The greatest arcade game of all time, tell your story.

[louisg]

I remember going ashore in Osaka (Namba) about 15 years ago, checking out the arcades and being blown away by SCUD Race. The graphics were mind blowing. Every year there was something new, something amazing from Sega - Virtua Racing, Virtua fighter, Virtua Cop, Daytona, Virtua Fighter 2 - I couldn't wait to see what was to come next.

No way did I imagine it was all going to go down hill.

Well, Sega's arcade teams never really stopped being great, thank goodness. Things like Outrun 2, After Burner Climax, Virtua Fighter 4 and 5, and HOTD4 are proof of that [admittedly, all those games are fairly old by now, bar VF5]. They're just not nearly as prolific in the 1990s anymore, siiiiiiiigh.

I gathered that PlanetHarrier was commenting on graphics more than gameplay, and I agree 100%. Graphically speaking, Sega Model 3 racers were years ahead of anything you could get at home. Scud Race had Xbox 360 visuals in 1996, when the best looking 3D racer on the consoles was Ridge Racer for PSX. The graphical disconnect between home and arcade disappeared shortly after that.

Nah, IIRC model 3 was sub-Dreamcast hardware in a lot of ways. It was used well though, and it came out at a time when what you got much worse hardware at home. Scud Race was jaw dropping though when I first saw it, but the big WTF experience for me was Daytona USA. I'd never seen a fully textured high res polygon world like that before.

Imagine if you could go to the arcade now, and there'd be some majorly powerful massively parallel hardware doing realtime raytracing. That was what arcades felt like in the 80s and 90s You'd go and play Power Drift at a time when the *best* you could do is something like Stunt Car Racer.

For demonstration, here are how far apart these technologies were...
Home (if you forked out for a full computer, and the Amiga was even exceptional in terms of what computers could deliver. If you had an IBM PC or Mac, you weren't pulling off this quality): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kn32IgQGrOQ
Console: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVSCFf6BjQ4
Arcade: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vSZip5RC5c

(BTW, if you haven't played Stunt Car Racer, you owe it to yourself )

Taking PD as an example, systems weren't up to doing a good home port of it until *two generations later*. I think even a Doom-era PC (or later?) would have a lot of trouble doing it-- tons of scaling and overdraw from overlapping all the sprites. That's another thing: You could design arcade hardware to do specific crazy stuff like that. Even the best home hardware was relatively general.

For me, the best arcade experience was Spy Hunter. Walking into the arcade and hearing that music? Holy shit.

[RGC]

.

[null1024]

I gathered that PlanetHarrier was commenting on graphics more than gameplay, and I agree 100%. Graphically speaking, Sega Model 3 racers were years ahead of anything you could get at home. Scud Race had Xbox 360 visuals in 1996, when the best looking 3D racer on the consoles was Ridge Racer for PSX. The graphical disconnect between home and arcade disappeared shortly after that.

Nah, IIRC model 3 was sub-Dreamcast hardware in a lot of ways.

Most Model 3 releases looked much like late Dreamcast stuff [and some of the DC ports of Model 3 games had a few cutbacks in terms of poly-count, compare VO:OT 5.2 on the Model 3 to 5.45 on the DC], and it's a more powerful system than the DC/Naomi in a few ways [and weaker in many others, this is 1996 vs 1998 hardware, and the 200MHz SH-4 CPU in the Naomi kicks the pants off of the sub-100MHz PowerPC in the Model 3].

Naomi could look almost the same for much cheaper though, especially since they were producing much the same hardware for their home system at the time. Thus, Sega dropped Model 3 after 1999.
The video hardware in the Model 3 is really top-notch stuff [custom built for just filling as many textured polygons as possible], whereas the Naomi's video hardware was only almost as advanced due to the time-gap between 1996 and 1998, and without the same kind of aggressive design for raw polygon pushing [then you would have seen 360 level visuals, haha].

It's a shame arcade hardware no longer has that push for graphics that you couldn't even try to get at home though. We'd probably be seeing real-time raytracing in arcade games now if that was the case.
...man, thinking of that last sentence made me wet, I want to see some sexy raytraced arcade games...

