I don't need to coin a new phrase, Canada already has a perfectly good one.
Here's the article quote:
[violent games] have no place in Germany's bedrooms.' Andreas Scheuer, German parliamentarian, 2005
And here's a quote by one of Canada's most famous prime ministers:
There's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nationPierre Elliott Trudeau, Canadian Prime Minister, 1967.
Of course, Trudeau was talking about a bill he had introduced as Justice Minister (before he became prime minister) that decriminalized homosexual acts in private. But it's one of his most famous quotes, and I think it applies just as well here. I mean, the quotes match up pretty well;)
You seem to be confused about the definition of AMD64. AMD64 is an instruction set extension to x86. It is not a "chip" (By which I assume you mean processor). It seems like you're confusing AMD64 with the Athlon 64.
Intel has implemented AMD64 on all their Pentium 4s, and all their Xeons, unless I'm mistaken. Since they obviously can't call it AMD64, they're calling it "EMT64", but that's just marketing.
I still find it amusing that Intel did this, though. They're taking the role that AMD traditionally has by implementing their competitors instruction set. A bit of role reversal there.
Perhaps they did and realized it doesn't matter. After posting I did read the article, and my statements still basically make sense. Just replace "1up" with "R&M" and the whole thing holds; these predictions are meaningless crap, and everybody is predicting something different.
Besides, by reporting on this prediction, 1up is granting it a certain degree of legitimacy. By the fact that they're reporting on this prediction, and not the one made by awzum_gamr63@aol.com that states that the P3 will capture 100% of the market because "omg it rox d00d".
No, but you CAN compare the speeds by megahertz, IF you know the rough ratios between them (As in, a Pentium M is equivalent to a Pentium 4 of 1.7x the clockspeed. This is a commonly accepted figure in many notebook-enthusiast communities), and take into account different core revs and cache sizes.
Since the Pentium M is up there with the fastest desktop processors, and desktop processors outpaced the tired old G4 long ago (prompting Apple to introduce the G5), it is actually a logical conclusion that the PM must be a better performer on the whole than the G4.
I don't know the comparison between G4 performance-per-watt and PM performance-per-watt, but my understandings is that towards the end of it's life the G4 started to hit thermal and clockspeed walls. The Pentium M is a mobile-oriented processor (unlike the G4). Considering that a single-core'd P-M would be a better performer (by last paragraph), and that the Yonah will have two *faster* cores without much power usage increase, the P-M's performance-per-watt would become significantly higher than a processor that probably ALREAY has a better performance-per-watt.
By those two categories, I think the P-M will far outstrip a 1.67GHz single-cored G4.
Another journalist predicted that the PS3 would fail because Microsoft would reduce the 360's price around the PS3 launch, and then release Halo 3 the same day as the PS3 launch. The exact opposite of 1up's position.
So, why should we assume that 1up's predictions are any more accurate? Why should we trust any of these predictions, for that matter?
Same? Um under which benchmark? I can assure you in the "bignum/crypto" world AMD64 is still king.
The average user could care less about such benchmarks, as they don't represent anything they're going to do in their day to day use.
Stop refering to mindless win32 benchmarks for AMD64 performance metrics [which sadly most people do].
Why? Most people don't care about compile performance or software rendering speeds (Or heavy duty math or cryptography). Most people care about how their web browser and word processor performs. And a lot more people are going to care about how games handle than how fast they can cause MD5 collisions.
Also stop refering to game benchmarks. FPS in game does not equate to CPU performance. It equates to *SYSTEM* performance.
In most game benchmarks, with the same memory and the same graphics card, most of the change in FPS is going to be due to the CPU rather than the motherboard chipset. And since those chipsets are tied to the CPU, they are relevant in comparisons between the two processors, meaning that your "system" performance turns into platform performance, which is the whole point of the comparison.
Moving off gaming, I would question if a 1.67GHz G4 could outperform a 2.26GHz Pentium M. Make the Pentium M dual core and take into account OSX's efficient use of multiple cores/processors and I don't think there can be any doubt.
