[ECH]

For those who are not aware the in game AA for Shift 2 PC still leaves jaggies. Here is what was said about the built in AA for the game:

Bit of a heads up on the choices we had to make regarding anti aliasing in Shift 2.

The new render engine for Shift 2 as well as having a full HDR range is also completely deferred. I think this is the first of its type in a racer and came with some benefits as well as trade-offs. We were able to go nuts on the night lighting and multiple cast real time shadows because of being deferred but the trade-off is that AA becomes a bit of a bitch to do. You can't run standard MSAA in the normal way. We used morphological antialiasing on the PC and consoles. The PC settings for medium is edge detect and for high also reads depth information. On PS3 we run post processed MLAA totally on SPU.

If we didn't have the night racing we could have gotten away with an enhanced Shift 1 render setup with the increased range and contrast and used simple MSAA (4x on 360 and quincunx on PS3).

Edit, should mention that the PC AA will eat CPU time as it's the only place we can run it on a fully deferred engine.

Posted here
Does this make sense to anyone? This is a DX9 only game. When you use MLAA from AMD the IQ is improved. So I really don't understand this.

[Malo]

Wouldn't that just mean that AMD's MLAA algorithm is better?

[Ike Turner]

NFS: SHIFT 2 on PC is horrible. Straight port of the Xbox 360 version. Textures are low-res (lower thant Shift 1). AA totally sucks (only the Car seems to be AA'd even on High the rest of the scenery is a jaggy mess). Their DOF implementation is a joke too. Replay cams are a joke too (jerky as hell). Poly-count on the cars is abysall compared to Criterion's NFS: Hot Pursuit.

[ECH]

And what is DX9 full deferred HDR range anyway?

[AlStrong]

post-processing post-resolve? (zomg it's deferred to after MSAA resolve!!!!11111111111111111111111111111111111111)

[nightshade]

If we didn't have the night racing we could have gotten away with an enhanced Shift 1 render setup with the increased range and contrast and used simple MSAA (4x on 360 and quincunx on PS3)

Pretty interesting that he says they'd have gone with QAA if it wasn't for the deferred setup, when MLAA is easily providing better results than what QAA did in Shift 1.

[ECH]

Originally Posted by nightshade

Pretty interesting that he says they'd have gone with QAA if it wasn't for the deferred setup, when MLAA is easily providing better results than what QAA did in Shift 1.

From my understanding QAA is cheaper then MLAA.


It is claimed that they are creating a more efficient form of MLAA with Intels help. He claims that it should reduce the performance hit. Is that even possible?
source

[ECH]

nevermind

[AlStrong]

In the graphics options the 'Normal' mode uses MSAA with a special sampling trick to produce correct results at triangle edges -

They certainly screwed it up on the Xbox 360 version.

[ECH]

One user suggests that the game on the PC is using an hle emulator. The developer's reply is here

[I.S.T.]

Originally Posted by ECH

One user suggests that the game on the PC is using an hle emulator. The developer's reply is here

Oh, god. Why would someone seriously suggest the damn game was running in an HLE emulator?

[Davros]

I think he really means the code was written for the xbox and zero optimisation was done for the pc version, he just worded it badly.

ps: amd's surface format optimisation doesnt work with this game

[ECH]

Breakdown of how they threaded the game for the PC. I just don't understand why they used directx 9 though. Wouldn't DX10 or DX11 with the inclusion of multithreaded rendering been a benefit for what they were trying to do?
post

Some conversation regarding DLC coming to the PC
post

[Kyyla]

How is this game compared to Shift 1? I rather liked that one.

[deeFive]

it feels like a more polished Shift 1, its like the leap from GT1 to GT2 if that helps

[ECH]

Originally Posted by Kyyla

How is this game compared to Shift 1? I rather liked that one.

There are some bugs that need to be fix that hinders a good comparison (like dark cockpits for some). Currently, AMD users have to disable surface format optimization to reduce some of the dark cockpit view, etc (lets see if the patch addresses this). Also the handling has to be fixed. But from the looks of it so far some are saying that Shift 1 offered better graphics (although slightly better) then Shift 2. Here is what one person posted.

