Orchid XP v8 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> I found the graphics to be fairly tame on the PC versions of AS1 and 
> AS2.

  Depending on how powerful your PC is, you might be simply comparing it
to other PC games, rather than to other Xbox 360 games.

  The Xbox 360 has a pretty decent CPU and GPU even by today's standards
(although the GPU is probably getting a bit antiquated by the month), but
the absolutely major flaw of the system is the amount of RAM: 512 MB, which
by today's standards is absolutely puny. (Many PC games have had a minimum
requirement of 1GB for years.) What is worse, the RAM is shared by the CPU
and the GPU, in other words, the GPU doesn't have its own RAM (as is
customary in a PC). This means that graphics and other game data have to
share the 512 MB (unlike on a PC, where graphics can be done mostly on the
GPU's RAM and whatever the game needs on the main RAM).

  This is a real shame because the hardware is otherwise pretty capable.
The major problem is that games run out of RAM pretty fast, and have to
be content with lesser memory-hungry graphical settings such as lower
resolution textures, shadow maps, and so on. It also often limits visiblity
distances and forces somewhat drastic LOD changes.

  Having played several Xbox 360 games and, while they were graphically
nice, being slightly disappointed at some of the graphics (especially
low-resolution textures are sometimes a bit annoying), I was positively
surprised at the graphical quality of Assassin's Creed 2. Most textures
are really crisp, and the levels of detail are really high even at very
large distances. While you can sometimes see changes in LOD as you move,
it's surprisingly rare. And this on an open sandbox game.

  I'm sure they had to resort to pretty clever tricks to get this while
being constrained by 512 MB of RAM in total.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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