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[RoadHazard]

Shadow of the Colossus is amazing for his time

Motion Blur

HDR

And many effect (life DoF / Fur)

The PS2 was a beast for creating your own shaders. I can mention many thing like fog or shadow in Silent Hill 2 & 3

Excellent post by jett

We talk about games that defy hardware.

I-I just played Ginga Fukei Densetsu Sapphire on the Turbo Duo... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OX_TxLtQA8&feature=related This game blew my mind! Holy shit, the scaling, rotation, and polygonal ships. Let's not forget the soundtrack (ok, it is a CD console). I'm totally blown away by...

www.neogaf.com

I'm pretty sure that's just bloom, don't think the PS2 was capable of actual HDR?

 

[Saint Boot]

I am not sure if these count, but the first time I played Link to the Past and when you leave Links house at night, the storm was impressive and to this day I will sit there for awhile soaking it in. For Super Metroid it was teh same thing. a slow decent to the planet and a storm in the background. I love that stuff.

 

[Sosokrates]

I think Remember me was the first game to use material based lighting.

 

[DonkeyPunchJr]

Legend Of Zelda on NES (1986) was the first game to feature game saves and continues.

Really quite surprising it took this long considering we had persistent high scores on arcade and pinball using a battery backup going way back to the 70's

The black screen with text + a heart icon was truly a groundbreaking visual effect. Many others have imitated it but Zelda was the pioneer.

 

[intbal]

Trespasser (1998) was one of the first featuring a full physics engine.

I‘m pretty sure Jurassic Park Trespasser was the first game with bump mapping (like normal maps today).

Not only environment physics, but also compound object physics and ragdoll physics.

Trespasser also pioneered:
-Billboard LODs. Rendering objects in the distance to a texture until they could be swapped for the models.
-Non-scripted AI for the dinosaurs, leading to unpredictable behavior.
-The first terrain engine based on real world height data (although they had to use a sculpted model to scan the data in)
-Physical sound modeling based on material interaction (friction, scraping, etc.)


Probably some other stuff I'm not aware of.

 

[carlosrox]

I remember being blown away by Battlefield 2's self shadowing in some early pics. Not sure if it did it first or not but it's the first time I remember seeing it.

I remember thinking the same of Brothers In Arms' depth of field when you ADS. Off the top of my head I don't remember seeing anything do that prior.

 

[intbal]

FEAR first game with volumetric god rays?

They are totally not volumetric god rays through.

Halo: Combat Evolved had those on Xbox in 2001. Although they are limited to the sun source and tree occluder.

 

[RoboFu]

cel shading

pretty sure fear effect came out earlier that year on playstation it had real cel shading. some would say megaman legends but I cant remeber if it was cel shading or just flat shading..

 

[Drew1440]

Super Mario 64 was the first 3D game I remember with bilinear filtering applied to textures.

Sega Model 2 games had bilinear filtering and was released in 1994, for home console however vert that was probably the first

I remember Wipeout being the first 1080p60 game on console

Ridge Racer 7 came out in 2006 on the PS3 and ran at 1080p 60fps. Wipeout HD had dynamic resolution scaling which was the first game I remember to feature it

 

[intbal]

Ridge Racer 7 came out in 2006 on the PS3 and ran at 1080p 60fps. Wipeout HD had dynamic resolution scaling which was the first game I remember to feature it

Both were beaten to that mark by Quake 2 on Xbox 360, released in 2005 as a pack-in with Quake 4. 1080p/60fps with 4xMSAA.

 

[intbal]

Not sure if either of these was a "first".

Messiah (2000)
Maybe the first game to use multi-resolution dynamic meshes for character models. Although their implementation was wacky, based on stacked slices.

SWAT: Global Strike Team (2003, PS2/Xbox)
Simulated HDR effect by changing exposure values when moving between areas of differing luminance. Also allowed issuing voice commands to AI squad.

 

[intbal]

Requiem: Avenging Angel (1999)
First game with Bullet Time

 

[amigastar]

Not sure if either of these was a "first".

Messiah (2000)
Maybe the first game to use multi-resolution dynamic meshes for character models. Although their implementation was wacky, based on stacked slices.

SWAT: Global Strike Team (2003, PS2/Xbox)
Simulated HDR effect by changing exposure values when moving between areas of differing luminance. Also allowed issuing voice commands to AI squad.

Man, i remember Messiah, that was the game with the baby angel, right?

 

[SomeGit]

Shrek on Xbox is the first game with deferred shading.

 

[Sub_Level]

Source engine - bloom?

Yep. I'm sure plenty of games had it before but HL2 is the first time I remember it advertised. Valve literally released Lost Coast primarily to show off HDR & bloom. HL2 really is a glorified tech demo.

 

[SF Kosmo]

Jet Set Radio - cel shading (I think that was the first one?)