[boagman]

For me, the best arcade experience was Spy Hunter. Walking into the arcade and hearing that music? Holy shit.

One of the best things about Spy Hunter's "Theme From Peter Gunn" was the fact that the longer you played it without dying, the *better* the music got! Yes, the standard music that everyone heard was great, but if you could stay alive for 10 minutes or more, you'd hear some *serious* riffing of the music which made things that much more rewarding and intense. You never wanted to die because the music was just too good!

[louisg]

I gathered that PlanetHarrier was commenting on graphics more than gameplay, and I agree 100%. Graphically speaking, Sega Model 3 racers were years ahead of anything you could get at home. Scud Race had Xbox 360 visuals in 1996, when the best looking 3D racer on the consoles was Ridge Racer for PSX. The graphical disconnect between home and arcade disappeared shortly after that.

Nah, IIRC model 3 was sub-Dreamcast hardware in a lot of ways.

Most Model 3 releases looked much like late Dreamcast stuff [and some of the DC ports of Model 3 games had a few cutbacks in terms of poly-count, compare VO:OT 5.2 on the Model 3 to 5.45 on the DC], and it's a more powerful system than the DC/Naomi in a few ways [and weaker in many others, this is 1996 vs 1998 hardware, and the 200MHz SH-4 CPU in the Naomi kicks the pants off of the sub-100MHz PowerPC in the Model 3].

Interesting! I always thought the opposite. I never realized VOOT was cut down (I only played the arcade one once-- it's hard to find a working machine), and I thought Dynamite Cop was model 3 but it's actualy model 2! Oops! I still think Virtua Fighter 3 gets crushed by the made-for-DC/Naomi efforts though. I guess Model 3 just had different design aims from DC, like comparing a PC Engine and a Genesis.

[Obiwanshinobi]

I think hardware and effort are there; what arcade games developers appear to lack is competence. See Battle Gear 3 - respectably polished game that pulls off some graphical tricks you don't see every day on PS2 hardware. Horse in the room is, the game just doesn't look pretty (nowhere near best looking car games of the time).
Most SCUD Race-like visuals I've seen in a console racer were some tracks of Jak X, but that's SCEA engineering for ya. Japanese games look underdeveloped nowadays, arcade or not. Developers overe there could use a lesson or two.

[RoninBuddha]

i'm gonna be generic and say Guilty Gear X (naomi hardware).

I grew up in SE Asia, and the 'arcade scene' there was pretty rich, we mostly had japanese games and cabinets, possibly surplus. But anyways, when I was a freshman in highschool, the best part of my day was going to the arcades after school and schlocking it up on fighting games with friends. We mostly played SNK and Capcom fighters that were popular at that time (MVC1, 3rd Strike, KOF98, etc).

Then Guilty Gear X came along. This was the first time (and probably the last) that a game really left a huge impression on me. Maybe it's a combination of my young mind's naivety and GGX's 'fancy new high resolution 2D". It was a perfect moment that time (around year 2000) that I was young enough to not fully understand how this game was technically possible. It really felt like I was playing 'real-time animation'. or something like that. But of course as one got older, and technology catches on, looking at GGX now, its nowhere near a spectacle as current 2D video games. One can laugh at how few the animation frames are, the gaudy character designs, and the whole "anime fighting game" style it propagated.

But overall, GGX felt like the right game at the right time, showcasing how to push a genre to new limits. Of course we all know how that ends up (there are 150 GG games already, :V).

I still have a GGX arcade poster above my work desktop, the just holds such good memories for me.

[ST Dragon]

Metal Slug. Wish I could say SCUD Race, but at the time something that looked like a toy car didn't look like fun to me. (Got into arcade racers late in the day and those are still primarily a console genre in my book.) Nowadays that SCUD Race cab haunts me. Seeing it out in the wild one of these days would be an awkward reunion.

One of my local movie theaters still has one, but it's in fairly sad shape at this point... That didn't stop me from taking over the leader boards this past winter. Playing the game on a cab with proper force feedback adds a degree of challenge that is completely missed when playing it emulated.

