Gears, Vegas, Unreal 3, and the Promise of Next Gen

Like Joe, I also had to cancel one GameStop preorder and start the dreaded trek for unpounced upon copies of Gears of War. Thankfully, I didn’t have to go far and managed to snag one across the blustery Duluth, MN parking lot at Best Buy. Next, after waiting for my IT workday to end, I rushed home to begin that other waiting period. I’m sure it’s a well known experience for the other parental 360 owners out there, the wait for bed time. Although I didn’t feel even a twinge of guilt letting Elijah play Unreal Tournament at age two, Gears is a little too gritty, a little too terrifying, and a whole lot too real. It’s not very often that a mature rated game comes out with anything more “mature” than Cowboys and Indians gameplay. Gears is one of those times.

One of the reasons I felt like Gears needed a dual approach for our review is that there is so much to talk about with Unreal Engine 3. I must have watched the Unreal 3 tech demo reel a hundred times, which is why I instantly recognized Epic’s iconographic bell tower when it turned up again in Gears. That surreal gothic refrigerator popping open and spewing forth physics powered glowy marbles is permanently etched into my memory. Visions of per-pixel lighting, real time shadowing and multiple high dynamic range light sources danced in my head like sugarplums for months. Fortunately for gamers, Unreal 3 has made the transition to the bloated disk access times and memory starved world of the console without a hitch. Well, almost without a hitch.

It’s at this point where we must bring up the Rainbow Six Vegas demo that turned up on the 360 slightly before Gears. I bring it up because Vegas illustrates almost everything that can go wrong when tweaking a game engine for a console. Vegas also uses the Unreal 3 engine, managing to break many of the best features while running at a nearly unplayable framerate. First let’s talk soft shadows. Soft shadows are a feature that runs right on the graphics processing unit, softening the edges of dynamically cast shadows in real time in much the same way antialiasing softens the hard edges of polygons. Vegas sports some of the worst looking soft shadows I’ve ever seen. They look roughly equivalent to a puked up Gameboy Tetris match, bobbing garishly alongside your character. Yes, they really are that blocky. On the other hand, the soft shadows in Gears are nearly indistinguishable from real shadows. The difference is well, night and day.

Next up is mipmaping, which is supposed to dynamically reduce the detail of textures as they become distant, saving that all important video ram. Bad mipmaps are pretty much the worst thing you can do to a game engine. They fill up your screen with very noticeable lines between the detail levels on textures and draw your attention away from where it should be, on the game. Again, the Vegas demo shows this flaw off perfectly with perhaps the worse mipmaps I’ve ever seen. Gears of War? You guessed it, no noticeable mip-map lines at all. There is a somewhat noticeable pop in texture filtering level in Gears, but you’d have to be staring pretty hard to be distracted by it.

Speaking of pop, Gears also suffers a bit from the good ole Halo 2 effect, with textures sometimes waiting a good 4-5 seconds to appear in a scene. This actually isn’t as horrible as it sounds because there is a decent placeholder texture in place before hand, making the pop much less prominent than Halo 2. Unfortunately, this is one of the problems in streaming all of your content from optical media. DVD’s simply aren’t as fast as the hard drives developers work from. Personally, I’m more than happy with the drastically reduced loading times, as the 360 cranks out more disk seeks per second than a machine gun. Unfortunately, it’s also only slightly quieter than a machine gun, which is why I hide mine as far from my actual gaming area as possible.

Finally, we have frame rate and vsync. The simplest explanation for vsync is that it lines up the number of frames per second (fps) expelled by your rendering device with a multiple of the fps expelled by your display device. Why do this? Because if the two devices aren’t synced, you’ll often get half of one frame and half of the next frame drawn at the same time. This produces a noticeable tear in the middle of your screen. Frame tears are most obvious in rendering situations where the camera is panning across a scene (most cutscenes) or when the camera is spinning a lot (most fps games). I’ve noticed frame tears in both Vegas and Gears; however, they are not really an issue in either game because the camera doesn’t spin or pan very much. Vsync is a very controversial feature from a development perspective because by design it must round down the number of frames to the next multiple of your refresh rate. It’s also controversial because not everyone can even see frame tears, which scream by in 1/30th of a second or less. The solution is an obvious one, and it’s already been deployed in Saints Row on the 360 (which suffers from obnoxious frame tearing). The Saints Row developers left vsync off by default, but left an option to turn it on. Genius. This ability has existed in PC games since the invention of the graphics accelerator, and it’s high time we found it in our console games.

The obvious and overreaching issue here is general frame rate. From my eyeballing estimation, Gears hovers at around or above 30 fps, dropping down to 15 only on the rarest occasion (and always in a cutscene). On the other hand, Vegas hovers just below 30 fps, and drops to 15 at the slightest provocation. On paper, this doesn’t seem like much of a difference; however, in gameplay, the difference is one between suffering and joy. Aiming is an activity very dependent on your framerate. In my humble opinion, 30 fps is essential for aiming. Gears of War rides this sweet spot like the bucking bronco it is, while Vegas repeatedly falls short. The saddest part is that Vegas has a great game under all that ugly. If only Ubisoft would take that pressure off to look their best and focus on playability.

Any discussion of Unreal 3 wouldn’t be complete without mentioning water. No, not standing water, but more the water running down trees, walls, and stones in several of Gear’s most suspenseful levels. This effect actually isn’t that difficult, simply being a layer of animated specular and high dynamic range lighting highlights applied to a texture. In fact, when staring right at it, I noticed the repeating pattern quite easily. However, when applied to a full scene, the effect is nothing short of knock-out “I’ve got to sit down” staggering.

So, what does all this mean for Gears of War? Although, Gears on the 360 can’t match the level of detail found in a 16x anisotropic filtered scene from Doom 3, Crytek, or Source at 1600×1200 on a PC, it comes astonishingly close. It also won’t run you the $2000+ that the high end, power hungry number cruncher would. Gears is the pivotal next generation experience right now; I can only hope that other Unreal 3 titles like Vegas will get their acts together to match it.