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PGR3 Achieves Near Photo Realism
rtt writes "After some accused them of faking screenshots, Project Gotham Racing 3 developer Bizarre Creations have released some more information to prove their critics wrong. Thanks to the extra grunt of Xbox 360, trackside buildings are covered in 1024x1024 textures that are so detailed, they really do look like almost photo realistic. From the article: 'This week, the debate moves on to Textures. Thanks to the extra grunt of the Xbox 360's ATI-designed Xenos GPU, the trackside eye candy is clothed in super-sharp 1024x1024 textures, rendered in astounding detail.'"
I was astonished when I saw the pictures. The pictures do look real, until you realize the repetition. Check out this image to get an idea of repetition. It looks real, but only if you look at half the image. Pretty nice still!
Nintendo has hyped next-generation gameplay for their Revolution console, but they haven't actually shown anything to demonstrate this (and in fact their descriptions sound closer to "last generation gameplay", in that they want to make games really simple for the relatively small group of nongamers out there). So "announced" might be too strong of a word...
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. -- Francis Bacon
And how does PGR1 and/or PGR2 in any way make you think Bizarre won't make a great game? Your post sounds like some kind of cliche gameplay over graphics argument to me, but that's a ridiculous complaint to make for a PGR game. We already know the gameplay is going to be freaking amazing since it's a PGR game - there's no news in that.
That doesn't mean there won't be some great new gameplay features in PGR3, of course. But implying that the gameplay might not get the same attention as the graphics is ridiculous.
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. -- Francis Bacon
As someone who has finished the PC version of Halo, I have to say I don't know why it has such a following. The story is ok, but a little convoluted, I haven't heard anyone argue that the levels aren't repetitive and boring, and the graphics, for their time, were a move forward but nothing spectacular.
The only true redeeming quality was the fact that you could have good online multiplayer in a console. Other than that, I only expected Halo 2 to have slightly better graphics since it's on the same system and the same convoluted storyline.
I think the selling point of the Halo series is not the storyline but the online console multiplayer capabilities.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
Modern video hardware supports in-memory compressed textures. I'm guessing the ATI chip supports the DTX standard natively, which offers variable compression rates depending on how you wish to allocates your bits for alpha channels, and what final quality you want. So, your calculations are a bit off (by at least a factor of 4), I'm afraid.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.