Bioshock Graphics

Really? I was pretty sure streaming was somewhat related to texture resolution.

I agree

What games?

 

Streaming is more about eliminating loading pauses... If your streaming is very fast, you may use somewhat more textures in a given scene and trust the engine to load the next room's data quickly, but it's not that common. It's usually more about adding more texture variance to an entire level on a larger scale. The point is, just because there are low-res textures in a game, it's not the engine's fault.

And AFAIK Bioshock is using streaming...

 

Streaming is IO rather than graphics engine.

 

While more accurate than "not related at all", that's still a misleading statement. Streaming, load points, level design and available resources are all related.

Specifically if their UE2 engine was not using streaming, they would set load points based on convenience as well as level design, possibly leading to lower resolution/tiled textures.
Just giving an example of course. I'm sure Bioshock has more up-to-date textures.

Is there a UE3 game that isn't using streaming?

So?

 

So the same engine used on a system with faster bus speeds will allow higher resolution textures.

 

Listen, you can argue on for argument's sake, but the point is that Bioshock's texture resolution is not a consequence of the engine that Irrational has used, that the idea is totally wrong...

 

It looks cool but from what i can see watching some gameplay videos, the camera angle is fixed . So i can't examine the ripples from a side angle to determine their depth (and, given the harware it is running on, i suspect that it is some trick from the 2d era but i may be wrong).

They look 3d, at least this is my impression by examining the frames. In any case they look like those at bioshock but they have different shape (circular ripples instead of the parallel of Bioshock)
some frames

IDT5 may help with the low-rez textures in the close distance, but AFAIk it can't do alot for the "draw-distance" problem. I hope that Ms and Sony won't use this engine as an excuse for their next consoles in order to release them with insufficient memory.

 

Why couldn't it help draw distance stuff? The entire point is that the further away a texture is from the camera, the smaller it's resolution will become, and thus the less memory it consumes. You could theoreticaly go for a 1024K (!) texture as well, it's just that there's no media to store it at the moment.

 

They have depth. The ripples pass through the character and terrain models at varying heights with the waves. It's procedural geometry. IIRC ERP said BGDA had the highest utilization of any game on the Performance Analyser because of the procedural water, though the rest of the game was 'ar for the course' in terms of poly counts.

So physical water has been around a while longer than people realize, and interestingly has remained rare. I don't know what system Snowblind Studios used and why is wasn't copied. I guess in most games the processing cost would have eaten into other graphical effects, and the choice was made to compromise the water for better whatever.

 

Thanks for the permission. Unfortunately its really hard to argue against someone who doesn't grasp his self-contradiction with claims like "not related to engine" and "until ID Tech 5".
Best of luck.

 

In the case of Bioshock, there's no relation between the two, because they have to work with the same amount of texture memory as any other game on the 360, or - roughly - the PS3.
In the case of Tech 5, they'll remove this limitation by virtualizing the texture memory, which is going to be a completely unique feature.

The point is again, that Bioshock's textures are the way they are because of the hardware's limitations, and not because it's using that certain engine.

Clear enough for you?

 

So what you're saying is that outside of virtualized assets, all the software(applications and engines) is exactly the same and it's all down to hardware

I don't know how if things work that way in high-end CG world, but in games that couldn't be farther from reality. There are often very Large discrepancies between the way certain engines (as well as applications themselves, regardless of the engine they use) utilize memory, and that directly affects the quantity of memory usable for graphics assets.

 

Does everyone really try to intentionally misunderstand me here?

This is what I've been replying to, this is what I don't think to be true.
I'm not trying to generalize things here, and I'm totally aware about things like KZ2's defered rendering engine using more of the system's memory and thus leaving less for textures, and so on.

 

I remember how Unreal Tournamnet 1 (2000) for PC had a second disc with S3TC compressed textures with a resolution of 1024*1024 and 2048*2048 for most stuff. Great stuff this engine could do....

But seriously it is obvious that the textures in Bioshock are low(er)-res becouse of the lowest common denominator hardware and not the engine used in this game (duh). RAM, VRAM, and so on.....

 

No other card but those early S3 Savage ones supported S3TC at that time. So was it the hardware or the software that allowed high res textures?

Edit: I know that _you_ are just kidding here but anyway...

 

I noticed that Oblivion has interactive water ripples on the same level as the DX10 Bioshock setting. I wonder why they couldn't get that in on the DX9 render path then?

For that matter, Morrowind did it too with DX8. Not quite on the same level, but the shader water is definitely interactive. Ironically Morrowind has the lower frame rate limit on the shaders too, like Bioshock. Oblivion's shaders seem to run at the same rate as everything else.

 

Yes but in Morrowind and Oblivion the water is 2D and the ripples a shader effect. It is different if the water is actually 3D geometry and reacts correctly to interaction.

Hehe, cheers!

It is unfortunate that the S3TC compression technique never got a bigger impact in the PC gamming world at that time.

 

BGDA is still one of my favorite games and I never got tired of running around in the water. It would have been great if Snowblind presented how it worked. Probably a high poly grid and navier-stokes for the interaction. I always wanted to implement a system like that, but never had the time.

 

Sure. CPUs can do anything GPUs can it just might not run as fast depending on the algorithm. If you have the CPU power to spare as BGDA obviously did why not use it.