Posts on Current Forum | Archived Posts
|
|
|
||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
| Frequently Asked Forum Questions | |
|||
|
||||
|
|
|||
| ||||
| ||||
| ||||
| Search Older Posts on This Forum: Posts on Current Forum | Archived Posts | ||||
| ||||
| ||||
| ||||
| Re: Questions: a (sort of) review of Halo 4 | |
| Posted By: uberfoop | Date: 1/11/13 1:40 a.m. |
In Response To: Re: Questions: a (sort of) review of Halo 4 (General Vagueness) : The Chief pretty much feels like the Chief there. Someone pointed out a while : back that Del Rio's orders weren't technically unreasonable and that's : kind of what I thought when I first watched it, and it dulls the scene a : bit, but the Chief more or less acting OK and Del Rio acting like a : raving... something... overshadow that, and it kind of him even harder to : understand-- if he has good reason for what he's doing, it's not against : regulations, and the Chief didn't just strangle his dog or something, why : is he in full rage mode? Is this some kind of alpha-male thing? Did : someone tell him Spartans respond better to anger, presumably to see if : he'd get himself killed? Clearly, Halo 4 is not just a story about the relationship between the chief and cortana, and the Didact's personality quirks. It is also a story about Lasky's mutiny attempts and eventual success to become captain of the UNSC Infinity. : I don't get what you mean. About the vibrantness: CRTs are sort of like plasmas in that they tend to have much better static contrast than LCDs. This means that they can simultaneously display very dark darks and very bright brights. It contributes to them being able to give quite vibrant imagery. This is usually a great thing, but when you have stuff like Forerunner where you have overall dark imagery with a bunch of whacky glaring patterns thrown in, it can be rather eye-burning. I suppose I could have cranked the contrast way down, but it's already fairly low, would force me to mess around with my settings later, and seems somehow wrong. Image quality at lower resolutions: The 360 typically renders games natively in the neighborhood of 1280x720. On a 720p or especially a 1080p display, this means that you're going to see a lot of aliasing. Things like jaggies. Supersampling (essentially, this is rendering the image at a higher resolution and scaling the result down) is the simplest form of antialiasing, and it gives terrific results for all kinds of specular aliasing. The downside is that it's extremely expensive, for obvious reasons. When you play Halo on a 360, it renders the image at 640p-720p (depending on the game) and then scales the output when it sends the image to your TV. Since 640p-720p is much higher than the native resolution of an SD CRT, the scaling is roughly equivalent to supersample antialiasing, giving a much less shimmery image when the game is in motion. Now, it is true that you'll lose detail in highly-detailed ares of the image, because 480i simply isn't going to be able to show details that require 720p to resolve; text especially is something that tends to not downscale gracefully. But most stuff in an image that isn't text tends to scale a lot better; most environment imagery simply doesn't contain as much high-detail stuff in it, and a lot of the game's texture and model assets aren't high-fidelity enough to take full advantage of 720p anyway. : maybe... I'm thinking there was some reason they didn't want the Sentinel
I think it's an entirely likely possibility that they simply didn't want to allocate the 360's resources to handling sentinel beams. Less to render on the map, the game doesn't have to be able to load a HUD model for another weapon on the fly (probably means freeing up more RAM), less physics to do with objects bouncing around the map... In general, Halo 4 is extremely picky about this stuff. It's why the Promethean enemies don't leave much behind when they die, and why their guns cause bodies to dissapear, and why vehicles dissapear so quickly after blowing up, and why the Lich exploding was so comically underwelling compared to Halo 3's scarabs, and why weapons vanish quickly after being dropped. : I'll tell you what I told Cody (I can't seem to find where I said it but I
No it doesn't. Especially not when you're gunning for a cohesive style with intentional flow throughout the game (which has always been the case with Halo). : No, I mean how after you start seeing Prometheans you start seeing weapon
Oh, that. Uh... I guess they figured they needed to make up for the bullet sponges and low ammo capacity. Which I suppose calls to question why they have bullet sponges and low ammo capacity in the first place. Whatever. : Does the power supply really make a difference? It makes all the difference in the world. Crazy rough explaination ahead. Transistor logic gates draw power whenever they switch values, which can happen with each clock cycle; to represent the change in logic states, electrons have to move about between and through the transistors that make up the gate, which means you have electric current moving through your chip, which means you're burning off power. If you don't give the logic gate enough power to make the switch quickly, the electrons don't move about quickly, and the voltages in the system (which represent logic states) don't change quickly. If the voltages don't change fast enough to propogate some logical result from one part of your computer to the next by the time another clock cycle rolls through, you have errors. So, if you decide to send less power to your chip, you have to decrease the clock speed to make sure that the slower logical propogation can keep up with the clocking (and therefore the computational throughput). Similarly, if you send more power to your chip, it's possible to increase the clock speed, because your transistors can switch faster, and the logical states propogate faster through your system, and can keep up with higher clock speeds. Obviously you can only push this so far; if you push A LOT of power to a chip to use a REALLY HIGH clock speed, the chip is going to turn the inside of your system into an oven. An object the size of a 360, using simple fan cooling, really shouldn't have more than 200 watts going into it. Even 200 watts is pushing it, if the RROD is anything to go by. "But wait," you say, "why is it that the slim version of the 360 can perform just as well as the regular 360 but with less power consumption?" Well, one of the main ways in which the silicon industry makes technological progress is by figuring out how to manufacture smaller transistors. One of the advantages of smaller transistors is that you can put more of them on a small silicon die, allowing for much more complex systems in chips of the same size. But there is another advantage: because they're smaller, they don't use as much current when switching values, and so they don't use as much power when switching values. Thus if you use the same power as before, you can get away with clocking the system faster... or, in the case of the 360 slim, you clock the system the same but at a lower power draw.
| |
|
| Replies: |
The HBO Forum Archive is maintained with WebBBS 4.33. |