Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion Archive [2010]

[SG79]

Well I'll be damned, Dimps has actually improved SSFIV on the PS3, and it's a consistent 720p now:

Before:

http://images.eurogamer.net/assets/articles//a/1/0/8/7/1/5/8/SF4_000_Final.jpg.jpg

After:

http://images.eurogamer.net/assets/articles//a/1/0/8/7/1/5/8/SSF4_000_Final.jpg.jpg

I wish Capcom's own internal studio responsible for RE5 followed their steps and swapped the pesky QAA to 2X MSAA instead.

Here's the full feature with other comparisons:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-xbox360-vs-ps3-round-25-face-off?page=2

Kudos for listing supported audio codecs too. On that note, I was under the impression that the DD bitrate on the 360 was 448kbps like current DVD's. Or perhaps it varies from one software to another? I think RE5 was 448kbps.

Dimps SFIV/SSFIV titles aside, all Capcom's internally developed titles have LPCM 5.1 support on the PS3 that for some reason has to be forced. The quality isn't any better than the DD option and they've been of noticeably lower volume too.

 

[AlNom]

448 is what's used for DVD, but 640 is the maximum defined by the DD5.1 spec. As far as my receiver tells me, the 360 does output this for what games I have played (or rather, own).

 

[SG79]

448 is the most common for DVD, but 640 is the maximum defined by the DD5.1 spec. As far as my receiver tells me, the 360 does output this for what games I have played.

Yeah, early DVD's were considerably lower than that too. I stand corrected, so I guess any differences I hear are mainly due to compression and volume levels.

I remember popping in RR7 and even though it doesn't support LPCM, the audio was certainly of higher quality than RR6,

 

[vjPiedPiper]

demoscene coders are awesome and never die.

LOL i love that, and totally agree!

 

[liolio]

Nice interview of David Jefferies from Black rock Studio
Black Rock shares the same view as Naughty Dogs in regard to gamma correctness.
Those guys are good imho Pure still impress me, I'll give the Split second demo a go soon.

 

[assurdum]

Nice interview of David Jefferies from Black rock Studio
Black Rock shares the same view as Naughty Dogs in regard to gamma correctness.
Those guys are good imho Pure still impress me, I'll give the Split second demo a go soon.

To be honest I found the opinion of MLAA vs MSAA very subjective ; I never seen a racer game so jaggies how SS & he contest MLAA in the finiest objects... MLAA not works for subpixel but Split Second IQ could only rebird with the MLAA technic used in GOW...it's really really jaggies... MSAA remain better choice for the transparancies, but MLAA through SPE for the IQ it's a generation ahead...

 

[Rangers]

Nice interview of David Jefferies from Black rock Studio
Black Rock shares the same view as Naughty Dogs in regard to gamma correctness.
Those guys are good imho Pure still impress me, I'll give the Split second demo a go soon.

That is quite a fascinating article.

-Reenforces the GPU/CPU PS3/360 split.
-Notes they are using the SPU's on PS3. I thought as a matter of course, multiplatforms did not do that. Though Split Second is quite the spiffy looking multiplat.

 

[liolio]

I've found this part interesting:

Most games don't bother with gamma correctness because it takes many months to develop a full gamma-correct pipeline and you can get it 'nearly' right without. If you do take the time to develop the pipeline then you guarantee that your lighting calculations are always absolutely correct. It's this that you're seeing when you look at the objects not directly in sunlight in Split/Second - the low-intensity pixels are lit correctly rather than being fudged.
Another important factor here is the anti-aliasing. Essentially MSAA averages the colour of the sub-pixels on a polygon edge, so for 2xMSAA it does something like P = (Pa + Pb) / 2.0. As explained earlier, maths doesn't work as you'd expect when in a non-linear space such as gamma space so the equation will not give the correct results.
Most games ship with incorrect anti-aliasing and the developer either ignores the artifacts that get produced or they have low-contrast lighting which means that the artifacts are less prominent.

I wonder if a lot of UE3 engine in regard to aliasing and artifact comes down to this.

 

[Titanio]

That is quite a fascinating article.

-Reenforces the GPU/CPU PS3/360 split.
-Notes they are using the SPU's on PS3. I thought as a matter of course, multiplatforms did not do that. Though Split Second is quite the spiffy looking multiplat.

I think it would be very very rare to find a multiplat game that doesn't use SPUs at all.

If you mean for rendering, graphics, that may be a newer development, at least for these parts of the pipeline. Using them for geometry processing is probably more common, and an older development.

Blur seems to do something similar, deferred lighting on SPU. It's what KZ2 did also. I'm sure they're all different implementations, you can read about Blur's here:

A Bizarre Way to do Real-Time Lighting

 

[Bigduo209]

Apparently Split/Second has a 7GB install.
http://media.e-mpire.com/images/Split-Second Back of Box.jpg

 

[assurdum]

I've found this part interesting:

I wonder if a lot of UE3 angine in regard to aliasing and artifact comes down to this.

