Anti-aliasing: my gripe

I am of the firm belief that Forza and Halo can have sufficient anti-aliasing. Once again I go back to my Gears of War example - while it's not the most open shooter around, it still has plenty of large, massive areas that you haul through, without any slowdown. For example, walking through the city streets, or going through the underground caverns. I have to admit that seeing the place where they plant the failed resonator from a distance was very impressive, as well as approaching the outside plant in the rain.

Halo 3 (at least on the multiplayer maps we have seen) has nowhere near as detailed or complex geometry compared to Gears of War, yet it slows down frequently and has no anti-aliasing support at all. Granted it is just a beta, but there are only four months left in the development cycle. I don't know about Forza 2 - all I know is that the developers promised 60fps and 4xAA, and they failed to deliver. Whether or not that is down to hardware limitations or just general lack of knowledge of the system, I don't know, but it's severely disappointing stuff.

Peter Moore promised us this, Gears of War brought the proof, so why can't the other graphically inferior games have it as well?
 
Have you seen the real time video for Halo 3 Knives?

I doubt the multiplayer will end up looking like that but I have faith in Bungie the multiplayer will look a lot better.
 
Bungie has a history of making their announcement trailers look far better than the actual release. Have you seen the Halo 2 announcement trailer? They also did a realtime demonstration of that, reflective visors and shiney parallax maps and all.

The announcement trailer has a stupidly high resolution, something like 8xAA, the textures are sharp all the way to the horizon indicating 16xAF and beyond. They wouldn't suddenly remove these features just for the multiplayer beta. They never existed.

http://www2.mythica.org/halo/hbo/halo2_announce_qt6_small.mov

Do the end of the Space Station level, and see the massive drop in graphics quality.
 
Ok, from my (somewhat limited) knowledge of the subject, there appears to be a few misconceptions.

1. As far as I'm aware, they announced that the eDram would allow 2x MSAA for free, and that 4xMSAA would cause a small (but significant) performance hit. This may be small enough to easilly allow 4xMSAA in some games.

2. From my understanding, 2xMSAA would allow anti-aliasing along either the X or the Y axis, but not both - this may well explain the aliasing seen in something like Forza2, whereby 2xMSAA is being utilised.
 
KNiVES said:
There is no denying that Halo 3 and Forza 2 are both extremely fun and playable games, but we are supposed to be seeing visuals that are a big step above their predecessors. They are not.
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Technically the leap is absolutely massive.
 
Demon said:
However, in context, the 360 is doing better then the PS3 when it comes to AA, Virtua Fighter 5 as an example, the developers are making noise about the 360 version having AA, with the PS3 having none.
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Can you provide a source please? Not calling you a liar but VF5 is one the most visually impressive games I have seen on PS3 so want to know how much better the 360 version will look.
 
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KNiVES said:
I'm sorry did you not notice the thousands of 'Halo 2.5' comments and 'omg Forza 2 graphics sucks!' ones too? There was a whole thread on the lack of AA on Forza!

Take a look, pretty big jury to me; http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=17727501
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They are just two games..

Edit: Sorry, they are the two games in question :p
Like the link to a thread started by you, though. Nice touch. :)
 
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Those two games are what this thread is discussing :p They're not just any games either, Forza 2 and Halo 3 are supposed to be some of Microsoft's biggest releases for the consoles. Expectations are high and of course the two games are going to be slated over glaring flaws in the graphics department, especially when said console is supposed to be giving a smooth good IQ.

edit: Yes, self-promotion for the win :p
 
I'm sure if some of the games that don't have AA were to have it then there would be some loss of quality in the graphics elsewhere, but for me lack of AA is the first thing I notice and hurts the overall experience.
 
KNiVES said:
Halo 3 (at least on the multiplayer maps we have seen) has nowhere near as detailed or complex geometry compared to Gears of War, yet it slows down frequently and has no anti-aliasing support at all. Granted it is just a beta, but there are only four months left in the development cycle. I don't know about Forza 2 - all I know is that the developers promised 60fps and 4xAA, and they failed to deliver. Whether or not that is down to hardware limitations or just general lack of knowledge of the system, I don't know, but it's severely disappointing stuff.

Peter Moore promised us this, Gears of War brought the proof, so why can't the other graphically inferior games have it as well?
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I've had absolutely no slowdown on halo3, even in split screen rocket matches =/
 
I think we're expecting WAY to much out of both the 360 and the PS3 tbh I really do, I think allot of us got caught up in the hype machine, Sony and Microsoft pitched these consoles to be NEXT GEN but by the time they got here they where current gen tbh, the thing is most of us on here own fairly decent PC's so we are going to be a bit overly critical b-cos we've been used to ramping the AA up on games for years, if it caused too much of a performance hit them all you had to do is lower something else, could be as simple as disabling shadows, or cutting the draw distance in half, the problem (as we all know) with the 360/PS3 is you can't do that, it has to try to be good at everything @ a high resolution (allot higher than xblock/ps2), I think it's a hard thing to balance, I really don't envy the developers/designers job at all, I don't think people (in this forum particular) are going to be happy unless all 360/PS3 games run locked @ 60fps, 4xAA, 8xAF and at the same time amazing graphics, my system in my spec struggles at thoses specs in the latest games.
 
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If your playing the game then AA doesnt matter, its a moving image anyway and a high res one.
Lack of AA looks poor on screenshots but if you do a smart resize it'll achieve the same thing anyway
 
For a minute there I thought we were talking about games that were out...

In the case of Halo it's 6 months until its release. The demo was a mp only early beta that the developers have themselves said is graphically far from optimised. (I'm guessing AA optimisation would be something that would be done quite late in the build)

The few journalists that have been privy to the actual game have been quite staggered and I'm confident MS and Bungie will make their 'Show piece' game look quite stunning.

Feel free to come back and quote me on this in September.
 
smcshaw said:
For a minute there I thought we were talking about games that were out...

In the case of Halo it's 6 months until its release. The demo was a mp only early beta that the developers have themselves said is graphically far from optimised. (I'm guessing AA optimisation would be something that would be done quite late in the build)

The few journalists that have been privy to the actual game have been quite staggered and I'm confident MS and Bungie will make their 'Show piece' game look quite stunning.

Feel free to come back and quote me on this in September.
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Bookmarked ;)

I've yet to see any demo improve much on final release. Everytime a pap demo comes out with tearing or poor framerate people say 'wait for the full release they will fix it'

They never do, they release the demo then sit round eating biscuits.
 
dannyjo22 said:
Bookmarked ;)

I've yet to see any demo improve much on final release. Everytime a pap demo comes out with tearing or poor framerate people say 'wait for the full release they will fix it'

They never do, they release the demo then sit round eating biscuits.
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This isn't a demo. It's an early beta.
 
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