Informal poll -- graphical fidelity vs draw distance

[wildside50]

So one of the all time pet peaves I have in video games (along with invisible walls... I HATE THEM SO MUCH!) is popin. Crysis is still considered one of the best looking games of all time, but for the life of me I can't figure out why. None of the user accessable graphical settings fix the biggest graphical gaffaw of all; popin. Oh sure, you can make it so the shadows have shadows of shadows, and you can see all 14.7 trillion grains of sand, but who cares if you can only see that fidelity for 15 feet. I don't know how your guys' eyes work, but mine don't stop seeing detail 15 feet from my face, and resolve it if I move closer.

So which would you rather have community? REALLY detailed graphics with the occasional popin, or solid, 1,000 meter draw distance fidelity, if it were knocked down a peg or two overall?

I remeber a game called Project IGI. It was a FPS that started life as a flight simulator. As a result, the terain was fully rendered. If you saw a mountain in the distance, you could walk there. Sure, the terain was muddy and the textures a little raw, but I didn't have palm trunks that turned into palm trees when I got close enough. Gimme that any day...

So which one draws you out of the world more? Popin or mediocre graphical fidelity?

 

[benski]

A little pop-in is a small price to pay for photo realistic graphics IMO.

 

[casualcolors]

Pop-in kills the immersion for me. It's why I never felt "there" in Crysis, despite appreciating the otherwise good graphics. Distant pop-in is bad, but Crysis on max settings had god damn grass popping in occasionally.

 

[rixy1991]

IMO there should an option to set the draw distance dont know how possible that is though

 

[HEXiT]

if your hdd is fast enough and your settings are high enough you should not notice texture pop, if the game has been written and rendered correctly... bf3 has very little texture pop and what it does have is hardly noticeable in most instances.
pop in is slightly different. it occurs when distance objects are brought forward and are changed from low poly count models to higher poly models. a good programmer can solve this with the application of a little common sense in his programming but most dont. they just render the objects at middle and far distance and dont care how they look as long as it doesn't affect performance. dice have managed to rectify this by creating the foreground models from middle distance models by adding more polys on the fly as the objects come closer (good programming) end result is pop in is minimized but has a huge impact on performance even in low detail scenes...

the faster cards and cpu's get the more pop in will be eliminated but the games will get bigger and hard drives will need to be faster just to keep up...
if you want to minimize it on your current system theres little you can do apart from upgrade.

 

[Badelhas]

if your hdd is fast enough and your settings are high enough you should not notice texture pop, if the game has been written and rendered correctly... bf3 has very little texture pop and what it does have is hardly noticeable in most instances.
pop in is slightly different. it occurs when distance objects are brought forward and are changed from low poly count models to higher poly models. a good programmer can solve this with the application of a little common sense in his programming but most dont. they just render the objects at middle and far distance and dont care how they look as long as it doesn't affect performance. dice have managed to rectify this by creating the foreground models from middle distance models by adding more polys on the fly as the objects come closer (good programming) end result is pop in is minimized but has a huge impact on performance even in low detail scenes...

the faster cards and cpu's get the more pop in will be eliminated but the games will get bigger and hard drives will need to be faster just to keep up...
if you want to minimize it on your current system theres little you can do apart from upgrade.

Thanks for ur input, u seem to know a lot about the subject What about RAGE, how does that game qualifies regarding the programming?

Cheers