Be Excellent To Each Other

Where is this massive improvement in graphics people have been claiming in the PC version? I can't see much difference in this comparison video from Digital Foundary:

http://www.eurogamer.net/videos/digital ... c-max-spec

Because the graphics card gives it less pixel impedence, therefore the visuals have great swing and pace. The colours are more harmonically full, while the gold connectors mean the I/O path suffers no alias distortion.


And just £500. To be honest, the supplier will kill me if he finds out I've been giving it away at that price.

You can't see because you don't already believe.

The PC does look better in that video. Only a raging blind man would claim otherwise. Also, of course, you can't see any benefits in the PCs resolution increase when the video is squashed down to 720p.
It's not that much better, though.

I concur with both bits of this.

The biggest difference for me is the somewhat horrible screen tear on the 360 version. I didn't seem to notice it in the demo - is it really as bad as that in the full game?

Only in the cut scenes, can't remember any tearing during actual gameplay?
That video highlights my two problems with the xbox version, the screen tearing and the shadow detail on the blacks.

I think it also backs up my statement, where I can't really see that much difference

You'd need video at 1200p (or at least 1080p), running at 60FPS to get the full effect of the difference between the two platforms.

The 360 version does tear like a bastard too, wheras the PC version tears a lot less or will run with V-SYNC on a decent enough machine.

Do Eurogamer say what settings they're running the PC version at? (Can't watch it myself now as on iPhone)

It's maxed out with everything turned up to 11.

The 360 version has a vomit filter added to protect people throwing up on their keyboards.

Hang on, you were claiming night and day difference between PC and 360, that spanned things like textures and poly levels. Now you say the changes are just pixel count and frame rates?

How much the PC version tears will vary with PC spec and game setting, of course, as screen tearing is a function of running out of rendering power. The 360 version certainly does tear, enough that I find it bothersome.

Yes. "Maxed".

I queued a torrent of the ISO for the PC. I might take a look at it with my own eyes. Dunno where my GF8800 GTS SLI and Intel Core2 Extreme X9650 3Ghz will get me.

Laughed out of Penis Replacements Monthly, at the very least.

The one on the left was teary and a bit skippy at times.

at 720p

Perkies and a kangaroo?

yes

842 bananas there.

I read What Hi-Fi at breaktimes, I have absolutely no idea why, as I don't have the cash for what they're selling and I'm certain they're talking guff.

I've played it on both, I can't see much difference other than in resolution being sharper so less jaggies, and shadows and atmospheric blurriness. Not enough to warrent excitement, really.

I wanted to get a review on an amplifier so I went to What Hi-Fi? In the process I found this http://www.whathifi.com/Review/van-den-Hul-Ultimate/ review. I stopped reading What Hi-Fi? shortly after.

I feel so stupid for only paying £5 for mine now. Batman Begins looks as ugly as Just Cause on the 360 with my poor man's HDMI 1.3 cable.

Now I'm angry, damnit.

Do you only have a cheap HDMI cable as well?

I have an HDMI that the SKY man gave me.

No, I have expensive ones. And now I've been reminded. Twice.

How can you stompy boot someone else's 'joke'?

That fucking smilie needs to come with a user guide.

No, I said that to see the full difference you'd need 1200p and 60FPS.

I've always maintained it's not just resolution, it's not just textures, it's not just aliasing, it's not just framerate and so on. It's the cumulative effect of all these factors combined that, taken as a whole, represent a substantial increase in overall visual quality on the PC version. (As with MW2 and BC2 also, for example.)

Resolution and framerate are certainly two of the more significant factors however, you're getting nearly twice the pixels and twice the framerate - that's a massive jump that's clearly visible to the untrained eye, and when you're as anal about these things as I am, it makes the 360 version largely intolerable.

(That's not to say the 360 version is outright bad if you're not overly fussed about all that stuff, but to me the ugliness of the game genuinely got in the way of my ability to enjoy it.)



Well a mate of mine is running the game maxed out at 1680x1050 on a £500 PC (brand new build, dual core i3, 5770), and the tearing is largely non-existent on his system, so you don't need an absolute monster, that's for sure.

Looking at a few benchmarks for this game, folks with 5850/5870 cards can properly max it out, i.e. 8xAA and V-Sync on at 1920x1200, I can run it at that on my system and it looks phenomenal, but my framerate is sub-20FPS (which is what the 360 version sometimes drops to as it is.....) so no good for gameplay.



Not sure how far you'll get with that in all honesty, your CPU is decent enough but unless there's an SLI profile for the game it's probably going to be pretty rough, and even then will most likely struggle at high resolutions and/or detail settings.