People argue this one. Wacky Races had the edge tracing outlines associated with cel shading, but not the actual shading itself where colors are broken into bands of different tones. JSR also added variable width outlines. So JSR definitely had a more robust implementation.

Anyway, I'd like throw in Commanche, the first game to use voxels.

pretty sure fear effect came out earlier that year on playstation it had real cel shading. some would say megaman legends but I cant remeber if it was cel shading or just flat shading..

Neither of these had shading, they just had textures that were designed to emulate the look of cel shading. Notable for their art style, not for any particular trick of rendering.

 

[intbal]

Man, i remember Messiah, that was the game with the baby angel, right?

Yep.
You can see the MRM technology working at 13:28 of DF's video on it.

 

[Reizo Ryuu]

HDR

It's not actual HDR, they are using tricks to emulate the effect.

 

[dwish]

Not sure if first but ragdoll and distance fog in ut2003 was mind blowing in early vids/screens

 

[rofif]

Morrowind - Water with shader effect and it had raindrops on the water when it was raining.

yep. Pixel shaders right here. man that brings back memories. This water still looks good

 

[Fuz]

Unreal, volumetric fog.

 

[amigastar]

yep. Pixel shaders right here. man that brings back memories. This water still looks good

Yes, it does. Oddly enough water was the first element in games to look so good.

 

[intbal]

Thief: The Dark Project (1998)
Real-time sound wave propagation. Many, many years before Sony/Microsoft started talking about "ray traced audio". No, it's not the exactly the same, but it accomplishes the same thing for game sound purposes.

Also, on the subject of game audio, at least one Original Xbox game used 3d positional audio through HRTF. But I can't identify which one it was (best guess - Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler's Green). A developer stated this on a different forum a long time ago, but neglected to say which game it was.

 

[Andodalf]

ITT: People who don't know that HDR can refer to more than just expanded color space and Lumosity.

HDR is also the term used for the way games used to, and still sometimes do, represent transitions from very bright areas to darker ones.

 

[intbal]

HDR is also the term used for the way games used to, and still sometimes do, represent transitions from very bright areas to darker ones.

Absolutely. The game Elex does not feature luminance HDR (not on initial release for 8th gen machines, anyway). Instead it has a very exaggerated light/dark transition model. The same as the game I mentioned above, SWAT:GST.

 

[SF Kosmo]

Oh, another big one for me:

Daytona USA, first use of texture filtering.

 

[Aure]

The heat haze in Gran Turismo 3, that was quite amazing.

 

[Reizo Ryuu]

I think Unreal 2 was the first one were you could affect certain smoke effects with explosions.

 

[BouncyFrag]

Morrowind - Water with shader effect and it had raindrops on the water when it was raining.

Grab a hefty mug of hot chocolate (marshmerrows optional) and wrap yourself in this cozy ambience:

 

[JeloSWE]

ITT: People who don't know that HDR can refer to more than just expanded color space and Lumosity.

HDR is also the term used for the way games used to, and still sometimes do, represent transitions from very bright areas to darker ones.

It can be a bit of a confusing term as it tend to be used in two separate ways.

HDR, engine doing light calculations resembling real world values and then tonemapping it to the displays capabilities:
Old games used to do it's light calculations in a Limited Dynamic Range of about 256 light intensity steps. Then as rendering matured games started to use real world intensities for light and materials based on how real world lights emit and materials absorb and reflect light, but in order to do that properly, you need more steps than 256 to be able to represent those large light intensity values, thus the High Dynamic Ranges (HDR) term. As a result, real world lights intensities are magnitudes of order brighter than the brightest TV, even today. Most TVs and monitors render white at around 150-200 nit. So if you have a sun in the game which is roughly 1.6Bn nit in the real world, it's obviously going to blow out IF mapped 1 to 1 on the TV/monitor. So what you have to do is compress the games internally rendered images dynamic range with a technique called "tonemapping". This will make the parts of the image containing the sun not blow out but instead map it perfectly to 100% white on your screen wile still maintaining proper exposure and contrast in the mid and dark regions of the image.

HDR for TVs:
These days there are many displays, especially high end LCD TVs that can do 2000+ nit of light out put. This is many times brighter than the old displays that did around 200 nit. Because of this, the games doesn't need to compress the internal light values as much in order to make them match the displays capabilities. Here the HDR term is denoting the displays light output capability, additionally the HDR standard also includes support for a wider color gamut, though few games or movies take advantage of the extra colors for now.


So when gaming on a HDR capable TV/monitor, most modern game does use HDR in it's internal rendering, then tonemaps the internal image buffer to match the display's HDR, thus there are two similar but different HDR terms being used at the same time, indeed a bit confusing.

