Tue, May 17, 2011 | 05:29 BST

Lionhead: Fable III PC “has never looked more beautiful”

Lionhead staff have commented that the PC port of Fable III is the most beautiful version of Albion seen so far, trumping its Xbox 360 progenitor.

“Because our artists originally authored their assets at such a high quality, removing the limits that the Xbox 360 imposed upon us immediately made the game look better,” lead engine coder Don Williamson told Beefjack.

“The main benefit to a PC release is to be able to see the world of Albion realised at such a high resolution,” added senior designer Mike West.

“We have some mighty PCs in the office and along with the fantastic 3D mode, Fable has never looked more beautiful which the artists love.”

Williamson gave some specific examples of graphical improvements to the PC version of Fable III, including greater texture pools, deeper draw distances, and increased shadow resolution.

Not that it was all smooth sailing, of course: the programmer said many Xbox 360-specific engine features had to be re-written for the port.

“For example, the PC version had to somehow keep up with the tens of thousands of occlusion queries the Xbox 360 engine could do every frame,” he said.

“Our histogram evaluation had to be moved from the CPU to the GPU to prevent stalls, some video cards can’t sample the depth buffer as a texture making depth-of-field and crepuscular rays difficult, we were employing lots of tricks to occupy space on the 360 that couldn’t be done on the PC, we had to counter lots of inefficiencies introduced with the higher level of abstraction in D3D on the PC…

“The list goes on, but the engine guys did a great job bringing it all under control.”

11 comments

Dralen
17/05/11, 5:41 am

Talk about stating the obvious.

Quasar
17/05/11, 6:55 am

fuck you lionhead for releasing it so late

TheWulf
17/05/11, 7:18 am

Sorry Lionhead, if you’d developed the PC version alongside the 360 one then perhaps I wouldn’t have had plenty of time to be dissuaded by videos like this one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSaw85bliyQ

Espers
17/05/11, 7:23 am

no body speaks ill of their own game, thus who can truly evaluate are the gamers and not you liongate. This statement gives me the impression that the game will suck like the other 2 before.

Espers
17/05/11, 7:31 am

http://lionhead.com/Fable/FableIII/Media.aspx <== PC screenshots .. the GAME SUCKS BIG TIME !!!

loki
17/05/11, 8:01 am

LOL
Lionhead, you idiots! Even Super graphics don’t save this crap from fail on PC

Ge0force
17/05/11, 8:56 am

But then there’s The Witcher 2, with much better graphics and at least interesting gameplay, story and challenge.

Droid
17/05/11, 11:28 am

A gold plated turd is still a turd Mr Molyneux.

deadstoned
17/05/11, 1:27 pm

No thanks Microsoft I’m not buying this so you can earn some valuable lessons hopefully.
1. Dont release games this late.
2. Dont skip Fable II next time.
3. Fix/destroy GFWL.
4. Learn that the PC Community hate your guts for GFWL, therefore you need to invest MORE.

#10

YoungZer0
17/05/11, 1:32 pm

@9: Fable is not made by Microsoft, you worm.

But seriously, Lionheart, next time you decide to do this, work simultaneously on the PC Version instead of releasing it after 8 months later.

#11

NeoSquall
17/05/11, 2:57 pm

@3 I pity you for listening to an angry joe whatever instead of actually playing a game.

Shame on you.