Colin McRae Rally '04 - "Japan S1" (720p)

One of my all-time favorite racing games, now back with the awesome Radeon 8500-style Super-Sampling Anti-Aliasing :D

The driving isn't exactly record-breaking here, but that's besides the point. I think that even after the entire triple-transcoding nightmare this video's gone through, you can still see how smooth and shimmer-less everything looks thanks to this retro anti-aliasing technique.

If you can't, just enjoy this beautiful track, I guess :)

A little background on SSAA - As opposed to regular anti-aliasing, which relies on complex edge and jaggies detection algorithms of all sorts (that eventually yield pretty decent performance), SSAA simply renders the scene at 2x, 4x or 8x the resolution, and then scales the image down in hardware, which eliminates the need for any sort of algorithms and all kinds "transparency antialiasing", since the image would look smooth anyway.
The downside is, obviously, that rendering any recent game at, suppose, 1920x1200 with 4xSSAA, means practically rendering the game at 7680x4800, which results in pretty crappy performance - hence why this feature is only useful on older games :)

ATI has introduced this feature with the Radeon series, but removed it in the 9700 series and above, as it wasn't really performance-effective for any of the games back then. The Radeon 5000 series brought it back!

Category:

Gaming

Tags:

• colin
• mcrae
• rally
• japan
• super
• sample
• sampling
• anti
• aliasing
• SSAA
• ati
• radeon
• 5770
• 8500
• awesomeness

[steafun67]

How did you manage to turn the Resolution to 1280x720 ? I can only see 1024x768

my screen is 15.6 (16:9) Laptop screen

[ChronoDog]

@steafun67 Regedit -> HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Co­demasters\Colin McRae Rally 04 -> Change the "Height" and "Width" values accordingly :)

It's gonna reset once you change the resolution in-game though.

[ikt93]

Hey! How are you able to make your graphics look that awesome? My graphics look worse. Or is it the rain that makes eveything better?

[ChronoDog]

@ikt93 Everything at maximum detail, Anisotropic Filtering x16, Ambient Occlusion forced ON... nothing else really, it's just a beautiful track :)

[motu828mk2]

man... this was the best Colin Mc Rae...

now its getting worse and worse...

[Mixaraah]

My only complain to this game is the absence of the hood camera angle. Bumper camera is too low, you can't see a shit from the drivers seat and 3rd person camera is too "arcade" kind.

[roush26]

These 2 stages were fucken hard in advanced mode. Took like 45 minutes to get it right. If only i knew S5 and S6 were easy i would've settled for 4th or 5th in S1 and S2. All in an effort to avoid UK and blind driving there lol.

[roush26]

@topografer i dont think so. They know us Americans don't care for rally. They have to add X games style gameplay to market in the US. I would love it I ordered CM 05 for my old Xbox, its gonna be new to me

[steafun67]

@ChronoDog thanks a lot :) much appreciated

[matthehatwar]

great game codemasters need to bring out a new game like this 

[letsride84]

Man, I really miss these kind of graphics. I personally think that today's graphics are ugly. :/

[clamax22]

name of the music ???

[Celsus1984]

OH, great game, I arranged the championship on local network in august of 2009 (between F1 rfactor seasons, he-he :), was cool. But the game has some lags with on-line =( Freez during the race, didn't know, how fixed its.