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PS3 Oblivion Approaching PC Quality Visuals
fistfullast33l writes "After taking a beating in Gamespot's side by side Comparison of Xbox 360 and PS3 graphics, Playstation 3 owners may finally have something to hold over the 360 fans. Both Gamespot and IGN have previews posted yesterday that talk up the graphics and performance improvements over the 360 version. Load times and texture quality and draw distance have been improved, as well as 'new shaders dedicated to rendering the foreground cleanly with sharper details, so rocky landscapes now have craggy appearances instead of smooth, non-distinct surfaces,' according to IGN. They end with the ultimate hype, 'screens from the PS3 version should approach those from high end PCs running Oblivion, which is an impressive feat.' How is this possible? Gamespot reports that 'Oblivion will make extensive use of the PS3's hard drive by caching multiple gigabytes of data, which seemed to help with load times from what we saw.' While there are no official reports of this making it into the new 360/PC expansion Shivering Isles, a rumor on the Gamespot preview says that 1up might have the scoop."
These claims may be true, I care little enough to give them the benefit of the doubt.
But the real advantage of playing Oblivion on a PC is the plethora of modifications. The marginal difference of graphical performance between xbox360, PS3, and high-end PC Oblivion is not really that important.
So this article leaves me asking..."So what?"
And the PS3 isn't a terrible piece of equipment, it's just an expensive one. I wouldn't be suprised to see nice graphics on it, I would demand it.
I thought the PS3 was meant to be the dogs bollocks in terms of everything from graphics to love making?
ps, the Wii is so much more fun - its peppy!
liqbase
"How is this possible? Gamespot reports that 'Oblivion will make extensive use of the PS3's hard drive by caching multiple gigabytes of data, which seemed to help with load times from what we saw.'"
This would be very possible on the 360 if they could assure the 360 actually had a hard drive. Unfortunately, this assumption cannot be made due to the hard driveless 360s floating around out there. Not including one of the best features of the XBox on the value edition 360s was a big mistake and it looks like Microsoft is already beginning to pay for it.
I swear, when I first saw the words "PS3 Oblivion" I thought it was going to refer to the PS3's sales record...
I'm confused. I thought that for the first year or so after launch, consoles generally out-performed $2000 gaming rigs, because of the simpler optimization environment of a non-moving target. After a year or so, it seems like Moore's Law kicks in and yesterday's console can't beat tomorrow's $2000 pc.
That PS3 isn't mopping the floor with PeeCee right now is suprising, especially given that its halfway between the cost of a normal console and a new gaming rig (logarithmically speaking). What's more suprising is that the article submitter doesn't agree with my assumption.
Will the PS3 have a rich mod community that's constantly releasing fixes/updates/new content for Oblivion? Probably not. That alone makes me want to stick with the PC version...
You can increase the quality of graphics as much as you want, but the gameplay will never change. A dead rat will still look like a dead rat. On top of that, given what Bethesda did with Oblivion (charging for quest-by-quest content in an SP game), I wouldn't entirely count this as "good publicity." Sure the game is still there, it has prettier graphics, but the people behind the game are drowning it in bad business decisions.
Given the PS3's architecture, that's to be expected. It has a decent GPU on the back end, and all those underutilized Cell CPUs to do things like generate procedural textures. The obvious approach for textures on the PS3 should yield a look like Pixar's All Renderman All the Time, with every pixel generated by little shader programs written in San Raphael, instead of compositing in real-world images like everybody else.
The big advantage of procedural textures is that they survive zooming in. In the film world, this isn't as critical, because you know how close the camera will get to a background, and you only put in detail the camera can see. In games, the user can move around and get close to a textured surface, which usually looks terrible.
I do. My Wii will sit alongside my ps3, once the Wii is available and the ps3 is more like $400. I'm skipping the MS thing.
"I thought the PS3 was meant to be the dogs bollocks in terms of everything from graphics to love making?"
*note to self* Do not buy a used PS3 from Liquidcooled.
Thank you for your random Wii plug that really has nothing to do with the article at all (except maybe the subject).
Yeah, and who really cares anyway? Ok, so they got a game to look good on PS3. That's what it's SUPPOSED to do. It's not like people are going to be like, "HOLY CRAP! Now that Oblivion will look good on PS3 I've GOT TO GET ONE!" Wiis are selling because they have something fun to offer. I can play Oblivion on my PC or Xbox360 already. I can't play Wii bowling on my PC with my buddies.
