Capcom's "Framework" game engine

[Dr. Nick]

I agree, it's not bad at all, but it's still 4x time slower than 'advertised'..at least in this game
I would not be suprised if other platforms out there pay a smaller cost, performance wise..

When you read on about the other things like fillrate and 2.5d it seems that they used the Edram buffer for things other than AA. I got a headache just trying to make since of the Babel fish translation.

 

[nAo]

When you read on about the other things like fillrate and 2.5d it seems that they used the Edram buffer for things other than AA. I got a headache just trying to make since of the Babel fish translation.

AFAIK they 'just' used per pixel depth data to 'smooth out' the classic per pixel motion blur post processing effect on silouhettes, it is a trick that is often used for DOF effects (cough..HS..cough..) , but since DOF and MB are in end almost the same thing..

 

[pwduncan]

Sorry to stop the flow of info, but after many years of lurking on many boards, this thread has given me a greater insight to the mind of developers than any other.

Paul Duncan

 

[AlNom]

Sorry to stop the flow of info, but after many years of lurking on many boards, this thread has given me a greater insight to the mind of developers than any other.

Paul Duncan

<glances over to the left>

Join Date: May 2004
Location: South Shields: England
Posts: 1

um...welcome to the boards?

 

[nAo]

Sorry to stop the flow of info, but after many years of lurking on many boards, this thread has given me a greater insight to the mind of developers than any other.

I hope this 'insight' into devs heads has given to you good vibes..

 

[Hardknock]

Holy crap it looks like the have Lost planet running on a quad core XP PC! Is this going to be a Vista game now too or something?

From my understanding the Framework engine builds the games on a PC and then they are transfered to each respective console where the code is optimized from there....

 

[Mefisutoferesu]

AFAIK they 'just' used per pixel depth data to 'smooth out' the classic per pixel motion blur post processing effect on silouhettes, it is a trick that is often used for DOF effects (cough..HS..cough..) , but since DOF and MB are in end almost the same thing..

Woohoo!!

 

[Rangers]

Zenji Nishikawa uploaded a very detailed article about the engine. "Capcom MT Framework" is its real name and MT means "Multi-Thread", "Meta Tools" and "Multi-Target". Probably this article answers most of technical questions raised in this thread.

http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/docs/20070131/3dlp.htm

It looks awesome. I wish I could read it.

edit: aprisoner at gaf's partial summary

I don't have time to translate it all, but here are some tidbits I found interesting:

1. This MT engine work started in Sept. 2004 and they had something up and running by January 2005. It's based on the Onimusha 3 engine. The project started with just one engineer, then ramped up to 3, and now they have 5 people maintaining and upgrading the code. They added 4 people now just for the PS3 port which started in Oct. 2005. The MT engine is currently used for Dead Rising and Lost Planet, but future cross-platform next-gen games will also use it.

2. They evaluated UE3, and they see they appreciate the strengths of that engine. But they were worried about some of the performance limitations at the time, and the lack of support personnel in Japan. They have high hopes for UE3 in the future. But they decided this time to go at building their own tech.

3. They started with Xbox 360 since it is so close to the PC platform and mostly compatible.

4. There have been requests from developers to license their engine due to the success of Lost Planet and Dead Rising. But Capcom feels that it would take too much effort to hire the appropriate support staff. They would rather put more effort into developing even better games for their users.

5. They talk a bit about the multithreading techniques they are using to get the power out of the asynchronously multicore CPUs in the 360 and PS3.

6. They give a detailed description of the technique and provide screenshots to show they are using to do motion blur on the Xbox 360. The algorithms are based on a talk given by Simon Green at NVIDIA at GDC back in 2003. (This is the one aspect of Lost Planet that looks truly next-gen, and makes the game really stand out and look unbelievably beautiful.)

 

[snakejoe]

1. more info on Xenon performance, 1 3.2Ghz core = 2/3 power of P4 3.2Ghz, but if use all 6 threads, you can get 4X performance.so Xenon 3.2Ghz 3 cores 6 SMT = P4EE 3.2Ghz 2 cores 4 SMT

2. and the memory access latency, yes the latency is bad, but like current gen GPU, more threads means you can hide the memory access problem better. so that is not a big problem.

3. each character has 10k to 20k ploy, VS has 30k to 40k poly, backgroup 500k. average 3m poly per frame. Dead Rising average 4m poly per frame.

4. dynamic MSAA adjust, base on the scene FPS. i.e. < 30fps, 4AA -> 2AA.

5. normally there are around 160mb texture on the memory, 60mb - 80mb is background

 

[Fox5]

more info on Xenon performance

1 3.2Ghz core = 2/3 power of P4 3.2Ghz
but if use all 6 threads, you can get 4X performance.
so Xenon 3.2Ghz 3 cores 6 SMT = P4EE 3.2Ghz 2 cores 4 SMT

and the memory access latency, yes the latency is bad, but like current gen GPU, more threads means you can hide the memory access problem better. so that is not a big problem.

