Shifty Geezer said:
Do you mean with AA on the particles? Or combining AA on opaque scene rendering with lots of particles?
AA on lots of particles.
zed said:
surely u turn off AA when u do particles (mainly cause particles dont have edges )
With automatic predicated tiling, you can't change a render target during it. Actually, anything other than rendering into the main framebuffer must be done outside of tiling including generating shadow maps. Of course one can do the tiling stuff manually, i.e. rendering the entire scene into three 1280x240 buffers one by one and control the render target as you wish, but in this case you have to deal with alot of stuffs like texture coordinate recalculating.
Shifty Geezer said:
Some do. Sparks and bullet traces for example. Larger particle effects, or rather, soft particles without distinct edges, no matter what the size, don't and should probably be rendered at something like 1/4 resolution and upscaled when compositing.
We did that too (1/4 buffer). It seems like Capcom's FrameWork engine has a better way to handle this via a so called "MSAA mini buffer". I think they just render all particles into a quarter sized buffer and resolve it without down sampling.
mrboo said:
Infact can any 360 games support 720p+4xMSAA without tiling?
4xMSAA@720p means 1280*720*4*4*2 = 29,491,200, that's three tiles for 10M EDRAM. Unless someone employs an equivalent 4x edge AA algorithm, tiling must be involved on X360.
groper said:
The game has the same (and some times worse) framerate issues when it runs in a X1900XT , so i cant see how tiling can be the limitative factor here.
IMO it has more to do with the use of UE2.0 on steroids wich is not the best solution for the console performance wise. I just hope that for their 5th game they will build a new engine who will take advantage of the overall hardware architecture.
I didn't work on the PC version so I can't tell where exactly the bottleneck is in that one. As far as I know, the PC version was rushed out because originally there was no plan to release it on PC until very late.
The franchise is based on a revamped UE2.5 version. During the 3rd one, the entire rendering part and some parts of script interpreter were rewritten. The 4th one also rewrote the framework to fit in multi-threading and math library to utilize VMX instructions. As for UE3.0, it's not that good on multi-threading too until very very late, according to some microsoft staffs.