I actually think Viva Piñata looks prettier than Gears of War. Gears is all dark metal textures, blocky characters :)
with no neck and heavy use of the word 'fuck' so they can say IT'S A MATURE TITLE. Viva is colourful and fuzzy,
and I like the animation better. The critters are softer - gears don't animate much beyond moving their limbs and jaws,
while piñatas have soft, deformable bodies. I don't count 'sploding the enemy in Gears
I have no issues with the graphics of Oblivion on 360 - I have both that and the Windows version. The problems I've
run into with the PC version haven't shown up at all on the console. I also run the PC version at 1024x768, while the 360
runs at 720p, which is slightly more in the horizontal aspect, so they're pretty much the same resolution. I'll give them the
load time, though it could be coded into the 360 version to check for the existence of a harddrive, I'm sure..
Yeah, way to not read the article.
Your link (1/17):
The PS3 Oblivion team compensated for the slower drive by duplicating data across the Blu-ray disc, making it faster to find and load
Today's link (2/6):
Bethesda's Pete Hines also commented that recent reports of data duplication on the PS3 Oblivion disc have been exaggerated, and this technique isn't different from the similar strategy that was employed in the creation of the Xbox 360 game last year.
Your $600 video card does just as well, if not just a little better than, a $600 console. How much was your processor, memory, hard drive, dvd drive, motherboard, network card, and case? And before we forget, how much did your copy of Windows cost you?
This has never, ever been true at anytime. It likely never will. Sony will have shills say such things and other marketoids have said things like that for various other dead systems in the past twenty years. The truth is that when games are compared head to head, consoles just don't match. It is about hardware price, there are no magical cheap chips. You get what you pay for even if you are Microsoft or Sony. If you want to beat a $2000 computer, you need to be selling a $2000 computer. Also even if your chip does cooler things than a chip already out on the market, if it changes the architecture ie. Cell versus x86 or PowerPC it will take years to get important software such as compilers optimized for it as well as a chip already on the market and gone through those growing pains.
The original Xbox was nothing but a cheap PC that was OK performance wise for a $500 PC when it was designed. However, the PC equivalent in hardware actually was cheaper than the Xbox just a few months after the Xbox was released. Now that old Xboxes are dirt cheap, the equivalent PC is more expensive (prices for a computer can't go below about $200 no matter what is in them due to component count and size). Integration/elimination of excess components saves maybe $100 in real manufacturing costs. It was dumb to buy an Xbox and put all that effort into putting Linux on it back then, now it actually makes sense.
If you want to make a console where the price point is below the integration sweet point of $200 based on common components that sells over a million somehow, then you can probably just beat the price/performance ratio of PCs. The Wii is actually pretty close to this where Nintendo is making money and giving people a somewhat reasonable box for the price. The only reason to buy a console is for their exclusive games and the console's simplicity/integration. Kind of like why Apple thinks it can sell Macs for a premium over PCs with the same hardware.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Now for my response to the parent (Xugumad):
Compare the XBOX360 launch titles to the current XBOX360 games (i.e. GRAW vs. GRAW2). It's night and day. What if the PS3 came out with GRAW as a launch title. It would blow the old 360 version out of the water.
The real question is, if they are about equal now and the graphics on both systems mature at the same rate, which system is going to max out first? I say it's going to be the XBOX360. Check back with the PS3 a year after the XBOX games can't be optimized any further.
I own both the 360 and the PS3. Right now I play the 360 more. I would be surprised if I can say the same thing in a year.
This is not true ...
... do you think a Pentium 4 in the 1GHz range with a Geforce 3 graphics card would be able to run Windows and a game like this?
Consoles outperform a similar aged PCs because the game can be tuned to the exact hardware (it is impossible to optimize a game for a Geforce 6, Geforce 7, Geforce 8, Radeon X800, Radeon X1800 and also cover Pentium 4, Pentum Core Duo, AMD X2, and PowerPC. On top of that console's have historically had a massive advantage in that they have 'no' OS to run and have a much lower resolution.
Just look at the Gamecube's best looking games Star Wars: Rogue Squadren 2 and the Resident evil games
Wow, this is incredible! For the price of a high-end gaming PC I can get a machine capable of high-end gaming PC visuals!
