Image Quality and Framebuffer Analysis for Available/release build Games *Read the first post*

[AlNom]

I don't think that 4xAA was the reason that the first game run at such a low res.

huh? That's going to be a fairly big part of it considering it's a type of deferred renderer plus they actually did proper shading of the MSAA samples.

So A) there's the edram consideration, and B) shading all those lit samples is going to be a fairly costly thing to do.

Yes, A2C with 4xAA is going to be pretty heavy on the fillrate and bandwidth as well, but that's not the only thing at play here.

Keep in mind, they do have a lot of buffers being used (shadow buffers, post-fx etc); there could also be a memory issue hence the jump in res not being high.

576p= 1024X576 I assume?

2xmsaa + fxaa?

Yep.

I thought they dropped 4*MSAA for 720p once they got FXAA in?

Nah, they only said the res was higher and they added in FXAA. The "we had 4xAA" can mean one of two things (either no AA or 2xAA).

 

[Kameradschaft]

huh? That's going to be a fairly big part of it considering it's a type of deferred renderer plus they actually did proper shading of the MSAA samples.

So A) there's the edram consideration, and B) shading all those lit samples is going to be a fairly costly thing to do.

Yes, A2C with 4xAA is going to be pretty heavy on the fillrate and bandwidth as well, but that's not the only thing at play here.

Keep in mind, they do have a lot of buffers being used (who knows what, but they do have a ton of post-fx etc); there could also be a memory issue hence the jump in res not being high.

Thanks for clarifying Al, from what I've played the slight bump in res with 2xAA+FXAA improved the IQ quite a bit.

A tech interview from DF on American Nightmare will be very interesting, hopefully we'll see something like this.

 

[Turok]

The IQ for Alan Wake looks a lot better this time around, although the A2C dithering is quite noticeable now.

 

[AlNom]

I may have a little correction for AW's horizontal resolution.

 

[Kameradschaft]

I may have a little correction for AW's horizontal resolution.

Spill the beans Al...

I played around 3hrs yesterday and the IQ is much better than the first game...the 2xAA+FXAA really helped with the jaggies, the game looks really clean and overall the game is much sharper.

 

[Rangers]

Digital Foundry ‏ @Digital_Foundry

Alan Wake feature going well. American Nightmare on 360 seems to be 1152x576, 2x MSAA + FXAA. Changed from 960x544, 4x MSAA in first game.

 

[AlNom]

Still a correction needed after that. Should be able to confirm it when I'm not busy though.

 

[MarkusRMD]

Yeah, DF is close but quite no cigar. I'll give you a hint from renderer.cpp

// largest 4xAA resolution that will fit in 2 tiles, upscaled with xbox hardware upscaler

 

[AlNom]

The 4xAA sure is pretty hard to spot now with FXAA, but now that I've got some uncompressed captures (FXAA seems done before transparencies are blended in as well?):

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Regarding res, something didn't quite look right with the 1024 width assumption from the other day, and I had to wait for grandmaster to get some proper grabs to even tackle it. The 4/5 ratio didn't fit for one thing, and even 9/10 isn't right once I found a long enough edge to disprove that one even (26/30 != 9/10 for instance). For one thing the math didn't make sense as you've pointed out, Markus (thanks!). Always has to be some logic to the chosen res on 360 at least. I'm guessing 960x544 was chosen after some time with profiling the performance.

Anyways, 1120x576 is what I found.

Actually, this reminds me of Ninja Gaiden 2, which fits the back buffer in 1 tile instead. So is the vertical res, 585? Such an odd number would require a little too much effort to compare to 576.

 

[Ruskie]

So, 4xMSAA and FXAA?

 

[Scott_Arm]

So sub-hd but 4x MSAA + FXAA. Where does that rank on the image quality scale? Are other buffers same results as opaque geometry or lower?

 

[Reiko]

So sub-hd but 4x MSAA + FXAA. Where does that rank on the image quality scale? Are other buffers same results as opaque geometry or lower?

I would rank that as high. 4XMSAA plus the combo of FXAA is just really clean.

I would put it slightly above MLAA for God of War 3 which suffered from sub pixel shimmering.

 

[AlNom]

Are other buffers same results as opaque geometry or lower?

Transparencies are at a lower res and can break the AA.