 

[Altares13th]

Quake 2 : texture filtering (i think)
Quake 3 : hardware AA and T&L
Silent Hill 2: self shadows (or maybe splinter cell first, can't remember)
Doom 3 : Stencil shadows
HL2: pixel shaders
GOW3 : morphological anti-aliasing
Crysis : SSAO
Crysis 2 : SSR
UE4: Voxel cone traced GI (unfortunately, it got trashed because of the weak gen8 hardware)
Quake 2 RTX: fullscreen path traced game.
Metro Exodus EE : Full RT GI with no other render path.
UE5: dynamic screenspace LODs (nanite, hopefully not trashed this time)

 

[Ceadeus]

Iirc Gran Turismo 3 introduced bump mapping?

I may be wrong, I think there was a dreamcast game who did it first. Hmmm..

 

[SF Kosmo]

Quake 2 : texture filtering (i think)

Daytona USA (1993)

Quake 3 : hardware AA

N64 supported hardware AA in many games before this.

Quake 2 RTX: fullscreen path traced game.

While not a game, I think it's interesting that a demo called Heaven Seven managed full screen path traced, texture mapped visuals almost 20 years earlier.

 

[intbal]

Doom 3 : Stencil shadows

Secret Service: Security Breach featured stencil shadows a year before Doom 3 came out.
I don't even know if that was the first game with them. But I know Doom 3 wasn't the first.

 

[nkarafo]

Shadow of the Colossus is amazing for his time

Motion Blur

Some N64 games like Majora's Mask and Perfect Dark had motion blur before.

Secret Service: Security Breach featured stencil shadows a year before Doom 3 came out.
I don't even know if that was the first game with them. But I know Doom 3 wasn't the first.

Didin't Silent Hill 2 have this? You could shine somewhere with your flashlight and it would generate real time shadows. I don't remember any other game before having this.

 

[R6Rider]

Grab a hefty mug of hot chocolate (marshmerrows optional) and wrap yourself in this cozy ambience:

Goddamn I love the music in this game. Will always be among my favorites.

 

[amigastar]

Grab a hefty mug of hot chocolate (marshmerrows optional) and wrap yourself in this cozy ambience:

Damn, i can't wait for Skywind. Looks to be awesome.

 

[tygertrip]

Was Crysis the first game with per-object motion blur? I remember that shit blew me away back in the day.

I'm not sure, but I am pretty sure I haven't seen per-object motion blur as good since. Maybe the sequels too?

 

[intbal]

Didin't Silent Hill 2 have this? You could shine somewhere with your flashlight and it would generate real time shadows. I don't remember any other game before having this.

I never played it. But the Playstation 2 didn't have stencil buffer support. So they must have been able to emulate that through other means. So... I'm not sure you can call that stencil shadowing, even if it accomplishes the same thing.

 

[intbal]

Wipeout HD had dynamic resolution scaling which was the first game I remember to feature it

Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay had dynamic resolution scaling in 2004 on Original Xbox.

 

[Cryio]

Crysis 1 and later in 2010 Metro 2033 in DX10: Per object motion blur
Splinter Cell 1: Soft Shadows on Xbox / GeForce 3-4-5 / DgVodoo nowadays
Splinter Cell 1 again: breakable lights?
Oblivion: HDR?
Doom 3 - Riddick - stencil shadows / also dynamic shadows?
ICO - motion blur?
Soul Reaver 1 - open world dynamic streaming AND real-time geometry displacement?
Crysis 2 - screen space reflections / global illumination
Battlefield 3 - (this is shared with Crysis 2, but I think BF3 did it better) - particle shadows
DIRT 2 - tessellation
Crysis 1 - ambient occlusion
Far Cry 2 - dynamic fire
Half-Life 2 - grand scale physics?
Assassins' Creed 3 - dynamic snow deformation using tessellation
Dead Space 2 - ALMOST 100% 1 long uninterrupted cut. God of War 2018? Nah, Dead Space 2 ALMOST did it 7 years before.
Either ICO or Morrowind for pixel shaders used for water reflections
Crysis 3 - screen space reflections on Xbox 360 / PS3
Last of Us - screen space global illumination on PS3
Uncharted 2 - per object motion blur on PS3 (I think?)
Gears of War 3 - per object motion on X360
Gears of War 1- 1st proper next-gen 7th gen game?
Resident Evil 4 - being POSSIBLE at all on Gamecube OR PS2
Gran Turismo 2 - 60 fps on PS1
Gran Turismo 4 - 1080i on PS2
L.A. Noire - the amount of face motion capture in a game
Call of Duty Black Ops 2 - the quality of face motion-capture in 2012 on X360/PS3 was insane. Better than anytime else at the time IMO
GTA IV - the amount of physics in a game on X360/PS3
GTA V - the fact it was possible at all on X360/PS3
Metro Last Light - 8th gen game more or less on X360/PS3
Crysis 1 Remastered - ray tracing on PS4 Pro / X1X
The Tourist (was it?) - 8K rendering on PS5
Titanfall 2 - dynamic supersampling on Xbox One X, above 4K
The Witcher 2 - basically a next-gen PC game in 2011, more similar to 8th gen games than PS3/X360 titles, backported to X360
Rise of the Tomb Raider - the 1st time Physical Based Rendering actually hit me anyway as the "new way games looked now" - it might've been in other games before maybe, but I feel in Rise it hit its stride
Sega Rally (2007?) - deformable tracks that persist for the entire race
Rayman 2 - being the only game in existence that was SO MANY DIFFERENT VERSIONS on major platforms - PS1 is different to N64 that is different to Dreamcast that is different to PS2. And not small changes either.
Batman Arkham Knight - it is a AAA game - and it had 4 year dev time (pretty hardcore back then) - and it used an old engine, so devs had plenty of experience with it is --- BUT GOD DAMN, Arkham Knight SCREAMS technical proficiency at the way cutscenes are directed, at how the camera pulls back when you slingshot out of the car - at how the camera moves around and zooms at various parts of Batman, enemies, car, environment, buildings, anything. It's a technical tour de force and a confidence in itself that is rarely matched (even the PC port has been fixed)
Witcher 2 - having some 60% of the game LOCKED AWAY in a secondary playthrough behind 1 decision
Alien Isolation - GPU accelerated particles (it's common now, but they were incredible when they were introduced)
Halo 4 - being possible on X360 in general
FEAR 1 - the A.I.
GTA III - the A.I. insanity / variety / routines
GTA San Andreas - the SCALE of a game possible on PS2 / Xbox
Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart and Miles Morales - 1080p60 gameplay with ray tracing
The Saboteur - PS3 - first console game with post-processing form of AA (MLAA) - previously console games had either no AA or some form of MSAA