Indeed Scud Race was awesome!
I've spent many sessions challenging a mate back in the day.
But is it actually fully emulated today? On what emulator and what PC setup do you need to run it at full speed, graphics & sound? SEGA Model 3 was a pretty hefty system.

[ST Dragon]

I gathered that PlanetHarrier was commenting on graphics more than gameplay, and I agree 100%. Graphically speaking, Sega Model 3 racers were years ahead of anything you could get at home. Scud Race had Xbox 360 visuals in 1996, when the best looking 3D racer on the consoles was Ridge Racer for PSX. The graphical disconnect between home and arcade disappeared shortly after that.

Nah, IIRC model 3 was sub-Dreamcast hardware in a lot of ways.

Most Model 3 releases looked much like late Dreamcast stuff [and some of the DC ports of Model 3 games had a few cutbacks in terms of poly-count, compare VO:OT 5.2 on the Model 3 to 5.45 on the DC], and it's a more powerful system than the DC/Naomi in a few ways [and weaker in many others, this is 1996 vs 1998 hardware, and the 200MHz SH-4 CPU in the Naomi kicks the pants off of the sub-100MHz PowerPC in the Model 3].

Naomi could look almost the same for much cheaper though, especially since they were producing much the same hardware for their home system at the time. Thus, Sega dropped Model 3 after 1999.
The video hardware in the Model 3 is really top-notch stuff [custom built for just filling as many textured polygons as possible], whereas the Naomi's video hardware was only almost as advanced due to the time-gap between 1996 and 1998, and without the same kind of aggressive design for raw polygon pushing [then you would have seen 360 level visuals, haha].

It's a shame arcade hardware no longer has that push for graphics that you couldn't even try to get at home though. We'd probably be seeing real-time raytracing in arcade games now if that was the case.
...man, thinking of that last sentence made me wet, I want to see some sexy raytraced arcade games...

Model 3 racers like Scud Race have still not quite been surpassed visually and its shocking to see that it was developed on 1996 hardware. I still haven't seen a modern racer with the sheer visual beauty, vibrant colours, constant frame rate & effects of Scud Race. I had a go of Daytona USA 2 this summer again after so many years and it still looks stunning.
How can this be?!

As for Raytraced graphics.
I remember that being the holy grail of still image depiction back in the AMIGA hay days, as a benchmark & reference point of a system's prowess.
What is the most visual stunning raytraced Arcade game today by the way? Didn't House of The Dead 4 reach a certain point of photo-realism back in 2005?

[gabe]

Indeed Scud Race was awesome!
I've spent many sessions challenging a mate back in the day.
But is it actually fully emulated today? On what emulator and what PC setup do you need to run it at full speed, graphics & sound? SEGA Model 3 was a pretty hefty system.

It's emulated almost flawlessly in Supermodel, and plays quite nicely with a 360 control pad:
http://www.supermodel3.com/

Surprisingly it doesn't require an impressive gaming rig. I've played it windowed on my Core i7 MacBook Pro with shitty integrated Intel graphics. The framerate dips when things get hectic, but it remains serviceable. I seem to recall folks on the Supermodel forums reporting a constant 60fps with relatively modest hardware (same goes for Daytona USA 2).

[boagman]

I still haven't seen a modern racer with the sheer visual beauty, vibrant colours, constant frame rate & effects of Scud Race. I had a go of Daytona USA 2 this summer again after so many years and it still looks stunning.
How can this be?!

You're *certainly* not the first to notice this. In fact, to these eyes, I would say that in most cases graphics in racers (and possibly all games) have, if anything, *regressed*. I look at complete *garbage*-looking games like GlobalVR's NASCAR or Need For Speed, and I honestly wonder how something like that could be released in this day and age, looking far worse than games that were released almost 20 years ago. This makes *zero* sense to me.

I'll tip my cap to stuff like H2Overdrive by Raw Thrills, or some other games of their ilk, but even stuff like Namco's Winding Heat (which isn't *bad*, mind you) isn't really all that impressive (but that may be partly because of the play of the thing, too), especially considering that it's on a high definition screen, which wasn't available when Sega was making their Late Greats of years ago.

