Project Cars [PS4, XO]

and, this is what game director have to say about ghosting (from gtplanet):

"It's not a bug. It's a side effect of the way we do AA on PS4, and is arguably a good thing (hear me out!). It's there, and very noticeable from static images of non-direct feed footage especially, but also undeniably in the game itself (mainly when paused). I spotted it and reported it as soon as it got checked in long ago (so we didn't "miss it" as many would have you believe).

However, I also "spotted" that the PS4 version has really lovely image quality, a very smooth and slightly soft (not low res!), "non-gamey" look, which is very natural, and (imo!) rather fantastic, due to this very clever AA approach. It also greatly minimises the distant "shimmer" you often see in console racing games, which is a side effect of low quality AA on thin vertical objects such as fences.

So yes, the ghosting effect is there, if you look hard enough. The advantages far outweigh this small disadvantage however. Notwithstanding that, if customer feedback demands it, we have a plan to add a UI slider in a future update, which will enable you to tune out the ghosting, at the expense of more aliasing and distant shimmer."


which I think is BS and an option to disable it should be there from the beginning, even GT5 had an option to disable TXAA
 
Oh, finally I found this thread. At least there are people here with enough technical understanding for me to not go completely nuts.

I was the one that brought up the issue. The timeline goes like this:
  1. I saw a TeamVVV video about 3 weeks ago. Their 60fps video did not feel 60fps and showed ghosting, so I thought it was an encoding error, I warned them in youtube comments about their encoding settings. I downloaded the video just to make sure, indeed, the video was 30fps! Little did I know, the game at actual 60fps had this ghosting. I thought I had figured it out because it was indeed a 30fps video with double frames.
  2. Digital foundry puts up an early piece, and thinks this is per object motion blur. This is very funny indeed. If they cared to advance their frames, they'd clearly see the effect is just a buffer blend across the whole frame. It doesn't look like motion blur even in stills but they had access to the whole capture of theirs. The P.Cars team says that is an old build so I didn't think it was important.
  3. Latest videos at TeamVVV come out, at actual 60fps. The capture is ghost fest. Yeah, smooth running ghost fest. I thought it was their encoding again, because they had that history of encoding 30fps video at 60fps.
  4. Gamersyde puts up videos. Ghosting everywhere. I began to lean on borked temporal AA, because one wouldn't seriously mangle their IQ as bad as this on purpose, I naively thought.
  5. I take the issue to GAF threads for the devs to see. They are very friendly and listening, but I had a hard time convincing that this wasn't a motion blur. The team member doesn't see the effect at all when viewing the game in motion, and if indeed it was a bug, it would need to get past 100's of people at Namco and their team. He even (kindly) dismisses my display of what proper motion blur would look like from shots of God Of War, by saying the car is running much faster (ignoring that there is ghosting also horizontally when car is turning, and I'd expect to see more samples from a motion blur. Not just a straight mixture of two consecutive frames.)
  6. People do not notice the ghosting even at 30fps twitch streams, let alone 60fps. Actually yeah, ghosted 30fps footage does look to have smoother motion compared to 30fps without ghosting. At the expense of a clean image.
  7. Now we learn it's some form of AA. If it's AA, it's a very bad implementation.
  8. I still think it's some bug, but they may be trying to downplay how it got past quality assurance by introducing as a feature (with remarks about how it gives it a nice, soft, non gamey look). I don't think destroying the image would be something to be done on purpose..
  9. Whatever it is, 99% do not notice it, and think the image quality is good.
This is why I think all those man hours working on complex temporal aa techniques by the likes of Guerilla, Crytek etc. could have been spent elsewhere, because simply blending two buffers seems to be the way to go. Nobody notices how bad it is. This has far reaching implications about where to spend your graphics programmers time and how you market your game. (Just put 16x AF during the starting grid for example.. Because you'll be blending those sweet sharp textures when the car moves anyway, you can tone it down later!)

I even made a PSD file proving this is just a crude blend, sent it to the team member thinking this was the motion blur implementation.
 
