Project Cars [PS4, XO]

[Arwin]

Will be interesting to find out. I'm hoping this will eventually lead to a full interview between SMS and DF that gives us some more details. In theory, for GPGPU the PS4 has 50% more CUs available than the Xbox One, so that could be a reason to have less jobs on the CPU than on the PS4 - it all just depends on where the bottlenecks are.

 

[Metal_Spirit]

If you look at the source of this story it's from the comments section on Eurogamer's article. I couldn't find the comment in question so take it with a pinch of salt unless you can a) find it and b) attribute it to somebody who knows what their talking about!

As stated above, the comments were made by someone called SMSRENDER TEAM. They can be found at this link.

 

[Arwin]

Looking at those posts, I have a hard time believing that this is unreliable information. Looks totally legit, in other words.

 

[Davros]

"However, Microsoft had recently opened up 50% of the 7th core to developers : in later builds the development team was able to offload work such as the audio mixing, engine sound synthesis and detailed grass generation onto this core, fixing this problem of becoming CPU limited."

Supports my theory that shape exists to save disk space

 

[Metal_Spirit]

"However, Microsoft had recently opened up 50% of the 7th core to developers : in later builds the development team was able to offload work such as the audio mixing, engine sound synthesis and detailed grass generation onto this core, fixing this problem of becoming CPU limited."

Supports my theory that shape exists to save disk space

If this is true I can only see this as a result of a superior API on the PS4. That means Xbox really needs DX 12 and the CPU parallelization features.

But Shape existing to save disk space??? How come?

 

[Davros]

If you look at shape most of it's power is dedicated to decompressing audio streams so they can be used in game without using a cpu core
so a xb1 game can ship with the audio files in a compressed format saving disk space, if you look at some cross platform games xb1/pc
you will notice the xb1 install takes up less hdd space because all its audio is stored in a compressed format while on the pc the audio is stored in a non compressed format.

Dont get me wrong since we are quickly coming to the age of the 50gb game and seeing that the xb1 only ships with a 500gb drive saving disk space is a good thing, but when we first learned about shape people were claiming it would be capable of creating all sorts of audio effects and realistic in game audio would take a huge step forward. I was very sceptical

 

[(((interference)))]

What audio middleware are they using? It depends on how the engine is set up to handle audio I guess.

But SHAPE does not exist primarily to save disk space, bkilian has made that quite clear, and he would know.

"The audio block is completely unique. That was designed by us in-house. It's based on four tensilica DSP cores and several programmable processing engines. We break it up as one core running control, two cores running a lot of vector code for speech and one for general purpose DSP. We couple that with sample rate conversion, filtering, mixing, equalisation, dynamic range compensation then also the XMA audio block. The goal was to run 512 simultaneous voices for game audio as well as being able to do speech pre-processing for Kinect."

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-vs-the-xbox-one-architects

 

[Arwin]

Point is that in this day of multiplatform development, not every game will have (or indeed need) dedicated audio code for each platform, and the SDK probably only takes so much out of your hand by default.

I also wonder if there just aren't enough capable audio-programmers out there or dev studios that bother hire one. I have to think about PD's call for hire for one about a year ago, who seemed to suggest they are hard to find. I know there is good scientific work done on computer generated audio though, but I think not much of that has made it into games yet. Best progress I've seen so far was the use of ray-casting in games like Uncharted 2 for occlusions and such, but I'm sure there was other stuff I missed. But that's the most important thing about audio hardware I think - it should probably limit itself to mixing, transposing and enhancing, but otherwise be very tightly integrated with the graphics data so it can react to the 3D environment properly?

 

[Deleted member 11852]

As stated above, the comments were made by someone called SMSRENDER TEAM. They can be found at this link.

My bad. I didn't see the follow up comments when I posted.

It'd be nice to see a proper interview. It would also be nice if more devs directly commented on DF articles.

 

[Davros]

(((interference)))
Non of that quote indicates anything to do with realistic in game audio (well the dsp sort of vaguely hints it can do something)
All of that is just mixing a lot of streams and cleaning audio up (and some kinect stuff)

I should of really changed my statement to "The reason shape exists is to put many simultaneous streams in game without hitting the cpu and saving disk space"
Still the biggest benefit of it to end users is the diskspace saving

 

[Shifty Geezer]

30 unique locations and 110 different courses.

http://www.projectcarsgame.com/locations.html

And you feel the need to post images of them all?!?! The link provides people with access to the track details and images.

The wonderful thing about the internet is you don't need to copy/paste information because it's readily at hand, just a click away. Some snippets to save people from wandering all across the internet are sensible in a discussion, but the wholesale copy/paste of a track listing with images is pointless.

 

[Cyan]

And you feel the need to post images of them all?!?! The link provides people with access to the track details and images.

The wonderful thing about the internet is you don't need to copy/paste information because it's readily at hand, just a click away. Some snippets to save people from wandering all across the internet are sensible in a discussion, but the wholesale copy/paste of a track listing with images is pointless.

Ok, it won't happen again.

Looking at those posts, I have a hard time believing that this is unreliable information. Looks totally legit, in other words.

I think Eurogamer should remove the Project Cars article, it'd be the sensible thing to do.

What audio middleware are they using? It depends on how the engine is set up to handle audio I guess.

But SHAPE does not exist primarily to save disk space, bkilian has made that quite clear, and he would know.


http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-vs-the-xbox-one-architects

That's what I wonder too. Why would they need the CPU to process the audio when there is a whole audio block meant for this?

I remember reading in an article that dedicated audio hardware has its advantages and disadvantages, but I don't think the disadvantages are impacting enough not to use the audio chip instead of the CPU

 

[Arwin]

They don't have to remove the article, just give the disclaimer that the developer asked for that it is an older build. It is always interesting to see what a developer can do in the last few months before release to boost performance.

 

[Cyan]

New PS4 gameplay at 1080p 60 fps.

They don't have to remove the article, just give the disclaimer that the developer asked for that it is an older build. It is always interesting to see what a developer can do in the last few months before release to boost performance.

It sounds reasonable from your perspective. When I first read the article...in hindsight I thought that the game wouldn't deliver and I am interested in this game. Sometimes DF seems to rush their articles and back then I thought the article was unfair.

However, from that perspective of yours, SMS can show what they can do.

 

[Arwin]

Good footage by VVV! And after watching it I want to buy this game just to reward them for making lens flare an option alone!

 

[chris1515]

Le Mans helmet cam

Nürburgring helmet cam. Two videos are on PS4

 

[DieH@rd]

Worth of note, there are 2 cockpit cams. One that is inside helmet that Alan from VVV prefers [muffles sounds, adds head sway in corners, adds g-force movements, DOF effect], and one that is clear and fixed without movements/effects [I prefer that one].

Good thing is, all those helmet effects and many others [FOV, various visual effects] can be customized or turned off even on consoles.

 

[Globalisateur]

Worth of note, there are 2 cockpit cams. One that is inside helmet that Alan from VVV prefers [muffles sounds, adds head sway in corners, adds g-force movements, DOF effect], and one that is clear and fixed without movements/effects [I prefer that one].

Good thing is, all those helmet effects and many others [FOV, various visual effects] can be customized or turned off even on consoles.

Praise the lord!

 

[DieH@rd]

Praise the lord!

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...s4-and-xbox-one-has-pc-like-graphics-settings

 

[Arwin]

I like how you subtly look into corners in helmetcam