 for its huge huge world...

However, I hope Bethesda has at least looked at the CryEngine2 code... and perhaps tried to do something similar. I mean, when it has become so worshipped by so many for its graphics, Bethesda better have though an extra thought or two about this

they should name the new engine TES-Engine. hehe, I think we will be blown away by the new engine, 2 more days and we can for ourself in the game informer magazine

Fixed that for ya.

I blame console developers for "delaying" next gen consoles. New consoles usually come out every 5 years. Now it's looking like 7 years.