I'm very reserved about the graphics. I'd love to be superoptimistic about the graphics, but I have concerns.
Knowing the game will also come out on consoles, I'm assuming the graphics will be rather a disappointment, as the aging consoles, X360 and PS3, will probably hold the graphics back, both in gpu-power (polygons lighting) and gpu-memory (texture resolution) as we have seen in other multiplatform games.

I just hope it will be scalable, so PC-users can max sliders and stuff. Or maybe even DX10/11-renderpaths, although I doubt it.
Also, I'm hoping antialiasing will be possible (as it's a trend nowadays to disable antialiasing, to keep decent framerates on consoles).


Ofcourse, they can finetune the engine and squeeze everything out of it, which is good news, but there is a maximum of what is possible if it needs to be multiplatform.

Totally agree. It's one of the best water effects I've never seen in a game. Open seas are especially remarkable.

No it doesn't.

I came in here to [censored] and whinge and jump on the "how can you judge yet!?" bandwagon.

But honestly, nice OP. You have done a good job at posting what you think you can judge from the screens and I agree with you on all points. It's nice to see a thread like this made by someone who knows what they're talking about and doesn't sensationalize.

I agree. That's just a very old technique done right.

I think the future is procedural content. If Skyrim has well done procedural snow, it'll be simply amazing.

What, a dozen footstep textures with a lifetime you count in seconds and a particle effect? Wow, impressive /sarcasm
Cell is old stuff, getting fancy effects to run on it is due not "to the power of the cell", but to the skill of the developer. Give credit where credit is due - and none of that credit goes to the hardware. Was mid end 6 years ago.

There hopefully has to be better overall weather then just snow, as it would be a shame to have rain effects looking really bad but snow looking really awesome.

I wouldn't call "old stuff" to a 3,2 Ghz processor, which is a frequency Intel and AMD CPU's have relatively recently grasped.

In my opinion, the ridiculous amount of memory consoles have is the main limiting factor. 512 Mbs is just insulting. No wonder footsteps have to be purged in less than 5 seconds.

@ above poster


Frequency on CPUs has not been a valid way to gauge performance for a long while. Architecture matters more nowadays.

I had that discussion before, and I won't have it again. If architecture is what matters today, tell that to Intel and AMD; they'll be glad to stop spending millions of dollars in reducing the die size of their transistors (where the record is currently at 32 nm) in order to increase the frequency of their CPU's.

Architecture is about how things are done. Frequency is about HOW FAST they're done. Both have at least the same importance.

i agree but cell also has a strong architecture: 8 128-bit SIMDs (SPEs), all running at 3.2 ghz.

Wouldn't call that exactly weak. My overclocked core 2 duo 6400 gives me barely 15GFLOPs. Anyway I think that PS3 isnt the bottleneck currently. I guess Xbox 360 must be although I don't know what hardware it carries.

3.2 GHz PowerPC Tri-Core Xenon

And I continue blaming their low RAM as their main bottleneck.

Well AMD's Bulldozer new architecture is at the gates. However die shrink gives more performance more reliably. New architecture always has its risks.

That's what http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepping_%28version_numbers%29 are for. Just wait a bit until they polish the new architecture, or until they release the next generation of it, which is always more pulished.

It's what I planned to do when I heard about the new "Fermi" architecture from nVIDIA. That's why I'm skipping the 4xx series and I'll jump directly towards the 5xx ones.

Without going into detail, I think it's safe to say that both the Xbox 360 and the PS3 are substantially less capable than a mid range gaming PC from a hardware standpoint. There are a huge number of factors to consider when trying to quantify this, but qualitatively I don't think there is much disputing this.

I don't think any of the issues related to the snow discussion are linked to the console hardware though, I think it's more a case of the developers prioritizing their time for other more important features.

No, clock speed is meaningless between architectures. Yes, it's important, but you *cannot* use it to compare processors, ever. It defines how many cycles a processor achieves in a second, but not how many cycles it takes to achieve anything, or how much it can do in one cycle.

For example, a 3GHz p4 sounds impressive, but any modern chip will blow it out of the water in any benchmark. The reason that higher than 3GHz processors are fairly rare is that the faster a processor goes the more heat is expelled - with great cooling you can run processors much faster, it's just not as much of a return as having additional cores on a chip or making the processor itself more efficient. Processors have become much, much faster in the past 6 years, regardless of whether their clock speed has gone up. Look up the Megahertz myth, and be educated.

I don't blame you, though, marketing for any company has nothing to gain from customers who actually know what they're buying - I do wish such ignorance wouldn't infect serious discussion, however.

