John Carmack: Doom 4 will support Partially Resident Textures (Tiled Resources)

Partially resident textures just moves some of the work that virtual texture rendering has done from software to hardware. It should be a more efficient way of doing the same thing that's already being done.

Trials uses virtual texturing as well. Not sure if they're using the PRT feature of GCN or not. I would guess yes, but the answer may be no as they were cross-gen for this release.
 
So what I'm getting here is that Doom4 should always display a super high res textured scene at any given point? Can we say it's equivalent of offline render texture quality then? If so that's gonna look incredible.
 
https://twitter.com/idsoftwaretiago

Tiago-Sousa.jpg


Tiago Sousa was Crytek's long-standing Lead R&D Graphics Engineer.
 
So what I'm getting here is that Doom4 should always display a super high res textured scene at any given point?
I don't see what known facts so far would make you draw such a conclusion...

Can we say it's equivalent of offline render texture quality then?
Unlikely. It'd need to ship on multiple BR discs, and the workload on texture artists would be immense...

If so that's gonna look incredible.
I'm sure it'll look good regardless.
 
Windows 8.1 is okay. I prefer 7, but you can live with 8 once you get used to avoiding Metro (which is awesome on phone but fairly shit on M&KB).

Plus, Win 9 should be out soon, and that'll fix a lot of the intentional NUI forcing going on with 8.

But if it helps just think of Win 8 as a more modern Win 7, plus some stuff you'll work out how to avoid.
 
Wow, some...interesting things are being said in this thread. Here's my 2 cents:

A. Sparse textures/tiled resources just provides some native hardware support for certain parts of a virtual texturing pipeline. In particular it lets you avoid a manual indirection in your shader, which makes it easier and cheaper to sample and filter your virtual textures. It's not going to allow for a dramatic leap in texture quality or anything like that. Most likely it's just going to give you better performance, and possibly allow for higher-quality anisotropic filtering than what the software path will provide. Which brings me to point B....

B. I really doubt that they're going to require tiled resources support for this game. They can certainly provide a software path for Win7 and older GPU's, and still achieve visual parity (or very close to it).
 
I don't see what known facts so far would make you draw such a conclusion...


Unlikely. It'd need to ship on multiple BR discs, and the workload on texture artists would be immense...


I'm sure it'll look good regardless.

I recall MS showcased a demo which highlighted how you can zoom in on an object continuously without loosing definition. Like how you can concentrate all the texture resources on what's only visible to what you see. I thought that's what PRT does or am I confusing it with something else?
 
Hardware support for partially resident textures (called Tiled Resources in DirectX API, or more generally "sparse textures"), do not bring any new possibilities over software virtual texturing implementation (custom shader code). It mostly shaves off a few ALU instructions (and one cache friendly memory load), makes anisotropic filtering easier to implement properly and doesn't need tile borders for filtering (that saves less than one percent of storage space, but makes addressing easier because tile borders make power of two alignment hard).

Hardware PRT also provides a minor memory saving (~10 megabytes total), as you don't need your own indirection lookup texture. However if you use a hash instead of a texture with full mip chain (one pixel represents one page, for example 128x128 pixels of texture data), your memory consumption is equal to hardware PRT version. But this requires one extra memory lookup (if cuckoo hash is used) and some extra ALU.
Tiled Resources isn't available on other platforms but the same tech via a different name (i.e. PRT) is available on many platforms.
Yes, all modern GPUs support sparse textures. OpenGL 4.4+ and DirectX 11.2+ has support for it on PC.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Hardware support for partially resident textures (called Tiled Resources in DirectX API, or more generally "sparse textures"), do not bring any new possibilities over software virtual texturing implementation (custom shader code). It mostly shaves off a few ALU instructions (and one cache friendly memory load), makes anisotropic filtering easier to implement properly and doesn't need tile borders for filtering (that saves less than one percent of storage space, but makes addressing easier because tile borders make power of two alignment hard).

Hardware PRT also provides a minor memory saving (~10 megabytes total), as you don't need your own indirection lookup texture. However if you use a hash instead of a texture with full mip chain (one pixel represents one page, for example 128x128 pixels of texture data), your memory consumption is equal to hardware PRT version. But this requires one extra memory lookup (if cuckoo hash is used) and some extra ALU.

Yes, all modern GPUs support sparse textures. OpenGL 4.4+ and DirectX 11.2+ has support for it on PC.

As I said, "Looks like the Xbox One version will be king " :cool:

But in all seriousness: thanks for the explanation!
 
How so? It has no advantage over other platforms.
It would if Bethsoft simply refuses to use the available hardware features on PS4.

They're just evil enough that I might believe they would do something like that. And Bethy has long-standing asslickery relationship with MS, so they might have financial incentive to make this version look/run better for whatever reason (this stretching back to the days of Oblivion launching first on 360 IIRC, all expansions for Skyrim launched first on 360 as well.)
 
Back
Top