Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion Archive [2010]

[joker454]

Fall out new vegas face off
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-fallout-new-vegas-face-off

There's an error in their face off, this quote:

"The 4x MSAA will have some impact on RAM usage, but surely not enough to see over 30 per cent of the texture data excised from the 360 game? "

Any form of msaa takes no extra memory on 360.

Why does the 360 version of Las Vegas have far worse textures than the PS3 version?

Maybe they paired them back to make it all fit on a single layer dvd, that would help it stream assets quicker when run purely off dvd.

 

[dragonelite]

Didn't digital foundry mentioned they placed most of the data on the fast parts of a dvd.

 

[assurdum]

There's an error in their face off, this quote:

"The 4x MSAA will have some impact on RAM usage, but surely not enough to see over 30 per cent of the texture data excised from the 360 game? "

Any form of msaa takes no extra memory on 360.




Maybe they paired them back to make it all fit on a single layer dvd, that would help it stream assets quicker when run purely off dvd.

The 4xmsaa combined with framebuffer resolution & other features not cause tiling? I think they talking about that 'impact'.

 

[joker454]

The 4xmsaa combined with framebuffer resolution & other features not cause tiling? I think they talking about that 'impact'.

The article says "The 4x MSAA will have some impact on RAM usage", but on 360 it has no impact on ram usage whatsoever. I can understand that typo though since the 360 is unique in that regard, as msaa does have an impact on ram use on every other platform out there. Tiling has zero impact on ram usage as well.

Didn't digital foundry mentioned they placed most of the data on the fast parts of a dvd.

I forget the millisecond penalty...but layer changes were really slow. So even if you put stuff on the fast part of the dvd, if you are bouncing between layers streaming stuff then you'll take a fairly heavy performance hit. Because of the really long viewing distances of the game I was wondering if perhaps that was the reason for chopping back textures. PS3 blurays are single layer and pc games are installed to hdd so they aren't affected. Then again, Red Read Redemption also has really long viewing distances and they didn't cut textures back so it's hard to say for sure what the reason was.

 

[AlNom]

Tiling has zero impact on ram usage as well.

I tried to explain it to gm , but I mean, it's also implied in the B3D article.

For anyone:

Once the first tile has been fully rendered the tile can be resolved (FSAA down-sample) and that tile of the back-buffer data can be written to system RAM

That's n-samples resolved to single sample per pixel.

 

[Dungeonscaper]

I see. Power lines are definitely clean looking. Too bad that technique apparently could not be applied to all elements of scenery across the board. The "sub-pixel mess" problem rears it's ugly head later on that track to the point where I find it really distracting (and I am not the kind of person to be usually distracted by details like that ).

I'm guessing the power lines are just textures with transparency at their edges. Bad Company 2 did this too. It's no 'special' technique I don't think.

 

[AlNom]

I'm guessing the power lines are just textures with transparency at their edges.

The power lines are not alpha textures in NFS.

That AA used in NFS:HP reminds me of GTA IV
http://www.gram.pl/upl/news/20080913082333.jpg

Not the same.

 

[(((interference)))]

Maybe they paired them back to make it all fit on a single layer dvd, that would help it stream assets quicker when run purely off dvd.

Ah ok, is the 4.8 GB just for the install to HDD size (which is normally a few hundred MB lower than the actual occupied disk space) or for the DVD disk space as well?

Don't single layer DVDs only hold 4.7 GB? wouldn't the 100 MB spill over to the second layer making it a dual layer DVD? Or perhaps the 100 MB is for stuff like menus and intro movies.

I was thinking that perhaps having higher resolution textures would impact the framerate somewhat when coupled with the 4xAA but paring texture data back to make it fit on single layer DVD makes more sense.

I wonder why Obsidian chose to go down this route, other open world games like RDR and AC2 hardly suffer from texture streaming issues and both use the full DVD space.

 

[N_B]

The engine doesn't have conventional streaming like those games does it? It loads a huge radius all around you at once rather than streaming in what you approach smoothly.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Don't single layer DVDs only hold 4.7 GB? wouldn't the 100 MB spill over to the second layer making it a dual layer DVD?

Maybe more than that, as XB360 discs only store ~7GBs so a single layer could be ~3.5 GBs. I dont know if the reserved space is on the second layer only, which would be smart, or spread across both layers. If the latter, you'll have layer changes over 3.5 GBs.

