Man if this plays as good as it looks... drool. I am specifically impressed with the shadowing demonstrated in the shots, especially the self shadowing. This makes a big difference to my eyes when play a game--it makes things feel more solid and more part of their environment.

The arcade version runs on a 6800GT class GPU and P4. I hope the conversion goes well...

Not necessarily. The PS3 version should look better because the RSX is a direct line of the 6800GT but has more of almost everything: Easily 2x the shader performance, 2x the texturing performance, more effecient ROPs, etc. The downside is RSX has less fillrate and memory bandwidth.

The 360 version could be more worrisome. It has substantially higher fillrate and shader performance and framebuffer bandwidth but raw texel fillrate (not counting any effeciency gains) is only about 40% higher. ATI and NV GPUs do things differently so porting to Xenos would take some work; e.g. they would need to move to FP10 storage format to get HDR and AA, they would benefit from running longer shaders and more dynamic branches in the shaders, they have to do an early Zpass, store normals in 3Dc, etc. and then there is wrestling with the CPU...

That may be asking too much, so I would expect the PS3 version to look better because it will be an easier port.There have been a number of past arcade perfect ports--the reason arcades have more memory and such is to remove load times.

VT3 will always be limited to 256MB of assets for graphics at any one time. Since the scene does not move they cannot effectively use streaming, and even if they did the 256MB of R is faster to transfer from than the 1GB of DDR400 on the arcade side.

The 6800 is not really fast enough to handle too much more than 256MB of video memory to begin with--especially since VT3 is not a streaming world. Put another way, since you can pretty much see everything on screen in VT3, if it were to use 256MB of textures every frame, at 60fps, that would be over 15GB/s of bandwidth. And you still need bandwidth for fillrate, backbuffers, framebuffer, etc

Basically 512MB would 100% saturate the memory bandwidth just for art assets leaving no bandwidth to render anything.

So 256MB is more than enough for graphics in such a small world. Now if the world was larger and you could randomly go whereever you wished and the game had to have a large archive of texture data THEN you would need more memory footprint because you never know what 200MB of textures you may need at any one time.

Sumo Digital is handling the conversion so it'll be spiffy indeed. Hopefully they'll add lots of extra challenges and stuff like that for extended solo play.

For better or worse (depending on who you ask) Virtua Tennis is a decidedly more arcadey experience than Top Spin. Top Spin with its customisation and its fiddly risk shots slapped around the balance in a way that wasn't really met with enthusiasm from Virtua Tennis purists. Having borrowed the best bits from VT and added sim-like aspects, some found Top Spin to be a more personalised and intimate game, but Virtua Tennis remains more balanced, faster and more accessible.

It's sort of like taking Mario, giving him a stamina meter and a randomized risk of headache when he breaks one of those blocks.

I find it especially bothersome in Top Spin (and similar sport titles) when you have a friend over, want to play with your own character (of course) and they're either SEVERELY under-powered or over-powered compared to the pre-defined stable of characters your friend picks from. Whether you're playing a friend's custom character or one of the ready made ones, it's impossible to have a proper balanced game of Top spin.

I'd say there's room for both if it wasn't for the fact that Top Spin 2 saw underwhelming sales and reviews, and Indie Built Inc. is shut down. Amped, NOOOO! Etc. Incidentally I'm a Supreme Snow God.

I for one am immensly looking forward to this, having enjoyed Top Spin to an extent but longed for something a little more charming and light hearted.

Edited for addressing something:This isn't entirely true. Although I have no idea about the numbers or whether it can be done in theory, there actually haven't been one instance in recent time of an arcade game surviving the translation from roughly same-powered hardware with more memory. There have been a number of incredibly faithful ports, notably from the Naomi board to Dreamcast, but they're not perfect if you look at texture quality.

What in my statement is not specifically true? I am not asking about your perception, I am asking what I said is factually not true.Lets put aside whether that is true or not for a moment and go back to the context of the port discussion I made originally: As outlined above such parallels don't mean much in this specific situation because

- We are not talking about porting of similarly powered hardware, the PS3 has a significantly more power than Lindberg

- RSX is much faster than the 6800GT in most areas

- RSX has more available video memory than the 6800GT

If the PS3 gets a port that is not arcade perfect it wont be due to lack of memory or power it is a *developer* problem and not a hardware problem.

Even if one were to conceed porting issues to rougly comparable hardware in the past, that really doesn't apply here as performance and relevant memory pools are decidely in the advantage of the PS3.

I know it may seem foreign to think 512MB of PS3 memory is more than the 1280 in the Lindberg Arcade system, but graphically the PS3 has more relevant video memory because RSX has very fast access to R while the 6800GT has VERY slow access to the 1024MB of main memory --which has a meager 6.4GB/s of bandwidth to begin with so it is almost completely useless for realtime access and since the screen scene does not change in VT3 you need immediate access to all your video memory all the time anyhow so streaming would be pointless.

The PS3 has more memory and more graphical power for a game like VT3 or VF5.

Whether that means an arcade perfect port who knows. But I am pretty sure the PS3 version WILL look better than the Xbox 360 version because Lindberg's graphic subsystem is much more comparable to the PS3 than the Xbox 360 (which has unified memory, eDRAM, and a totally different balance of graphical power).

Acert, I quoted the bit containing what wasn't accurate, there should be no confusion. Regardless of if machines are capable of producing perfect ports on paper, there hasn't been a port in recent time that has been, thus rendering the certainity with with you suggest that the VT port will be somewhat questionable.

I'm sure all the numbers check out, I even said they probably do. That doesn't change the fact that like I said, games have traditionally not been arcade perfect unless the hardware they're translated to is significantly superior.

edit: But then you never really did suggest that it was going to be. Sorry, my bad. :D