Which makes me ask the question why do retail boxes bundle winxp32 with AMD64s?
Probably because WinXP 64 still isn't perfect. Perfect meaning as good as the 32-bit edition.
The core OS and all the apps it comes with are native code. Most major applications have announced that they will be shipping universal binaries. A year or two after the first Intel mac launches, very few apps will be available only as PPC code. So I don't think your concerns are really quite as bad as all that.
The dual-core Yonah chip could very likely deliver performance greater than Apple's current G4-based PowerBooks.
Could very likely? That's quite a bit of uncertainty.
The Pentium M is roughly performance-equivalent to an Athlon64 of the same clockspeed (The PM is still a bit weak in the multimedia department, but Yonah is expected to fix that. The statement holds true for gaming, at least). Assuming that the dual core Yonah ships at the same max speed as current Dothan processors, that means 2.26GHz. That's roughly an Athlon64 X2 4400+. The PowerBook ships with a single 1.67GHz G4. I think it is safe to say that the processor "definately destroys performance-wise" rather than "could very likely deliver performance greater than".
This is all server software, and as I understand it, people don't usually upgrade between major software revisions on production servers. So all the 32-bit servers out there are going to keep on running the same things.
On the other hand, new servers sold today are pretty much exclusively AMD64; both Intel and AMD have deployed AMD64 accross their entire desktop and server product lines, IIRC. So for the new servers that will be using this new software, it's not a big deal.
Of course, does it make sense to require it? Not really. It's still pretty arbitrary. And stupid.
Epic (Unreal) doesn't agree with you. They think that as games become larger, online distribution just won't work.
As an example, they are saying next-gen games (UT2007) are going to be 20 to 30 gigs. Obviously you can't distribute that on CDs, as that'd be 45 CDs. So they're moving from multiple CDs with optional single DVD to multiple DVDs with optional single HDDVD/BD.
30GB is currently too much to push out over online distribution. While a 1mbit broadband user can download HL2 (~5GB?) in about 12 hours, UT2007 would take them about three days. That is starting to get pretty high, and preloading can only go so far.
Faster internet connections solve the problem yes, but in many places game data counts are going up much faster than internet connections.
I'm not saying that 30GB can't be done at all over the net. Bell Sympatico's 6mbit DSL would be able to handle the download in about the same amount of time a 1mbit user would download HL2. But really, you couldn't ship UT2007 over the net any more than you could ship it on CD.
If they shut down the authentication servers (unlikely to happen any time soon), then fake activation servers won't really be a crack, they'll just be an aftermarket patch to allow gameplay to an old defunct game. This really isn't different than those people producing things like XP hacks for old unsupported Win98 games, or the like.
There is, of course, the ability to play the game without the activation servers at all; if STEAM can't connect, it prompts you to start up in offline mode (assuming you've started up at least once). So if one day they suddenly decide to shut down the activation servers, you can continue to play the game.
You can even continue to take advantage of the multiplayer component. While the master server would be down, that is no different from other games whose master server is down. Counter-Strike: Source can still connect to remote servers in offline mode. Certainly with LAN servers this works fine. I'm not sure how the server authentication thing would work out.
I don't think of STEAM as DRM. I think of it as a content distribution system. One that works very well, and is actually works better than games that ship on CD. I don't ever need to put the CD in the drive, I don't have to worry about no-CD cracks to play a game I own, and I don't have to worry about a game refusing to launch because I've got Daemon Tools running. I also don't have to worry about the game doing evil things because I have Daemon Tools running.
To a small company trying to sell a low budget game like Darwinia, STEAM must surely look tempting. A large marketplace with little competition, low publishing costs, and high profit margins. Darwinia isn't the first non-valve-related game to be published via STEAM either. That honour goes to Rag Doll Kung Fu.
Canada has a fair amount of broadband penetration in high population density areas. Go outside the major cities and the situation is the same as the US. Perhaps a bit better, but go out into the country or small rural towns and you can't get broadband. The real advantage we have in Canada is price/speed more than penetration.
