Gaming Do you think 3ds has achieved its full potential in graphics?

[Transdude1996]

The 3DS still has a long way to go when it comes to graphics. Those cartridges can hold up to 8GB which means we haven't even seen the tip of the iceberg.

 

[Clydefrosch]

i have to say, i guess things wont look much better than they look in the best games available now.
yeah, there will be improvements so things like clipping errors or loading textures wont ruin the experience. and i'm sure, they can work to reduce slowdowns and overall improve fps too. though they already cleverly hide loading times. but there are clear limits to what the 3ds can do. not even in the ability to render graphics, but in its ability do display them due to the resolution.
obviously, on the lower end of the spectrum, there will be improvements. companies that made rather bad looking games at first will get better with time. but the next resident evil or a hypothetical next kingdom hearts wont improve by a lot over the old one in pure gaphics.

but of course, that doesnt mean the games wont be better.

 

[Blaze163]

While I admit the graphics for Resident Evil and Kid Icarus are mind blowing, the system is nowhere close to its full potential yet. A cogent paradigm would be the PS2. Look at some of the games that impressed fairly early on in its lifespan, Soul Calibur 2 for example (not the best example as it was a while before that hit, but I didn't have a PS2 for a while). Great graphics. Then check out something from close to the end of its life, like Final Fantasy XII. OUTSTANDING. So while there will of course be games that impress along the way, it'll be some considerable time before developers truly master the hardware and learn the little exploits to milk every last screed of potential out of the chips.

 

[chartube12]

Final Fantasy 12 looked horribly pixelated. Almost like a ps1 got ported over. Hell even some ps1 games looked a lot better.

 

[papermanzero]

Look at games like Nano Assault



This is just the beginning. The 3DS can achieve even more.
The developers need only time to adjust their technologies to the system to improve the visual quality.

 

[Gabelvampir]

I don't know, isn't that like asking at the end of 1985 if the Famicom/NES has peaked graphically with Super Mario Bros. 1?
I do not think 3DS is near its full graphic potential yet, in my opinion it is even hard to predict now how "good" the 3DS graphics will be in 5 years if the system (hopefully) lasts that long.
I don't think it will be a change as drastic as going from SMB 1 to 3 (or the few last 1st party titles like Kirby's Adventure and Wario's Woods), but it is hard to guess, especially without in-depth knowledge of the hardware and its programmability.

 

[BORTZ]

I dont know if you can answer that till the 3DS is dead and buried... I mean can we even answer if the DS achieved its full graphical potential?

 

[Gabelvampir]

I dont know if you can answer that till the 3DS is dead and buried... I mean can we even answer if the DS achieved its full graphical potential?

You are right. When you think about what some homebrewers squeeze out of a Mega Drive or NES or even an Atari 2600 these days....
Granted, many of this is achieved by having greater ROM size than the biggest ROM that was feasable 20-30 years ago, but there are also new programming tricks that were learned after the official lifespan of the systems, and better development frame works than were possible back then.
So a better phrasing for the question should be something like "Will the 3DS have better graphics then now in its commercial lifespan" which many here will also answer with a resounding "of course". And I feel we are approximately at the transition from the 1st generation of game title to the 2nd one, or early in the 2nd generation (such rather arbitrary differentiations are better done in hindsight), so I think this E3 we will see some 3DS games whose graphics will make some jaws drop and the games that will come out over this year (especially in the holiday season) will raise the bar much higher for portable graphics.

 

[Yepi69]

Nope, it still has plenty of juice to give, just look at Pokemon X and Pokemon Y.

Fuckin awesome graphics and that's only the beginning

 

[ShadowSoldier]

Nope, it still has plenty of juice to give, just look at Pokemon X and Pokemon Y.

Fuckin awesome graphics and that's only the beginning

You're joking right? I won't deny the graphics are good, however, Resident Evil Revelations is infinitely better looking than Pokemon.

 

[Yepi69]

You're joking right? I won't deny the graphics are good, however, Resident Evil Revelations is infinitely better looking than Pokemon.

I haven't looked at it yet.

