Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion Archive [2010]

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Nebula said:
Ehhh.. welcome to yesterday... :LOL:
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:mrgreen: I am always happy to make other people laugh!

I am aware that resolution is the best thing since sliced bread...but can you explain me:

In the screen shots, e.g. the ground textures in 1080p get improved a lot. Why is this?
When switching to 1080p mode, do they increase the texture resolution as well? Then the more detail would not be solely dedicated to the 1080p resolution but to higher texture resolution as well - which is kind of double performance hit and not "fair" comparison.

If they did not up the texture resolution simultaneously, does this mean that they use this high res textures in 720p mode as well? This would surprise me really, because it seems like a waste of memory when using such high res textures in 720p mode, when only a "blurry mess" is left at the end...
 
Indeed the textures dont seem to be like for like. I doubt they used the same texture detail in 720p mode
 
That may be a good point about AMD's MLAA being better in 1080p. One of the things we haven't seen much yet is people posting screenshots of what they can now run in games with MLAA as opposed to MSAA. In other words, we've been seeing the no AA, MLAA, 4xMSAA comparisons but not the here's what I can run run with 4xMSAA with an acceptable framerate and here's what I can run with MLAA and have a similar framerate comparisons.

Another thing to consider is that even if MLAA implementations on the 360 do not become prevelant, it still may encourage devs to do more tiling and take advantage of 4xMSAA. That is still a win.
 
dragonelite said:
Would it be possible to do 2xMsaa with mlaa on 360.
Or would that take away to much gpu rendering time.
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I suppose it is way cheaper to implement 4xMSAA on Xbox360 as the dev stated in the DF interview that more than 10% of a 30fps frame is needed on the Xbox GPU for MLAA - seems to be expensive, compared to tiling?!?
 
Do they really know enough about the GOW3 method to make such a claim? As I remember, the method was implemented pretty late into development, so it can't be that restricting or hard. The game certainly wasn't technically undemanding.
 
Folks, this isn't a place for spewing "lazy devs" discussion. There are other websites you can go to that cater to that mentality.
SG79 said:
Do they really know enough about the GOW3 method to make such a claim? As I remember, the method was implemented pretty late into development, so it can't be that restricting or hard. The game certainly wasn't technically undemanding.
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Considering the integration into Edge tools, any PS3 dev should have access to it.
 
Trejser said:
God of War AA coming to PC/360?
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Ugh, those sample images are bad, it blurs the image way too much. Stuff like the foliage, trees and barb wire probably look even worse in motion. As long as they keep it off by default on pc, or always leave the option to turn it off, then I won't care. I'm still not a fan of these post process aa methods, they seem to crapify the image too much on games with fine details.
 
KKRT said:
@ps2rocks
I actually recommend my direct feed screens choices for showing how good MLAA in gow 3 is. [tried to get as much varied locations i could find and without dof and motion blur].

http://strony.aster.pl/kakarotto/gow3_mlaa/1.jpg
http://strony.aster.pl/kakarotto/gow3_mlaa/2.jpg
http://strony.aster.pl/kakarotto/gow3_mlaa/3.jpg
http://strony.aster.pl/kakarotto/gow3_mlaa/4.jpg
http://strony.aster.pl/kakarotto/gow3_mlaa/5.jpg
http://strony.aster.pl/kakarotto/gow3_mlaa/6.jpg
http://strony.aster.pl/kakarotto/gow3_mlaa/7.jpg
http://strony.aster.pl/kakarotto/gow3_mlaa/8.jpg
http://strony.aster.pl/kakarotto/gow3_mlaa/9.jpg
http://strony.aster.pl/kakarotto/gow3_mlaa/10.jpg
http://strony.aster.pl/kakarotto/gow3_mlaa/11.jpg
http://strony.aster.pl/kakarotto/gow3_mlaa/12.jpg
http://strony.aster.pl/kakarotto/gow3_mlaa/13.jpg

Ps. Ps2rocks those screens arent mine ;p Most of them are from guys that post them on gametrailers board [2-3 different guys with capture cards, props to them].
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The MLAA in GOW 3 is excellent. I don't see this blur some people are talking about. Maybe they can point to it in the pics above. It would be very much appreciated.
 
Since aliasing in general becomes less offensive as resolution increases, I'd think the GOWAA on a 1080p framebuffer would be sufficient for the most of us. I have a single dead pixel in the bottom right corner of my 1080p TV, and it's very hard to spot even when I'm looking for it. This is a 46" TV from 8' (2.5 meters) viewing distance, which is probably what the average user has. When pixels are that size, aliasing is much less noticable. So I think Sony might just add a few more SPU's and just go with MLAA on 1080p next gen.
 
