Yesterday Sega announced the 40-strong Mega Drive Ultimate Collection for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation3, and fans were ecstatic, until they saw screenshots of the title's HD smoothing in action. Yes it's hideous, but it's also completely optional. Martin Snelling of Sega UK confirmed with RPG Site that the hideous-looking smoothing filter can be shut off. Even better, all games will play in whatever aspect ratio your television supports.

"I've had confirmation that the filter can indeed be switched off...And the games will display at whatever ratio your console is set at - 4:3 or 16:9. If playing in 16:9 the game will fit and not have black borders at the side."

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We know Crysis Warhead has some odd nomenclature for graphic settings, but how well do those graphics settings actually performed. After all of the complaints about the original game's outrageous system requirements, developer Crytek promised that this side story would be tweaked to run well on a much more affordable computer, but did they deliver? The guys over at TechSpot have gone in-depth to analyse the game's performance, providing benchmarks for 14 different video cards at each of the game's three quality levels, and the results aren't too spectacular. What they basically discovered is that said tweaks are negligible, and only a very high-end video card is capable of breaking past 32 frames per second at the lowest resolution they tested, 1440x900.

Hit the link for the full report on Crysis Warhead's performance, including more comparison shots of the three levels of graphical detail.

Crysis Warhead performance in-depth [TechSpot]

Rod Fergusson from Epic thinks that his company is close to squeezing the last few drops of graphical performance from the Xbox 360.

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Nvidia have produced a proof-of-concept demo that shows how standard (albeit powerful and heavily tweaked) graphics processors can be used to render raytraced scenes in real time.

The demo showed animation running 30 frames per second at 1,920 x 1,080. Nvidia cranked the demo up to 2,560 x 1,600 but would not reveal the frame rate. This could have huge implications for in-game graphics, although as the system currently requires 4 parallel Quadro GPUs with 1GB memory apiece, costing around $US 10,000 a pop it may be a couple of years before this hits even the most hardcore PC gamer's desktop.

Quoth Nvidia, "the ray tracer shows linear scaling rendering of a highly complex, two-million polygon, anti-aliased automotive styling application". Which certainly sounds impressive. What this appears to mean is "Look! A shiny car that we can move around real quick!" and, you know, that may well be enough.

Nvidia demos real-time GPU ray tracing at 1,920 x 1,080 [CustomPC]

Raytracing is a method of generating a computer image by tracing a ray of light through an image plane. The whole process is similar to how light bounces off objects in nature, determining the colour, sheen, luminosity, etc. Whereas other methods of creating graphics have to generate special effects, shadows, bloom, and other popular lighting techniques are all occur as a natural product of raytracing. The problem is that raytracing is very resource intensive, making it great for pre-rendered applications, not-so-great for on-the-fly applications like games. According to Intel's Michael Vollmer, that's a fact that could change sooner than we think.

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While some people argue that what games need is more monotony, at least in terms of black and white games, plenty of people are dissatisfied with the current trend of drabness in developers' colour palettes. Of course, there are plenty of brightly coloured games that are and will continue to be released, but plenty of people miss colour. Bright colour. I myself am rather fond of candy-coloured palettes, preferring them to drab medieval "realism". One blogger thinks he has the answer to who stole the colour from games:

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Addressing the 2007 SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group for Computer Graphics) conference, EA's visual and tech officer Glenn Entis has said he believes the future of graphics lies in user-generated content. As graphics advance, he says, sooner or later we'll hit the point where they become as good as they'll get - and once they get there there'll be challenges. Where do you go when you don't have to worry about increasing the fidelity of graphics, and just have to worry about making things look nice? User-generated content, that's where.

Do not underestimate people's desire for self expression and self creativity. Social networking and self content sites like You Tube, MySpace, Facebook are leading the way. This is the rebirth of creativity in the hands of the many.

Man may have a point. I reckon I spent about 10 hours driving a car in Forza 2. And twice as long painting the damn things. Sure, some may say it was a waste of time, but damned if my racing-striped 69 Camaro wasn't better looking than anything that came bundled with the game. Future of game graphics could hinge on user-made content [Develop]