Sony ID Buffer *spawn*

[Miniature Kaiju]

Unless they have eye-tracked foveated rendering which is even more important. Then VR is far more efficient than TV gaming.

TSS is one of the ways of doing foveation. Also allows you to have different spatial and temporal shading rates, completely decouples shading from rendering - can update the shading at 30fps on a 120fps game, for instance. Can do a bunch of really neat stuff that goes way beyond VR, but is going to be crucial to do it with really high quality, IMO.

 

[BRiT]

All we really need is a new acronym for CBR that resolves to generic reconstruction. Compute-Based Reconstruction.

And use CBRUID when using id buffer?
And use ASCBR for ASync CBR?
And use MBR for mesh shaders approach?

This is going places...

 

[Globalisateur]

It may have an impact on performances, but until now we don't see a particular advantage quality wise in actual games. I mean games using reconstruction techniques just look as good on MS consoles.

Others solution like Ubisoft solutions or what is done in Gears 5 (or RDR2 cough) look quite blurry (so what's the point ?) compared to what is used in Anthem, The Witcher 3 or the last Tomb Raider games on Pro. But we can't compare Sony solution and a pure software solution, at least without ID buffer emulation, because we don't have any examples AFAIK for that.

If we want to compare with native resolution we have Shadow of the Tomb raider: Native 4K on XBX, 4K CBR (using most probably ID buffer stuff) on Pro. The Pro looks not far from XBX resolution at first glance. I'd say maybe like around 1850p-1900p because Pro -> XBX perceptual resolution difference is easily smaller than XB1 (900p) -> PS4 (1080p) difference using their comparison tool and the game even performs better on Pro.

This game could have even being used to make a case to prove that reconstruction done right was the way to go (because we can't use any Sony first party games obviously to see if it works).

When it's used properly with a decent implementation, CBR using ID buffer give results (see The witcher 3 which is another good example). This is why it's used in notably God of War, Detroit and others. You still get some artifacts in motion though but I am sure that will be improved.

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2018-shadow-of-the-tomb-raider-tech-analysis

But we'll see if Sony first party developers are really happy with ID buffer (is it worth the silicon cost ?) if it's still in PS5...

 

[BRiT]

Does Shadow still use Reconstruction techniques like TAA in Performance mode or is it purely native resolution 1080p?

From that DF article...

"For Shadow, we're looking at 2016p on the Microsoft machine and 1872p on Sony's hardware. Pixel-counting this game isn't easy (and TAA lessens the importance of native resolution somewhat) but there remains the possibility of dynamic resolution in play here. That said, if it's dynamic, it's not dropping very often. In general, Xbox One X delivers a crisper overall image but in truth, all versions look great."

"The tables turn somewhat on the enhanced consoles. In high frame-rate mode, PS4 Pro runs with the same kind of performance we saw in Rise - any kind of demanding scene sees a drop from the target 60fps and variable frame-times. And again, similar to Rise, I prefer the consistency of the higher resolution 30fps mode (which again super-samples down when the machine outputs at 1080p). By contrast, Xbox One X makes a really good fist of hitting and sustaining 1080p60. Yes, there are dips, particularly in foliage-heavy scenes and during intense combat, and yes, screen-tearing returns, but for the most part, high frame-rate works well."