Oh, and Outrun 2006/SP did a good job, I'd say. Again, though...that's a major Sega project.

[Obiwanshinobi]

Do you really think coin-op racers of yore looked better than Burnout 2&3 or even Crash 'N' Burn (2004)? Pretty immaculate performance in all three cases too. (Not "modern" anymore, but much younger than those Model 3 games.)

[boagman]

Do you really think coin-op racers of yore looked better than Burnout 2&3 or even Crash 'N' Burn (2004)? Pretty immaculate performance in all three cases too. (Not "modern" anymore, but much younger than those Model 3 games.)

I'm really making an apples-to-apples comparison of arcade-only games to arcade-only games.

[Obiwanshinobi]

OutRun 2006 isn't a coin-op game and it was a British studio that put it together. The games I mentioned are, in terms of gameplay, arcade racers (none of them shimmers as badly as 2006 in 480i on the PS2 I might add).
Is there any coin-op NFS, eh? Either way, the original Most Wanted (2005) looked VERY good on PC.

[ST Dragon]

I still haven't seen a modern racer with the sheer visual beauty, vibrant colours, constant frame rate & effects of Scud Race. I had a go of Daytona USA 2 this summer again after so many years and it still looks stunning.
How can this be?!

You're *certainly* not the first to notice this. In fact, to these eyes, I would say that in most cases graphics in racers (and possibly all games) have, if anything, *regressed*. I look at complete *garbage*-looking games like GlobalVR's NASCAR or Need For Speed, and I honestly wonder how something like that could be released in this day and age, looking far worse than games that were released almost 20 years ago. This makes *zero* sense to me.

I'll tip my cap to stuff like H2Overdrive by Raw Thrills, or some other games of their ilk, but even stuff like Namco's Winding Heat (which isn't *bad*, mind you) isn't really all that impressive (but that may be partly because of the play of the thing, too), especially considering that it's on a high definition screen, which wasn't available when Sega was making their Late Greats of years ago.

Oh, and Outrun 2006/SP did a good job, I'd say. Again, though...that's a major Sega project.

I never managed to get Outrun 2006 running on my PC back then, but the Arcade version was so so...

I really enjoyed Hydro Tunder back in the day, but sadly the DC port was not as good imo.
Interestingly, there was supposed to have been released on the PS2 in 2003 a game with the same title (H2Overdrive) I wonder what happened to that?

http://uk.ign.com/games/h2overdrive-200 ... /ps2-16441

And how good in the 2010 Xbox360 sequel?
Hydro Thunder Hurricane
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydro_Thunder_Hurricane

The only recent Arcade game that shocked me almost as much as Galaxy Force 2 back in the day, is After Burner Climax!!
That game simply rocks!!

The F-15 fighter is actually the best of the 3 and you can 1'cc it with that.
But visually the game is just awesome!
I could buy the whole cabinet and place it in my living room!

[boagman]

OutRun 2006 isn't a coin-op game and it was a British studio that put it together. The games I mentioned are, in terms of gameplay, arcade racers (none of them shimmers as badly as 2006 in 480i on the PS2 I might add).
Is there any coin-op NFS, eh? Either way, the original Most Wanted (2005) looked VERY good on PC.

WRT Outrun...what am I thinking of, then? The big old arcade game that was the sequel to Outrun put out in the mid-2000s in the arcade, which had Special Tours as a follow-up? I'm mixing up my titles, I think.

There are coin-op NFSs, yes. And I think they look like garbage in comparison to the older stuff.

EDIT: I'm simply thinking of Outrun 2.

[boagman]

I never managed to get Outrun 2006 running on my PC back then, but the Arcade version was so so...

The only recent Arcade game that shocked me almost as much as Galaxy Force 2 back in the day, is After Burner Climax!!
That game simply rocks!!

Hmm. We're in complete agreement about ABC, but I consider ABC to be a contemporary of Outrun 2. I was seriously "wowed" by Sega's redux of Outrun. In fact, with how ridiculously they did in paying homage to After Burner and Outrun (what with the crazy-good cabinets and feedback those games had with them), I'm still kind of surprised that they didn't give Power Drift the same treatment. Can you imagine how good a new Power Drift would be with the kind of time/money they threw into redoing Outrun and After Burner?

