yes, its going to be amazing on the 360

The OP and I at least were having an intelligent discussion about graphics technologies. The CPUs in the consoles have little to do with graphics, so I don't know why they're being brought up. The only argument anybody has to bring up the Cell's superiority is that the SPEs can do some graphical things. Other than that we should stay on topic...

There's also the interesting point that the original designs for the PS3 didn't have a GPU at all, rather it was designed for everything to be done on the CPU, but a GPU was eventually put in as developers requested it - but even then, it was somewhat substandard, so the CPU still gets a workout. In that sense, the CPU in the PS3 has always been designed to deal with graphics.

If you're going to talk about technology, please know what you're talking about. Cell is a CPU. Xenos is a GPU, which appears to be based upon the ATI Radeon X1800 or X1900 series. Xenon is the Xbox 360's CPU, a tri-core PPC processor. The RSX is the PS3's GPU, and appears to be based upon the nVidia GeForce 7800 series.

Edit: D'oh, I read the quoted post wrong.

.......and so it begins bliviongate:

OK, let's put this to rest now. Xbox360 and PS3 are both capable for producing games with great graphics: this topic is for discussing what graphics features we will see in Skyrim.


Back to what we were talking about before, I remember now about the lack of MSAA in Crysis (I recall they used some home-made dithering affect to try to mitigate this somewhat). I guess if this issue has been solved then smooth foliage in Skyrim is no indication either way.

(I think the screenshots do have AA enabled by the way, although I agree it's not certain.)

Are there any clues in the shadows (so to speak)? I recall reading something about deferred shading leading to more jaggedly edged shadows. The shadows in Skyrim look pretty smooth.

Crysis supports MSAA. It also has an "edge AA" postprocess shader. Crysis 2 probably won't, as it http://www.incrysis.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=797. It's entirely possible that the Skyrim engine could also use deferred rendering, as it's a very nice performance-enhancement technique particularly with dynamic lighting, but at the cost of being incompatible with hardware MSAA.

Actually I take that back, I think I meant Adaptive AA ( the thing that does AA on transparent textures).

Deferred shading should have no effect on the quality of shadow maps, as far as I'm aware. If you can find the source for that information, I'll take a look at it (a quick Google search didn't turn up anything), but I really don't think that's the case.

Edit: Did that information involve Unreal Engine 3's shadowing by any chance? It kinda looks like that has to do with their particular (deferred) shadow mapping algorithm, as it complicates antialiasing of the shadow maps. Theoretically it shouldn't be impossible/impractical to do shadow AA even with their technique, though, so it's a wonder why they didn't implement it.
Even then, you don't necessarily need multisampling shadow antialiasing to make them smooth. Oblivion's shadows, without any filtering and using the default shadow map resolution setting in the ini, look quite jagged. With filtering turned up to maximum (I'm not sure if multisampling antialiasing is involved in that filtering, to me it just looks like some sort of depth-based blurring; I'll take a look at a high-res shadow map with filtering off) and turning up the shadow map resolution higher, they look decently smooth.
The amount of aliasing in the shadow maps is also dependent on the algorithm used. For example, compare perspective shadow mapping to "standard" shadow mapping.

Edit 2: I messed around with Oblivion's shadows. The shadow aliasing and "acne" is pretty jarring even with 2048x2048 resolution shadow maps. Low filtering doesn't help all that much. High filtering does a half-decent job at trying to cover it up. There is definitely no shadow map multisampling involved in the filtering process.

they look sixy

and for some reason that guys arm looks good for eating, hmmm I guess that crazy guy that bit me last night was sick or something....

oh well BRAINS................BRAINS.....

lol

It's not incompatible with MSAA anymore. Though it depends what system you're looking at. Console games rarely implement MSAA anyways. They usually go for MLAA or some equivalent.



Yeah, sorry, I was thinking of a STALKER game, whichever one was the first in the series to use deferred shading. They have an edge-detect AA to supplement the lack of MSAA. I actually don't remember the reason for no foliage AA in Crysis, it was so long ago.

And have you seen the 360 version of Metro compared to PC?

PC
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v284/Bigtnaples/Metro2033-03.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v284/Bigtnaples/Metro2033-05.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v284/Bigtnaples/Metro2033-31.jpg

Now go look at the 360 version. Looks nothing like that.

Also. Sins of a Solar Empire may not be the most impressive game at first glance. But you can zoom into a single man fighter and then zoom out to view the whole galaxy at once. In fact, the game scales and can create as big of a universe to play in as your computer can handle. So as time goes on, and computer hardware improves, Sins will handle bigger and bigger maps. It is mind boggling how big they are and how many thousands of ships and buildings there are in a game at once.