Grandmaster could you test and analyse the memory hit of MLAA?

If I am right, it seems to me that you have access to the PC version. You can measure memory usage with MLAA and without any AA to compare the memory hit.

If you do this for different resolutions, you should get a clear number for the memory usage of MLAA, right?
 
Lucid_Dreamer said:
The MLAA in GOW 3 is excellent. I don't see this blur some people are talking about. Maybe they can point to it in the pics above. It would be very much appreciated.
Click to expand...

I'll quote myself, and there is blur on those shots.

There's a bit of blur it seems though it varies. Also ATIs MLAA is right now AFAIK part of unofficial drivers and also only works in DX9. Also many are using the MLAA on 5xxx series via a driver hack but ATI said they will give MLAA option officially for 5xxx series and hopefully 3-4xxx series. GOWIII could also use a sharpen filter applied after MLAA pass to sharpen up frames. Your pics looks like they have a bit of sharpening going on. I do know some games use sharpen filter. For example Crysis games uses customisable and adaptive sharpen filter and CE2/CE3 allows this.
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Gitaroo said:
didnt one of the artical mention the increase in memory

http://www.iryokufx.com/mlaa/

"Memory footprint is 2x the size of the backbuffer on Xbox 360 and 1.5x on the 9800 GTX+."
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But is this really an increase in memory? Is MSAA really 'memory neutral'? Maybe in certain rendering pipelines with tiling on the 360 it can be almost free in terms of memory I guess though.

From the article above (whose numbers for 360 I'm not sure are that relevant if they were done with XNA?), I also thought this was interesting:

What are the advantages of MLAA over MSAA?

For similar quality, it is considerably faster, one order of magnitude in the PC case.
For consoles, where the MSAA sample count is limited due to hardware restrictions, it allows better quality.
It enables the usage of anti-aliasing in conjunction with Multiple Render Targets, which is specially useful for deferred engines.
It can provide better quality when HDR is used, as anti-aliasing is performed after tone mapping.
Anti-aliasing quality can be dynamically adjusted on the fly, depending on the available resources at each frame.
MLAA is not incompatible with MSAA: this leads to hybrid MSAA-MLAA approaches.
Click to expand...
 
Err, that article lists "Crysis" as a 360 title, complete with MLAA render time compared to a 9800 GTX. Ummm...

Anyway sounds like an interesting technique, but the hit seems too long to be completely viable on 360. Unless the move from XNA to dev kit offers substantial savings. Otherwise obviously you're looking at 10+% of a 30 FPS game and ~1/4 of a 60 FPS game's render budget on 360.
 
Rangers said:
Err, that article lists "Crysis" as a 360 title, complete with MLAA render time compared to a 9800 GTX. Ummm...
Click to expand...

The article says..

How were the times measured for the Xbox version?

We captured frames from the games listed in the table, and processed them running a XNA version of our technique on a real Xbox. Using a proper dev-kit would probably lead to better times.
Click to expand...

Though i believe that DF did something similar, by processing frames of Uncharted and Battlefield and seeing the result, but in movement something was off (worse than the current issues) so more work would be needed than just using a devkit.
 
Arwin said:
But is this really an increase in memory? Is MSAA really 'memory neutral'? Maybe in certain rendering pipelines with tiling on the 360 it can be almost free in terms of memory I guess though.
Click to expand...

Exactly, that is what I want to know.

IF we know the numbers of MLAA, we can hunt for the numbers of MSAA on Xbox. But several devs (for instance the Blur devs) hinted that the memory hit for 4xMSAA compared to 2xMSAA is not much on Xbox (compared to the hit on PS3) - so this could be another big advantage to go 4xMSAA on Xbox instead MLAA!

I really hope that we see (in near future) multiplat titles with 4xMSAA on Xbox and MLAA on PS3 - would be ultra interesting IMO and the individual optimum for both platforms!
 
Billy Idol said:
IF we know the numbers of MLAA, we can hunt for the numbers of MSAA on Xbox. But several devs (for instance the Blur devs) hinted that the memory hit for 4xMSAA compared to 2xMSAA is not much on Xbox (compared to the hit on PS3) - so this could be another big advantage to go 4xMSAA on Xbox instead MLAA!
Click to expand...

eDRAM tiles are resolved to main memory, so the render target memory overhead for enabling MSAA should be nothing.
 
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