There has been a lot of talk about the “downgrade” of the Xbox One exclusive Ryse: Son of Rome, that now sports less polygons per character than previous builds, while shaders have been upgraded and the use of LOD has been removed.

The discourse has even reached Crytek Founder and Ceo Cevat Yerli that tweeted about it to explain that it was a deliberate choice. But how do the two builds stack against one another? We don't have much material for a comparison, but we do have two relevant screenshots that portray basically the same scene, in the old build with 150,000 polygons per character model and in the new build with 85,000.

Below you can see a through comparison of the two screenshots, and draw your own conclusions (Note: the newer screenshot comes from a livestream, so it’s a bit more blurry. resolution isn't important towards our comparison though, as what we’re looking at is polygon density and shaders).

The reduction in the polygons is quite visible, but we can also notice that the overall feels of the materials is now more realistic and textured, especially on metallic surfaces that now don’t look like polished plastic anymore, and on the skin, that shows more detail(check the neck of the character on the right for instance), while normal mapping also seems better defined with no visible jaggies, as shown by the etching in his armor. That’s most probably due to a higher resolution or less compressed normal map texture.

MAIN ARTICLE (DualShockers):http://www.dualshockers.com/2013/09/28/ryse-old-and-new-builds-compared-polygons-vs-shaders/

this doesnt surprise me, played that game at an event. feels like shit.

If no one knew that the new versions were lower-poly, I'm sure this wouldn't even be news. I like the new ones better.

The old shots have great detail, but look distinctly "CG". The blur and the lower contrast of the new style lends a great filmic quality to the images. Also, as you mentioned, it seems like the pretty intense aliasing in the old shots is gone in the new ones.

And overall, it's kind of pointless to judge game graphics from pre-release stills, as the importance is really all about how the lighting/shaders work in real time. But hey, it's the internet. We gotta argue about something. ;)

New one looks better.

Here is article about the "downgrade." Whatever though... stuff like this is more about console war flame-baiting than it is about actually criticizing the game.

Old Slide:

New Slide:

If they weren't put side by side I wouldn't notice, but the difference is certainly there.

Hoping that the game is much better than the clunker that previews have been describing it to be.

The new shot was taken from a Stream, the old one is from direct feed. So will wait on that one.

Also from that stream.

@bigjeffrey: Damn that looks so good! Hopefully it'll get even better in the final version. The better-shading did change a lot imo.

I like the new one more.

Too bad the game isn't very fun. It's like Arkham Asylum had the life sucked out of it... Crytek are a graphics house, that's about it as far as I can tell.

@pandabear: Did you try out the Crysis games?

Eh, I don't care how pretty the game looks, it doesn't mean anything when the gameplay sucks.

The new one looks better to me, but if it's the same gameplay as what was demoed at PAX, this will probably become a bargain bin pickup when you're bored waiting for a new, better game to come out.

Call me when they can even get the name of the protagonist right.

@mrfluke: like shit huh?

Polygons don't matter as much as people think, the textures and post processing are where it's at. 85k poly's per character sounds about right, 150k seemed like a bad idea in the first place for a video game.

The new one looks better. And it shows a lot more detial going on in the background too. Weather, distance, etc.

Crytek can't make a good game to save their lives. Looks good though.

I'll throw mine into the mix as well but they are video screen pics. It looks like overall it's brighter, but I can't help but feel some of the lighting aspects may have been downgraded.

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

The Blue hue is definitely gone, skin shaders seem to be improved, but the old lighting seemed to be a bit more consistent and realistic.

One thing I did notice in the multiplayer coliseum build, is that the their global illumination engine was casting some really evident dark shadows, making for some pretty bad contrasting. You had very dark areas in the shadow, nearly pitch black, and then a drastic difference in the light.

It's possible this was done to fix some of that obvious contrast.

This is always what happens when developers have to move from speculative PC hardware to actual console hardware with primitive drivers and so on. If anything I think that the changes were more dramatic back in the PS3/360 or PS2/GC/Xbox days.

Also I didn't think that people cared about Ryse this much, or at all.

The blur in the new build isn't an effect, it's because the game is being rendered at 1600x900 then being upscaled to 1920x1080. Kind of crazy to think that the new machine can't even manage half of what my PC could do over a year ago.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-ryse-runs-at-900p

Also kind of a bummer that Killer Instinct is only targeting 1280x720 internal with scaling. These machines really are just going to be exclusive only boxes this time out for a lot of people provided all the third party stuff hits the PC.

@sergio: Escapist played it recently and loved it.

That's usually how this works right?
"Alright, we need to sell a product so let's just mash something together from the game and polish the hell out of it. Like everyone's been doing for the past decades, right?"
"Yes sir!"
"Alright then! Just, don't mess it up like those Aliens: Colonial Marines people did!"

reggie says 'Play the Game!!!!"

My guess is they built the game on a PC of roughly similar specs with a 7790, 8 GBs DDR3 RAM, perhaps even some 8 core processor with the cores dialed in at 1.6GHz.

