The Screenshots Thread

[Pagan's Mind]

Yeah that motioninjoy or whatever it's called was headache inducing to use. I went and bought the 360 controller for Windows and it works like a charm with pretty much everything.

[emwearz]

[GooberMan]

[PixieGirl]

Resident Evil 5... I didn't really enjoy this game, but I found it to be one of those games where I'd watch a cutscene and find it difficult to believe that my computer was really rendering what I was watching. Looking at the screenshots, they don't really do it justice, and I'm wondering if it's already dated looking by now. But I think in motion it looks a lot better.

Maxed Out, DX10, 8xAA

[GooberMan]

Uhm. You know many of RE5's cutscenes were prerenders, right?
_________________

[PixieGirl]

By prerendered do you mean, videos already recorded with CG and popped into the game? I don't think so. The only cutscene I remember being a video was the very first one before you start, and I could tell because it was obvious with compression artifacts on the video. I know none after that were prerendered because A) I noticed graphics changes when I was messing around with settings, B) I have fraps on all the time and I noticed framerate dips anywhere between 60 and 30, and C) all cutscenes were crystal clear, where as the first video was not.

It might be different on the consoles though, which would make sense. But on the PC these were rendered...

[Pagan's Mind]

They look rendered to me. Much better than the console versions.

[GooberMan]

I'd expect the Jill flashbacks to be pre-renders, same with the Michael Bay plane crash just before the end.

Easy test - put on an alternate costume and watch them again. Any that use the default costumes are pre-renders.
_________________

[Fetidchimp]

they all wear what you are wearing at the time
_________________
kill, kill, kill.....the white man. Kill the white man, kill

[GooberMan]

Yeah, I remember it more clearly now. Similar to RE4, many real time cutscenes. Although while RE4 only went pre-rendered for the introductory video, I seem to recall seeing more than just the intro video pre-rendered in RE5.

And I can't really ever bring myself to load that game up again, so I can't confirm if the ones I suspect being pre-rendered are actually pre-rendered.
_________________

[emwearz]

[GooberMan]

[emwearz]

Stating the obvious I guess, which is that your a bit of a dick.

My point was that the shadows depend greatly on your CPU, fair more extensively than it should. My own FPS jumping up so high show this to me, as I can raise and lower different graphic options with nothing changing on the FPS front (meaning I am being bottlenecked by my CPU), I lower the shadow setting and my FPS sky rockets.

[GooberMan]

_________________

[grim-one]

[GooberMan]

Shadows are an amazingly tricky subject to talk about, simply because there's several different methods used in modern games.

At its simplest, if it's generating shadow volumes for light occluders, then that does require the creation of a shadow volume. Traditionally, this has been done on the CPU. Previous gen hardware lacked vertex shaders, and even with current gen hardware it's tricky to create shadow volumes on the vertex shader (it involves throwing more polys at the shader than it needs). Geometry shaders are fairly perfectly suited for shadow volume generation. But no current gen console hardware supports that, nor does DirectX 9.

For Skyrim, I'd expect that shadow volume generation to be done on another thread, or SPUs on the PS3. Either way, it'd be done in a task-based paradigm. And this is step 1 in the whole "lazy console port" argument I see popping up - an Xbox 360 has 6 hardware threads, the PS3 has 2 hardware threads and 6 SPUs, and the PC has, well, anywhere from 2 to 12 hardware threads. The amount of parallel processing any of those consoles can do far outmatches the minspec PC.

As always though, it's not that simple. While there are many operations that you can just send across to the GPU and not worry about, there are blocking operations that will cause your CPU to stall while it waits for the GPU to finish whatever it's working on. These are bad and should generally be avoided in a retail application, but are generally fantastic for debugging. I expect that the shadow rendering uses some of these blocking calls when they shouldn't, which isn't so much a case of "sloppy PC port" but "sloppy programmer didn't turn off the debug features".
_________________

[Jarrod]

[PixieGirl]

The PC version of RE4 had prerendered cutscenes too and they looked so awful on a high resolution screen you could hardly tell what was going on >_>
_________________

[Frozencry]

Less CG/Realtime cutscene talk more screenshots.

BFBC2 Eyefinity

Saints Row The Third Eyefinity (lower res)

Saints Row The Third Eyefinity (lower res)

Space Marine, including an image of making an Ork explode into glorious gibs.





More Skyrim






_________________

[PixieGirl]

After making a post about it I thought i'd break out the Mirror's Edge screenies

Maxed, 4xAA

[Phreakuency]

Really enjoyed Mirrors Edge (back on PS3), should grab it again now that I am a PC gamer

A couple more from me, some Skyrim, NBA2K12 and Bulletstorm:








_________________
My YouTube game videos!

[PixieGirl]

Those are some really well chosen screenies, I love the Skyrim one and the first bulletstorm one, gorgeous!!!
_________________

[Phreakuency]

Cheers

One thing I love about gaming on PC is snapping your own 'memories' of your games.

Another Skyrim and Rage...




_________________
My YouTube game videos!

[Frozencry]

Amazing place in Skyrim.




_________________

[Cyph]

Mirrors Edge is a very attractive game.

I should dig up my old EQ1 screenies. I remember looking them a few years ago and thinking to myself 'Damn, the old East Commons Bazaar, I loved that place'