Well, it isn't exactly a news the concept of low contrast better AA edge & again I sound like pretty lamer or troll but in Second Split I have found this AA almost inefficient, at least in the demo; I don't know why not to use at least MLAA to support...they are the second developers who criticize the MLAA after DiCE and I don't follow the logic jaggies is better of MLAA because not works in some edges What the hell means? Just said MLAA waste too much resources not this absurdity.

 

[Titanio]

It did not sound an awful lot like he was dead set against MLAA, but that he had some reservations at least in theory. It doesn't sound like it was something they'd actually evaluated in practice for Split/Second.

The results in GoWIII were quite eye opening, so I would certainly hope that developers if possible would evaluate it in reality for their game, and if it works, to use it, and if not, don't. I'd love for it to become a standard avenue to explore.

But one thing to bear in mind, in the short term at least, is that implementation may not be trivial. Looking at the more detailed 'history' of the technique's development (the Sony ATG/GoWIII implementation, I mean) it doesn't seem like it was something that just worked perfectly out of the box, performance-wise etc. It took a bit of work to get it into a optimized state and so on. I do not believe that third parties have access to that code, at least not yet. So it's one thing for a developer like Media Molecule to cheerfully pick up the code from Sony ATG and plug it and say 'this is awesome, we'll have thank you very much', but for a third party...it's not so simple. Right now I presume they don't have access to that code, and so even just evaluating the technique would mean rolling their own implementation. That = time, resources. Something you'd probably have to plan for, probably not something you could accommodate at the tail end of a project shipping soon (as in Split/Second).

I do hope Sony will push it out to third parties as they did with the Edge tools though. It would be a nice companion, a library that covers one end of the pipe (Edge), then perhaps another that can jump in and the other end (post-processing - MLAA and perhaps some other nice post-processing techniques optimised for SPUs). THEN, indeed, not giving it a go would become less excusable, even in third party games.

 

[joker454]

-Notes they are using the SPU's on PS3. I thought as a matter of course, multiplatforms did not do that.

That's just a prevailing (and heavily incorrect) opinion on forums.

 

[Bigduo209]

Wait, how many 3rd party studios actually gets developer support from Sony. Especially with up-to-date development techniques used in 1st-party games, and is it the quality of support anywhere near what MS does (even with the 360's ease of development).

I mean does Sony do anything to help curb the difficulty some studios have with PS3 development? I always hear of some studio contact MS for help, but I rarely hear the same thing happening with Sony when it comes to the PS3.

 

[assurdum]

Wait, how many 3rd party studios actually gets developer support from Sony. Especially with up-to-date development techniques used in 1st-party games, and is it the quality of support anywhere near what MS does (even with the 360's ease of development).

I mean does Sony do anything to help curb the difficulty some studios have with PS3 development? I always hear of some studio contact MS for help, but I rarely hear the same thing happening with Sony when it comes to the PS3.

Sony gives support to third parties but clearly not reach the job of the first parties cooperations...

 

[joker454]

Wait, how many 3rd party studios actually gets developer support from Sony.

3rd parties can chat with guys on the Naughty Dog Ice team, send them performance profiles for analysis and suggestions, or have them send a dude out on site to look over the code. A friend of mine works on the Ice team and he has been sent to 3rd parties here and there to help out.

 

[Bigduo209]

3rd parties can chat with guys on the Naughty Dog Ice team, send them performance profiles for analysis and suggestions, or have them send a dude out on site to look over the code. A friend of mine works on the Ice team and he has been sent to 3rd parties here and there to help out.

Well that's nice to know, but I'm curious as to how many 3rd party studios receive that kind of support though. If your friend can/has give any examples then I would like to know, but if that's confidential then I'm fine without knowing.

One thing I'm curious is why Split/Second requires a 7GB install for the PS3, and what does that have to do with the game's performance?

 

[Kasersky]

One thing I'm curious is why Split/Second requires a 7GB install for the PS3, and what does that have to do with the game's performance?

track detail is probably streamed this way you can push higher texture detail by swapping them out, data streaming off hdd is much better than bluray. also reduces initial load times as well. as for the install size it probably just installs the entirety of the disc to simplify implementation

 

[Gitaroo]

I think someone mentioned on GAF that the 7 gig install is a typo, it is actually 3.7 gig.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

A very interesting issue about the resolutions...

Split/Second is using 1280x672 (860160 pixels) vs. Halo Reach using 1152x720 (829440 pixels). And yet it is Reach that does not appear to be using any scaling, so it really demonstrates how horizontal scanning is less noticeable to the human eye.

Yeah I know Reach has temporal AA but it still wouldn't help the general image quality. The game looks cleaner with less pixels, which is a very valuable lesson for future development.