Where do you get this information from?

Based on the way PC ports to Xenon (or vice versa) seemed to perform, I had guessed than 1 3.2ghz core was around the power of a 2 to 2.4ghz p4. Assuming that's right though, where did you get 4x the performance for multithreading? It's not too unexpected I guess, hyperthreading on the Xenon should give better results than it did on p4, due to being both a more inefficient processor and having a better implementation, but it seems weird that going multiple cores would be efficient enough to raise performance 4x over a single thread. There's never been that kind of performance increase per core from going multithreading in any game ever, not even on the Saturn. I remember hearing the largest increase on the saturn was about 50%, and that's also about the largest I've seen so far from going dual core in a PC game. Assuming the tasks split between the two cores can't be parallelized any further, that probably doesn't leave much left to increase performance on.
I'd also be surprised if current games haven't offloaded some significant portions off on multiple threads already, such as sound and some graphics processing (such as the gpu driver or some form of hidden surface removal), both are easy to implement and can provide substantial speedups.

 

[snakejoe]

Where do you get this information from?

watch impress latest article
http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/docs/20070131/3dlp.htm

石田氏：「我々の経験からすると1コアのパフォーマンスは大体同クロックのPentium 4の2/3くらいですかね。各コアのSMT(後述)をフルに活用して6スレッド分をフルに稼働させることができると、大体その4倍くらいのパフォーマンスが出ますよ。PCでいうとデュアルコアPentium 4 Extreme Edition 840(3.2GHz)のSMT有効時の4スレッドくらいのパフォーマンスは出せますね。ゲームエンジンを並列化実装しないとかなりきついですが、並列化実装したときのパフォーマンスは今のハイエンドPCと比較しても遜色ないと思います」

 

[Rangers]

aprisoner:

Other interesting notes:

1. MT stands for Multi-Target, Multi-Threaded, Meta Tools engine.

2. Dead Rising scenes render about 4M polys, and Lost Planet scenes max out at about 3M. This is because of the demanding number of particles needed for Lost Planet. They said that drawing bleeding zombies is technologically much easier than creating a rich organic world filled with smoke, fire, and snow.

3. They are very proud of the techniques they been able to employ to get a tremendous amount of good looking particle effects on screen without causing slowdown. They said that utilizing the Xbox 360 EDRAM for certain screen effects gives them great speed without hurting frame rate. They said that this EDRAM, along with learning to properly use the multithreaded processors, are the two "tricks to making Xbox 360 games run well".

4. They also mention that although their MT engine is being launched with Dead Rising and Lost Planet on Xbox 360, next it will be used for the PS3 title Devil May Cry 4, and then they plan a Xbox 360/PS3 multiplatform game next, Resident Evil 5.

I really like to hear that about the EDRAM.

 

[22psi]

3-4M poly a sec?

I really like what Capcom is doing for next gen (or is it current gen right now). They are leading the way for Japanese developers.

 

[TheChefO]

3-4M poly a sec?

I really like what Capcom is doing for next gen (or is it current gen right now). They are leading the way for Japanese developers.

3-4m per frame x 30fps = 90-120mpoly/sec

 

[22psi]

3-4m per frame x 30fps = 90-120mpoly/sec

LOL @ my noobness. 90-120m poly/sec seems pretty impressive especially for Capcom's first two games on the system. I hope RE5 will even push that further.

 

[TheChefO]

LOL @ my noobness. 90-120m poly/sec seems pretty impressive especially for Capcom's first two games on the system. I hope RE5 will even push that further.

I'd love to get some numbers from other devs to see what they're getting out of xb360 and ps3 games.

These numbers sound reasonable as I think the theoretical limit for xb360 is 500m poly/sec.

Capcom is off to a great start on their multiplatform engine and they're actually taking advantage of the edram too. Good stuff guys! :smile:

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Heavenly Sword is about 2,5-3 million polygons per frame...

 

[aselto]

Heavenly Sword is about 2,5-3 million polygons per frame...

in HS we easily render 2-2.5 MTriangles per frame at 30 fps

Not that it really matters, just pointing out...

Reading babelfish translation of the article gives me a real headache.

 

[Jacob]

He's talking about this:

The numbers quoted about HS are slighty wrong..cause a few days a go I realized there's a bug in the code that computes the triangle count: in some cases it's more close to 3M triangles per frame mark than 2M.

http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showpost.php?p=906526&postcount=57

 

[ihamoitc2005]

polygons

Not that it really matters, just pointing out...

Reading babelfish translation of the article gives me a real headache.

I don't know my friend, I look at models for these games (all systems) and I do not know what they mean when they say they have so many polygons each frame. Maybe they include normal map original but real polygons is much less, I dont know. I think even Lair has now much less polygons than 170,000/dragon. But I do not know, maybe this is what millions of polygons looks like. (?)