[ST Dragon]

I never managed to get Outrun 2006 running on my PC back then, but the Arcade version was so so...

The only recent Arcade game that shocked me almost as much as Galaxy Force 2 back in the day, is After Burner Climax!!
That game simply rocks!!

Hmm. We're in complete agreement about ABC, but I consider ABC to be a contemporary of Outrun 2. I was seriously "wowed" by Sega's redux of Outrun. In fact, with how ridiculously they did in paying homage to After Burner and Outrun (what with the crazy-good cabinets and feedback those games had with them), I'm still kind of surprised that they didn't give Power Drift the same treatment. Can you imagine how good a new Power Drift would be with the kind of time/money they threw into redoing Outrun and After Burner?

Power Drift!! Yes I totally forgot about that game! I remember being very impressed by it. Very cool hydrolic cabinet as well.
I remember the AMIGA port being quite descent too!





By the way, what system is this?



And how good was the Saturn version compared to the other super scaler Arcade games ported to it?



I always found very funny the punk with the spiky hair driving the car!

They must absolutely remake it on modern systems, as well as Space Harrier and G-Loc.
I can only imagine what they would have looked like...

[null1024]

Model 3 racers like Scud Race have still not quite been surpassed visually and its shocking to see that it was developed on 1996 hardware. I still haven't seen a modern racer with the sheer visual beauty, vibrant colours, constant frame rate & effects of Scud Race. I had a go of Daytona USA 2 this summer again after so many years and it still looks stunning.
How can this be?!

As for Raytraced graphics.
I remember that being the holy grail of still image depiction back in the AMIGA hay days, as a benchmark & reference point of a system's prowess.
What is the most visual stunning raytraced Arcade game today by the way? Didn't House of The Dead 4 reach a certain point of photo-realism back in 2005?

HOTD4 looks great, but it's not raytraced. It's still using the industry standard polygon rasterization methods. Sega Lindberg custom PC, fairly high-end and quite different as far as arcade PC hardware went, ran Linux instead of Windows, etc. Nothing uses real-time raytracing for graphics, sadly. You'd need a Model 3 like effort with a graphics company.

And as for nothing having surpassed visually regarding Scud Race and Daytona 2, it's definitely more the look than the tech. They have that stylish Sega look to them, and that's something that won't be matched with raw power alone. The Sega of that era coming to now and being given Xbox 360 level hardware would just completely blow everyone's mind for years. It's why Model 2 stuff looks good at all, considering the fact that it's actually a very weak board, and they didn't have the benefit of proper shading. It's why Model 1 stuff looked good at all, and they didn't even have the benefits of texturing. Sega had that really vibrant style going for them.

And yes, I really meant it when I said very weak and Model 2. Much of the design of Virtual On was actually made as a concession to the hardware's weaknesses. The brilliant minds at Sega turned that into interesting gameplay. Sega's AM departments were amazing. AM1, AM2, AM3, AM4, AM5. We all know and love their work. There's more [there were 8? AM departments], but they didn't do arcade stuff.


As a side note, it was years before games looked better than After Burner Climax. I saw the videos, my jaw dropped. I finally got to play the cab at a Movietowne in Trinidad, 'twas amazing [when the coin lock wasn't active, damnit]. Great fun.

It's still After Burner though, with all the flaws that game has. I always picked Space Harrier over it.

[Obiwanshinobi]

Again, Jak X*, in places, HAS that Sega-like flair at 60 fps, no less. Excite Truck has it at sub-arcade framerates.
Most coin-op games developed in the last decade look rather cheap (judging be screenshots anyway).
When I saw 2006 for the first time on PC, I wasn't terribly impressed by the graphics. PS2 version doesn't look all that high-tech for consoles it was made for either, (long loadings and the aforementioned shimmering), but the artistry shines through in the end.

*) Play it without memory card in slot.

[yojo!]

They must absolutely remake it on modern systems, as well as Space Harrier and G-Loc.
I can only imagine what they would have looked like...

