Good informative post.
I know in PC sims, to run enough AA to smooth things out will often halve performance and cause stuttering. My PC is pretty beefy and still can't manage all the filters I'd LIKE on GTR evo. Live for Speed is nice because I can crank up the filters as high as I like and it makes everything silky smooth and still maintains over 100fps. But LFS could use better textures, lighting and shadows.
Thankyou.
Anyone can develop on PC and go utterly mad with their game engine and totally outstrip the technology available at the time cough crytek cough
Console development is often much harder, you gotta work with what you got, and you will always be compared on a level platform with the results of other developers. This generation of consoles is emphasising increase in resolution, geometry, pixel shading and texturing, not filtering. Basically raw detail. Because of this massive ramp in detail EXPECTED then applying filtering as the icing on the cake so to speak is usually well beyond the capabilities of 360 and ps3.
Older PC games can still look good not because they match the detail of this generation of consoles, but because you can pour filters on top and come out the other side with a less detailed game, but incredibly smooth and still attractive looking. Much like how you say the details on live for speed on PC are lacking because the engine is quite old, but with all filters applied its a very clean game visually. Same goes for Rfactor for me. PC gamers often take anti aliasing for granted, usually because we have machines much more powerful than is needed for many games and coat on the pixel prettifiers like there is no tomorrow. Its also why we throw our toys out the pram when a game like crysis comes along and smashes our beloved PC to pieces!
My personal opinion with GT5 is that the balance between detail and filtering is pretty good for Ps3. Unlike some Ps3 games GT5 doesnt completely sacrifice image quality AA filtering for detail. People always want MORE and MORE but dont realise how far GT5's engine is pushing ps3. They should be more realistic, everything on console is a compromise for something else, hence my first comment about PC development off the bat!!! i applaud the target of a higher resolution and 2 x AA, as the owner of a 1080 HDTV i wil always prefer a higher resolution with slightly less AA over a lower resolution and more AA. If textures and models look good in the 1080p mode, then they will look good in 720p mode. This is also extremely smart, because it doesnt always work vice versa.
The fact is GT5 is managing to cater best for both worlds. 720P set owners get more AA, 1080P set owners get a higher resolution. Its reassuring they thought through the technical challenges really well from day one.
The "high end" these days is to play PC games at 1920x1080 with 2 or 4xAA (or for the super high end, 2560x1600).
If the engine at maximum load runs 30FPS then it doesnt really matter, because the other 99.9 percent of the time its over 50FPS. This is also why it doesnt appear to have a v lock or vsync which is the most disappointing thing. People are banging on about improving this and that but its just not gonna happen this generation, so i would settle for GT5 prologue visuals with vsync ON!
In fact, I played my PC games at 1280x960 with just 2xAA.
2560 x 1600 and up and up....