The MSAA also seems to be incorrect with bright light sources, which probably means they do the resolve before all the HDR lighting/post-fx gets layered on. It'd be much more expensive to do per sample shading. The same lighting/AA issue can show up on PC as well, but the high quality FXAA mode seems to catch those edges a lot better than the implementation for American Nightmare.

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As for your other question, there's just too many considerations to rank it. 4xAA on its own is pretty rare, but it also doesn't help if the pixel result gets borked by HDR lighting. At the same time, 4xAA helps quite a bit with sub-pixel objects, edge crawling, A2C alpha textures, and all of that ends up being at the mercy of the artistic direction. Similarly, their specific FXAA implementation on 360 doesn't catch all the edges, and these tend to be the edges that are the ones that need it the most because of the lighting issue (you can still get broken AA with transparencies behind opaque geometry). It really depends on the environment setup. Clearly, resolution is going to be more important in the really bright scenes, but looking back at AW, it was generally a dark game with few surfaces that lit up like the sun compared to the adjacent surfaces. Or put another way, the range of lighting across surfaces was rather consistent for the most part. Some surfaces get that crazy specular and go super bright next to a duller lit surface, or the HDR light source is just really bright e.g. computer monitor in the Wake apartment.

 

[reptile]

1120x576 msaa4x, 2 tiles. cigar?
edit: oh, AlStrong beat me to it.

 

[Scott_Arm]

...
As for your other question, there's just too many considerations to rank it. 4xAA on its own is pretty rare, but it also doesn't help if the pixel result gets borked by HDR lighting. At the same time, 4xAA helps quite a bit with sub-pixel objects, edge crawling, A2C alpha textures, and all of that ends up being at the mercy of the artistic direction. ...

One thing I noticed is A2C dithering on hair really stands out. The girl you meet at the beginning of the game, in her garage, looks very strange because the dithering basically destroys any detail you would see in her hair. It doesn't look like hair at all. I thought the 4xMSAA was supposed to deal with that.

 

[Gitaroo]

So sub-hd but 4x MSAA + FXAA. Where does that rank on the image quality scale? Are other buffers same results as opaque geometry or lower?

I am surprised it was 4XMSAA still, can see some jaggy here and there even with FXAA and higher res now. IQ scale still not very high for me since it still pretty blurry compare to real 720p. Would prefer 720p 2XMSAA over it easily. I know its not a fair comparison, but I just got the PC version of AW, and have been playing in 1080, 2xmsaa and fxaa set to high, going to AW:AN is like going a huge step backward, especially when the foliage was highlight of the original game and they seems to cut them down significantly in the new game. Did they do that to free up bandwidth so they are able to up the res?

 

[AlNom]

One thing I noticed is A2C dithering on hair really stands out. The girl you meet at the beginning of the game, in her garage, looks very strange because the dithering basically destroys any detail you would see in her hair. It doesn't look like hair at all. I thought the 4xMSAA was supposed to deal with that.

It's not perfect, but then alpha tested hair would be pretty aliased enough.

I know its not a fair comparison, but I just got the PC version of AW, and have been playing in 1080, 2xmsaa and fxaa set to high, going to AW:AN is like going a huge step backward

Well of course, you're comparing your current PC setup which has clearly got buckets more power than a 6 year old design. Kind of meaningless for the thread.

 

[Gitaroo]

Well of course, you're comparing your current PC setup which has clearly got buckets more power than a 6 year old design. Kind of meaningless for the thread.

Ya, that why I said its not a fair comparison but just the order the release it on 2 different platform. Should release AW:AN on pc at the same time, but I know MS wouldn't allow that.

 

[Kasersky]

DF alan wake+alan wake AN is up

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-vs-alan-wake

 

[Kasersky]

DF just put up an article on Syndicate. what a great looking game and a real achievement on console. And surprised by the lack of people's reaction to the visuals in this game.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-syndicate-face-off

one thing in particular stood out to me, take a look at the fences even at very far distances it still retains detail and you don't get floating pixels on the 360. I dont think i've ever seen fences this well done on the 360 even beating out the PC imo.

360:
http://images.eurogamer.net/2012/articles//a/1/4/5/0/7/1/1/360_046.png
PS3:
http://images.eurogamer.net/2012/articles//a/1/4/5/0/7/1/1/PS3_046.png
PC:
http://images.eurogamer.net/2012/articles//a/1/4/5/0/7/1/1/PC_1080_005.png