The in-car view actually looks pretty decent in the few tiny screens shown. However it's not in the GT5 class. The shiny plastic look is easy to pull off. Making a leather lined interior look like it's made wit real hand stitched leather is something else all together.
Overall fidelity seems to be in the Forza 2 class.
of this article is given the timing. Reflects poorly on Nguyen.
Until the price was dropped to $199 (the price at which almost everyone can afford one) it was dead last in sales. Even the $400 PS3 was outselling it by 35% month after month from Jan to August of 2008.
The price drop and the price drop alone transformed the 360's previously bleak sales outlook.
That Microsoft pushed the $199 price point so soon is a bad sign. It means that the 360's demand is simply not good enough to generate sufficient sales at a higher pri...
It's simply doing a hell of a lot more on screen in terms of audio, visuals, dynamic objects, animation, etc... than any other game.
As for visual style, story, characters, etc. ... that's all subjective.
A weak CPU, the unfortunate polygons vs pixel shader trade-off, and inflexible rendering system (such as a read-only frame-buffer), among others are major obstacles. However, from an aesthetic standpoint, even the PS2 had games like Okami and Shadow of Colossus that are arguably prettier than Killzone 2.
The 360 GPU has been maxed out for a while. Gears 2 maxed out the CPU as well (unlike Gears 1 which had poor CPU utilization).
Where this game can improve on the original is by better utilizing the CPU to stream higher res textures and improve animation, physics and AI. I am optimistic that they will do so.
In terms of how a small scale 3rd person shooter will look, Gears 2 is about as good looking as a 360 game will get.
Certainly appears to be nearly on level with Gears in that regard. However some terribly inconsistent aspects of the graphics hold it back. The water, for example, is just horrendous, particularly in the final scene of the trailer where it swells up. It looks more like an extra thick milk shake than water. The animation looks like it's from the PS2 era. Not the silky smooth movements we've come to expect from next gen titles. The mech's look severly polygon challenged (hexaonal turrets!...
is just a hyper-threaded 4 core CPU. The slowest version costs as much as a Wii and the top of the line model costs almost as much as three PS3s!
PC and Console CPU floating point performance specs (source: Beyond3d):
Xbox XCPU 733mhz: 1.5 GFLOPS
PS2 Emotion Engine 300mhz: 6 GFLOPS
Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz: 6 GFLOPs
Intel Pentium 4 3.4GHz: 7 GFLOPs
Intel Pentium 4 670: 7 GFLOPs
Intel Pentium D 840: 13 GFLOPs
Intel Pentium D 955: 14 ...
which is why movie studios would love for DVD to die off tommorrow.
does a lot of things well, even a few things better than Killzone 2. However, Killzone 2 simply has a hell of a lot more going on on-screen. For example the Cell processor can simply handle vastly more dynamic objects than any desktop CPU. The deferred rendering engine also enables things like hundreds of real-time dynamic lights. Polygon counts are also superior to Crysis (in fact many console games push more polygons than Crysis!). The hit response on dynamic, AI driven, moving objects...
because Killzone 2 is already doing so much more than any other game in just about every technical category, it's hard to see a massive improvement.
However, I can see a game with a lesser scope, which does not need to simulate all out warfare on such a massive scale, cutting back on some of the outright extravagent things that Killzone 2 does just to show off how much better it's engine is (like glowing embers from explosions bouncing realistically around the environment while...
Lots of companies are working on this. It will be quite common next year.
Kaz Hirai, who is currently the president of SCE, is taking over more aspects of Sony's business. In other words, the gaming division is absorbing other, less successful and important departments. Not only is this kind of consolidation inevitable when markets and consumer habits change (or are projected to change), but any one who has ever started and run a business understands that this is a smart choice.
I already explained before (very long ago on this site or perhaps an...
This kind of analysis really delves deep into the engine and tells us just how much of it is real-time and dynamic and what's faked. The results of the analysis are utterly mind-boggling.
If you like technology you owe it to yourself to read the article and view the videos.
Killzone 2's deferred rendering engine uses a 36MB buffer vs the 14.75MB buffer for conventionally rendered 720P games. That's a huge gap considering the final resolution is the same. To put it simply, Killzone 2 is rendering more than double the amount of data per pixel than any other console game.
This simple fact effectively erases any "talk" (or more correctly, FUD) about bandwidth or memory.
Utterly fake. Header has it all wrong and it's probably intentional.
Just like most of gears. Your character's lighting is not based on what appears to be actual environmental lights. Most of those lit surfaces are just textures colored to look lit.
Why are we rehashing the old and the obvious. Gears (and any UE3 game by Epic) has always about using tricks liked fake lighting baked into textures, 2D effects, very little truly dynamically lit surfaces, a single real-time light with everything else being baked (like how things light up from the gun flare), high contrast MDR lighting, etc... It's not meant to be looked at carefully. They are basically the same genre (3rd person shooter) but technically they aren't even in the same league...
the 360 is a lot easier for developers. The problem is that he is still stuck in the old mindset that sees the seperate memory pools as an obstacle rather than an advantage. That's the kind of thing that causes the huge performance gulf between second rate developers like this one and first-rate developers like Polyphony Digital and Guerrilla Games.
in both versions. Why is the 360's gamma so far off? So much detail is lost in dark areas. Poor artistic choice.
Then again, the 360's hardware is hard-coded to exaggerate darks and brights while damping middles to mask excessive banding in LDR and MDR rendering.