Forza: A Test Case for next gen hardware discussion

Acert93

Artist formerly known as Acert93
Legend
Let’s play the, “How much hardware do we need to fix these issues” aka “Will Next Gen Hardware be fast enough to at least fix these issues?” As of Feb. 2nd, 2013 we do not have confirmed hardware specs/architectural details for the next Xbox or Playstation so I expect this to be a fluid discussion. I do expect the discussion to shift from "what is needed" to "can they do it" in the coming months. What I hope to accomplish is to have a running thread looking at current console issues that impact visuals and gameplay and how new hardware will/won't resolve these and, just as importantly, not just fixing the issues of today but tackling new horizons of gameplay and rendering (will there be hardware left for such?)

A great test case for this discussion is Forza Motorsport 4 (FM4) for the following reasons:

* The first reason is there will certainly be a Forza Motorsport 5 on the Xbox 3 to eventually benchmark this discussion against.

* FM4 is a technically excellent title: 720p, rock solid 60Hz, 2xMSAA. The technical are good (cars on the track, physics, etc), has a slew of assets (cars, tracks), and has robust features (online, leagues, car modifications, rivals mode, etc). FM4 stands on the podium of “best racing games” in the industry as it has both robust gameplay features and excellence in technology (not either/or), i.e. one has not been sacrificed for the other.

* FM4 (2011) is the 3rd iteration on the Xbox 360 (FM2 in 2007, FM3 in 2009). This gives us a good baseline as the same developer, working on the same hardware, iterating the same franchise was able to utilize the machine. By looking at FM4 compared to other franchises we can get a rough sense of what the system limitations are versus what Turn10’s limits/design decisions are. i.e. the negative LOD bias for textures is a performance concession many Xbox 360 titles make due to the performance impact of AF (due to texture cache issues?).

* GT6 is also a certain release on the PS4. Artistic preferences and design accents aside the two titles and developers are roughly on par in term of technical excellence (although many would give a nod to PD in terms of lighting and Turn10 in terms of world detail). As the PS4 is rumored to be both similar in base technological decisions and design constrictions (TDP, noise, size, cost) but with possible differences in memory footprint, bandwidth, and hierarchies as well as GPU balance there will be some discernible discussion points to evaluate how the technological choices (hardware and software) aided, and prohibited, the developer from addressing issues and building forward.

Goal:
(a) Discuss the various IQ issues and game issues. (By game issues I mean # cars on track, physics, etc).
(b) How can these issues be addressed.
(c) Performance Cost to address.
(d) Will the announced hardware be able to meet these estimated costs.
(e) Will the new hardware provide enough hardware to explore new rendering and gameplay enhancements? (Will we for example get "split screen" gaming via 3D glasses? Fully integrated motion controls? The long fabled RT?)

Targets: For our discussion I ask the following targets be assumed:

60Hz. Non-negotiable for a racing sim. FM4 already runs at a solid 60Hz.

1080p. Quasi-negotiable. Diminishing returns, market penetration of HD let alone Full HD sets, etc. dictate a “hard” 1080p be required. Assume that dynamic resolution (with 720p being the lowest for our discussion), scaled horizontal or vertical resolutions, and sub-1080p upscaled (but, again, resolution still above 720p) are all techniques “on the table” but less than ideal. (Personally, after watching a couple seasons of Transformers Prime at 480p I would say 720p with gobs of techniques for pristine texture and edge quality would be awesome, but I digress).

4xMSAA or equivalent. MSAA is negotiable, but an Anti-aliasing effect minimally equivalent to 4xMSAA is to be expected as a baseline. Crude techniques such as edge blur, motion blur, depth of field, as well as post-process AA (FXAA, SSMA, etc) are all acceptable solutions although how pleasant they are is dependent on the quality of the implementation. 4xMSAA is a solid baseline equivalent that, anything less, would indicate a lack of consideration for AA

Assuming the above targets 1080p alone will drive about a 2x need for increased performance on whatever element(s) are limiting current performance. (1080p is 2.25x 720p but depending on what the limiting factor is there may not need to be a pure 2.25x increase due to how GPUs work). Right out of the gate FM5 is going to require some elements of the Xbox 3 to be 2x as fast to make the jump to 1080p before any of the following are addressed. Also bear in mind that most of the following points are addressing immediately visible shortcomings; the hope would be the new hardware not only addressed these issues but had enough horsepower to allow developers to go in new directions that go beyond fixing the current issues.