I was thinking that perhaps having higher resolution textures would impact the framerate somewhat when coupled with the 4xAA...

If your game is bandwidth limited, maybe, but otherwise the cost of higher res textures is just RAM/storage.

 

[Neb]

The engine doesn't have conventional streaming like those games does it? It loads a huge radius all around you at once rather than streaming in what you approach smoothly.

That is correct for atleast Oblivion and Fallout 3 and much likely to for Fallout Vegas to. It loads in cells forming a circle or oval.

 

[(((interference)))]

Maybe more than that, as XB360 discs only store ~7GBs so a single layer could be ~3.5 GBs. I dont know if the reserved space is on the second layer only, which would be smart, or spread across both layers. If the latter, you'll have layer changes over 3.5 GBs.

I was thinking that perhaps having higher resolution textures would impact the framerate somewhat when coupled with the 4xAA...

If your game is bandwidth limited, maybe, but otherwise the cost of higher res textures is just RAM/storage.

But aren't they just normal sized DVDs but MS copy protection and other things (do we actually know what takes up that much space?) takes the usable space down to 6.8 GB?

Of course as you said, it would depend on whether this reserved space is only on the second layer or also on the first.
I think it's likely the former otherwise it wouldn't make sense to pare texture data back on 360 so it can all be on 1 disk layer (since the disk layer size would only be 3.5 GB if the reserved space is split between layers).

If you're using 4xAA would having to keep the extra tiles in memory affect available RAM for textures? Or is this not significant?

 

[Dungeonscaper]

The power lines are not alpha textures in NFS.


Not the same.

How do you know it's not alpha?

 

[kagemaru]

If you're using 4xAA would having to keep the extra tiles in memory affect available RAM for textures? Or is this not significant?

Does tiling take up extra memory?

 

[Trejser]

Joker454:

The article says "The 4x MSAA will have some impact on RAM usage", but on 360 it has no impact on ram usage whatsoever. I can understand that typo though since the 360 is unique in that regard, as msaa does have an impact on ram use on every other platform out there. Tiling has zero impact on ram usage as well.

Previous page people

_________________________________________

BioShock Infinite revolutionises UE3

Interesting artcle... but why changing one engine so much when you could write your own that is ideally ajusted for game/s you're creating? I know it's probably cheaper (but you don't have to pay Epic) but they're changing A LOT in UE3 by the sound of things.

 

[kagemaru]

Joker454:



Previous page people

Right, that's why I asked, I remember reading that post from Joker, but I wasn't sure where. Usually post from work and things are pretty crazy now so my mind isn't always there.

_________________________________________

BioShock Infinite revolutionises UE3

Interesting artcle... but why changing one engine so much when you could write your own that is ideally ajusted for game/s you're creating? I know it's probably cheaper (but you don't have to pay Epic) but they're changing A LOT in UE3 by the sound of things.

Still IMO, it makes sense. Wouldn't it be easier to make these modifications instead of building an engine from scratch? I understand that they are making a lot of changes, but it still doesn't sound like it would be on the same scale as making your own engine from scratch.

Don't remember where, but I remember reading that with Bioshock 1, they switched to UE3 toolset, which may also add reason for working on UE3 instead of their own engine.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Remember people, at least half of the package in licensing UE3 is the content creation tools.
Level editor, animation editor, GUI-based shader editor, scripting, whatever... It'd take a huge team and a lot of time to build these up from scratch and you couldn't even produce a prototype until they're all at least in like an alpha stage. Sustaining an unproductive art and level design team for just a few months would cost millions of dollars, so even if you end up rewriting half the engine, you'll still save a lot of money if you can hit the ground running on day 1.

 

[jlippo]

But aren't they just normal sized DVDs but MS copy protection and other things (do we actually know what takes up that much space?) takes the usable space down to 6.8 GB?

There were talk that they have a DVD partition of ~1GB in there to display message on standard DVD player.
Apparently the video partition is nowadays used to store some updates as well.

 

[Billy Idol]

@grandmaster: are you planning a KZ3 beta tech review, maybe review obvious changes to KZ2?!

 

[LightHeaven]

So when can we expect a DF feature on kinect's lag?

It seems that on setup you can get a view on kinects vision + skeletal tracking, how about comparing the delay there to in game measures?