So very doubtful. I'd love to be wrong.

Pretty sad when such highly demanded--and useful--features are pretty much "pie in the sky, we never can really hope for it" type of stuff.

Hopefully the up and coming ambitious developers turn an ear toward this sort of stuff.

They count on it! ;)

"Close" isn't a technical word ;)

And no, if the custscenes are realtime they will NOT look that good...

Sorry, it must be that my explaination of what Bugnie did was way over everyones head. It is simple: They ran their engine at like 1fps and rendered at highest LODs and then supersampled the image to get quality IQ you won't see any any game this generation. Period. Impossible. End of story.

If you think the finish product looks better it is because you subjectively looking at art. Which is fine. But subjectives and "it looks close" really don't say anything other than, "I don't understand what I am talking about, but I want to believe therefore it will be."

Your explanation? That's exactly what Bungie themselves said literally days after the event. There's no need to get high & mighty, we get it. The cutscene is effectively kicked out at the same res as their screenshot viewer frame by frame and put back together.

That says to me, asides from the resolution and level of AA, everything else in that cutscene represents the visual benchmark they are aiming for in cutscenes

So taking them at their word on this (i.e. no tricks) then pretty close is what the vast majority of people would describe it as.Bungie have already stated a preference for running their cutscenes in real-time so as to not disconnect the player with two levels of quality. I can't see them changing that approach even if they had the disk space, which they don't.

More than anything I just hope they clean up the image quality. ODST is a stunner sometimes but you can barely tell through the heavy aliasing. It's especially telling because I went back and played Crackdown for the first time a couple of weeks ago, and that game still looks superb thanks to the sharpness and great use of colour. If they just re-released Halo 3 with proper HD resolution and AA, the clearing in the jungle early on in the game, with the water stream and the Phantom ship dropping soldiers would suddenly look surprisingly great instead of being a jittery little mess.

I don't care how much they improve the graphics if the base picture quality doesn't improve, then it'll just be hopelessly videogamey and jarring to look at anyway.

They said they're going to improve the AA and I don't think they would be daft enough not to.

I'm in two minds with regard to Halo 3 though as that lighting model is gorgeous and it does set it apart from plenty of other games, IMO.

I fully agree, I'm being sincere when I say I think ODST is stunning. It's just way more stunning than comes across most of the time.

When you see thumbnail shots of the city bits with ships flying in overhead and their lights are contrasted against the dark skyscrapers and the red sky, that looks fucking ace. It's just too bad it never pops the same way when it's playing in front of you on the telly.

Tell that to Infinity Ward.

Yeah, MY explaination. Because when people HERE were posting that it was real-time and quoting BUNGIE I called it BS.

Revisionist history is always funny!

And my post was specifically addressing those right above mine that a) thought Bungie was backing them up and b) that they had the gall to postulate the game could look even better.

Sorry, when people dismiss common sense and say Bungie can do the level of AA, etc as in this thread then, yes, I think it needs addressed.That is awful vague. If you mean by resolution output (720p versus say 640p) and [MS]AA I disagree that they give us a solid idea of what the game rendering will look like. Now if you put into the vague "Resolution" bucket output resolution, texture resolution/filtering and LOD, geometry LOD, shadow resolution and filter quality, well, there could be a huge gulf in quality.

The game isn't going to look the same with aggressive LOD, shadows that disappear 10 feet ahead of you, and bilinear filtering, oh, like Halo 3. Bungie released similar PR material with this same technique for Halo 3, so I don't know how we can say that this video tells us the graphical benchmark. All it says it was offline rendered with their engine tools and game assets.

So we know the art, but how that ends up on screen can look night and day.

"AA" is also vague. Unless you are including under "AA" all forms of aliasing -- texture, edge, and shader -- then no, I don't agree that the video can be simply quantified as "Halo Reach--Commercial Release... just add some edge jaggies" and ta da, end product. Taking your 7x7 supersample and using in its place a negative LOD (swimming textures) and bilinear filtering (nasty mip transitions) and no AF (vasalene textures) absolute destroys image quality. Most Xbox Games are victim to these issues, so unless Bungie has really cranked up the IQ to match the video it isn't a very good metric for what the retail product will be.I am not talking about tricks.

I am simply pointing out that saying that the normal definition of Resolution and AA doesn't even begin to address the IQ deficit between what Bungie did and running the game at normal resolutions. It isn't "tricks" but the benefit of SuperSampling the image. AF and AA are rendering tricks aimed to address the quality deficit but there is a lot more to it. Bungie isn't tricking anyone--but fans who are in love with Bungie products aren't putting into perspective what a massive supersampled image does to IQ.

Bungie uses a high quality HDR pipeline, but art preferences aside ODST is a technical joke. Besides all the IQ issues (sub HD, no AA, horrible texturing smearing), low poly budgets, broken shadows, all in a pretty static environment ODST has this amazing ability where in FireFight things fade out at ridiculously close distances. When your mates say, "Oh, the sniper riifle is over there, just keep looking, it will pop in" you know your game has some issues.

I find Bungie really uneven graphically. You had some great set peices (like the sky boxes as you mention) but then you see their butt ugly humans, poor technical tradeoffs, and their horrific human models, and you scratch your head.

The games play find, technically their focus is elsewhere, and the fans don't care about the graphics because they a) love the art theme and b) will defend Bungie to the death. As long as they lead the pack in AI, and keep evolving large # coop games and online MP features I think their focus is solid. But that doesn't magically upgrade the graphics engine.

Well, I am asking specifically for them to clean things up, get proper AF and AA and higher res stuff in there, because then the underlying potential of the visuals would be done justice. As is, screenshots of the game that are resized and mask the IQ problems show what I reckon is that potential. The games themselves, during fleeting moments where the aliasing isn't as prevailent, also show glimpses of it.

Haha, great dc, I think you might aswell put a dynamite stick in acerts pants. :)