Taken from the Eurogamer write-up linked to by the OP:







(Fair comment, you'll most likely need a few runs through the third and toughest built-in benchmark to get a perfect display set up, but it's a one time only requirement.)

He then kind of ducks the question about which version is the one to have overall because Just Cause 2 is a 'console game at heart' (well yeah, we knew that) - so you don't get a straight answer.

However, considering the choice between 360 and PS3 versions involved this:



Or you could play the PC version, which has none of the issues listed above. (And use FRAPS for video capture and not be limited to the low bitrate 640p capture you get on the PS3.)

This is demonstrably not true. I remember back in the day chucking Quake up from default resolution - something very low - to one of the much higher settings - at least 4x the pixels. My cousin (whose computer it was) couldn't tell the difference. Many people don't seem to be able to tell the difference between an HD feed and a SD feed.


I struggle to see why you still own a 360, what with you being a complete graphics whore.

And demonstrably true, as many people I know can see the difference.

I missed out an always. Maybe even an often.

The point being that resolution is not as big a point as some people wish to make out.

Point 1 - Weren't the textures themselves in Quake really low quality to start with though? (i.e. higher resolutions won't help much.) And I'll bet you had a CRT back then too, which made anti-aliasing largely redundant due to the inherent smoothing effect of CRT technology.

Even running at 1920x1200 I still have 4xAA by choice as the jaggies get on my nerves at 2x or with AA turned off.

Back when I still had my 1600x1200 CRT AA didn't bother me nearly so much.

Point 2 - I like my 360 well enough, but these days it's mainly for XBLA stuff. As it happens there's been a really good run of the games I want to play being released on both PC and 360, and given all of the above, obviously I'm going to choose the PC version (On top of that PC is my default choice because my gaming buddies all have PC as their platform of choice too.)

Also: The story about a family members new LCD TV. Everyone cooed at how marvelous this new HD thing was. The problem being that not only was it not an HD source, it wasn't even an HDTV. It was the same old resolution. It just looked better because it was supposed to.

But you're using the same silly subjective argument that everyone else is - 'I can't really see the difference and some people I know can't really see the difference either, hence you're wrong.'

I keep coming up with all these, y'know, actual facts, and you're giving it 'When I played Quake in 1996 and I changed my resolution from 640x480 to 800x600, the game looked mostly the same.'

I'm using tangible, measurable, provable differences, and you're being strangely Tom Cruise about it.

Short?

While I agree that high resolutions look better than low ones, I do think the industry is going down a wrong path chasing after them.

JC2 can be played at, what, 3x the resolution of a DVD on a good PC. But does it look twice as good as a DVD? No. It doesn't even look half as good. Not even one tenth, I reckon.
And that's got nothing to do with res, it's to do with details you can see. That's way Grand Theft Auto 4 looked so good despite the clearly low resolutions it was running at - the amount of detail the crammed into each frame.

I feel I've put my point across really badly there

I just realised! The condescening "I know better than you" tone that Atrocity Exhibition takes when talking to console games is exactly how I feel when I talk to PC users as a Mac user.

Mac users -> PC users -> console gamers

The condescension flows from left to right.



One of my mates has a 1080p 50" plasma and another has a 720p[1] 50" plasma. I was surprised to see that at closer-than-normal viewing distances I was struggling to see anything wrong with the 720p set playing a (downscaled) Bluray.

Then I did some reading about the average visual acuity of the human eye in arc-seconds and some trigonometry involving viewing distance and pixel size and discovered that the difference between 720p and 1080p on a 50" screen at something like eight feet is about on the boundaries of what is visible. This surprised me; I thought it would be more than that. You can repeat this analysis for PC resolutions and viewing distances if you'd like. It's trivial mathematics.

[1] it actually runs at some bizarre rectangular pixel resolution, but I think it's 720 lines.

The difference really was night and day. Just installed it and we're talking about the difference between 320x240 and 1280x1024. That's 17x the pixel count. On one, pixellation is obvious, on the other, not so much. I couldn't believe he didn't spot a difference is visual quality. And the textures weren't so bad you wouldn't spot a jump from 320x240 to 800x600.

The main advantage is the denser the resolution, the less requirement for anti-aliasing.

Wait! I'm a mac user and a console gamer. The console is connected to an SD telly!

I'm very confused!

This is why I've never claimed that resolution alone makes the difference, there's something about higher resolution + higher framerate working very well together though (and let's have no one confusing films with games again when it comes to frames per second......), and then you add in all the other 'techy nerdy stuff' that I go on about (or if you will Grim..., the 'details'), and you're left with an overall effect that's pretty considerable.