Another consideration is FM4’s replay mode runs at 30Hz and employs 4xMSAA, better LOD, and improved motion blur. We don’t know if the costs associated with these features but we can assume their cost makes a stable 60Hz beyond the consoles abilities (it could run on average above 50Hz or just above 30Hz, we don’t know).

With those points in mind I present some of the issues (from memory) I believe FM4 on the Xbox 360 had that I would hope FM5 on the Xbox 3 would address.

Day/Night Cycle. FM4 has time of day presets that cannot be changed. FM5 needs day and night options for all courses and ideally dynamic time of day adjustments to race any time of day the user wishes. A plus would be for it to change in realtime and an accelerated clock.

Weather. FM4 has no weather. FM5 minimally needs to offer sunny, cloudy, overcast, light rain, heavy rain, and thunder storm weather (with wind speed and visibility being options). Ideally FM5 would offer realtime transitions (rain to sunny as an example) and dynamic location syncing (e.g. if it is raining lightly at the Ring it should in the game). Snow, while looks cool, outside of specialty racing you don’t take the cars in FM into an icy, snowy coarse.

These two options are going to require major upgrades to how FM5 handles the following…

Shadowing & Indirect Occlusion. In FM4 some direct shadows have jagged edges. Indirect light occlusion is fairly weak as can be seen in overcast settings. FM5 is going to require dynamic shadows and a robust ambient occlusion system (not all methods are as robust or have the same quality) to not just correct FM4’s issues but also to prove convincing Day/Night and Weather.

Lighting. FM4 improved its lighting but the issue is there is a lot of work left both artistically and balance (see: GT5). These issues will be compounded by the need for a more robust pipeline would help that can offer convincing dynamic lighting. Paint needs to bring the car even more into the environment while the engine will need to improve indirect lighting (GI hacks) while at the same time offering robust point light (head lights) solutions. Atmospherics (lightening, flickering street lights, sparks) all need to be addressed. Little things like the glowing brake disks and tail lights need an overhaul. Lighting, both on the cars (paint), as well as point lights and world lighting will be the areas of biggest impact (along with post processing and particles) in making the world look better. It is a tall order to ask FM5 to move up in resolution, increase lighting IQ, but also asking it to become dynamic.

Load Times. FM4, as good as the load times are compared to many other racers, still is poor. The time from accepting a Rival to the track is poor—and this is compounded by having to go back to the Rival screen to select the next rival. I always skip testing my tuning changes because the time to make changes and then get to the track takes forever. FM5 needs to be designed so that a track is always in memory so whatever activity it is—test driving cars, tuning, painting, buying new parts, changing out a couple cars after a race, selecting a new rival, etc—that as long as the track is not changed you can always, and immediately, make these basic changes and be on the track within seconds.

AA. FM4 uses 2xMSAA most of the time and the IQ is reflective of this level of AA (most major jaggies are absent although on high contrast areas or items with fine geometry stair stepping and crawling are noticeable; to Turn10’s compliment they have improved AA each iteration by addressing various artifacting). A move to 1080p will help some. A number of current console games are making good use of 2xMSAA+Post Process AA (with an unfortunate hit to texture clarity). New GPU hardware makes post-process AA much cheaper.

Texture Resolution and Filtering. FM4 had solid texture resolution and variety for the genre (racing sim) and while a step above FM2 there remains much room of improvement at 720p, let alone 1080p. Filtering was poor with a negative LOD bias attempting to “solve” the low levels of filtering back causing all sort of distortion. The combination of fast motion and the unique decal system went a long way in hiding a lot of short comings. Everything to the cars, tracks, and skybox would benefit from better texturing. “Better texturing” would include, but is not limited to, a move to 1080p, higher texture resolution, more texture variety, substantial texture filtering, more texture layers, and dynamic effects (e.g. scratches, burnout marks on the road, etc). This will require more performance and memory to address these IQ issues.

Motion Blur and DOF. FM4’s replay mode had solid motion blur and DOF effects (for this console generation standards); the realtime racing was mainly limited to blur on the wheels and road. The key with MB and DOF is to use it sparingly and subtly, with the best results coming from quality implementations. Quality MB and DOF are not cheap and Bokeh is currently very expensive. With MB there remains the issue that most affordable methods confine the effect to within the geometry of the object moving. Post processing effects can “cover a multitude of IQ sins” from low amounts of AA and AF, lower texture resolution, and so forth.

