Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion Archive [2015]

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Yes. QAA = 2xMSAA + Vaseline smeared all over your screen. :p

The quality isn't even remotely similar to 4xMSAA, unfortunately, but somewhere in between. But as many mention, it's generally regarded with derision and abandoned by NVidia as soon as they were able to produce competitive MSAA (speed and IQ) to ATI.

Regards,
SB

In fairness, I felt QAA really added to the filmic look of KZ2. It's one of the reasons why I was always more impressed with KZ2's visuals than KZ3.

KZ2 was however the only implimentation where I didn't mind it. So in general you're right. I remember the headache's I used to get after playing GTAIV for hours, because my eyes were constantly trying to focus on detail that just didn't exist because the aggressive QAA smudged the screen to hell and back.

Probably made my optical perscription worse that game did.
 
Ugg, a little disappointed with the 30fps animation for units in a distance. Otherwise not bad.
 
Ugg, a little disappointed with the 30fps animation for units in a distance. Otherwise not bad.

Sounds like a lot of sacrifice (tradeoffs) went into achieving a locked 60fps.

Dynamic sub-1080p resolution
Poor texture filtering
Aggressively close LoD pops and dithered fades (even then you don't always get a high quality mesh)
Half-framerate distant enemy animation
Low-res prebaked lighting
Realtime shadows fading or popping in/out just a few feet in front of you
Low quality motion/impact blur (highly visible steps, even in motion)
And some straight up low quality textures not fit for a current-gen AAA game.

Halo560.png


Ground textures/filtering looks terrible...
 
The shadows, LOD, AF and lighting are really disappointing but i guess that's the cost for aiming 60. I still think the campaign needed to be 30, where the visuals are more important. Just take a look at the cutscenes, they look great imo.

Edit: That thread you linked from gaf... It is something :LOL:
 
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However, that 30fps animation...
I watched a fair bit of the gameplay on Gamersyde (that was 90 minutes long) and I didn't notice the animation thing. I don't recall anybody complaining about the lower animation rate of distant things until the DF article which suggests to me that it's actually not that distracting unless you're looking for it.
 
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I noticed the same choppy animation for the spectators in driveclub, they might update at 15 or 20fps since the game is 30.

I'm sure they can improve à lot and I Wonder if sometimes devs keep some found ressources for their next game so we always get a feeling of improvement.

At least cutscenes look on par with the order if not better.
 
Distant enemy animation (i think it's tied to enemies on screen + distance) in Bloodborne is also updated at 15hz so that's nothing new.

Some geometry in Halo 5 seems really unpolished though, like miss-matched textures/mesh unpolished.

Halo5snowchu.png


Why is this even a thing?
 
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Distant enemy animation (i think it's tied to enemies on screen + distance) in Bloodborne is also updated at 15fps so that's nothing new.
Curious as to what types of savings there are by animating at a slower rate, I can only think of CPU savings, unless changing animations are now done by the GPU.
 
Curious as to what types of savings there are by animating at a slower rate, I can only think of CPU savings, unless changing animations are now done by the GPU.
If the animation for characters in motion is reacting to geometry (which you would expect it to) then halving the rate probably saves a lot of calculations for what can be a lot of distant AI moving about quite a bit.

When you drop from a luxurious 32ms for each frame to a more frantic 16ms, something has to give. Some of the battles in the opening level have a lot of combatants!
 
If the animation for characters in motion is reacting to geometry (which you would expect it to) then halving the rate probably saves a lot of calculations for what can be a lot of distant AI moving about quite a bit.

When you drop from a luxurious 32ms for each frame to a more frantic 16ms, something has to give. Some of the battles in the opening level have a lot of combatants!
Agreed, but this is the part I'm generally unsure about: When you write an importer for an engine to take animations from a specific program that is meant to map the animations to the model etc - what part of the hardware is responsible for translating the actual geometry? does that sit with the CPU or the GPU? i guess either is doable. I think modern engines likely push this onto the GPU, but that's a lot of load the GPU is picking up by being responsible for so much.
 
Some geometry in Halo 5 seems really unpolished though, like miss-matched textures/mesh unpolished.

Halo5snowchu.png


Why is this even a thing?
Likely because the system can't handle much more. We'll see if the full version has such poor texturing/meshing (it's clearly a playable area, so I wouldn't believe that this is an oversight in level design). But if the final version stays the same I'd leave chalk it up to performance. Would be curious to find out what part of the system is being bottlenecked here though.
 
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