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One free new car each month for two years apparently. Car list is ok for me, as long as I like the way the cars drive, then the track-list makes up for it. The better the driving experience, the fewer cars I need, really. I was driving a 458 in Assetto Corsa yesterday, and that was such a great experience. What a joy to drive!.

That's still only 24 more cars, and they're probably going to be racing cars or exotics anyway. I suppose it depends on what you like most about sims, I especially like the fact that I can drive a variety of different everyday cars and feel the nuanced differences in how they drive (and so I know how a particular car compares to my car, or a car compares to its close competitor). But other people (like yourself) are more interested in racing high powered machinery around real life tracks and playing at being actual racing drivers.
 
That's actually me as well. It's what I like about games like Gran Turismo so much. The subtleties of a front wheel drive losing grip under acceleration and knowing that's what it feels like because you drive one everyday, knowing that you have to let it roll through the corners etc. I just think Project Cars is coming out to be much better than I ever expected out of this kind of project now already that I can't feel they underdelivered against my expectations.
 
This is why I think all those man hours working on complex temporal aa techniques by the likes of Guerilla, Crytek etc. could have been spent elsewhere, because simply blending two buffers seems to be the way to go. Nobody notices how bad it is. This has far reaching implications about where to spend your graphics programmers time and how you market your game. (Just put 16x AF during the starting grid for example.. Because you'll be blending those sweet sharp textures when the car moves anyway, you can tone it down later!)
That's true even of an excellent, complex motion blur rather than a buffer blend. The intention of developers is, or should be, to give the best experience in motion, rather than the best freeze-frames (for which we have photo modes!) so I can't criticise options that reduce per-pixel clarity if they improve the motion experience. Which is subjective, of course. The obvious solution is settings where users can choose what effects to preserve. The issue here is more one of implementation than intention, and just who decided a flat buffer blend is a reasonable AA solution? Or even, how is ghosting a side-effect? Antialiasing is a side effect of temporal buffer blends rather than the other way around!
 
Reviews are pretty good so far, praising the campaign in particular.

Personally, this comment from the Eurogamer 'release impressions' from Oli W. is what I am the most concerned about:

@Playstationman Don't get me wrong, it's not bad a bad sim at all, especially on a wheel. But it's no Assetto Corsa or iRacing. I think Gran Turismo has an edge over it too.

And yes I'm purely talking about handling feel... as TelexStar points out there is an impressive range of simulation options for damage etc. I'll deal with all this in more detail in the full review.

That handling is my primary concern. Hopefully it is close enough, but I am slightly worried.
 
How can ex-SimBin guys get the handling wrong, they used to be the only ones getting it right?
 
That's true even of an excellent, complex motion blur rather than a buffer blend. The intention of developers is, or should be, to give the best experience in motion, rather than the best freeze-frames (for which we have photo modes!) so I can't criticise options that reduce per-pixel clarity if they improve the motion experience. Which is subjective, of course. The obvious solution is settings where users can choose what effects to preserve. The issue here is more one of implementation than intention, and just who decided a flat buffer blend is a reasonable AA solution? Or even, how is ghosting a side-effect? Antialiasing is a side effect of temporal buffer blends rather than the other way around!

True, I agree game graphics have to be qualified in motion. The most ideal would not be to have any motion blur and maybe run at 120-240 hz, the more temporal resolution, the less you need to willfully destroy visual information. Since we don't have that, motion blur can produce pleasing results for the eye. Also, a proper motion blur can look really nice in motion, as well as in still shots. It's a win-win.

Very bad youtube compression on here (taken from a comment under digital foundry) but it's enough to tell a frame blend from a motion blur:
L34ouz7.png

XboxOne seems to have a proper motion blur implementation, while PS4 has no motion blur but a frame blend. The fact that Digital foundry thinks this is a motion blur implementation is very strange. Calls them "banding" artefacts. Yeah, motion blur effects may have banding with too few sample outputs along a path, but you can't call a straight buffer blend a form of motion blur. This puts doubt in me about their expertise. I don't even think there needs to be semantic discussion about what one can call motion blur. (and the devs mention this is "temporal aa" anyway)
 
True, I agree game graphics have to be qualified in motion. The most ideal would not be to have any motion blur and maybe run at 120-240 hz, the more temporal resolution, the less you need to willfully destroy visual information. Since we don't have that, motion blur can produce pleasing results for the eye. Also, a proper motion blur can look really nice in motion, as well as in still shots. It's a win-win.