Spare Harrier, Power Drift, Out Run and HangOn are available on the Dreamcast.

[Obiwanshinobi]

OutRun was, in fact, ported to the PC lately (rather than just emulated). Last time I checked there was still no analogue controls, but pretty impressive job all the same.

[Ex_Mosquito]

My pick has to be 'Shinobi' This game defines the 80's arcade to me. The music, graphics, difficulty. It marks a time in my arcade timeline when I could go to arcades on my own without relying on family holidays to a seaside town. Well, unknowingly to my mum! I remember getting home from Primary school in 87/88' (9 years old) putting on my rollerskates and going into the town centre 2miles away in the winter darkness to play Shinobi in a dingy videoshop. Looking back now it was pretty dangerous. The area of the town centre where the videoshop was located in know to be pretty rough, and I've since heard of stories of people getting mugged around that area. It was the price you paid in those days to play arcade games I guess. Interestingly, even at that age I had an arcade rule of 1-credit and never continue. Eventually I could 1cc it. My mum would've grounded me for a year if she knew I'd done that at 9 years old!

Fast forward to 95'. I picked up my first Supergun from Raven Games. Not wanting to pay ridiculous prices from MHP enterprises and RavenGames for pcb's I decided to look in the yellow pages for local 'automatics' companies. I sourced a company that used to put Jamma cabs in local kebab shops and taxi ranks in the 80/90's and it turned out he had an old Shinobi pcb he was letting go. A few days later I met the guy in a pizza shop while he was on his rounds emptying his on-site fruit machines to pick up the Shinobi board from him. Out of interest I asked him where that particular Pcb used to be in town and it turned out it was the exact Pcb that was in the dodgy videoshop that I used to play on back in the 80's! I was pretty happy with that.

I still have that Pcb now and its one of the few pcb's I have left that I'll never sell.

[null1024]

OutRun was, in fact, ported to the PC lately (rather than just emulated). Last time I checked there was still no analogue controls, but pretty impressive job all the same.

It's got analog controls now, and force feedback. With a proper wheel and monitor, you can have the ideal OutRun experience at a full 60fps, not that 60fps background and 30fps foreground thing that a bunch of Sega games used to do [hell, I remember Nights does that, haha].

Better and faster than emulation, a proper port from the original code. You could probably get it working on something as low-power as Raspberry Pi and build an OutRun cab.
And it even runs in hi-res and widescreen, letting you see the higher-resolution sprites that are in the original ROMs.

[yojo!]

I still have that Pcb now and its one of the few pcb's I have left that I'll never sell.

Great story. did you patch the PCB with a de-suicide kit? the battery should be dead by now.

[Udderdude]

I played a lot of DDR at various arcades. Got up to the 10 foot stuff and couldn't get any higher than a B on them.

I also made a bunch of custom charts for Stepmania.

Yup. That's my story. >_>

[ST Dragon]

Model 3 racers like Scud Race have still not quite been surpassed visually and its shocking to see that it was developed on 1996 hardware. I still haven't seen a modern racer with the sheer visual beauty, vibrant colours, constant frame rate & effects of Scud Race. I had a go of Daytona USA 2 this summer again after so many years and it still looks stunning.
How can this be?!

As for Raytraced graphics.
I remember that being the holy grail of still image depiction back in the AMIGA hay days, as a benchmark & reference point of a system's prowess.
What is the most visual stunning raytraced Arcade game today by the way? Didn't House of The Dead 4 reach a certain point of photo-realism back in 2005?

HOTD4 looks great, but it's not raytraced. It's still using the industry standard polygon rasterization methods. Sega Lindberg custom PC, fairly high-end and quite different as far as arcade PC hardware went, ran Linux instead of Windows, etc. Nothing uses real-time raytracing for graphics, sadly. You'd need a Model 3 like effort with a graphics company.

And as for nothing having surpassed visually regarding Scud Race and Daytona 2, it's definitely more the look than the tech. They have that stylish Sega look to them, and that's something that won't be matched with raw power alone. The Sega of that era coming to now and being given Xbox 360 level hardware would just completely blow everyone's mind for years. It's why Model 2 stuff looks good at all, considering the fact that it's actually a very weak board, and they didn't have the benefit of proper shading. It's why Model 1 stuff looked good at all, and they didn't even have the benefits of texturing. Sega had that really vibrant style going for them.

