Runescape Graphics Overhaul

Jagex announced a massive graphics update for Runescape (An Image of the Future), to enhance the entire Runescape world. Many changes have and will be made, and I thought I'd give you my opinion on it, and help you to notice some of the changes.

Textures are the most obvious change, being more detailed and more numerous. From the dirt path to the stone wall to the two hander in Jagex's preview screenshot, high quality textures are everywhere. This by itself is a really awesome update, something Jagex has been doing over time, but nothing to this degree. Note if you will, that though Jagex added more texture, they've also left the doo-dads and special terrain objects that you normally see in high detail. (IE the rocks along the path, the grass sticking up from the ground).

Screen Resolution is much greater after the graphical update. Runescape will never be the same! Not only will the detail be higher, but more view will be available for interfaces and more area of gameplay! Finally you'll be able to keep up with a busy chat room, or see a lot more of your favourite quest cutscenes, and more beautiful views.

Tiling, the squares you see in Runescape now, is much smoother in the provided screenshot. All the terrain seems to fit very well together and fewer patterns can be seen.

Additionally, Antialiasing and Filtering appear to have been applied to the edges of many objects, specifically the leaves on the trees and edges of the park benches. While on this note, you can notice little white specks where some of the textures connect on the stone wall. This is somewhat expected in videogames, and will eventually be worked out entirely (probably by the time the graphical update is released).

Finally, Enhanced Lighting has been implemented. Take a look at the ground to the left of any object and you'll see shadows! This is very exciting as Runescape Classic and Runescape have only used simulated shadows where terrain around objects is made darker instead of having a shadow cast. As a result, better daytime/nightime and weather effects are possible.

How will this affect performance?
As it is now, Runescape does not require a very powerful computer. It might seem like these graphical updates will put your computer to the test, but I think not.

Right now, only the CPU is being used to mainly render the 3D graphics in Runescape. From the way Jagex worded their update, it sounds as if 3D acceleration will be used in the new version of graphics, utilizing the 3D graphics card on your computer, which normally has been used for displaying the 3D graphics rendered by the CPU as 2D images. If this is true, a performance increase will be seen versus a decrease, because graphics cards are highly optimized to generate 3D graphics at high resolutions very quickly.

On top of this, Java is being developed to support multithreading to more efficiently use multicore CPU processing power.

In the end, this is going to be one of the best updates that could come for Runescape, and is a complete surprise after the last few that we've seen. We're looking forward to it, Jagex!

Click here for the full image.