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Installing Xbox 360 Games Makes Them Look Better?
by Chris Faylor, Nov 03, 2008 8:29am PSTInstalling games to the Xbox 360 hard drive may do more than just reduce load times. According to Variety's Ben Fritz, it made Lionhead's Fable 2 look prettier:
Fable 2 looks noticeably better. The graphics are sharper and brighter. So much so that it's like the game, or my graphics processor, has gotten an upgrade.
Optional game installation is one of the many features packed in the New Xbox Experience, a free software update coming November 19, though it still requires the game disc to be present in the system. A public test of the update is underway.
Shacknews has contacted Microsoft for more information on the matter.
Comments
ROFL
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Fable 2 streams in textures as you play (in fact, even UI textures can pop in a few frames late, which is weird). They have to do this because they are limited by how fast they can read texture files from the DVD. DVD transfer speeds are not great, and seek times are abysmal.
To reduce latency and get more textures loaded in a given amount of time, they might be using a technique known as "mip level streaming" which stores different resolutions of the same texture in different locations on the DVD. This would load a small lower-res texture quickly, and then when everything is loaded and the DVD is not busy, it would start upgrading textures to the higher-res files.
Many games use a similar technique. Mass Effect is a great example, but their textures were split at a level where the small version was so visibly downressed that everything looked smeared until the high-res texture popped in.
Fable 2 might be doing the same thing but with better tuning, so that the lower res versions don't look so objectionable. If disk access were faster... there would be enough time to read all the textures at their highest resolution before they were needed. And if textures were always loaded at high res, they would look "sharper" at medium distances.
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The game didn't get an upgrade. It looks like all the textures loads in one step, instead of progressively ala Mass Effect, so everything looks nicer.
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http://www.pcworld.com/article/153181/xbox_360_cd_versus_hard_drive_install_game_quality_comparison.html
How can the game look a dot better if the basic data hasn't change a single binary digit?
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Another example is Bioshock. When you load a saved game on the PC the textures will go from a very low blurry resolution and scale up to what your system can handle at a decent frame rate.
The simple act of the data getting faster to the gpu & cpu may result in better detail. I know for a fact that fable 2 grinds my 360 dvd something awful.
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Nah, probably placebo effect.