Wikipedia indicates that the CG models no longer exist. When they originally rendered them, they rendered them all in 4:3 at SD, expecting that it would be cheap to re-render them in HD widescreen at a later date. Since the models don't exist, they had to use the original 4:3 SD CG renders. Fortunately they had the foresight to frame the shots so that they could discard the top/bottom of the frame without cutting anything important.
Any game would have to recreate the models from scratch, but this is really not different from any other game. This is probably for the best anyhow, since modern 3D hardware can handle better quality than the original models due to modern developments such as normal mapping.
100,000 is trivial these days due to the use of normal maps. Most models for modern games start out at something like a million polygons. They're then reduced to a few thousand polys for in-game display, and the normal map simulates the difference to make them look like they still have a million polys.
It's probably pretty easy on modern hardware to render the TV models to LOOK pretty much identical.
Sigh. For the last time, the visual difference between two images is primarily in the number of vertical lines of resolution (480 or 720). 2x the number of pixels does NOT lead to a 2x perceived increase in quality. Exact pixel counts only matter for discussion the computational difficulty, NOT how much better it will look to the user.
No, what I'm trying to claim is that while there is certainly a difference between the two is not enormous. Is there a difference? Yes. Is it a huge earth shattering change? No. The reason that people are doubting that Halo 2 is running at a higher resolution is because they are expecting too much out of a meager resolution increase, and don't know what to look for to verify that a resolution increase actually took place.
When comparing two resolutions visually, the total number of pixels doesn't matter; that only matters as far as performance is concerned. The perception of quality is going to roughly equate to the lines of vertical resolution. And the difference between 480p and 720p is pretty small.
We're talking about the visual perception of Halo 2 looking better on the 360. Computational power doesn't enter in to it, nor is it really relevant.
The original XBOX had, if I recall correctly, a GPU that was somewhere between a GeForce 3 and a GeForce 4. The 360's graphics processor is MANY times faster, so 125% more pixels onscreen isn't really relevant. The problems only show up on the CPU side, since it is the CPU that has to do full blown emulation of a Pentium 3, and at the same time has to remap API calls for the OS, and also has to remap Direct3D calls to their equivalent XNA calls. Or whatever the equivalent graphics APIs are. The workload on the GPU isn't any more than it was on the XBOX, except for the increased resolution. But again, the performance increase on the GPU side is enormous.
What I'm trying to say is that while there certainly is a visual difference between 480p and 720p, by no means is it an enormous difference. It isn't the end-all be-all in resolution increases. It is akin to changing between 640x480 and 1024x768 resolution. Is there an increase in quality? Yes. Is it a night-and-day difference? No. Games like Doom 3 play rather well at either resolution.
So, yes, the increase in resolution is nice, but the reason people are claiming that they are cheating is because those people are expecting too much from a meager increase in resolution.
I'm talking about along the vertical axis. The number of pixels in total is irrelevant, the fact is that there are 50% more scanlines. That's not a whole heck of a lot.
You get used to it to the point where it plays OK. Yeah, it's no mouse and keyboard, but it isn't as bad as you make it out to be.
Keep in mind here I don't even own a console, so I obviously don't get much practice. Still, it doesn't take me long after sitting down with one to get used to it. Do I suck compared to a PC? Yes. Can I get along? Sure.
I think the Revolution might make things significantly better. Can't wait to try it for an FPS.
No, Halo isn't upsampling, you're just expecting too much from a meager 1.5x change in resolution. The actual resolutio n difference between 480p and 720p is only 50% extra. It's really not that much. The jaggies on the pistol are obviously due to polygon clipping or some other phenomena, since they happen in exactly the same place no matter the resolution.
If you look more carefully at the chunky wires, you can clearly see that the xbox 360 ones are higher resolution. It looks about consistant with what I'd expect from half again the resolution.
