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I want to sort a few things out and hopefully make people think about what makes good graphics in a game. This will involve looking at the Hardware available and also what I believe to be the most important things to graphical quality!!
As you all may be well aware, 3D graphics in games are maily to do with vectors, polygons and the like, all 3D games have this is common. These make up 3D models (wireframes) and then a texture is mapped around the object to make it look more like the thing it is meant to be. Some games use fully 3D environements (i.e. wireframes wrapped in textures to make the envirinments) others use what are known as pre-rendered backdrops, i.e. a 2D drawing which the characters the run around on, some games use a mixture of both. That is your basic 3D environment.
Different effects are then used to make games look better, some are done by the hardware, others by the software itself (this needs more processing power).
Mip-mapping - used to blur images in the distance so that they look out of focus, to make the scene look more realistic.
Z-buffer - used to make sure that objects which are behind other objects on the screen are not in view.
Environment mapping - used to show the surroundings reflecting off of an object (usually in car games, but some cheat, like RRV which just scrolls a picture of trees along the surface of the car.)
Anti-aliasing - there are different types, the most popular being full screen and edge, but more importantly they blur pixels to prevent jagged edges.
There are many, many more but these are the few which I think people are most concerned with when it comes to rating a games graphics, along with the term pop-up. Pop-up is the objects in the distance just appearing out of no where. This is usually caused by the developer reducing the draw length of the game (how far into the distance you can see), the old fashioned way was to use fog effects (i.e. Turok on the N64)
Anyway all of these combined create a good looking visual scene. But what is more important high resolution with no jagged edges but lower quality models and textures, or a little less resolution with jagged edges but much more detailed models and textures??
To look at this we must first find two games to compare on the same platform and the PS2 is the ideal candidate with Crazi Taxi and RRV.
Crazi Taxi has;
High resolution
few jagged edges
low quality models
low quality textures
decent frame rate with some slow down
severe pop-up
RRV has;
Lower Resolution
Severe jagged edges
high quality models
high quality textures
supreme frame rate with no slow down
no pop-up
a form of environment mapping
mip-mapping
Personally I can live with the jagged edges and lower resolution because it lifts the frame rate and therefore the overall speed of the game and allows for a much higher detail of graphical finese from developers. When you look at the little details in RRV like sparks flying from the car as it scrapes the ground or the brake pads lighting up under the heat created by severe braking. It by no means makes it a better game than Crazi Taxi, they are both quite good, but graphically it is far more advanced and technically brilliant. Many people have slagged off the graphics on show in RRV, because they looked at the jagged edges and said, yuk!!
I hope this makes some people think about what they should and shouldn't be looking for in their graphics, true different people like different things, and yes it doesn't effect the gameplay, but I like my eye candy too.
As you all may be well aware, 3D graphics in games are maily to do with vectors, polygons and the like, all 3D games have this is common. These make up 3D models (wireframes) and then a texture is mapped around the object to make it look more like the thing it is meant to be. Some games use fully 3D environements (i.e. wireframes wrapped in textures to make the envirinments) others use what are known as pre-rendered backdrops, i.e. a 2D drawing which the characters the run around on, some games use a mixture of both. That is your basic 3D environment.
Different effects are then used to make games look better, some are done by the hardware, others by the software itself (this needs more processing power).
Mip-mapping - used to blur images in the distance so that they look out of focus, to make the scene look more realistic.
Z-buffer - used to make sure that objects which are behind other objects on the screen are not in view.
Environment mapping - used to show the surroundings reflecting off of an object (usually in car games, but some cheat, like RRV which just scrolls a picture of trees along the surface of the car.)
Anti-aliasing - there are different types, the most popular being full screen and edge, but more importantly they blur pixels to prevent jagged edges.
There are many, many more but these are the few which I think people are most concerned with when it comes to rating a games graphics, along with the term pop-up. Pop-up is the objects in the distance just appearing out of no where. This is usually caused by the developer reducing the draw length of the game (how far into the distance you can see), the old fashioned way was to use fog effects (i.e. Turok on the N64)
Anyway all of these combined create a good looking visual scene. But what is more important high resolution with no jagged edges but lower quality models and textures, or a little less resolution with jagged edges but much more detailed models and textures??