Where folks are happy with the visual fidelity of 360/PS3 games then I'm happy for them, not everyone's as anal about this stuff as I am and that's fine - personally however I want to play games on the platform that can deliver the best overall experience (which includes the graphics), and pretty much every single time, that's the PC. (And certainly I can't remember the last 3-way faceoff that Eurogamer did where the PC didn't come off best.)

You're making making vague claims of psychological superiority now? Do you own any £300 HDMI cables?

I own some £3.00 ones.

The argument over graphics and being able to tell the differences are the same as the sound/speakers argument. Some people have the critical listening skills to pick out the tiny differences and others don't. I have been told due to my Autism I have an acute sense of hearing and sight. Especially with things like vivid colours. So maybe I am sensitive or even fussy? I don't know. I do, however, have both a very powerful gaming PC and a set of Mission loudspeakers.

So make of that what you will, I guess.

You could just be a gullible idiot

Right (1) the default res in Quake wasn't 640x480, it was half that. Since you seem quite obsessed about anti aliasing, I'm surprised you don't know the advantages a resolution change would have in terms of natural anti aliasing. A change from 640x480 ti 800x600 would have a beneficial effect on AA if you were to look for it. Many people wouldn't, and so don't notice.

(2) No, you're hardly using facts. It's a well known fact about the human brain that it will prefer something it is told is better (quite an important evolutionary point, for that matter). It's similar in a fashion to the placebo effect. HD sales have had a significant boon from this effect. And it can be easily shown by the number of people who think this HD thing is a massive improvement despite not having an HD feed.

It's a case of knowing what you're looking for. If you don't know why HD is better, you generally don't tend to notice the difference. And it's hardly unique. When I got my very nice bass guitar, it sounded an awful lot better than my old one. Non musical friends couldn't tell the difference in sound between the two, because they didn't know what they were listening for. The difference between a wine buff and someone who isn't. The wine tasting chap will know what he's looking for in the taste, someone who doesn't won't notice the difference so much, and be happier to drink £2 bottles of wine.

In all cases, there's something to be said for either side. Being able to drink cheapo wine certainly has its advantages.

(1) Yes I know because originally it used a software renderer. I chose 640x480 to 800x600 to illustrate my point, not because I was concerned about getting resolution spot on. (IIRC you could run it at 1024x768 with a 3dfx card, so the jump could have been from 320x240 to 1024x768, but that wasn't what I was getting at.)

I'm not sure what your point is about AA, on the same sized screen, higher resolutions will need less AA to look good, that's a given (where did I say that's not the case?). Personally I still like 4x even at 1920x1200 on a 24 inch TFT.

(2) What isn't factual about my statements on resolution, framerate, aliasing, texture details, shadow settings etc?

A lot of HD screens have massively increased brightness and contrast over CRTs, so a non-HD feed can look better on a HD screen than it would on an old telly. That's besides the point anyway, I'm not arguing with the subjective stuff ('the game looks fine to me'), it's the contention that there's effectively no difference between the two versions that's patently (and factually) wrong.

Funny joke but no, on a serious side sometimes I really truly wish I could not tell a difference.

I paid $afuckinglot for a Kicker Solobaric competition pro 12" sub. It was square and handled absolutely ludicrous levels of power. To that I married it into a 1kw 2ohm Audiobahn world tour series amplifier. Within a week the amp and sub were both gone and I had replaced the system with a Phoenix Gold amplifier and a JBL competition subwoofer. Simply as at low levels the Audiobahn/Kicker combination sounded lovely. As soon as you cranked the volume knob the lovely soft bass was replaced with back slapping hard assed shit. After I was done I was very pleased and kept the same system for years. My friends? all of them said "It doesnt sound any different to me if anything it's not as loud".

At times I wish I did not have those levels of perception because it's not cheap. It's also not nice being that bothered about it either. I really wish sometimes I could take the cheap option as I don't exactly live on caviar money.

I will grant you, though, that a lot of people buy that stuff because it's expensive. But companies like Mission and so on could not exist on silly rich twats so there must be a notable difference somewhere. Even at a midi cacko hifi - cheap low end seperates system level.

Get off my wine/PC graphics Analogy you;

Woah, woah, woah. Where can I get £2 bottles of wine?

In spain, I could get 30p bottles cartons of wine.

They were properly vile.

The large Sainsburys in Bristol did £2 bottles of wine when I lived near it. They were, however, plastic bottles, such that you'd get cooking oil in. I never dared buy one.