There is no doubt in my mind that Halo 2 is shown at 720p, the problem is that Bungie admitted they used an imperfect analog capture card to take the 360 screenshots, while they had a digital feed of the original xbox. The analog capture card obviously degraded the quality a bit, making the already slim advantage all the more slim.
I think another contributing factor to the wires is that they aren't being antialiased in the 360 screenshot. Obviously they're not polygonal. Makes sense, considering how many polygons they'd use up, and the original xbox's limited capacities. It is possible that all the wires are really a semitransparent texture, or perhaps they're done similar to how cables are done in HL2.
You can have the engine re-render eveything at a higher rez but you can't re-patch all the textures so esily so it will look a bit fuzzy simply because the textures will now have to be upsized (stretched). It will beb etter on a big TV becaus eyou can now see mroe detail but it will suffer from a bit of fuzzyness
Actually, no. Textures are the same as before, exactly. Things are not fuzzier, they are exactly the same. The only difference is the number of pixels used to make up the texture. If the texture is low-res, adding more pixels isn't going to change anything if you were already seeing it close up.
In fact, higher resolutions allow for sharper textures in the distance, because at that point you've got less pixels on-screen than in the texture. This means that you are actually gaining additional detail. And as I mentioned, close up textures are the same as before.
And, for your information, texture filtering is not "fuzzyness".
Umm, no, they usually don't, especially when the developers provide a patch to support the new settings rather than a user forcing it.
Go back about as far as you can in the 3D spectrum to glQuake. That's about as far back as you can go on modern hardware. Now, crank up the res, apply AA, and AF. It looks like... you increased the resolution and applied AA and AF. How does it look worse? I mean, the textures are sharper at distances, the jaggies are gone, and everything is just sharper in general due to the higher resolution. I'm not seeing your point here.
I'd be more impressed if that display was made of colour ePaper. I mean, I know ePaper isn't designed for motion, but a wall-sized ePaper that you could change to have any game world map would be cool. Sort of like supergeek wallpaper.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't need to coin a new phrase, Canada already has a perfectly good one.
;)
Here's the article quote:
[violent games] have no place in Germany's bedrooms.'
Andreas Scheuer, German parliamentarian, 2005
And here's a quote by one of Canada's most famous prime ministers:
There's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nationPierre Elliott Trudeau, Canadian Prime Minister, 1967.
Of course, Trudeau was talking about a bill he had introduced as Justice Minister (before he became prime minister) that decriminalized homosexual acts in private. But it's one of his most famous quotes, and I think it applies just as well here. I mean, the quotes match up pretty well
You seem to be confused about the definition of AMD64. AMD64 is an instruction set extension to x86. It is not a "chip" (By which I assume you mean processor). It seems like you're confusing AMD64 with the Athlon 64.
Intel has implemented AMD64 on all their Pentium 4s, and all their Xeons, unless I'm mistaken. Since they obviously can't call it AMD64, they're calling it "EMT64", but that's just marketing.
I still find it amusing that Intel did this, though. They're taking the role that AMD traditionally has by implementing their competitors instruction set. A bit of role reversal there.
Perhaps they did and realized it doesn't matter. After posting I did read the article, and my statements still basically make sense. Just replace "1up" with "R&M" and the whole thing holds; these predictions are meaningless crap, and everybody is predicting something different.
Besides, by reporting on this prediction, 1up is granting it a certain degree of legitimacy. By the fact that they're reporting on this prediction, and not the one made by awzum_gamr63@aol.com that states that the P3 will capture 100% of the market because "omg it rox d00d".
No, but you CAN compare the speeds by megahertz, IF you know the rough ratios between them (As in, a Pentium M is equivalent to a Pentium 4 of 1.7x the clockspeed. This is a commonly accepted figure in many notebook-enthusiast communities), and take into account different core revs and cache sizes.
Since the Pentium M is up there with the fastest desktop processors, and desktop processors outpaced the tired old G4 long ago (prompting Apple to introduce the G5), it is actually a logical conclusion that the PM must be a better performer on the whole than the G4.
