Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion Archive [2015]

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That is why i think the main reason for the lower resolution is the 60fps target.
Well. It's the remedy. Ps4 has been doing 1080p@60 for call of duty. And Xbox can do 1080p@60 for forza.
So I just want to figure out what FB3 is doing that is taxing the systems to drop resolution
 
don't know if it's much more demanding technically than BF4 but the end result looks a lot better on my PS4, and framerate is more stable too.
Of course maps are smaller and 24 less players.
 
It's fairly easy to see that the volumetric effects in SWBF are screen space based, which suggests they are not using what was presented at Siggraph for this game.

Probably the beta download is not finish for me. I will play tomorrow...
 
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So I just want to figure out what FB3 is doing that is taxing the systems to drop resolution

Me too, they seem to have heavily invested in geometric detail and adaptive lod and the results look great, but geometry shouldn't really scale with resolution very much. The rest seems pretty standard (or maybe even a little behind) tech-wise for this gen so I'm wondering where their frametime is going. It's possible they just traded resolution for draw distance but it's really impossible to say.
 
Most likely reason for the resolution is not bandwidth per se but rather g-buffer size exceeding the 32MB available in esram. The switch the pbr and material variety probably fattened it up a good bit. This is where not having split memory pools becomes the primary advantage.
 
Don't they support tiling buffers in and out esram / ddr3 as needed so the entire buffer doesn't have to fit in there all at once?
 
My guess is actually that a huge amount of their frame is going to sun shadow, but I'm just spitting in the wind. Unless someone manages to renderdoc it we're all just guessing. I said their tech is behind above but part of that is just me as a developer being annoyed at how well everyone receives their game... but in reality it's actually pretty disappointing that they're not using even some of the newer FB3 tech like the SIGGRAPH volumetrics. The game would look even better with that.

It's certainly not free and they made the tradeoffs they felt were acceptable, but I'd definitely have tried to push for higher res and better volumetrics over what they have now were I involved in any meaningful way in that project. Even at 60fps I'd be embarrassed to ship a locked 900p game on PS4.
 
Imo the game looks good and quite clean for 900P, the BF games have always had IQ issues due to their cheap FXAA pass along with sub native resolution but this game seems to be better at that.

It is a lot of fun to play at 60FPS and it's nice to have it run better than BF games, but I would not have minded more spectacle at 30FPS, the levels themselves look and feel considerably static. The hoth level looks particularly plain imo, also not a fan of the specular maps on the ground caused from the lighting on the other multiplayer map (not the coop tatooine map).
 
It is a much bigger technical achievement to make a 900p game run at locked 60 fps compared to making a 1080p game run at locked 30 fps.

900p @ 60 fps is almost 40% more pixels than 1080p @ 30 fps.

Yeah, interestingly there's actually a bolus of 24m pixels/second on 900p@60 compared to 1080p@30.

I can imagine future Dice games could actually aim for 1080p@30 with increased graphical detail in order appear closer the future PC spec (on PS4 at least. 720p@60 < 1080@30).

Alternatively, they could potentially drop to 900p@30 and keep up with the same graphical settings as a PC that's 3x as powerful (as pps of of 900p@30 is 43m and 1080p@60 is 124m). Though I guess the CPU could become more of a problem later.
 
As long as their games are primarily online shooters, they are likely better off with 60fps ... ?
 
Performance Analysis: Star Wars: Battlefront beta on Xbox One

Battlefront on Xbox One is fixed at 720p, meaning that it runs at 64 per cent of the PS4's overall pixel count. From an image quality perspective, the compromises are just as you'd expect; we see more aliased edges, and a higher level of shimmering on fine distant detail - particularly on Tatooine's flag-lines. Added to that, there's a softening to the picture as a whole - a result of a more drastic upscale, combined with a similar grade of post-process anti-aliasing to PS4.
 
As long as their games are primarily online shooters, they are likely better off with 60fps ... ?

I agree, multiplayer at 60 is really good, as long as that 60 is stable. I prefer locked 30 if it can't handle 60.
 
As long as their games are primarily online shooters, they are likely better off with 60fps ... ?
It depends on if the developer wants disparity between framerate or graphical settings between consoles and PC in future games. Alternatively, they can keep the engine essentially the same the whole generation and PCs can play at higher and higher resolutions.

And we coped with Dice games all last gen running at 30fps.
 
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