LOD. FM4 has nice models but there is a clear difference in LOD between replay and realtime, e.g. some engines disappear. With increased resolution the LOD bias will need to be less aggressive—lack of detail in distant cars will no longer be hidden behind the cloak of resolution. With 2.25 as many pixels and cleaner IQ (AA, texture filtering, reduced shader aliasing) LOD issues will be more visible.

Reflections. FM4 lost the reflections of dynamic objects. The PGR3 hack of using the previous frame’s render target was a slick move but the changes in FM4 at dedication to 60Hz led to the feature hitting the cutting room floor. It needs to come back. This will become more relevant when dynamic lights and night scenes come to life.

Foliage. FM5 may be the first version that gets the real 3D grass announced in FM2. FM4 had some dithering on distant foliage and subtle LOD transitions. Tree leaves were typically entire sections of a branch with transparancies. Leaves didn't litter the track and flutter around, grass did not fly up and leave indentations or even muddy ruts, and gravel did not shoot out and litter the track. Cones were about the most interactive parts on the track. While the trees and the little grass you saw in FM4 was not bad FM5 has a lot of room for improvement, both in quality and quantity, to make the worlds look more realistic.

Particles. The dust and smoke in FM4 fall far behind the competition. The NFS and DiRT games years ago introduced thick clouds of “burning rubber” that dynamically swirled around your car. Is it too much to ask for a car traveling 125MPH hitting a dirt shoulder to toss up a thick cloud of dust that dissipates naturally? This is the single weakest part of FM4. FM4 needs to address smoke, dust, and gravel and also have falling leaves, sparks, and an assortment of subtle effects in the air. Semi-related would be heat wave distortions on hot tracks and exhaust systems. And of course there is the aforementioned weather elemental affects.

Paint. This falls under lighting as well but since cars in a car sim are made or broken by their paint it is worth repeating. FM4 improved the paint (better lighting balance, HDR artifacts were mostly removed, less shader aliasing) but as GT5 showed artistically there is room to grow and lighting balance in general is huge. A redesigned lighting pipeline and paint shaders will always be at the top of the list. But there are also subtle things, e.g. taking on the color of paint from another car impacting yours or the accumulation of dust, mud, and water.

Damage. FM4 is essentially using the same damage system from FM2. Sure cars roll over now but the damage is not very dynamic. Games like BurnOut Paradise (released in 2007 or 2008) seem like a technological leap over Forza 4. Heck even Toca 3 allowed your wheels to burst. The damage needs to appear more dynamic (there also needs, NEEDS, to be a "simulation damage" mode for realistic damage and impact on the race--or not racing may it be). This needs to extend to structural damage, panel damage, paint scraping, glass (lights, windows) cracking and littering the track, smoke, oil, etc.

Fences. Fences have been a trouble spot all generation for most games with the links being aliased and fading in and out and generally being a crawling mess. This absolutely needs to be fixed.

Cars on track. FM4 moved up to 12 cars on track in many situations but on some tracks this still seems quite barren. 16, 20, or 24 seem like reasonable targets. But consider: improved physics, improved damage modeling, jacked up rendering, etc but there will always be certain limits (e.g. online bandwidth) as well as gameplay constraints (more isn't always better). On the other hand driving through traffic is a BLAST and this really needs more cars, as do the big oval tracks.

Windshields. The cockpit view in FM4 is great and Kinect actually works! That said the windshield... oh wait, what windshield? What is said is PGR3 was a launch title and it had some of the best HDR and effects all gen. My guess was they were too expensive.

Summary: It is going to be expensive to 2x cost for increasing resolution, + improved LOD system, + better AA, + texture resolution and filtering, + MB and DOF, + more robust lighting pipeline, + dynamic lights and shadows for dynamic time of day and night driving, + robust particle system for weather and improved dirt/dust/smoke/crashes, + more detailed cars and more cars on track, + car physics, + track detail, + better foliage and grass and gravel, + overhauled damage system, all while improving the core gameplay features, - load time and making features accessible anywhere, and so forth is very much far and above what the Xbox 360 can do.