I don't know the comparison between G4 performance-per-watt and PM performance-per-watt, but my understandings is that towards the end of it's life the G4 started to hit thermal and clockspeed walls. The Pentium M is a mobile-oriented processor (unlike the G4). Considering that a single-core'd P-M would be a better performer (by last paragraph), and that the Yonah will have two *faster* cores without much power usage increase, the P-M's performance-per-watt would become significantly higher than a processor that probably ALREAY has a better performance-per-watt.
By those two categories, I think the P-M will far outstrip a 1.67GHz single-cored G4.
Another journalist predicted that the PS3 would fail because Microsoft would reduce the 360's price around the PS3 launch, and then release Halo 3 the same day as the PS3 launch. The exact opposite of 1up's position.
So, why should we assume that 1up's predictions are any more accurate? Why should we trust any of these predictions, for that matter?
Same? Um under which benchmark? I can assure you in the "bignum/crypto" world AMD64 is still king.
The average user could care less about such benchmarks, as they don't represent anything they're going to do in their day to day use.
Stop refering to mindless win32 benchmarks for AMD64 performance metrics [which sadly most people do].
Why? Most people don't care about compile performance or software rendering speeds (Or heavy duty math or cryptography). Most people care about how their web browser and word processor performs. And a lot more people are going to care about how games handle than how fast they can cause MD5 collisions.
Also stop refering to game benchmarks. FPS in game does not equate to CPU performance. It equates to *SYSTEM* performance.
In most game benchmarks, with the same memory and the same graphics card, most of the change in FPS is going to be due to the CPU rather than the motherboard chipset. And since those chipsets are tied to the CPU, they are relevant in comparisons between the two processors, meaning that your "system" performance turns into platform performance, which is the whole point of the comparison.
Moving off gaming, I would question if a 1.67GHz G4 could outperform a 2.26GHz Pentium M. Make the Pentium M dual core and take into account OSX's efficient use of multiple cores/processors and I don't think there can be any doubt.
Which makes me ask the question why do retail boxes bundle winxp32 with AMD64s?
Probably because WinXP 64 still isn't perfect. Perfect meaning as good as the 32-bit edition.
The core OS and all the apps it comes with are native code. Most major applications have announced that they will be shipping universal binaries. A year or two after the first Intel mac launches, very few apps will be available only as PPC code. So I don't think your concerns are really quite as bad as all that.
The dual-core Yonah chip could very likely deliver performance greater than Apple's current G4-based PowerBooks.
Could very likely? That's quite a bit of uncertainty.
The Pentium M is roughly performance-equivalent to an Athlon64 of the same clockspeed (The PM is still a bit weak in the multimedia department, but Yonah is expected to fix that. The statement holds true for gaming, at least). Assuming that the dual core Yonah ships at the same max speed as current Dothan processors, that means 2.26GHz. That's roughly an Athlon64 X2 4400+. The PowerBook ships with a single 1.67GHz G4. I think it is safe to say that the processor "definately destroys performance-wise" rather than "could very likely deliver performance greater than".
This is all server software, and as I understand it, people don't usually upgrade between major software revisions on production servers. So all the 32-bit servers out there are going to keep on running the same things.
On the other hand, new servers sold today are pretty much exclusively AMD64; both Intel and AMD have deployed AMD64 accross their entire desktop and server product lines, IIRC. So for the new servers that will be using this new software, it's not a big deal.
Of course, does it make sense to require it? Not really. It's still pretty arbitrary. And stupid.
Epic (Unreal) doesn't agree with you. They think that as games become larger, online distribution just won't work.
As an example, they are saying next-gen games (UT2007) are going to be 20 to 30 gigs. Obviously you can't distribute that on CDs, as that'd be 45 CDs. So they're moving from multiple CDs with optional single DVD to multiple DVDs with optional single HDDVD/BD.
30GB is currently too much to push out over online distribution. While a 1mbit broadband user can download HL2 (~5GB?) in about 12 hours, UT2007 would take them about three days. That is starting to get pretty high, and preloading can only go so far.