They spent and will spend millions of dollars in reducing the size to minimize heat losses (which also were the reason why higher core frequencys than 4Ghz aren't possible without a very lot of cooling) and to get more cpus on a chip.
Architecture is worth more than speed, as you can see at AMD CPUs, their architecture allows them to compete with a 3.2GHz Intel CPU with only 2.4GHz.


I personally think that the RAM of the XBox360 will be the bottleneck.
The XBox360 has 512MB DDR3 RAM @ 700Hz and the PS3 256MB XDR RAM @ 400MHz.
But the XDR is much faster than DDR. At 400MHz you can have far beyond 100Gbit/s.

I don't know about the Cache architecture of the consoles though, that can change everything.


PS: As far as I know the smallest transistor made today is one atom thick and 10 atoms wide (carbon atoms) and was made at the university of manchester.

This makes me a sad panda. :shakehead: I really was expecting Uniengine-like tesselation for Skyrim - it would've suited it perfectly! Besides, previous BGS-games (except FO3) have been demanding the best PC's at their time to run well at max settings, so it wouldn't have been anything new...

Consoles are apparently very capable of making graphics like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEMxSUGZ6TU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Kvl31g77Z8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-D9oINHI11E

Using the "it's a multi-platform game" is a bad excuse, when you're looking at what other games can acheive on consoles.
If Skyrim has bad graphics (we have to wait until we see a real video), it's "only" because lack of money, lack of knowledge, lack of will.

Probably not lack of money, since Bethesda's games have been really successful.
Probably not lack of knowledge, since Bethesda has been able to afford to hire some of the best.
Most likely lack of will; meaning that they rather spend their resources elsewhere.

Gameplay is very important, but so are graphics. I'd say it's 50 - 50; equally important. Gameplay (as broad as it is) satisfies the mind, while graphics satisfies the eyes?

They got rid of that system a while ago, didn't they? Now the frequency they show up is the real frequency, I think (at least for Phenom-based processors).



I was referring to domestic, avaliable-to-customer technology, not freakish' laboratory one.

I don't think you can say that so generally.
You're right, there are a huge number of factory to consider, and in the end it depends on how good the programmers can use the hardware.
But I'm pretty sure that a console can show better graphics than a mid range PC.

You're right, I just needed an example of the importance of architecture .


And because of the freakish laboratory transistors:
I wasn't sure if you meant "record is currently at 32 nm" generally or on a customers point of view.

I hope that Bethesda manages to make a well-scalable engine.
Then all consoles and PC user would have the best visuals for their system.

The easiest way to resolve this is too look at games that appear on console and PC hardware. In almost every case a mid range PC would be able to play the game at higher resolution than the console for a given frame-rate. And bear in mind that this is probably a conservative test since most AAA titles are optimised more heavily for consoles than for PC.

I believe that this is mostly due to the fact that mid-tier PC GPUs are significantly more advanced than the GPUs in consoles, although it's been a while since I've delved into this.

So...having that in mind, I have a question that still nobody couldn't answer me...

If AMD has a nice processor architecture for their Phenom (II)-line processors, and similar clock speeds than Intel CPU's....why a Phenom II 6-cored CPU costs even 3x less the exact equivalent of an Intel processor? In other words, why are Intel processors so &%$# expensive?

It's *all* about having them more Lx memory?

There were 3.4 GHz P4 in february of 2004. Relatively recently... trololololol. Anyway, you can't derive performance from pure clockspeed when comparing completely different architectures, ergo double fail. Not to mention PS3's horrible GPU...


Cell has 1 simd disabled for yield and 1 completely for OS, so it leaves 6 for games. Besides, only 1 of those cores is a full core in a traditional way. And theorethical cpu-power is not a good point to compare performance, expecially because PS3 is the hardest platform to code well. XB360 has a way better GPU and it's CPU's might be better suited for gaming purposes.


They don't go for smaller manufacturing process to simply get higher frequency. Haven't you head about rising core counts, BETTER IPC, better price&watt/performance? Architecture is not just about how things are done, it's also about what gets done.


Have you been sleeping the past 6 years? AMD lost it's competiteveness per hertz right after C2D was released. After that they've had to be at 3.2 GHz to compete with a 2.4 GHz Intel-processor. But let's see what Bulldozer brings IPC-wise...

Not really, my PC is pretty midrange (Phenom II X2 555, GTS 450) and it runs games prettier, at higher resolution, and faster. Even a low-end (but still gaming-class) PC can output decent graphics at 720p these days.