To look at this we must first find two games to compare on the same platform and the PS2 is the ideal candidate with Crazi Taxi and RRV.
Crazi Taxi has;
High resolution
few jagged edges
low quality models
low quality textures
decent frame rate with some slow down
severe pop-up
RRV has;
Lower Resolution
Severe jagged edges
high quality models
high quality textures
supreme frame rate with no slow down
no pop-up
a form of environment mapping
mip-mapping
Personally I can live with the jagged edges and lower resolution because it lifts the frame rate and therefore the overall speed of the game and allows for a much higher detail of graphical finese from developers. When you look at the little details in RRV like sparks flying from the car as it scrapes the ground or the brake pads lighting up under the heat created by severe braking. It by no means makes it a better game than Crazi Taxi, they are both quite good, but graphically it is far more advanced and technically brilliant. Many people have slagged off the graphics on show in RRV, because they looked at the jagged edges and said, yuk!!
I hope this makes some people think about what they should and shouldn't be looking for in their graphics, true different people like different things, and yes it doesn't effect the gameplay, but I like my eye candy too.
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Bonus wrote:
> This is true Resi, Crazi Taxi PS2 does have a few jagged edges then???
Yes but so do alot of the dreamcast titles and Crazy Taxi is just as good on the anti analizing as any dreamcast game.
> This is true Resi, Crazi Taxi PS2 does have a few jagged edges then???
Yes but so do alot of the dreamcast titles and Crazy Taxi is just as good on the anti analizing as any dreamcast game.
jd99 wrote:
Crazy Taxi could have been vastly improved from the DC
> version by getting rid of the pop-up as the PS2 has the capability
> of having a much longer draw distance.
Hmmm, not sure about. I found this in an article comapring the DC and PS2 hardware. The whole thing is a lot longer than this, and quite intersting. Here is just a snippet:
"With only a 4MB VRAM cache on its GS graphics processor, the PS2 is severely limited in what it can achieve on screen. While it's true that 32MB of main memory and the fairly powerful Emotion Engine processor are capable of producing in the neighborhood of 10-12 million textured and lit polygons/second, the poor design of the GS and its small pipeline to main memory restrict the final number to roughly half of that.
What? You mean, regardless of the power of the EE processor and the large amount of available memory, the PS2 is still only capable of displaying 5-6 million on-screen polygons? The answer, unfortunately, is yes. By contrast, the Dreamcast has only 16 MB of main memory and a processor that is only capable of one-half the number of polygons/second - ie. 5- 6 million - but the whole point of the exercise is to get these onto your television. An intelligent memory saving technique known as differed rendering, coupled with the PowerVR2DC graphics chip's hardware texture compression abilities, allow the Dreamcast to display all of its generated polygons.
To better understand the PS2's limitations and the Dreamcast's strengths, you need only look at the available video memory for your answer. While the DC has 8MB of VRAM, the PS2 has only 4MB of VRAM. The main problem arises because a polygon takes up roughly 40 bytes of RAM. When you have 5 million of them in a given second, this amounts to 5 million/60fps = 83,333 polygons in a give frame of animation. If each of these polygons uses 40 bytes of VRAM, you will use 3.33 MB displaying these 5 million PPS. This doesn't leave the PS2 much room for it's framebuffer which uses around 1.2MB just to display the end data, not to mention that you still need to leave room for textures to put on those polygons.
Now, there are a few tricks which will allow the PS2 to display 5-6 million PPS, even though it only has a 4MB VRAM cache. One of them is to update the cache more frequently than once a second. But, there are other bandwidth limitations that prevent this from happening more than two or three times per second and the net result is that the PS2 is still limited to 5- 6 million PPS."
Crazy Taxi could have been vastly improved from the DC
> version by getting rid of the pop-up as the PS2 has the capability
> of having a much longer draw distance.