Faster internet connections solve the problem yes, but in many places game data counts are going up much faster than internet connections.
I'm not saying that 30GB can't be done at all over the net. Bell Sympatico's 6mbit DSL would be able to handle the download in about the same amount of time a 1mbit user would download HL2. But really, you couldn't ship UT2007 over the net any more than you could ship it on CD.
If they shut down the authentication servers (unlikely to happen any time soon), then fake activation servers won't really be a crack, they'll just be an aftermarket patch to allow gameplay to an old defunct game. This really isn't different than those people producing things like XP hacks for old unsupported Win98 games, or the like.
There is, of course, the ability to play the game without the activation servers at all; if STEAM can't connect, it prompts you to start up in offline mode (assuming you've started up at least once). So if one day they suddenly decide to shut down the activation servers, you can continue to play the game.
You can even continue to take advantage of the multiplayer component. While the master server would be down, that is no different from other games whose master server is down. Counter-Strike: Source can still connect to remote servers in offline mode. Certainly with LAN servers this works fine. I'm not sure how the server authentication thing would work out.
I don't think of STEAM as DRM. I think of it as a content distribution system. One that works very well, and is actually works better than games that ship on CD. I don't ever need to put the CD in the drive, I don't have to worry about no-CD cracks to play a game I own, and I don't have to worry about a game refusing to launch because I've got Daemon Tools running. I also don't have to worry about the game doing evil things because I have Daemon Tools running.
To a small company trying to sell a low budget game like Darwinia, STEAM must surely look tempting. A large marketplace with little competition, low publishing costs, and high profit margins. Darwinia isn't the first non-valve-related game to be published via STEAM either. That honour goes to Rag Doll Kung Fu.
AKA a standard DVD with h.264 to allow HD content?
Is this really anything new? I mean, Microsoft has been putting HD content onto standard DVDs for a while now, using MPEG-4 instead of h.264.
Canada has a fair amount of broadband penetration in high population density areas. Go outside the major cities and the situation is the same as the US. Perhaps a bit better, but go out into the country or small rural towns and you can't get broadband. The real advantage we have in Canada is price/speed more than penetration.
Wikipedia indicates that the CG models no longer exist. When they originally rendered them, they rendered them all in 4:3 at SD, expecting that it would be cheap to re-render them in HD widescreen at a later date. Since the models don't exist, they had to use the original 4:3 SD CG renders. Fortunately they had the foresight to frame the shots so that they could discard the top/bottom of the frame without cutting anything important.
Any game would have to recreate the models from scratch, but this is really not different from any other game. This is probably for the best anyhow, since modern 3D hardware can handle better quality than the original models due to modern developments such as normal mapping.
100,000 is trivial these days due to the use of normal maps. Most models for modern games start out at something like a million polygons. They're then reduced to a few thousand polys for in-game display, and the normal map simulates the difference to make them look like they still have a million polys.
It's probably pretty easy on modern hardware to render the TV models to LOOK pretty much identical.
Sigh. For the last time, the visual difference between two images is primarily in the number of vertical lines of resolution (480 or 720). 2x the number of pixels does NOT lead to a 2x perceived increase in quality. Exact pixel counts only matter for discussion the computational difficulty, NOT how much better it will look to the user.
No, what I'm trying to claim is that while there is certainly a difference between the two is not enormous. Is there a difference? Yes. Is it a huge earth shattering change? No. The reason that people are doubting that Halo 2 is running at a higher resolution is because they are expecting too much out of a meager resolution increase, and don't know what to look for to verify that a resolution increase actually took place.
When comparing two resolutions visually, the total number of pixels doesn't matter; that only matters as far as performance is concerned. The perception of quality is going to roughly equate to the lines of vertical resolution. And the difference between 480p and 720p is pretty small.
We're talking about the visual perception of Halo 2 looking better on the 360. Computational power doesn't enter in to it, nor is it really relevant.
