Next Gen Graphic Effects Are Amazing (Xbox 360, PS3)

Shifty Geezer said:
The difference between FP10 and FP16 should be in aliasing/banding of illumination where the lack of FP10's resolution by comparison causes rounding errors and such. I personally can't see there'll be that much difference between FP10 and FP16 on renderings. The greater range of FP16 seems overkill as you don't need that much brightness difference range when you're displaying to a limited TV, and with diligent art assets can get the same look with a sun that's 4x brighter than a lightbulb
Now, that being said, there are many other effects that need floating point precision other than just lighting of a 3D scene. When people have discovered rendering artifacts in 16-bit floats on various pixel shaders (as opposed to 24, 32), imagine what'll happen on 10-bit buffers, a storage format that is thousands of times coarser than 16.
 
you're making alot of assumptions there Titanio. How do you know MGS4 isn't using some form of FP10 HDR rendering? How do you know that 360 games aren't using some form of FP16 rendering?
 
Hardknock said:
you're making alot of assumptions there Titanio. How do you know MGS4 isn't using some form of FP10 HDR rendering?
Well I think that can be safely assumed seeing as nVidia don't support FP10 on the GPU that MGS demo was running on. But yeah, it's a bit daft to compare demos to launch-games without details of either and try to derive from that whether FP16 looks better than FP10 in the realworld, without actually knowing who's using what data format or even if they're using it optimally.
 
Hardknock said:
How do you know MGS4 isn't using some form of FP10 HDR rendering?

It's not supported on Nvidia hardware. If you're doing HDR on NVidia hardware, it's a good bet you're using FP16.

Hardknock said:
How do you know that 360 games aren't using some form of FP16 rendering?

FP16 HDR isn't supported on Xenos, blending isn't there.

Getting back to transparency for a second - a 2 bit alpha channel means just 4 "stages" of transparency? Or..?
 
If you're doing HDR on NVidia hardware, it's a good bet you're using FP16.
Nope.

If you are doing floating point blending then you are using FP16, but that is not the only method of "HDR".
 
Shifty Geezer said:
Well I think that can be safely assumed seeing as nVidia don't support FP10 on the GPU that MGS demo was running on. But yeah, it's a bit daft to compare demos to launch-games without details of either and try to derive from that whether FP16 looks better than FP10 in the realworld, without actually knowing who's using what data format or even if they're using it optimally.


What if Cell is doing the lighting or some other method of HDR is used? While I don't think that's the case, there's so many flaws and holes in this comparision it's not even worth talking about at the moment IMO.
 
Dave Baumann said:
If you are doing floating point blending then you are using FP16, but that is not the only method of "HDR".

I'm not saying it's the only method - your other options are presumably as discussed previously. I'm saying it's the one most likely to be used. If FP16 blending is available to you and the performance is acceptable for your application, you're going to use it, no? Or do you think most PS3 titles using HDR won't use FP16?

!eVo!-X Ant UK - don't spark a "screenshot war". And don't mistake bloom for HDR. The indoor scenes - the darker scenes - exhibit MGS4's quality far better than that.
 
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Titanio said:
!eVo!-X Ant UK - don't spark a "screenshot war". And don't mistake bloom for HDR. The indoor scenes - the darker scenes - exhibit MGS4's quality far better than that.

I dont really to start ANY kind of war as you have already started one.
 
!eVo!-X Ant UK said:
I dont really to start ANY kind of war as you have already started one.

A war? This is a discussion. Back and forth posting of screenshots tends to be fruitless. If you really want to post shots, post the best of each, but besides, seeing a game in motion is required nowadays. Anyone can easily go look at these games for themselves if they wish.
 
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!eVo!-X Ant UK said:
Kind of like saying one system is doing a lower quality HDR because it does'nt look as good as an other system.

Technically it is a lower quality. Without looking at any games, FP10 is less precision than FP16, simple as that. The debate then is what differences if any that would imply, and we've been doing reasonably well sofar.

If people really see value in screenshot analysis, then maybe it is time this was spun off into its own thread. I dunno?
 
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So let me get this straight: Xenos cannot blend or AA rendertargets/buffers at FP16 per component precision (per developer confirmation), but it can output to a rendertarget/buffer at FP16. Can it output at FP32 (w/o AA or blending of course)?
 
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Hardknock said:
To add fuel to the fire here's PGR3 performing HDR taken off someone's HDTV:

http://img421.imageshack.us/img421/5639/picture201349gd.jpg

;)

To be clear, HDR on X360 is not in question as such. The question is: what's the quality like, how robust is fp10, what are the implications of a 2-bit alpha channel, what are the tradeoffs?

On that picture though, someone ought to keep their garage doors closed when nuclear bombs are being detonated outside ;)
 
Luminescent said:
So let me get this straight: Xenos cannot blend or AA rendertargets/buffers at FP16 per component precision (per developer confirmation), but it can output to a rendertarget/buffer at FP16. Can it output at FP32 (w/o AA or blending of course)?

The following render target formats are supported:
- 8:8:8:8 fixed point with blending
- 2:10:10:10 fixed point with blending
- 2:7e3:7e3:7e3 packed floating point with blending (add-only at full rate, other modes at half-rate)
- 16:16 fixed point with blending
- 16:16:16:16 fixed point with blending (at half-rate)
- 16:16 floating point without blending
- 16:16:16:16 floating point without blending (at half-rate)
- 32 floating point without blending
- 32:32 floating point without blending (at half-rate)

The 32-bit-per-pixel formats all operate at full rate; the 64-bit-per-pixel formats operate at half rate. The 32-bit packed floating-point format supports additive blending (SRC + DEST) at full rate, while other blending modes are half rate.
Both 2× and 4× multisampling are supported. On resolve, the GPU can downsample multisampled render targets and do format conversion. However, multisample downsampling is limited to blendable target formats.
The 8:8:8:8 fixed-point format can be gamma corrected using an approximation to the sRGB gamma 2.2 curve to convert from linear light space to gamma space on writes and to convert from gamma space to linear light space on reads.
 
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