 

[Rizsparky]

You're joking right? I won't deny the graphics are good, however, Resident Evil Revelations is infinitely better looking than Pokemon.

Indeed you are are right but there's only been one trailer for Pokemon and it hasn't really shown off its graphical muscle. The question is, can the 3DS surpass revelations graphics?

 

[BORTZ]

Indeed you are are right but there's only been one trailer for Pokemon and it hasn't really shown off its graphical muscle. The question is, can the 3DS surpass revelations graphics?

Probably. As compression and texturing get better, I would imagine. Revelations was an early title. We will have to wait for the actual Pokemon Chromosome to come out before judging it, but i really dont think those 2 games are really going to push anything graphically.

 

[FAST6191]

You are right. When you think about what some homebrewers squeeze out of a Mega Drive or NES or even an Atari 2600 these days....
Granted, many of this is achieved by having greater ROM size than the biggest ROM that was feasable 20-30 years ago, but there are also new programming tricks that were learned after the official lifespan of the systems, and better development frame works than were possible back then.

For the record many of the demoscene items released for parties/contests (which is a good chunk of them) have quite harsh limits on file sizes and usually a stipulation that the program works on real hardware without a crazy set of addons. ROM hackers on the other hand do make use of "enhancements" afforded by emulators quite a bit.

Development frameworks..... most of the systems covered there really do not do well when high level languages get involved so most are assembly coded. New programming tricks... I do not see it- I would never dream of saying programmers and language developers have not been cooking up new and interesting methods (one need only look at video encoding and the 3d graphics world for that) with the hardware people playing along as well and the general science of game design getting better by the week, but on these old systems as far as programming goes you are limited to various types of maths that, while I am reluctant to them call basic, are far from novel.

All that said we have probably all just made the necessary arguments for the "are you nuts?" response to the OP.

 

[Rizsparky]

Yeah, its also a hard task for the Pokemon team to implement 'amazing' graphics for over 700 Pokemon, the models from the trailer look very impressive.

 

[granville]

The Pokemon models themselves look clean but are really fairly basic from a graphical standpoint. The environments and battle scenes aren't impressive whatsoever. And despite the unimpressive visuals, the trailer showed some serious framerate problems in the overworld when there's really no reason the game should be having performance issues with such simplistic graphics. I'm not saying it's ugly or anything from a stylistic perspective, but it's definitely not a technical showcase. There are a number of other 3DS games that really pretty much beat the pants off it. Capcom's efforts especially.

The amount of Pokemon in a game by the way isn't a matter of the graphical capabilities of the system, but the capacity of the cartridge. The models are clean and all, but they're not really any sort of technical achievement or anything. They're not exactly built with extraordinarily high amounts of polygons, they have extremely basic texturing (in fact the models don't really have much texture detail at all, much of the texturing on the Pokemon isn't texture at all, just colored flat shaded polygons), and there's no really impressive useage of the shader effects the 3DS supports as seen in Capcom's titles.

3DS still has plenty of untapped potential. There really aren't that many games that take decent advantage of the GPU in particular and the shaders it can pull off. Capcom are some of the few developers that have even attempted to push the 3DS hardware. As time goes on i'm sure we'll see even more games that better use the hardware.

 

[Gabelvampir]

For the record many of the demoscene items released for parties/contests (which is a good chunk of them) have quite harsh limits on file sizes and usually a stipulation that the program works on real hardware without a crazy set of addons. ROM hackers on the other hand do make use of "enhancements" afforded by emulators quite a bit.

Yeah I know about the demo scene, but I was thinking more about stuff with actual gameplay. But you are right, the stuff released from the demoscene on vanilla hardware is oftentimes breathtaking and seems impossible given the specs of the hardware. I.e. the demos on the Pokemon Mini handheld.

Development frameworks..... most of the systems covered there really do not do well when high level languages get involved so most are assembly coded.

Ok I was not really thinking my statement through here, There are development frameworks i.e. for the NES if I recall correctly to make it easier to program, but to get the most out of the old hardware you need to write the assembler by yourself. But one could build a framework for any (old) hardware plattform, as the compiler will translate the code to assembly or machine code or whatever is needed. It will probably just not be the most efficient code possible.

