- Early 3D games like Spyro the Dragon and Turok: Dinosaur Hunter used "fogging" techniques to reduce polygon counts and render distances due to hardware limitations, which improved performance but reduced visual quality. - Modern consoles have much more powerful hardware, eliminating the need for unnecessary fogging and allowing for higher levels of landscape detail and resolution in games. However, some fogging effects are still used for atmospheric purposes. - The debate around differences in the Xbox One and PS4 versions of games like Call of Duty: Ghosts stems from the PS4's ability to output true 1080p resolution compared to the Xbox One's upscaled 720p, despite minimal visible differences.

1. TERRAINS, LANDSCAPES
AND LEVEL OF DETAIL
By Aaron Newbigging

2. LOOKING BACK
• If we look back to 1998 when the hit PS1 game “Spyro The Dragon” came
out we see a revolutionary change in the way games process graphics.
Spyro had a custom built engine for it as it was a 3D open world game it
suffered limitation from the hardware on the PS1, if Insomniac were to use an
existing engine they’d have to have fog in the distance ruining the stunning
visuals in the game, so Alex Hastings of Insomniac developed a new engine
that eliminated fogging in the game by reducing the amount of polygons
that are shown at a further distance away, the polygon count in an object
would increase as the player go closer to it. Thanks to this first step we begin
to see greater and better landscape detail and more visually stunning
terrains within video games.

3. FOGGING
• So I mentioned fogging in the previous slide but what does fogging actually
do? Well the best way to think about it is to compare to rendering a video, if
you wanted to run a video on an old laptop that had an old CPU and about
256MB of RAM you won’t render the video at 1280x720, you’d render it at
something like 853x480 or even lower, or when in Photoshop you optimize
and image for web, you can add Gaussian blur to the image to reduce the
size and the amount of processing power required in order to output the
image. When “Fogging” occurs in a video game it reduces the polygon
count in order to take strain of the processor inside of the console or PC, a lot
of earlier games use this technique in order to run better on the hardware
limitations of their time, this is something we really don’t see nowadays as
much.

4. GOING BACK A BIT FURTHER…
• Going back now to 1997, a video game for the Nintendo 64 came out
known as “Turok: Dinosaur Hunter”, this game and many other games
released on this console are name for using distance fogging in order to
lessen the stress on the processor inside of the console. Though instead of just
having this limitation in the game as a nuisance the developers actually
used it for atmospheric effect to actually better their games and make the
limitation less noticeable by turning it more into a theme of a game rather
than a hardware limitation. This being said it was a completely different
game to Spyro The Dragon in the fact that this game did not rely on visually
stunning landscapes but more on the gameplay and atmosphere of the
game, so it makes sense as to why Insomniac went through so much trouble
in order to have a game without fog for Spyro The Dragon.

5. FOGGING IN MODERN GAMES
• The thing is we will probably never see unnecessary fogging in games ever
again (unless it for atmospheric effect), the hardware found in modern
consoles is just to good now compared to older hardware found in holder
consoles, so good to the point where there is no need to worry about to
many polygons on screen at one given point in time. Thanks to modern
hardware we should never see this horrible fogging in games again meaning
we get more stunning visuals and better landscapes and levels of detail in
games. If we look at a newer game such as Titanfall we see there is in fact
no fogging found within the game and all visuals are visible with a higher
polygon count. Though one thing to note is that a sort of fogging effect is
used to create depth within modern games, it is used to show that
something is further away and is not the main focus at the current moment.

6. 2D GAMES
• 2D games usually will not have fogging as there is no real distance in the game
which would demand much processing power, in 2D games most backgrounds will
probably be static which doesn’t need polygons in order to render, a good
example of a 2D game which is “Ultima III: Exodus for the Nintendo Entertainment
System, it is an open world game like Spyro but it was released in 1983 so it only has
2D graphics but because of this there is no fogging at all in the game. Due to the
hardware limitation around 1983 there was no way we could have had 3D graphics
so with the games all being 2D there is no need for fogging and since there are no
3D graphics there are no polygons for the processor to render. You could argue that
because there is no fogging in 2D games that they have higher levels of detail and
better landscapes which in a way could be true if you look at it in a way of the
ability to show more elements on screen at one given time, but the more visually
stunning games are going to be the 3D games, especially in open world games.

7. COMPARISON IMAGES
• The first image is from Ultima III which has no fogging present but only
contains 2D graphics, the second is from Turok: Dinosaur Hunter which has 3D
graphics but contains much fogging, and the last is from Spyro The Dragon
which contains 3D graphics and no fogging is present at all.

8. RESOLUTION
• Going forward a bit now to 2000 and 2006, what’s special about these two
dates? In 2000 we had the release of the PS2 and in 2006 the release of the
PS3, during those 6 years there had been many breakthroughs in CPU and
Graphics card processing power. When the PS2 first came out the maximum
resolution we could have was 480p which was good for the time, when the
PS3 came out it came with a built in Bluray player and the nessessary
components in order to output 1080p HD video which was amazing for the
time, since at the time many people still didn’t have HD TV's. Resolution is
ALWAYS a limitation of the console with different consoles having different
resolutions which actually has come to spark some controversy within the
gaming community with the newer generation of gaming consoles which I
will go into more detail in the next slide.
PlayStation 2 Playstation 3

9. XBOX ONE VS PS4
• Currently within the gaming community there is a lot of debate going on
about how the Xbox One upscales 720p to 1080p with most games whereas
the PS4 displays true 1080p. A game which is a great example of this is “Call
of Duty: Ghosts” which runs at 720p on the Xbox One and 1080p on the PS4,
this is due to the Xbox One having weaker hardware than the PS4 in terms of
CPU and Graphics Card power. Because of this people expect the Xbox
One version to have a lower level of detail and not as good visuals
compared to the PS4 version, though in reality if you compare the two side
by side it is actually quite hard to tell the difference, they both run at a solid
frame rate of 60FPS so they run just as smooth as each other, but because of
the Xbox One having weaker hardware the developers had to sacrifice
resolution in order to get a higher frame rate or the game may look choppy
when played.

10. XBOX ONE VS PS4 CONTINUED
• This is a comparison
between the Xbox
One and PS4 versions
of COD: Ghosts. As
you can see there
really is not any
different, if you were
to look at one then
the other you’d think
they’re on the same
console.

11. SOURCES
• http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131581/lessons_in_color_theory_fo
r_spyro_.php?print=1
• http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2013/11/03/call-of-duty-ghosts-
launches-at-the-center-of-xbox-one-controversy/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_world