You offset the price of chips with the price of games and sell your console at under their cost of manufacture. So there are magical cheap chips.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
It's not so bad when you consider that 2X Blu-ray is 9 megabytes per second and 12x DVD-ROM is about 16 megabytes per second. We had a similar shake-up when DVD-ROM hit the market, people were disappointed by 2X DVD-ROM which was about as fast as 16X CD-ROM. I hear 8X Blu-ray is on the horizon...I wonder if somebody will mod his PlayStation 3 to get a zippier drive, or if it will be offered in a later revision. The PS2 went through a tremendous number of hardware revisions.
I may make you feel, but I can't make you think.
Who else out there paitently waded through all the game sections in the Gamespot article, waiting for some actual PS3/360 Oblivion comparison shots?
/. post title, and all?
Y'know... based on the
VOTE!
But sales don't necessarily mean the console is better, which I'm sure is what you used to parrot five years ago when you were a Gamecube fanboy.
I'm sorry, your Wii doesn't get to play in this discussion. When an article is about controllers, value, fun, or which console is selling the best, please chime in. If Nintendo makes a Wii v.II that actually intends to compete with the other guys on graphics, please chime in. But if the PS3, 360 and PC are all comparing dick sizes on graphics, you might as well find something else to do until it's over. A) You're simply not sporting anything to compare with and B) Belittling the whole sport because you don't have the equipment to play is kinda rude.
If you don't care about good graphics, that's your business. If you're telling me not to care, then go fuck yourself.
The optimization argument is true but applies mostly to late-era games. It takes time to learn all the tricks that allow you to get significant boosts from specific consoles, especially when you're "tuning" to get around limitations like limited main memory. Rogue Squadron 2: Rogue Leader was a good showcase of next-gen visuals early in the GC's life, but compared to games released later on the GC (like RE4) it doesn't look so hot anymore. However by the time the ability to tune for the specific hardware is providing dividends for console developers, baseline PC hardware has already advanced by a generation and is twice as powerful running the same un-optimized code as before. In other words, optimization for a specific platform helps consoles keep up and have longer life spans, but it does not put them in front of PC hardware.
I'm not going to call OS overhead a massive advantage. If you reboot your machine and refrain from running any services it shouldn't make that big a difference; it's not as though the console has no OS. This is an advantage, to be sure, but not one that is going to make up for the gap between PC and console hardware.
Resolution is a red herring here. It's why consoles have been able to get away with having weaker hardware, not an example of why they are better. Consoles are just now starting to support resolutions that were standard in PC games five years ago. This is not evidence that they are equally powerful. It means they were doing less to begin with.
By the way, I don't know about a Pentium 4, but the Athlon XP 1.66GHz and GeForce Ti 350 I bought in 2001 at the same time I bought my GC, was later able to run UT2K4 and Doom 3, both at resolutions and with effects that look better than what the GC could do. Could it have handled Rogue Leader? Yes. Absolutely it could have, and at a higher resolution too. Could the GC handle Doome 3? Eh... considering that the biggest problem I had with my hardware was the limited video ram, I'm going to say the GC would have choked and died.
Of course the GC was cheaper, easier to set up, and doesn't crash (not that my Linux box crashes ever since NVidia and X.org got their act together so crashing game != crashing box, but crashing game isn't something you expect either on a console). Consoles have advantages. Performance has never been one of them.
The enemies of Democracy are
You're right...
...I know which one I'D rather play with!
I think a good analogy would be, while the PS3, 360, and PC are all comparing dick sizes, Wii is walking around in a string bikini and DD size braw...
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
"They've had over a year to tweak it for the PS3.
What did you expect?"
No matter what, the PS3 can't win. GoW (gen2 release) > Resistance (gen1 release), and all the 360 fanbois can it. PS3 Oblivion > 360 Oblivion, and the 360 Fanbois cry unfair because they've had 8 months extra to work on it. You guys continually adjust your argument to suit the facts.
Yes, Sony have been dicks in the way they've over-hyped the console. And yes, the PS3 is comparatively expensive (for a console). But as a blu-ray player, it's one of the best on the market (and the cheapest). As a game console, there is a LOT of time for developers to get to learn the machine. This "console" war won't be over for years.
To know that you know what you know, and that you do not know what you do not know, that is true wisdom. --Scooby Doo