New programming tricks... I do not see it- I would never dream of saying programmers and language developers have not been cooking up new and interesting methods (one need only look at video encoding and the 3d graphics world for that) with the hardware people playing along as well and the general science of game design getting better by the week, but on these old systems as far as programming goes you are limited to various types of maths that, while I am reluctant to them call basic, are far from novel.

I was thinking about the Pier Solar devs that said that many programming tricks were discovered for the Mega Drive/Genesis between them starting a game and the end of the systems commercial life. I assume that some new thinks were also thought up or discovered at least for popular systems like the NES or GB. But I have nothing I can point to for that except the Pier Solar statement.

Sorry if I sounded a bit too enthusiastic. I guess the whole question rubbed me a bit the wrong way, it is rather odd to think that a gaming system has peaked with its graphics so early in its life cycle. Surely games like Kid Icarus and Resident Evil: Revelations look amazing, but the only systems so far that peaked that early are the ones that shortly died afterwards. So they only peaked because nobody tried to make something better. And fortunately the 3DS does not seem to be in danger of this.

 

[FAST6191]

Oh yeah people try their hands at making any number of languages have a compiler interpreter on odd hardware but I would hold it was largely into the PS1/GBA era before they became something you could reasonably spend most of your time developing in. Before I reckon most language work was more for things like sound hardware having scripting languages and such like made (if we are trading developer comments some of the stuff from the early game audio people like Yuzo Koshiro and Rob Hubbard is well worth a read).

I have yet to read the Pier Solar stuff (or at least I can not recall it offhand) but going by what similar things we have seen from other developers and what ROM hackers have encountered I shall have to continue to disagree, however it seems we are debating from two slightly different standpoints; although they did great things as far as abusing DMA systems, rarely used instructions/functions, hardware bugs and whatever else to have games appear to load far more data and be more varied than you might expect I was thinking more along the lines of people using Boolean logic, trignometric/log transforms and such like to achieve things. Leaving aside the algorithmically generated algorithm/computer learning world I do not see a huge difference in the fundamentals of the maths underpinning everything.
Looking at it though I could agree my point is largely semantic and messing around to create a super fast memory handling code using all sorts of features to their fullest still has the effect of creating better graphics/sound/framerates/whatever else where are using to measure aesthetic quality.

 

[heartgold]

The Pokemon models themselves look clean but are really fairly basic from a graphical standpoint. The environments and battle scenes aren't impressive whatsoever. And despite the unimpressive visuals, the trailer showed some serious framerate problems in the overworld when there's really no reason the game should be having performance issues with such simplistic graphics. I'm not saying it's ugly or anything from a stylistic perspective, but it's definitely not a technical showcase. There are a number of other 3DS games that really pretty much beat the pants off it. Capcom's efforts especially.

The amount of Pokemon in a game by the way isn't a matter of the graphical capabilities of the system, but the capacity of the cartridge. The models are clean and all, but they're not really any sort of technical achievement or anything. They're not exactly built with extraordinarily high amounts of polygons, they have extremely basic texturing (in fact the models don't really have much texture detail at all, much of the texturing on the Pokemon isn't texture at all, just colored flat shaded polygons), and there's no really impressive useage of the shader effects the 3DS supports as seen in Capcom's titles.

3DS still has plenty of untapped potential. There really aren't that many games that take decent advantage of the GPU in particular and the shaders it can pull off. Capcom are some of the few developers that have even attempted to push the 3DS hardware. As time goes on i'm sure we'll see even more games that better use the hardware.

Ironically Pokemon Mystery dungeon 3DS has more polygons and better texture models than Pokemon X and Y. I think Mystery dungeon models are ripped from the Pokedex 3D app.

 

[ashxu]

I'd say we're not too far off. A lot of 3DS games have frame rate issues or at least have moments where the frame rate obviously drops. I think Metal Gear Solid had trouble staying at 60fps.

Some games are just badly optimized though. SSFIV3D has some FPS issues while DoA;D stays at 60fps 95% of the time.