Comparisons
Post 1
Shift 1
Shift 2

Shift 1
Shift 2

Post 2

[ECH]

Bugs fixed in PS3/360 title update 2 (even though this a PC patch update thread )

- Input processing, tweaked default wheel settings and fixed force muting problem. Addresses wheel lag/feel issues. (somewhat understated - a large code change to reduce latency is included improving both the input and wheel animation delay)
- Fix Upgrade / garage screen crash / hang.
- Fix Logitech FFB.
- Fix tech hang on vehicle selection if own loaner car and it's upgraded it past initial class.
- Fix occasional logic flaw for redeeming voucher codes.
- Fix restarting or quitting a race while slow motion is active in replay
- Improved validation of lap times, scores and speeds:
- Fix don't report unrealistic records to stat servers.
- Fix don't store unrealistic records to profile if playing online.
- Fix : Reset unrealistic stats stored in the profile after successful signin.
- Fix : All constants controlling record validation can be overridden from server-side config.
- Fix drift scores above 3600 not appearing in Records.
- Fix : Don't send lap times in game reports when playing drift (fixes issue with Nevada Circle Night track sharing leaderboard id with Asia Drag Strip)

(this is unofficial and there's probably a few things I missed - the PC patch obviously includes all these fixes)

*EDIT* I originally said 'DLC title update' instead of 'title update 2' - the 1st console update is a subset because the equivalent of the 1st PC patch is split over two updates. My bad, that'll probably cause some confusion.

post



AMD and Nvidia have the new builds for driver optimizations. None SLI users will see 5% increase in performance while AMD users will see nearly 10% increase in performance with the patch (I don't think it implies optimizations from the newer drivers).

What I found interesting is that this game doesn't allow using Surface Format Optimizations (FP10/11) which is the result of dark cockpit view, etc. Yet the same thing is happening with nvidia users. Are they simply using FP16 or is there more to it? I recall this discussion before (from post 86 to post 89).

[AlStrong]

hm...

Q: We've talked in brief about the deferred rendering in SHIFT 2. Can you go into more depth on this? Bearing in mind the 4x MSAA we see on Xbox 360, is it safe to assume you're working with the light pre-pass approach?

Tom Nettleship: We use a three phase light pre-pass approach for our deferred renderer. The main reason we chose this as opposed to a two-phase approach was because being a racing game, we needed to focus on high quality rendering of diverse material types, ranging from rubber and cloth all the way up to paintwork, glass and carbon fibre. While a BRDF-lookup texture approach allows for decent material variety in a two-pass deferred renderer, it doesn't cut it when you need to implement a totally different lighting model (carbon fibre, brushed metals).

Also, our most important visual components are the cars, which need high quality environment mapping. We tried every encoding possible for the normals channel of the G-buffer before deciding that it wasn't possible to get an acceptable quality level for bodywork reflections. So, we dropped back to the cheapest normal encoding (888 view space XYZ, which helped a lot with PS3 performance) and use those for general lighting. For bodywork reflections we re-evaluate the normal mapping in the third phase of the light prepass render. It's more expensive, but the quality you get makes it worthwhile.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...-part-2?page=2 (gonna need a login for the rest)

Q: You opted for MLAA on PlayStation 3 - is this the standard code supplied by SCEE's ATG as part of the PlayStation Edge tools? How easy was it to integrate into your engine?

Tim Mann: It's a slightly modified version of the pre-release Edge code. It's very easy to integrate in the pipeline and is placed between the HDR tone-mapping phase and motion blur. It can be quite fussy tuning-wise but we managed to find a good balance between too much edge detection - which produces too much blurring - and not enough, which leaves you with jagged edges.

[ECH]

Does this make any sense to anyone?

[AlStrong]

I believe he means the two-geometry pass approach for LPP.

First Pass: Normals + Depth buffers
Second Pass: store light properties in a light buffer (sounds like they use an FP16 RT)
Third Pass: Normals + depth again + fetch light buffer, apply different materials per surface.

Sounds like they don't do MSAA'd lighting hence the reason there is still aliasing on PC.

[ECH]

Post 1



Post 2

[homerdog]

Thanks, now I know that I will never ever ever ever ever buy this game.

[ECH]

Originally Posted by homerdog

Thanks, now I know that I will never ever ever ever ever buy this game.

I still don't understand what the patch will actually include.