Can a 6x-8x increase in RAW throughput (plus extra for efficiency of new architectures) hope to meet the demands of all these areas in need of improvement? Considering the resolution jump that 6x-8x is more like 3x-4x in extra power to address the other shortcomings. That sounds like a very, very tall order.
 
I wanted to separate the second part of my post as it is a slight transition of thought to compliment the above, namely in "addressing" the short comings "how far" do developers really need to go? Any discussion of how to address the visual issues in current gen games (what hardware is needed and how to fix it) is the inevitable question of: How far do you really need to go? When do you drop off into the realm of diminishing returns or when the energy is better placed into other parts of rendering or features?

Which brings me back to the point of the "baseline" criteria, namely resolution. The move to 1080p actually opens the door for greater disparity in hardware with minimal effect on the end user. How many users are going to notice the difference between 1080p and 800p (280 pixels, or 33% less resolution)? Wheels with 1000 polygons or 800 polygons? A dynamic fabric with a 1000x1000 mesh or 812x812 mesh (33% less)? Not many. This is why I recently said if a “faster console” wished to expose the weakness of slower competitors max IQ at 720p would be the goal as it blocks the most obvious and simple method to address the different with the least visual impact on most end users. Spending budgets in highly visible/noticeable areas puts a competitor in a harder position than pushing relentlessly in areas of diminishing visual return (poly, texture, and resolution budgets).

From a pure rendering perspective it is interesting, just looking at the above, that a multiplatform game could get the same result on a console with raw specs 33% slower just by tweaking resolution (an area of diminishing visual return). Things would get “easier” if only parts were 33% slower (e.g. if triangle, texel, and pixel throughput were similar but only shader performance was lower) but assuming 33% slower across the board a move to 800p (from 1080p) and slightly scaling back asset quality solves the problem for many of the rendering issues. Just like the increase in geometry and texture resolution, as pixel density increases the visual impact decreases (diminishing return) to the point the difference is unperceived.

Digging slightly deeper there are a host of trade-offs that can be made. E.g. AA: if 4xMSAA has a 15% hit in framerate, what about a post-process effect that is only 3%? What if your nice AO technique (like HBAO) has a 20% hit but a cheaper screen space solution in the low single digits? The issue may no longer be what can it do, but at what quality—so a couple trade-offs with faster techniques may close the gap and, again, not be noticeable. Just like swapping out texture resolution in the Xbox/GCN/PS2 era could be an easy check box to impact performance it may now be a subtle tweaking of the many various effects.

The killer may be how post-processing obscures these differences. If rendering is a veritable ABC soup of subtle rendering tricks, what is the net impact if the flashy particle and post process techniques diminishing the IQ impact of previously mentioned IQ trade-offs.

And… what if… when lining up these designs it isn’t as easy as one being 33% slower? What if the budget for CUs/TMUs was shifted to a pool of fast local memory to sustain high ROP performance? What if one has a pool of very, very fast low latency memory with a lot of full-speed ROPs and close access to compute. You stick the entire Z/framebuffer in this workspace to attack post-processing issues.

Does this not change the equation?

Are we now in the era of: Art. Art! Art!!! As Laa-Yosh often says it is how polygons are dispersed in a model, not the raw number. Are the differences now so small, and the way to attack them so varied, that developer skill more important? ERP has mentioned the eDRAM was beneficial in a way gamers rarely consider: it was one less thing developers have to balance. Having to never worry about the bandwidth your ROPs chew through and knowing you will always get 4GPixel/s on Xenos had its benefits. Is a console with lower peak figures (lower ceiling) but higher floor better? Is it better for developers to get really consistent performance across the board than one big pool they have to balance out themselves?

It will be interesting to see what trade-offs 1st party developers are willing to make. E.g. If the key objective of rendering is a better final image is the following worth the sacrifice if it gives you double-digit performance improvements: moving to a dynamically adjusted resolution and dynamic MSAA and aiming between 1080p and 720p. The gains in render time could be shifted to beef up everything else. This could be taken further, e.g. an impressive post-processing pipeline could move many traditional metrics like texture resolution more into the category of “diminishing returns obscured in the final image” so the trade-off may be a net win.