That's all that comes to mind currently.

 

[joedan]

Came in to say lens flare in Turok Dinosaur Hunter on the N64. Hadn’t realized it was done on the Super NES.

 

[carlosrox]

I remember Max Payne 2 stealing HL2's thunder with the physics since it got delayed and MP2 came out first. Was pretty awesome experiencing all that for the first time.

Honestly I think HL2 didn't even use the physics that well and the gravity gun just felt like a gimmick to me. Like, I never enjoyed the Grav Gun much in HL2 cuz it felt gimmicky and overpowered. I wanted to just shoot like in the first game. Maybe I'm being too hard on HL2 cuz I have a bit of a history with it and the first game but even though HL2 actually does use the physics a lot, it still felt like this weird gimmick to me.

 

[carlosrox]

The N64's water effects (portals in SM64 and Turok) were indeed awesome. Hell, they can't even be properly emulated today if I'm not mistaken. The Turok remasters don't even do them justice.

And I still think Wave Race 64 looks better than Wave Race Blue Storm.

 

[TGO]

I remember Wipeout being the first 1080p60 game on console

Ridge Racer 7 (PS3)

Ridge Racer 7: The 1080p Dream

While the 1080p dream is all but dead in the here and now, things were very different back in 2006 when the PlayStation…

www.eurogamer.net

 

[nkarafo]

The N64's water effects (portals in SM64 and Turok) were indeed awesome. Hell, they can't even be properly emulated today if I'm not mistaken.

Nah, there was never an issue emulating those.

Came in to say lens flare in Turok Dinosaur Hunter on the N64. Hadn’t realized it was done on the Super NES.

Yeah but i think Turok may still have some firsts. For instance, motion captured polygonal human enemies in a FPS? The 3D foliage effects (trees, bushes, etc) were also surprisingly detailed for the time, compared to other 3D games. Finally, it was the first (i think) game that had destructible foliage (some of the trees would break down from nearby explosion) but it was a scripted animation, not real time physics.

 

[carlosrox]

Nah, there was never an issue emulating those.

?

Pretty sure at the very least the remaster of Turok 1 is not the same effect. It looks worse to me. Maybe cuz it's based on the old PC version? Either way I'm pretty sure it's different and looks worse. It's also missing the effect when you shoot the bonus room floor/ceiling. Well, at the very least it's inconsistent. N64 version never had such weird issues.

 

[Fermbiz]

Source engine - bloom?

I always hated how Source handled bloom back in the day,

 

[ZehDon]

Source engine - bloom?

Full Spectrum Warrior released a few months prior to HL2 and it included some pretty egregious bloom, especially for the sky effects.

 

[Vae_Victis]

Another one I just noticed personally and haven't done deep researches on, but as far as I know Dark Cloud on PS2 was the first game to have real-time cloth physics during gameplay (at least, some done at a level where it actually looks smooth and fluid, and not just a bunch on pixels jiggling around).