The Technology of GTA IV/RDR *Rage Engine*

Yes, FFXIII Gran Pulse is awesome too.

EDIT: Btw, GTA4 is also one of the reasons I don't believe in game reviews.

What did you find awesome about Gran Pulse? Their artists were nice throughout but the engine isn't what you'd expect from top PS3/360. It's behind in my view.
 
That's why I said it would be more interesting to see how they juggle the resources to make The Agent. ^_^

Who knows...maybe they start to use spus as some b3d users suggest :LOL:

They'd have to use SPUs to write a good game (The PPU alone wouldn't cut it). I was referring to any special sauces given that they have a large team/budget. Culling and physics are standard techniques by now.

What did you find awesome about Gran Pulse? Their artists were nice throughout but the engine isn't what you'd expect from top PS3/360. It's behind in my view.

I liked the set up and gameplay in Gran Pulse. Visually, it doesn't stand out much IMHO. In GTA4, the graphics and gameplay both needed more tweaks (e.g., I remember there were complains about car control right off the bat).

Square Enix has the opposite problem here in that the 360 port underperforms.

Btw, is Midnight Club an open world game ?
 
That's why I said it would be more interesting to see how they juggle the resources to make The Agent. ^_^



They'd have to use SPUs to write a good game (The PPU alone wouldn't cut it). I was referring to any special sauces given that they have a large team/budget. Culling and physics are standard techniques by now.
I know that,i was just joking,being sarcastic...PPU would not be enough for table tennis probably :D
I would bet they use spus for deferred rendering,eh?Like how KZ2 uses it or now Split second...I also dont think they just watch spus sitting idle on their 3rd game while RSX is on its knees.
 
I'm pretty tired to repeat the same things again and again. Do you want get the point? Get it. But Rage engine it isn't rewrite to 0 but has a source code in the older gta on the ps2. R said that not my mind. R has done a great job to create a real life engine, I'm not said the opposite. But now because on the ps3 is subhd is becomes the state of art, impossible for the sucks cell and the glorious xenos of 360. Take that sony, you fail miserable. Now we are everyone happy.

My friend,you are to defensive and i have a feeling you take this sub hd thing really hard.First of,you did not provide me ANY sort of evidence that RAGE has source code or is redefined RenderWare as you said so how can i take you serious when you talk about it?Also,since you said its redefined RenderWare and it was build around Edram then you must be very well informed,but since in your last two sentences you sound like you are Ken Kutaragis son im gonna leave you alone.Dont even know where did you get that glorious xenos,cell sucks from in this thread...:rolleyes:
 
My friend,you are to defensive and i have a feeling you take this sub hd thing really hard.First of,you did not provide me ANY sort of evidence that RAGE has source code or is redefined RenderWare as you said so how can i take you serious when you talk about it?Also,since you said its redefined RenderWare and it was build around Edram then you must be very well informed,but since in your last two sentences you sound like you are Ken Kutaragis son im gonna leave you alone.Dont even know where did you get that glorious xenos,cell sucks from in this thread...:rolleyes:
Indeed I delete my post. My post. Time waste. Congratulation, however for this, great move.
I hope in the exclusive game R has the full support sony, maybe will see a true hd on the ps3 finally by R.
 
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I know that,i was just joking,being sarcastic...PPU would not be enough for table tennis probably :D
I would bet they use spus for deferred rendering,eh?Like how KZ2 uses it or now Split second...I also dont think they just watch spus sitting idle on their 3rd game while RSX is on its knees.

I think you misunderstood. We mentioned that the SPUs may not be fully utilized. It doesn't mean they let the SPUs sit idle. In fact, they implemented custom music with the spare SPU cycles, which seems like a waste compared to throwing the SPUs at something more core.

Is Midnight Club an open world game ?
 
I think you misunderstood. We mentioned that the SPUs may not be fully utilized. It doesn't mean they let the SPUs sit idle. In fact, they implemented custom music with the spare SPU cycles, which seems like a waste compared to throwing the SPUs at something more core.

Is Midnight Club an open world game ?

Yea MC is open world game,and it would be really nice of them to release some documentation about it,now we cant know exactly.
 
... or better yet, improve it more, like what they did for GTA4 PS3 DLC. They will need the performance for The Agent anyway. If not, it may look dated compared to future PS3 titles.
 
Textures in RDR look sharp as hell. I'm thinking there's a good amount of texture filtering at work.

You have the game?Because i played it last week(now finally have it) and i said that textures are done amazingly good,especially for open world game.There is also fine deal of variety and lots of random foliage that make everything look quite unique.
 
Cool, are all these available on the PS3 and 360 version ?

AFAIK all of that except perhaps building reflections. Well mirror reflections and building reflections seems to be a 64bit exe feature though cant think of a reason for it not being in 32bit exe unless it eats RAM like a monster.
 
Well, there's no official source ?