Have we officially entered the era where:
(a) peak throughput is less relevant due to diminishing returns in pixel, geometry, and texture density.
(b) rendered images are a balance of GPU techniques covering an alphabetic spectrum of technologies.
(c) artists skill constrains asset quality more so than raw performance.
(d) visual impact is determined primarily by the balancing of the alphabet of technologies and quality levels.
(e) due to the increasing poly/pixel/texture budgets new hardware afford, tweaks to such can go substantially to offset raw performance differences.
(f) Ultimately will the best results come from hardware that allows efficient use of resources and allows extremely quick iterative changes to gameplay design and art instead of the faster hardware?

With that I will let other debate.

Ps. If Turn10 is reading this: Please make the following happen in FM5. Mandatory Pit Stop settings for MP. LAN. Keep Custom Lobbies. More AI in split screen. Rip off every DiRT Showdown MP mode (you guys just killed MP with FM3). Real dynamic damage. Force MS to adopt standard ports so we can get quality 3rd party FF wheels. I care more about each of these things than pixels. The lack of LAN, the afterthought of split screen, and affordable wheels is more of a concern than pretty pixels or 500 more cars I don’t care about. And no, we don’t want floating wheels or death from DLC.
 
For a next gen Forza i want :

-60 frames . Not negotiable (F4 is already there).
-1080p . Come on , it's expected and anything less will be dissapointing . Maybe a little below is acceptable ...
-Anti-Aliasing . Don't care much about the method , as long as it's there . MSAA is preferable though...
-Dynamic Lighting and Real time Day/Night cycle . Absolutely necessary . I want night tracks with hundred of lights .
-Weather . I' d prefer if it changes during the course .
Weather Ideally FM5 would offer realtime transitions (rain to sunny as an example) and dynamic location syncing (e.g. if it is raining lightly at the Ring it should in the game).
Excellent idea , something like what Metropolis Street Racer did , it uses the clock of the Dreamcast to calculate time in each city .

-Lots of environmental effects .Dust , smoke , newspapers flying in the wind , garbage etc..
-Cars on track . Minimum 20 , more for Daytone races . (obviously number of cars depends on the course).

-Damage to a certain degree i suppose . Nothing extreme .

That's more or less what i wish for F5 ...

Can a 6x-8x increase in RAW throughput (plus extra for efficiency of new architectures) hope to meet the demands of all these areas in need of improvement? Considering the resolution jump that 6x-8x is more like 3x-4x in extra power to address the other shortcomings. That sounds like a very, very tall order.

To be honest i don't believe a 6-8x increase will be enough (and from the "rumors" we won't get even that) so most of the above will remain wishful thinking and we'll hear again excuses from Dan Greenwalt . Imo F5 will look a bit better than F4 but in 1080p and that's it .
 
It may be fairer to compare FM4 to GT5 in some respects to what could be possible, as for instance something like Burnout style car damage is something many car manufacturors still don't agree with. It would basically require PD and Turn10 to work together and ban all car manufacturors that don't allow it, which kind of seems unlikely.

Personally, I also don't really care. As long as there is a good penalty system for races where the person who makes the mistake or cheats gets punished, that's far more important to me. That said - for something like Daytona style races good, realistic crashes would add a lot. I don't care for Daytona, but that kind of racing can still be really exciting to do if done well (like the ancient PC game Indy 500 did, back in the monochrome CGA days!).

I agree that 60fps should stay. 1080p would also certainly be nice. With 1080p in place, I don't care that much about AA. 2xMSAA is probably enough. Good object/motion blur would probably have more impact.

I definitely do care about lots of cars on the track, where 16 should now be the absolute minimum.

Good realtime weather and lighting has proven extremely valuable to me in Gran Turismo 5, keeping racing on the same track interesting for far longer.

Good AI and realistic physics for wind and drag effects are also a big point of priority for me. For races, keep qualifying in (looking at you GT) and add pit-stops, tire and fuel wear (looking at you Forza)

For graphics, obviously there is plenty of room for improvement, but I agree with many others that the priority should by now be to get the tracks to feel more alive. Trees move in the wind, stuff blows over the track, some birds flying around, audience looking alive, etc. I agree with you that the windshield getting dirty, although I want it more subtle perhaps than in PGR3, was a neat effect.

And yes MS, allow me to plug-in as many existing wheels as possible. I don't want to get separate wheels for each device, and I have been able to use the same wheel for PC and PS for ages now.

