Capcom's "Framework" game engine

Yeah, looking at some foes in LP it looks much lesss than claimed, you can even see poly-edges on some of those big things - at least at that one in the demo at the start of the level, almost looks low-poly to me. But maybe they counting 2D-particles and environments in alot as well.

 

Yep, that's a kind of average number of triangles per frame we have in heavy scenes, being an average it can go up and down a lot (just to say that it also happens sometime to have > 4 Mtriangles per frame at 30 fps..expecially when in particular cases we render a lot of stuff in the shadow maps.. but to be sure we run at target frame rate we try to avoid those situations)
Anyway I don't really think we need more triangles than that per frame (at least this generation); it's not about how many triangles you can push, but what kind of triangles we can push.
We should get more clever at (dinamically) distribuiting geometry details only where it's absolutely needed, cause we, as game developers in general, are not being pariticularly smart at this (I don't consider static LOD to be an advanced rendering technique )

Marco

 

It might seem that way but I think they and many other Japanese devs are still behind the technical curve this gen. It will be sometime before we see a HS or Gears contender from them.

 

Why do you say that?

Name me one technical effect that either Gears or Heavenly sword does that you can't see in either DMC4, Lost Planet or Dead Rising?

Granted they don't have normal mapped "everything" but the tech is present in the games mentioned, just not as predominate..

To be honest I'd MUCH rather have the beautifully smooth and rich animation and motion blurr effects of Lost Planet than most of the effects in Gears..

But thats just my oppinion.. (& this is slightly OT..)

 

Modern engines based on shaders are not that much about 'effects' anymore, once you have programmable hw one can tailor techniques to his needs.
Usually every good engine shares a lot in common other good engines, but it also has some special thing that make images on screen feel and look different from any other engine (art direction apart..)

Marco

 

Hopefully this info isn't too redundant. Stole it from a forum that stole it from another forum.

*As for multi-core optimization, the session mainly discussed methods for symmetric multi-core (Xbox 360). Since parallelization per module or loop which are often seen in parallel programming is not suitable for a game engine, parallelization per task including player character, enemy, bullet, camera, effect generator etc. is mainly used in the engine.

*To suppress parallelization bugs such as dead lock, they made 2 clearly separated rules called "parallel update" which has no dependency and "synchronized update" in which each task can refer to and update other tasks. Task relationships and synchronization update intervals are adjustable on a GUI tool to make it easy to find parallel processes against the rules.

*The performance for 1 thread vs 6 threads is, 2.6x in Dead Rising, and 2.15x in Lost Planet (under development). The CPU load is 80% for the main thread, 70% for rendering and sound, and 50-60% for other parallelized tasks.

*There were only a few parallelization-related bugs against the rules in thousands of bug reports in the bug-checking period of the Dead Rising development, which shows totally parallelized application doesn't necessarily equal a bug-hell and they can realize stable parallelization thanks to the parallelization techniques and the strict rules in the Framework engine.

*As for hi-def graphics, they pointed out "frame rate, fill rate, texture quality and size are more problematic than shader." Because of their estimation that 60fps is impossible for next-gen-esque imagery, they added lightweight 2.5D motion blur to make 30fps look smoother. Besides MSAA mini buffer is used in effect drawing to gain more fill rate (with the premise that GPU can use MSAA mini-buffer without cost). For better texture compression, they do original texture compression which appropriates an alpha channel for an extended information area and decompress it with programmable shaders.

 

I wonder why they did not use ATI 3Dc format..

 

Jawed posted a list of formats supported but I didn't see 3Dc on it. Is there another name for 3Dc that I may have missed?
If it is supported it could always be the case like someone posted earlier that this game may not remain 360 exclusive so they are probably better off not using it or it could have something to do with their engine.

 

Xenos supports it, AFAIK it supports ATI1N and ATI2N

 

I asked a question about 3Dc a month ago in a round about way to see if I could get a straight answer from someone deving on the platform as to if the Xenos used it or not. What I got was an answer that I think has more to do with ATI gpus in general rather than Xenos specifically but this is what I was told maybe someone else can add to this?

The person also mentioned that there was a cost per texel as well.

 

So you'd want to imply that PS3 would suffer smaller performance drain in this case at 4xAA, even without EDRAM (or exaclty for that reason?)?

 

There are several tricks to reduce the impact of predicated tiling on vertex throughput (manual predication for example, 'cutting' your models in smaller and spatially coherent batches and so on), which help a lot reach the famous 5%. It's not a walk in the park though. It does require work. I'd say that in many situations 2X can be essentially free, while 4X has some more impact; free in terms of performance, but it's not even close to be free in terms of programmers time and development cost.

Fran.

 

fran agrees you with this:

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

 

I think it's too hard to give meaningful numbers like this that hold in general. It does depend so much on exactly what you are trying to do.

Fran.

 

Tru, But what alot of people around here neglect to remember when they make statements like this:-

Is that video game technology isn't all about rendering and displaying pretty pictures. Granted maybe my arguement probably wasn't given very well but I simply disagree that one can simply say something like "Japanese devs are behind when it comes to the technology" because as far as we know they could have very powerful and advanced tech for doing many other tasks unrelated to rendering..

I understand the statement was probably made in the context to graphics which I guess is to be expected around here since that seems to be what invokes the most interest in threads in the tech forum but by saying "Capcom & many other Japanese devs" Dr Nick is infering that somehow the fact that these developers are Japanese is somehow linked to the fact that they are not on the forefront of computer games tech.. What about all those non-Japanese developers that aren't producing UE3 like visuals?
If he'd have said "Capcom and many other devs" then I wouldn't have had a problem to be fair..

 

Really interesting! thanks one!!!

 

Awesome stuff - Thanks one!

notes I found interesting:

-xenon ~ 3.2GHz P4EE dual core

-vertex performance of the Xbox 360 GPU can match that of NVIDIA GeForce 8800

-3million poly/frame @ 30fps - 90million poly/sec

-10-40k poly per char 500k poly background

-160mb textures at one time

-dynamic 4x-0AA dependant on frame rate

-multiple physics engines (Havok + custom multithreaded engine)

-60fps next gen graphics "will be difficult" => 30fps + motion blur helps hide their lower frame rate

-only 5 developers built the MT Framework Engine (adding help to transfer to ps3)

-engine is currently in development for ps3

-Devil May Cry and Resident Evil will both use the MT Framework Engine

 

I understand they are talking about diffuse texture compression, not necessarily NM, what has 3Dc to do with it?

 

Are they talking about triangle setup limit?