I have read that they use various 3rd party libraries (e.g., Bullet, Euphoria Engine) for GTA4. Would be interesting to know what they turn on/off.
 
Who knows...maybe they start to use spus as some b3d users suggest :LOL:

Lots of 3rd party devs use the SPUs for rendering. Been that for year(s). Sure there are improvements to be made but the "magic untapped potentials" banner waving is getting quite out of hand. Both machines have different strengths and so will excel at different tasks. Maybe the huge polygon count is easier on Xenos architecture and doing it on Cell occupies several SPUs as RSX would be much weaker for that than Xenos.

But seriously suppose only 50% of the SPUs are used or total efficient use regarding PS3 and GTAIV/R.A.G.E. How could that make R* "lazy-devs" or "not optimising port" when exclusive PS3 devs talk about "only" using "30%" or "only 50%" of the Cell and deliver mostly highly linear games in comparision? :p
 
Aye, in the first place, if you read carefully, none of them use the 'lazy dev' argument. :)

Not optimized enough is true at least for GTA4 launch since the DLC and now RDR perform better. It may not be caused by lazy dev though. PS3 is difficult to program, and there may be important project + money matters to overcome.

As for the 50% utilization number, it was only used in the context of turning on MLAA in the future, if possible.

You should already know that % utilization is not necessarily an accurate measurement for effectiveness or efficiency.
 
Well, there's no official source ?

I have read that they use various 3rd party libraries (e.g., Bullet, Euphoria Engine) for GTA4. Would be interesting to know what they turn on/off.

Well what I meantioend is visible but ofcourse there is more. Though it would be around 'PC version'* but the exe and some other files including shaders holds quite a lot of interesting info about limits, tech used and more.

* Some console settings are present.
 
It doesn't mean we cannot blame the developer/publisher though. I am all glad they have improved. Looking forward to see how they handle The Agency. :)

I don't see anyone comparing GTA4 with GT5 or Uncharted 2 or GoW3 here.
 
I'm sure you're referring to inFamous.

Definitely can't be Infamous. I finished that game and while very cool (underrated imho), it's not in the same visual league as GTA4. It does provide a clue though to some of the performance problems that RDR might be facing on PS3. Let's break it down:

1) Infamous is PS3 only so we can assume that they coded it perfectly since they aren't dumb multi platform devs. So we know they will use spu's, get Sony's help, won't leverage edram, etc, basically they will make optimal use of the PS3 platform.

2) If anyone recalls from playing that game, on the second island there is an old shanty town type area that has more detail that most of the other areas in that game. In that area the framerate takes a hit, it has trouble maintaining 30fps. Looking at RDR, from what I read on the net the framerate takes a hit in the detailed city areas as well on the PS3 version.

3) Looking at Infamous again, they do all manner of cheating to minimize what is drawn. Buildings are laid out not for look, but for culling to block as much as possible. When that doesn't work though one can see really bad lod popping that they try to mitigate with extreme depth of field blurring. RDR on the other hand went for huge viewing distances with less lod pop and less depth of field blurring.

So it seems like there is a pattern here irregardless of it being a PS3 only dev or a multi platform dev. Both of these open world games have frame rate problems on PS3 when detailed areas need to be rendered, but they took different approaches to alleviate it. Infamous didn't drop the resolution and instead decided to live with less impressive visuals, 1/4 resolution un-smoothed transparencies, heavy aliasing and aggressive draw distance culling to keep frame rate at 30fps, and they were willing to live with frame rate issues in that shanty town area. RDR on the other hand went with better visuals, less lod pop, longer draw distance, less depth of field blurring, and less aggressive culling, but dropped the resolution presumably to compensate and keep the frame rate steady, although just like Infamous it also drops frames in the more detailed areas.

So two different approaches. Perhaps RDR on PS3 could have just done what Infamous did, which we know to be well coded since they are PS3 only devs and hence it's totally tailored/optimized to the PS3 platform, and employ far more aggressive lod popping, place hills strategically all over the place to cull objects, add aggressive depth of field blurring, don't bother smoothing out transparencies, but bump up the resolution to 1280x720. Would that have been preferred? There probably would still have been frame rate drops in the detailed city areas, just like in Infamous, but then you would have 1280x720 full hd.


I don't see anyone comparing GTA4 with GT5 or Uncharted 2 or GoW3 here.

Well you can't naturally, they aren't comparable. Tons of reasons why, the least of which is that GTA4 has 24hour lighting cycle which obliterates all forms of performance cheats.
 
... which is why I was comparing GTA4 and GTA4 DLC ?

The rest are just asking innocent questions, like turning on MLAA. And they get slapped by IMHO, overly defensive 'lazy dev', 'bias' arguments.

And what's wrong with hoping for better performance in The Agency ?

inFamous was discussed in the context of gameplay, graphics and ecosystem.

... and why spend memory on custom music *if* the game is screaming for more memory ?
 
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