Good looking around in the cockpit thanks to Kinect or the dual camera PS Eye if that's indeed coming, would also be cool, though I personally think that if they would have used tilt in the Sixaxis (though maybe it would need more precision, like the version that is in Vita) would have been pretty good for that already.
 
I'd like to see 1080p vertical resolution. Don't care if it is 1920 or GT5 fakeHD (1280x1080) , but the vertical resolution is needed to resolved perspective foreshortened curves. I would like 4 x MSAA (or some form of sub pixel sampling, no PP crap AA), I would like support for 3D as well.

I would like weather support.

I want at least 20 cars on track.

Day/night cycle is a Mickey Mouse feature in my opinion. It gives immersion to a few endurance races (Sebring, Le Mans), but other than that it is a waste of time, racing is normally done in daylight for a reason. Yeah you can put hundreds of dynamic lights in, but only one or two will cast shadows, so it is never going to look convincing. I'd much rather have effort spent on making daylight racing look great. Better lighting model and very high shadow quality for sun shadows.

If I'm to prioritize the above, it goes like this:
1. 60Hz
2. 20+ cars on track
3. 1280x1080
4. 4 x MSAA
5. Weather
6. 3D
7. 1920x1080
8. Day/night

Compared to Forza 4's 1280x720+2 x MSAA (922K pixels, 1,843K fragments) with 12 cars we get the following demands on hardware:
2: 2x CPU. It won't impact worst case rendering much, the additional cars will be further away at lower LOD. Simulating the additional cars will cost CPU resources.
3: 1,382K pixels, 50% more than F4
4: 5,539K fragments, 3 x F4
6: 0-100% more fillrate (drop resolution and/or AA to hit framerate).
7: 2.25 times the pixels and 4.5 times fragments as F4
8: 30-50% extra GPU needed (estimate).

With Durango having 4 x the CPU resources and 8 x the GPU resources, all of the above should be doable.

Cheers
 
Well what I'm finding is that being able to race a track in the early morning, with the sun slowly coming up, or with late or early light in general, or at night, dusk, etc., it just keeps a racetrack really interesting. Also, the effect different types of light can have on the paint of the car (or shaders) is really wonderful (just like in real life).

Same with weather. All of them make the track far more 'alive' and less boring, and I could do with way fewer tracks if they all have dynamic weather and dynamic time of day. I would also like an option to get the race to have the exact conditions that are currently also on the real track.

Oh yeah, much better sound would be great.
 
Well what I'm finding is that being able to race a track in the early morning, with the sun slowly coming up, or with late or early light in general, or at night, dusk, etc., it just keeps a racetrack really interesting. Also, the effect different types of light can have on the paint of the car (or shaders) is really wonderful (just like in real life).

I hated (HATED !! ) the circuits in Forza 4 taking place at dusk, where you would get blinded by the glare from the low sun. In particular Suzuka and Sedona Race Way were horrible in this regard.

It might look nice, but there is a reason racing is normally done in daylight, with drivers bitching every time it isn't (Australian F1 GP for example).

As for weather: Certainly a nice feature, I'd also like proper tyre wear and refuelling back.

Cheers
 
Judging by the fact that the 360 is roughly comparable in power to PS3, I would initially say that all of the requests can be accomplished:
4xMSAA, 16 cars; all featuring reflections and great LOD, real image based lighting, realtime lighting, realtime shadows, weather, 24h cycle, 60hz update, and so on.

Compare the London, Madrid, Nurburgring or other new tracks to anything from Forza and you will see a clear distinction between developers. Keep in mind: this is all done on roughly the same hardware.
I conclude that the Turn10 development team needs much better hardware in order to deliver comparable visual quality. Looking at released Durango specs; I don't think that Turn10 will be able to deliver.
The EDRAM equivalent in the Durango is several times slower (3 times based on last numbers), so dust and other particle effects (useful for weather effects) will probably be non-existent again. If turn 10 had the skill to work around it, they would have done so by now. Weather and 24h was promised years ago, also F4 supposedly had OBL, but nothing in the game seems to reflect that. I write this down to the developer, because the 360 is a quite capable machine, if I do say so myself (like you said, look at PGR 2005 and you see the potential)

It would be a different story if MS hired Bizarre (the former members) to do the game, then it would even exceed all requests.
So, No: Turn 10 needs a PC (ie 'unlimited' memory, GPU power, etc) the Durango will fall short.