When going from the PC version to the Xbox One version they lost the DDR5 RAM inside a video card which caused a huge new bottleneck. Using DDR3 RAM for video memory is very bad. This is a common problem for integrated graphics.

If Microsoft overclocked the hell out of their DDR3 RAM it would go a long way. Have they said what memory speed (well technically bandwidth but you know what I mean) they are running at at?

@maddman60620: Reggie gets it right once again.

I learnt that the game runs at 900p. Resolution is important to me, so I'm glad I decided not to get an Xbox One.

Still looks like a boring ass game to play and lol at it running at 900p

@the_laughing_man: That's good. Hopefully they polished more than just the graphics, because the gameplay was not as good as other similar games.

It is amazing how petty people are over aspect ratio. So you wont get a good game unless its 1080p? Amazing.

Looks better. Also, who cares? The game seems to play like shit anyway.

Too bad you can't polish a turd.

Naw, this is like someone going on and on and on and on about how great the new sports game looks but another just doesn't care at all. I would expect someone releasing software from an E3 demo to continue to improve it. I'm more amused by the fanboys who think they can convince people who don't care that this time with this post they'll start to care and be won over.

Personally, as I have mentioned in other threads, I know that Crytek can technically do a lot of things so I'm sure it will look stellar. I also know that Crytek is often terrible at creating the game where they fall into the same pit id Software does focusing hard on the tech and hoping a game comes out of it when all too often it falls very short.

Mythbusters say other wise.

This is getting into the nitty-gritty of graphic power that I just don't care about. Both old and new look OK. At this stage, I really don't care about polygon counts or which models have more. That isn't important, and I don't think that it should be important for anyone not heavily involved in the game's development.

Like many others in here, I think I prefer the new one more than the old one. If anything, the old one looked fake as fuck to me. The blur caused by the upscaling adds an extra layer to it somehow for me.

It's much the same way that I feel about Battlefield: Bad Company 2 on PC vs. Xbox 360. Despite having KB/M controls on PC with over 60fps capable, I like the game locked at 30fps and on a controller. Why? The 30fps and controller add weight to the characters overall, and Bad Company 2 is the kind of world created to have weight to it. I don't want to feel light as a feather when I'm playing as a guy carrying at least 30 extra pounds of fucking gear on him, ya know? Everything just felt...right.

So if they are downgrading somehow, I don't really give a shit. The game still looks good. Moreover, the first two years of any console cycle are generally dedicated to figuring all of this shit out. After that period has passed, we'll see what the hardware can actually do. It's one of the fascinating things to me about consoles: developers are working with ancient shit by the time a two-year period is up, but they are pulling off some crazy fucking tricks to genuinely improve the capabilities of their games. It's much the same as the continuing homebrew Dreamcast and Atari 2600 scene is, except a tad bit less extreme.

Also, isn't this fucking Crytek? Those guys can make a turd look like the goddamn Mona Lisa! If anyone knows how to hold graphical fidelity with less polygons overall, it's those guys. I'm not too fucking worried about the graphics of the game. Does it play good? Is it a worthwhile game? The answer: no. It's going to be a tech demo launch game. It's going to be the Red Steel for Xbox One. Hell, they even cut the majority of the Kinect shit out of there already and put Marius on a fucking controller. Even Microsoft and Crytek don't have that much confidence in the Kinect's capabilities at launch.

I'd rather that Crytek took the risk, made it full Kinect, and either succeeded glowingly or failed miserably. It would at least offer others that want to do Kinect stuff a step forward towards improving the products. Instead, Crytek is relegating those duties to someone else to blunder upon.

I wouldn't go that far. But I played the multi player at Eurogamer and it just bored me. It was just some generic button bashing with vague objectives. I sure hope the single player will be better.

And I prefer the new one over the old one too.

i dunno. thats what i played as well, and it was boring, and the flow of it was very slow. maybe thats the point since they are gladiators, but it didnt feel great at all.

1. I prefer the new look? (doing more with less isn't a bad thing necessarily)
2. Graphics aren't that games biggest issue.

It's on my radar. I think that it has the potential to be one of the better launch titles, but I'm definitely not about to run out and preorder it. In fact, I'm not going to preorder ANY next-gen games. I want to wait and see what reviews say about each game and make an informed decision. But yeah...I don't think Ryse is a lost cause. If the SP campaign is good and the MP is fun (I'm hoping for something along the lines of ME3's MP because I hear it's co-op in a gladiatorial arena and round-based survival modes are fun), Ryse may actually end up being the first next-gen game I get.

looks real sweet.

When I see this game, I can only think of Ninty-nine Knights or the mob scenes from Kameo.

Both seemed designed to take advantage of the ability of the (then) new gen to display lots of characters on screen at once. Both seemed to spend little regard with whether the gameplay would be any fun, just whether it would look good or impressive.

I hope I'm wrong, but right now it's all it feels like to me.

I played the singleplayer a bit, and it just feels like a less fluid Batman.

Definitely an improvement from E3.