Originally posted by Underwhelming Force
If a couple shadows on faces which you will never actualy see during Gameplaay is all the XBox has over other consoles I\'m going to be realy disapointed.
It\'s easy to be dismissive of a feature until to see it being used more and more within games. It was more than a couple of shadows on faces, since that lighting applied to EVERY polygon in the screen. At the beginning of the Malice movies currently available, Malice is standing in a pipe with a light swinging back and forth overhead, and EVERY shadow moves perfectly as it swings.
No game system has ever demonstrated lighting at this level. If the GC is later shown to handle such lighting, then ALL those GC demos with look significantly better with such a feature enabled.
The fact that the malice demo was running at 30 fps alone makes it kind of disapointing[/B]
Why? The hardware it was running on is the NV15 (the GeForce2 in today\'s PCs) which is only 1/5th final XBox power. Since no game or demo pushes the hardware 100%, Malice would be using less than 1/5th final power. Therefore if we were to guess that Malice used say 50% of the NV15\'s power, that would mean the game as we saw it represents about 10% of final XBox\'s power! IMO, THAT\'s impressive.
.. because even if MS lives up to its claim of 5 times the power, if you want the game to run at 60 fps you could very easily eat up the rest of that power with a screen full of enemies.[/B]
Malice was locked at 30fps because it was running on the NV15, which means the
real framerate is over 30fps. We do not know the effect of having many more characters on the screen, since it may require 5, 10 or even more high polygon characters before the framerate drops below 30fps on the NV15.
Also, the NV15 doesn\'t have the full XBox feature set, such as pixel shaders and vertex shaders. Therefore as a demonstration of the potential power of the XBox, Malice was very impressive IMO.