And yes, I really meant it when I said very weak and Model 2. Much of the design of Virtual On was actually made as a concession to the hardware's weaknesses. The brilliant minds at Sega turned that into interesting gameplay. Sega's AM departments were amazing. AM1, AM2, AM3, AM4, AM5. We all know and love their work. There's more [there were 8? AM departments], but they didn't do arcade stuff.

As a side note, it was years before games looked better than After Burner Climax. I saw the videos, my jaw dropped. I finally got to play the cab at a Movietowne in Trinidad, 'twas amazing [when the coin lock wasn't active, damnit]. Great fun.

It's still After Burner though, with all the flaws that game has. I always picked Space Harrier over it.

What other similar game like After Burner Climax actually looks better?

But Is there actually any photo-realistic raytraced game on any system out there that is playable & performs at a constant frame rate?
What about the 3 Crysis games on the PC that supposedly boast the best graphics to date, aren't they ray-traced?!

What game can claim the title of the best graphic in real-time, in the world?

[dcharlieJP]

What game can claim the title of the best graphic in real-time, in the world?

Realtime ray tracing still needs a hell of a lot more horse power - Brigade 2 Engine is up there, but this shows the issue :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyY9pQEJkSk

this is likely multiple highend PC GPUs and it's still not going to hold a good frame rate and the lack of computation power means each retrace is going to cause a whole lot of artifacting. Given you're going to need an architecture/solution that allows this sort of rendering in 0.016 of a second (plus game logic overheads, AI etc) then we are unfortunately a long way off. Plus we're going to be starting the semi-step to 4K then the actual step to 8k in the next few years (mass adoption probably will push that way back...) and i'm not sure what resolution current realtime engines are aiming for - i'd assume most of this tech is designed with movie studios in mind and acts as a final-render preview so i'd doubt it's spitting out 35mm film resolutions (4000x2000/4000x3000 for super 35mm)

Also note that the Brigade Engine spokesman believes the PS4 will offer path/ray tracing style processing but sounds like it will be limited (http://n4g.com/news/1187666/brigade-eng ... -and-video) especially with the final comment about needing a PC with a couple of Titans ($2000 worth of combined 12gb top end GPUs)

The other issue is that you can "fake" it and have games look pretty good without having to resort to the expense of real time ray tracing.

But you know what MIGHT be viable if someone was crazy enough? Throwing together a PC based arcade unit that goes stupid and has 4-way SLI'ed Titans. But that would seem pretty unlikely given the current Arcade scene complexion. And you'd still have to have a game of limited compexity - and with that sort of power, you could create an insane looking game without using Ray Tracing. :/

I don't want to think about a Sega tightly focused arcade racer running on this sort of hardware - my pants might overtighten and it's an impossible dream i'd have thought for at least the next X years.

What about the 3 Crysis games on the PC that supposedly boast the best graphics to date, aren't they ray-traced?!

nope - as per above, ray tracing that sort of detail would bring even super high end PC rigs to their knees - and you'd have noise effects and lag galore and -maybe- 1fps. We're a long way off

[Ex_Mosquito]

I still have that Pcb now and its one of the few pcb's I have left that I'll never sell.

Great story. did you patch the PCB with a de-suicide kit? the battery should be dead by now.

Amazing I've never changed the battery in the Hitachi CPU and its still works perfectly. I've had it since 95' so I don't think it's been de-suicide and everything is original. Strange!

I made this replay video on my cab only last year. Maybe it's possessed by the spirit of a Ninja?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfPSk59XO5o

[dcharlieJP]

Remember that Ray tracing in real time discussion?

Jonnyram just sent me a link to the 5 Faces demo by Fairlight from the Revision 2013 scene event - it placed first. If you have a PC of note, you can download this and run it.

Here's the vid on Youtube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLPAHHb8j20

i said "h*ly f****** s***" - especially near the end. God dammmmmn.