Also, please excuse me btw, most PS-exclusives disgust me, but GT5 is like a guilty pleasure to me :)
 
I hated (HATED !! ) the circuits in Forza 4 taking place at dusk, where you would get blinded by the glare from the low sun. In particular Suzuka and Sedona Race Way were horrible in this regard.

It might look nice, but there is a reason racing is normally done in daylight, with drivers bitching every time it isn't (Australian F1 GP for example).

As for weather: Certainly a nice feature, I'd also like proper tyre wear and refuelling back.

Cheers

You mean you hated their bright light gimmick? ;) (I did too)
 
In my opinion a racing game lacks a lot of the complexity that would really stress a console's hardware; a game with lots of characters and especially with an open world will almost always require more in almost every aspect.

Skin shaders, hair, dynamics simulations, more complex AI and pathfinding, skeletial animation system for the body with advanced animation blending, facial animation system, and so on. A racing game is 'just' a bunch of hard surface constructs going in circles, although the vehicle physics are naturally complex too, especially if you introduce collisions and deformations; so there's less to manage and optimize to work together well.

Te next gen GTA and Elder Scrolls games will be a more interesting subject for comparisons, especially with how refined their latest installments on the current gen seem to be.
 
I want 1080p/60fps
great track detail
and most importantly realistic car sounds.

And I want a pony. The problem with blindingly wanting 1080p60 is that there will be many games that instead go for 720p60 and look far better because most people can't tell the difference between 720p and 1080p, especially if you're dealing with a lot of fast action (at some point, the quality of the TV makes a huge difference).

If anything, what I really want is the UI to be 1080p and target resolution for 3D to be "above 720p" like the OP stated. Static elements are far more noticeable at a higher resolution than moving objects in a sceen. Throw in some MSAA and you'd probably won't be able to tell unless you're looking at screen caps. More realistic details, effects, higher resolution textures would have a better payoff in the end.
 
In my experience it looks better to have full vertical resolution with horizontal scaling, and with some AA; preferably some multisample AA before the actual scaling. GT5 is a good example of this, or Halo Reach to some extent.

With such an approach 1080p games aren't completely unrealistic - something like 1400-1500*1080 is relatively small a step above 1280*720, about 50% more pixels would still leave you with 3-5 times as much computing power per fragment just on the GPU, enough for a visible step up in quality.

I'm sure a lot of developers have already done some extensive testing to compare the possible options. I think there would be three main choices for next gen:
- 1280*720 scaled up to 1920*1080
- 1x00*1080 vertically scaled to 1920*1080
- 1920*1080 not scaled on TVs with 1:1 pixel mapping

I wonder how much a difference there would be between the first and the last; nowadays we consider a "full" 720p image to be the best possible quality, but most sets are either 1360*768 or 1920*1080 so even that res gets scaled...
 
And I want a pony. The problem with blindingly wanting 1080p60 is that there will be many games that instead go for 720p60 and look far better because most people can't tell the difference between 720p and 1080p, especially if you're dealing with a lot of fast action (at some point, the quality of the TV makes a huge difference).

If anything, what I really want is the UI to be 1080p and target resolution for 3D to be "above 720p" like the OP stated. Static elements are far more noticeable at a higher resolution than moving objects in a sceen. Throw in some MSAA and you'd probably won't be able to tell unless you're looking at screen caps. More realistic details, effects, higher resolution textures would have a better payoff in the end.

Why would you want the UI to be 1080p, if your game isn't 1080p? It doesn't make sense to me.
 
Why would you want the UI to be 1080p, if your game isn't 1080p? It doesn't make sense to me.

Because HUD elements are more static and usually incorporate text. Both of these make the artifacts caused by low resolution more apparent than they are in the more dynamic parts of the screen. Being able to render these elements separately gives you noticeably better IQ for (effectively) no added cost.
 
And I want a pony. The problem with blindingly wanting 1080p60 is that there will be many games that instead go for 720p60 and look far better because most people can't tell the difference between 720p and 1080p, especially if you're dealing with a lot of fast action (at some point, the quality of the TV makes a huge difference).

Do you have any data to back up your claim that "most people can't tell the difference between 720p and 1080p"?
 
I have anecdotal evidence in that some guys I know thought Black Ops on the PS3 is running at 1920*1080; actually, that all games are running at 1080, but BLOPS is a nice example, being 960*540 2xAA in reality.
 
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