Very bad youtube compression on here (taken from a comment under digital foundry) but it's enough to tell a frame blend from a motion blur:
L34ouz7.png

XboxOne seems to have a proper motion blur implementation, while PS4 has no motion blur but a frame blend. The fact that Digital foundry thinks this is a motion blur implementation is very strange. Calls them "banding" artefacts. Yeah, motion blur effects may have banding with too few sample outputs along a path, but you can't call a straight buffer blend a form of motion blur. This puts doubt in me about their expertise. I don't even think there needs to be semantic discussion about what one can call motion blur. (and the devs mention this is "temporal aa" anyway)

From a friend buying the game. He hopes the patch for giving option to disable the temporal AA will arrive soon. Ghosting is annoying.
 
I'm getting it on PC, but if the game is good, I may support it by also getting the PS4 version, so yeah, I bet making that optional will be in a patch soon. ;)

Also, I red in Eurogamer comments that the weight-shift force-feedback in your wheel is one of the many settings that you can fully customize in this game. So the level of options so far seems to be very exhaustive. Definitely look forward to testing that out.
 
True, I agree game graphics have to be qualified in motion. The most ideal would not be to have any motion blur and maybe run at 120-240 hz, the more temporal resolution, the less you need to willfully destroy visual information. Since we don't have that, motion blur can produce pleasing results for the eye. Also, a proper motion blur can look really nice in motion, as well as in still shots. It's a win-win.

Very bad youtube compression on here (taken from a comment under digital foundry) but it's enough to tell a frame blend from a motion blur:
L34ouz7.png

XboxOne seems to have a proper motion blur implementation, while PS4 has no motion blur but a frame blend. The fact that Digital foundry thinks this is a motion blur implementation is very strange. Calls them "banding" artefacts. Yeah, motion blur effects may have banding with too few sample outputs along a path, but you can't call a straight buffer blend a form of motion blur. This puts doubt in me about their expertise. I don't even think there needs to be semantic discussion about what one can call motion blur. (and the devs mention this is "temporal aa" anyway)
Digital Foundry staff are human after all, sometimes they have to judge what kind of AA a games uses from their screengrabs, and that's a very difficult thing. I guess that they were wrong sometimes, Project Cars is just an example, where a developer engaged in the conversation and told the truth about the actual AA the game uses.

I think they should refrain from calling certain things the old familiar FXAA, SMAA, MSAA, etc etc, and just call it AA. They could simply make a distinction between temporal AA or not --this one is easy to see. Because I think FXAA is the worst of them all and sometimes you are just calling FXAA some technique that maybe is just a lot more refined form of AA.

They are also surprisingly good at finding little details that might go unnoticeable for 90% of the people. As discussed in another thread about how to build a new PC for gaming, I just hope they could actually use PCs that cost the same as the consoles and compared the results even if they used a top of the line PC too.

I think that should be a more fair comparison.

You brought a good point. cheers!
 
Very bad youtube compression on here (taken from a comment under digital foundry) but it's enough to tell a frame blend from a motion blur:
L34ouz7.png

XboxOne seems to have a proper motion blur implementation, while PS4 has no motion blur but a frame blend.
The blending is plain ugly in that shot, although the car appears to have motion blur especially on the front. There's no way I can look at PS4 and XB1 and agree that PS4 has a temporal AA system in place as a benefit. The most obvious explanation is a bug or, god forbid the internet explodes, an inferior renderer for whatever reason.
 
Judging from the performance on the PC version, the consoles are holding up very well. What's with AMD graphics cards and this game?

pcars_r_1920h.png
 
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