When i first read Gamespot's Halo 2 Graphics Comparison article, i was quite shocked at the quality of the Xbox screen captures. I personally didn't feel that these screen captures were a true representation of how the Xbox version of Halo 2 looked, and so i felt like the article was biased. If you are going to compare the graphics that the game is producing you should not be capturing the screenshot's after they have been transmitted through other devices and or cables, in this case they have come from composite cables judging by the screenshot's.
Now what I have done is captured the image straight from the Xbox itself using a debug enabled xbox, these screenshot's are captured directly from the frame buffer so these capture's will not suffer from any kind of interference, as seen in the Gamespot article.
Using these methods it will provide a fair comparison between the two rendering methods produced by each platform. I had to change some of the settings for Halo 2 Vista to make it a fair comparison, these are..
- Brightness set to 3, this value is by default set to 4.
- Gamma set to 1, this value by default is set to 2.
- Vista screenshots captured at 800x600 (Lowest resolution available) then resized to 640x480.
- Using no anisotropic filtering or anti aliasing.
- Safe area on
- Using defailt nview settings.
- Also note that Halo 2 Vista uses a different FOV than that of the xbox version, and so the images are slightly different.
Roll over images to see each comparison.
Campaign - Armory
The game menu taken from campaign, as you can see there is hardly no difference at all.
Ingame screenshot comparison, Xbox vs Vista
Vista screenshots below with the Level of detail set to high.
Campaign - Metropolis
Field of View Comparison
Here's a comparison view of the xbox game (4:3) to the PC version (16:9), the xbox image is contained inside the black lines.
Conclusion
As you can tell, the comparisons Gamespot made are not as bad as they make out, although the quality of which the Xbox is shown will depend on what kind of connections you are using with your TV, but alas the same can be said for the pc. With that said, when the settings are really turned up it is easy to distinguish between the two platforms. For the image captures below, the resolution was set to 1280x720 for a 720p HD image. Level of detail was set to high, and the scene was rendered with 2xAA and 4xAF.
Click for 720p image.
