https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2019-gears-5-tech-interview
A lot accomplished in 2 years.
Finger's Crossed!
A lot accomplished in 2 years.
The Coalition: On Gears of War 4, we ran only a few passes async such as reflection capture actors. We made a large investment on Gears 5 to run our entire post-process chain on async compute. This made a lot of sense given it is always running at native resolution due to the temporal upscale. This gave us a few more milliseconds to work with and achieve 60fps on Xbox One X, as well as in all MP modes on Xbox One S. There was a non-trivial amount of engineering effort to convert every post-process pass we used on Gears 5 to compute so we could then run it async. We also added a deferred present where the base pass of the next frame is started while the GPU completes the async post process pass of the current frame. These same asynchronous compute optimisations are also supported on PC.
Finger's Crossed!
Digital Foundry: DirectX 12 supports ray tracing on PC now through DXR and the Project Scarlett has announced hardware ray tracing support, UE4 has also added support for various ray traced effects. Where do you see the usage of ray tracing in Gears 5 or in future titles from The Coalition?
The Coalition: On Gears 5 we are using GPU compute-based ray traced distance field shadows which works across all platforms and does not depend on DXR or dedicated ray tracing hardware. We are excited with the possibilities of DXR and Project Scarlett's native hardware support for accelerated ray tracing. At this point, we are not ready to talk about our future plans, however we are following closely the emerging techniques and innovations in this exciting space.