4A Engine (Metro 2033) AA modes

[Neb]

1) Why bother saving 11MB in favor of a worse looking AA when you already have 100MB unused..??

Perhaps the "100MB" number is for certain places like narrower corridors etc. I would find it amusing if 100MB would be left out and not used as atleast cache for streaming system.

2) Why not have the game 100% V-synced with no Tearing if your game runs at 40-50FPS ?

Isn't game locked to 30fps with vsync until framerate dips below then it disables vsync?

 

[assen]

Honestly, I don't understand the "100 MB free" thing. It's absurd.

The only reason to have 100 MB free at startup is if you have a PC-style, heap-allocation-happy engine, and you leave as much as possible free in order to ward off the eventual death by fragmentation - in which regard, they say, they are much better than Stalker.

 

[grandmaster]

It makes more sense bearing in mind that the guy is alternating between strictly engine-based discussion and discussion of the first game to use it. Plus it's probably the case that Metro 2033 is being posited as one big showcase for a soon-to-be middleware platform so they'd want to show their features over and above the hardware solutions.

If there are follow-up questions by all means pose them and I'll see if I can get them answered, but this interview was fairly time-intensive in itself bearing in mind the PR layer and language barrier.

 

[assen]

Most recent games I've seen tend to load high-res textures dynamically as needed - the dreaded "texture popping" (opponents of which should take a look at Dragon Age, which doesn't seem to have it - because it seems to statically load the entire level at loading time, and as a result is extremely blurry).

I don't know how big Metro 2033's levels are - but if they are streaming textures, they could always trivially increase the memory dedicated to high-res textures, instead of leaving 100 MB free. This is what makes it so puzzling. The tradeoff between free memory and space used for high-res textures should be a single number in a config file somewhere.

 

[Neb]

Metro 2033 has good texture streaming system.

 

[nightshade]

One thing I don't understand is even with Metro 2033 xbox360 having 2GB worth of uncompressed textures [as mentioned in the interview] most of the textures in the xbox 360 ver remains around decent enough to average/poor.

 

[assen]

One thing I don't understand is even with Metro 2033 xbox360 having 2GB worth of uncompressed textures [as mentioned in the interview] most of the textures in the xbox 360 ver remains around decent enough to average/poor.

Simple to understand: "2 GB of uncompressed" is a technical measure, "decent to average/poor" is a measure of artistic skill. One cannot compensate for the other; the best a good texture streaming system / renderer can do is present faithfully the original art assets, it cannot improve them. The games visuals aren't a sum, or a product of the technical and artistic skills; there's a "minimum" function involved

 

[grace12]

hehe I remember that thread.