Gaming Beauty Is Only Pixel Deep

Posted by simoniker on Friday May 21, 2004 @11:03PM from the my-beautiful-face dept.

Thanks to NTSC-uk for its feature discussing what the new pixel and vertex shaders mean to this generation of videogames. The piece laments: "Looking back at the past few years, games have looked incredibly similar. And this is the main reason why: they all used the same tools", before going on to explain: "The hardware previously contained logic circuits to simply perform the operations needed by Gouraud and Flat shading, but now the fully Programmable Pipeline has introduced a whole new world of graphical effects for us all, limited only by the programmers' time and creativity", referencing "the water effects used in Super Mario Sunshine, cel shading effects used in Zelda, or the rippling water effects on Dead or Alive 3."

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As far as I know... by Quarters · 2004-05-21 23:34 · Score: 5, Interesting

The Gamecube doesn't have a programmable function pipleline for graphics effects - it has a very robust fixed function pipeline. The effects the author emphasizes in those three Gamecube Games were more than likely done on the CPU and not with a programmable GPU. While that doesn't diminish the look or technical achievement of those games it does throw water on the author's assertion that games all looked alike before GPUs because all fixed function pipelines give the same look to their output.