The original XBOX had, if I recall correctly, a GPU that was somewhere between a GeForce 3 and a GeForce 4. The 360's graphics processor is MANY times faster, so 125% more pixels onscreen isn't really relevant. The problems only show up on the CPU side, since it is the CPU that has to do full blown emulation of a Pentium 3, and at the same time has to remap API calls for the OS, and also has to remap Direct3D calls to their equivalent XNA calls. Or whatever the equivalent graphics APIs are. The workload on the GPU isn't any more than it was on the XBOX, except for the increased resolution. But again, the performance increase on the GPU side is enormous.
What I'm trying to say is that while there certainly is a visual difference between 480p and 720p, by no means is it an enormous difference. It isn't the end-all be-all in resolution increases. It is akin to changing between 640x480 and 1024x768 resolution. Is there an increase in quality? Yes. Is it a night-and-day difference? No. Games like Doom 3 play rather well at either resolution.
So, yes, the increase in resolution is nice, but the reason people are claiming that they are cheating is because those people are expecting too much from a meager increase in resolution.
50% more pixels along the axis, not in total.
I'm talking about along the vertical axis. The number of pixels in total is irrelevant, the fact is that there are 50% more scanlines. That's not a whole heck of a lot.
You get used to it to the point where it plays OK. Yeah, it's no mouse and keyboard, but it isn't as bad as you make it out to be.
Keep in mind here I don't even own a console, so I obviously don't get much practice. Still, it doesn't take me long after sitting down with one to get used to it. Do I suck compared to a PC? Yes. Can I get along? Sure.
I think the Revolution might make things significantly better. Can't wait to try it for an FPS.
No, Halo isn't upsampling, you're just expecting too much from a meager 1.5x change in resolution. The actual resolutio n difference between 480p and 720p is only 50% extra. It's really not that much. The jaggies on the pistol are obviously due to polygon clipping or some other phenomena, since they happen in exactly the same place no matter the resolution.
If you look more carefully at the chunky wires, you can clearly see that the xbox 360 ones are higher resolution. It looks about consistant with what I'd expect from half again the resolution.
There is no doubt in my mind that Halo 2 is shown at 720p, the problem is that Bungie admitted they used an imperfect analog capture card to take the 360 screenshots, while they had a digital feed of the original xbox. The analog capture card obviously degraded the quality a bit, making the already slim advantage all the more slim.
I think another contributing factor to the wires is that they aren't being antialiased in the 360 screenshot. Obviously they're not polygonal. Makes sense, considering how many polygons they'd use up, and the original xbox's limited capacities. It is possible that all the wires are really a semitransparent texture, or perhaps they're done similar to how cables are done in HL2.
You can have the engine re-render eveything at a higher rez but you can't re-patch all the textures so esily so it will look a bit fuzzy simply because the textures will now have to be upsized (stretched). It will beb etter on a big TV becaus eyou can now see mroe detail but it will suffer from a bit of fuzzyness
Actually, no. Textures are the same as before, exactly. Things are not fuzzier, they are exactly the same. The only difference is the number of pixels used to make up the texture. If the texture is low-res, adding more pixels isn't going to change anything if you were already seeing it close up.
In fact, higher resolutions allow for sharper textures in the distance, because at that point you've got less pixels on-screen than in the texture. This means that you are actually gaining additional detail. And as I mentioned, close up textures are the same as before.
And, for your information, texture filtering is not "fuzzyness".
Umm, no, they usually don't, especially when the developers provide a patch to support the new settings rather than a user forcing it.
Go back about as far as you can in the 3D spectrum to glQuake. That's about as far back as you can go on modern hardware. Now, crank up the res, apply AA, and AF. It looks like... you increased the resolution and applied AA and AF. How does it look worse? I mean, the textures are sharper at distances, the jaggies are gone, and everything is just sharper in general due to the higher resolution. I'm not seeing your point here.
I'd be more impressed if that display was made of colour ePaper. I mean, I know ePaper isn't designed for motion, but a wall-sized ePaper that you could change to have any game world map would be cool. Sort of like supergeek wallpaper.