Also, I would wager a bet that the 360 version of Oblivion looks nothing like this.(I own both)

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v284/Bigtnaples/Oblivion2011-01-0316-43-25-83.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v284/Bigtnaples/Oblivion2011-01-0316-54-08-73.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v284/Bigtnaples/Oblivion2011-01-0316-57-51-77.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v284/Bigtnaples/Oblivion2011-01-1611-50-32-55.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v284/Bigtnaples/Oblivion2011-01-1611-53-10-78.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v284/Bigtnaples/Oblivion2011-01-1611-51-18-59.jpg


The PC versions of console games, (sometimes with a little help from the user thanks to console lead dev) look heads and shoulders above the other versions. To the point that its hard to believe playing some of them side by side they are the same game.

This is just a clarification post, as I game on on my systems (360, PC, PS3, Wii, PSP, ect.) and love them. But don't try to act if something is not that great, especially if you have not seen it first hand...



OT, like I have said before, I think Skyrim is really going to wow a lot of people. In motion I think the game will look spectacular. Silencing all those that say it is only a mild improvment over oblivion. I am buying both the PC and 360 versions, and I think both will look spectacular.

Well, I'm finding this is all very interesting! I think I was associating jagged visuals to deferred rendering, due to a lack of sharpness in Stalker, Crysis, and GTA4. If I'm understanding you guys correctly, this used to be more of a problem than it is now (although is it possible that AA in deferred rendering is slightly inferior to the sort that is used in FO3?). I think that I must be getting mixed up about jagged shadows, since as you point out this is more algorithm specific.

So, are we at the conclusion that it is very hard to tell if a game uses deferred rendering just by looking at a screenshot? Or would the AA still give it away slightly?

I may have been fairly off about some of the stuff about UE3's shadowing and antialiasing (it may be that UE3's shadowing algorithm simply prevents/complicates MSAA altogether, not make it hard to use a multisampling-type AA filter on the shadows, what I was reading wasn't quite clear), you should realize. It's been a couple of years since I really took an in-depth look at graphics and rendering technology (I hadn't read all that much about it since deferred rendering started becoming more and more common) and I had to do a bit of rushed catching up.

About deferred rendering AA, if you can do MSAA (the most traditional and even "standardized" form of AA) with deferred rendering, it'll look the same as MSAA in a renderer that doesn't do deferred rendering. Same with SSAA. Things like "edge AA" and "MLAA/morphological AA" are not true forms of antialiasing, they just fake it. They can do a fairly good job at hiding jaggies, but there's often cases where some pixels will be "occluded", for lack of a better term, and that causes a certain kind of jaggy artifacts that can only be solved by multisampling or supersampling.

And then antialiasing trasparent textures (like foliage) is kinda a separate thing.

Yes, impossible, unless you could detect more than a dozen separate light sources (which is the very upper limit to what forward rendering can do in real-time).

Plus, like I've been saying the resolution/size of the screenshots makes it entirely impossible to detect AA. They look as if they were printed on canvas, haha. For example if you take a 720p non-AA image, and scale it down to an equivalent 360p in a magazine, you've just simulated a 4x SSAA (If I'm assuming the correct terminology they use for the multipliers) because 4 pixels at 720p become 1 pixel at 360p. So the magazine images could simply be anti-aliased by the printing and downsizing process.

However, I would assume they probably gave the highest quality screenshots possible to GI. I think most dev units for the various consoles also operate at a higher resolution and may enable MSAA and such for "free", in the case the screens are from the Xbox 360 version.

The new GI http://www.gameinformer.com/games/the_elder_scrolls_v_skyrim/b/xbox360/archive/2011/01/17/the-technology-behind-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim.aspx gives us a couple of small updates regarding the graphics engine.

The LOD system has been improved, which we can reasonably assume will allow for better draw distances and more detail at long distances.
It is reiterated that shadows are now cast by everything - we have no info on the system algorithm used for casting shadows
BGS are using their own platform to render the trees, in place of SpeedTree. Individual branches can be given weight which then effects the way they move in the wind. We can probably expect slightly better wind effects.

Regarding the snow, the new paragraph still manages to be almost as ambiguous as the original GI article. The snow system they describe is either a development tool, that helps them add snow to a scene without needing to add it manually, or possibly a dynamic system used in game to allow an area to become snowy.

The graphics look amazing, and I really can't wait until we see some actual gameplay.

I wanna tap dat.



^^ Sorry, couldn't resist.

As a modder, I'm hoping that this means that it can be actually dynamic. In Oblivion, you couldn't really have things like the Great House strongholds, since you couldn't have them not there in the distance at the beginning of the game and then show up later during the various stages of construction, since the LOD was pre-generated and static. In Fallout 3, you could make a particle effect show up within the distant LOD, which was kinda nice, but the distant LOD still suffered greatly from staticness.