Hmmm, not sure about. I found this in an article comapring the DC and PS2 hardware. The whole thing is a lot longer than this, and quite intersting. Here is just a snippet:
"With only a 4MB VRAM cache on its GS graphics processor, the PS2 is severely limited in what it can achieve on screen. While it's true that 32MB of main memory and the fairly powerful Emotion Engine processor are capable of producing in the neighborhood of 10-12 million textured and lit polygons/second, the poor design of the GS and its small pipeline to main memory restrict the final number to roughly half of that.
What? You mean, regardless of the power of the EE processor and the large amount of available memory, the PS2 is still only capable of displaying 5-6 million on-screen polygons? The answer, unfortunately, is yes. By contrast, the Dreamcast has only 16 MB of main memory and a processor that is only capable of one-half the number of polygons/second - ie. 5- 6 million - but the whole point of the exercise is to get these onto your television. An intelligent memory saving technique known as differed rendering, coupled with the PowerVR2DC graphics chip's hardware texture compression abilities, allow the Dreamcast to display all of its generated polygons.
To better understand the PS2's limitations and the Dreamcast's strengths, you need only look at the available video memory for your answer. While the DC has 8MB of VRAM, the PS2 has only 4MB of VRAM. The main problem arises because a polygon takes up roughly 40 bytes of RAM. When you have 5 million of them in a given second, this amounts to 5 million/60fps = 83,333 polygons in a give frame of animation. If each of these polygons uses 40 bytes of VRAM, you will use 3.33 MB displaying these 5 million PPS. This doesn't leave the PS2 much room for it's framebuffer which uses around 1.2MB just to display the end data, not to mention that you still need to leave room for textures to put on those polygons.
Now, there are a few tricks which will allow the PS2 to display 5-6 million PPS, even though it only has a 4MB VRAM cache. One of them is to update the cache more frequently than once a second. But, there are other bandwidth limitations that prevent this from happening more than two or three times per second and the net result is that the PS2 is still limited to 5- 6 million PPS."
Grandprix wrote:
> Yes thanks. I was just saying that maybe they sacrificed a bit on
> graphics to make the game better.
No, I think it was because the DC couldn't handle better graphics and they were too lazy to update them for the PS2. That way they could get a quick release, and makes it ideal for this sort of comparison, if it makes everyone happy, I can do the same when I get my hands on GT3, compare GT3, RRV and Crazi Taxi, that is!!!
> Yes thanks. I was just saying that maybe they sacrificed a bit on
> graphics to make the game better.
No, I think it was because the DC couldn't handle better graphics and they were too lazy to update them for the PS2. That way they could get a quick release, and makes it ideal for this sort of comparison, if it makes everyone happy, I can do the same when I get my hands on GT3, compare GT3, RRV and Crazi Taxi, that is!!!
This is true Resi, Crazi Taxi does have a few jagged edges then???
Yes thanks. I was just saying that maybe they sacrificed a bit on graphics to make the game better.
dude, Crazy Taxi is Exactly the same as on the dreamcast. The people still walk through the cars and the enviroment, the builings still pop up and all this gibber about jagged edges on it is bull.
Crazy Taxi PS2 has tiny tiny jagged edges but trust me you can't see them unless your 1 foot away from the screen and really looking hard and the dreamcast version even had these.
Crazy Taxi PS2 has tiny tiny jagged edges but trust me you can't see them unless your 1 foot away from the screen and really looking hard and the dreamcast version even had these.
Bonus wrote:
It by no means makes it a
> better game than Crazi Taxi
Answer your question GP???
It by no means makes it a
> better game than Crazi Taxi
Answer your question GP???
But has the lack of graphic detail affected the gameplay?
This topic was solely concerned with demonstarting what I class as good graphics, to do this you must compare an example of what I believe to be good graphics and poor graphics from a single platform, so that hardware deficiencies cannot be blamed for the difference but programming laziness/poorness!! Yes Crazi Taxi should have been so much better on the PS2, but the fact is it wasn't and that will never change!!!
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