Sony's Next Generation Portable unveiling - PSP2 in disguise

[Titanio]

There's a presentation here from Dec 6 on 'Advanced Graphics Techniques for Playstation Vita' - not at all sure if it provides any new insight on the hardware side, but in case it does, here it is:

http://research.scee.net/files/presentations/gceurope2011/VitaIactaEst.pdf

On a more software-y note, it gives an overview of deferred rendering on Vita using Uncharted as an example - kind of surprised it's using that given that the PhyreEngine presentation from GDC wasn't very optimistic about deferred rendering on Vita.

Anyway, enjoy

 

[Lazy8s]

The visual designs of almost all Vita games so far aren't doing a good job of acknowledging the strengths of the hardware. The screenshot mechanism of the system appears bugged and makes it difficult to judge properly, yet image and texture quality are needlessly suffering in a lot of games. Tapping that enormous stencil performance wouldn't hurt for some games, either. I have hope for Little Big Planet, though.

Development maturity is still launch grade, of course.

 

[Gitaroo]

I thought MSAA is suppose to be almost free, how come almost all the launch titles don't use it. Even Uncharted, especially when its run at sub native res,

 

[Aeoniss]

Even apart from the 'launch title' qualifier, these games look pretty sick for a handheld.

 

[piSquaredOverSix]

does anyone know if golden abyss renders at native 960 by 544?

 

[AlNom]

I thought MSAA is suppose to be almost free, how come almost all the launch titles don't use it. Even Uncharted, especially when its run at sub native res,

It's not so much free as it is less costly than conventional implementations in other GPUs. You'd still have to pay a cost for shading for instance.

 

[Aeoniss]

does anyone know if golden abyss renders at native 960 by 544?

From what I understand its rendering below the native screen rez.

 

[frogblast]

I thought MSAA is suppose to be almost free, how come almost all the launch titles don't use it. Even Uncharted, especially when its run at sub native res,

'free' MSAA goes right out the window when doing deferred shading, which Uncharted is doing. You'll only see cheap MSAA for forward renderers (and maybe for light-prepass?)

 

[nAo]

'free' MSAA goes right out the window when doing deferred shading, which Uncharted is doing. You'll only see cheap MSAA for forward renderers (and maybe for light-prepass?)

There is a lot of research going on about making MSAA more affordable in terms of shading and storage requirements for deferred shaders and progress on practical algorithms is being made at a quite good pace. For instance see:

http://software.intel.com/en-us/art...g-for-current-and-future-rendering-pipelines/
http://vidimce.org/publications/sbaa/

 

[Rodéric]

Those papers made me think of that one I saw yesterday:
http://cg.ibds.kit.edu/ShadingReuse.php

 

[Aeoniss]

The visual designs of almost all Vita games so far aren't doing a good job of acknowledging the strengths of the hardware. The screenshot mechanism of the system appears bugged and makes it difficult to judge properly, yet image and texture quality are needlessly suffering in a lot of games. Tapping that enormous stencil performance wouldn't hurt for some games, either. I have hope for Little Big Planet, though.

Development maturity is still launch grade, of course.

Actually Dynasty Warriors Next compares rather favorably to Dynasty Warriors 7- which is to say that DW7 is not a bad looking game (not amazing either) and the Vita version seemingly keeps pace with it. Even one upping it in some shots I've seen.

But I guess there is alot we don't know- how much RAM is usable by developers? That's a big question, which is probably determined by the OS size.

It also has quite a few advantages compared to the present consoles, for one thing it only has to push half the amount of pixels as a full 720p title, it uses carts which presumably have extremely fast streaming abilities (thus saving on memory for buffers right?) and of course it does sport 128MB more RAM.

So to me, alot of the mystery rests solely with the OS. But one would think that Sony has gotten this stuff down pretty well thanks to their work on the PS3.

 

[Gitaroo]

dunno about that, someone posted some dev shot for the shinobido game, one shot says OS used 256MB of memory.

 

[Aeoniss]

What? Where?

 

[Arwin]

My guess has been for a while now that games can use 256MB RAM and 128MB Video RAM, and that the remaining is left to the OS and its Apps that can stay in memory while the game is running.

 

[Aeoniss]

Well that's.. Stupid.

But is there any real confirmation? Where's the mentioned shinobido screens?

 

[Xenus]

If that is true that the OS is taking 256 MB. They really need to think about overhauling their OS team. From what they've shown so far there is no reason for that.

 

[Aeoniss]

This is just speculation. Gitaroo is stating that some image has been posted showing that the OS takes up that much.

I've gone all through this forum (and this thread) and cannot find any such, nor on Google. So until we can see the image and verify that claim...

Gitaroo where is the image!

 

[Gitaroo]

spent 15 mins and can't find them on neogaf, probably burried under a billion other posts since the launch. If you have neogaf account maybe you can ask directy. I have an account there for years and I still cant post anything, if anyone can help me to get approved too it would be nice. Account name is also Gitaroo. But yeah it was more a a speculation than anything, there were also some other shots that says system memory 400+ mb etc. If they really reserved 1 cpu core, which is confirmed I believe and if the 256mb of memory is true does that give it a ipad 1 level of performence reserved for doing other task?

 

[Aeoniss]

spent 15 mins and can't find them on neogaf, probably burried under a billion other posts since the launch. If you have neogaf account maybe you can ask directy. I have an account there for years and I still cant post anything, if anyone can help me to get approved too it would be nice. Account name is also Gitaroo. But yeah it was more a a speculation than anything, there were also some other shots that says system memory 400+ mb etc. If they really reserved 1 cpu core, which is confirmed I believe and if the 256mb of memory is true does that give it a ipad 1 level of performence reserved for doing other task?

Same boat as you. My 'vulgotha' account has been on gaf for awhile, still no activation.

 

[Aeoniss]

I found a number of Neogaf threads concerning the Vita.. One of which was specifically about the OS here:

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=445377&page=8


There' speculation but nothing hard that I can see thus far.