Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion Archive [2010]

[nightshade]

Amazing article, such an indepth interview. Good job !
And it seems like I was correct about their SSAO approach

By the way can someone explain this ? What does he mean by low res transparent rendering solution ?

We created a low-resolution transparent rendering solution to get around the fill-rate/overdraw bottleneck and render a lot more transparent layers.It doesn't use the 360's MSAA fill rate trick, so it costs a little more, but you don't get the crunchy edges or up-sampling artifacts.

 

[zed]

Chris Tchou: We use a single 7e3 buffer for our final render target in Reach. This results in a more limited HD

R
Ive gotta blow my own horn again (oh-er) but looks like I accurately predicted reach would use a more standard HDR method
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1306423&postcount=113

well first thing to go would be there HDR method
get rid of that + I woulnt be surprised if they could do 720p @ 2xAA + 8xAF

I thought Ild already written this but cant see it, heres my take
someone high up at bungie thought of this HDR method + didnt want to ditch it, even though its proven bad.
we've seen countless examples of others keeping with there own methods even when proven to be worse or wrong (eg reading a book on W bush at the moment, the invasion of iraq is a good example) ego's sometimes dont lead to the best decision

i believe everyone now agrees that this was the correct choice on bungies part, good to see them take it

 

[NRP]

That was a great article!

 

[JB9861]

Tech interview is up!

Seems like they've been working hard lately with Reach and GT5. Great article.

 

[(((interference)))]

Great interview.

So they are using the 360's tesselator for the water.

And we got some explanation of how the imposter system works - it turns out it is in fact different to the LOD systems seen in other games as it automatically generates the LOD model instead of using a set of LOD models.

The single biggest factor was our new system to automatically generate a low-LOD version of every object and piece of level geometry in the game. This will actually be presented by Xi Wang at GDC. To give you a short summary, it builds a very efficient vertex-shaded version of each object and piece of level geometry. These LOD models render extremely fast, can be batched, and look nearly the same at distance. And because it was an automatic process we didn't have to take time from the artists. We also improved our visibility culling algorithms and made use of amortised GPU occlusion queries to reduce the amount of stuff we had to consider each frame.

Someone should have asked them about the 3-4 player campaign/firefight split screen glitch (which usually works with no major performance hangups -especially firefight) was it a feature cut due to performance issues or is it in fact just an unintended renderer glitch.

 

[Lucid_Dreamer]

Great interview indeed! I'm glad we can final end the "no one's pushing the 360 hard" crazy talk.

 

[SteelOak]

Great interview indeed! I'm glad we can final end the "no one's pushing the 360 hard" crazy talk.

it was't so crazy before Reach came out.

 

[(((interference)))]

Great interview indeed! I'm glad we can final end the "no one's pushing the 360 hard" crazy talk.

Well, besides Remedy and Bungie who is? (and multplat titles like RDR)

And Bungie is no longer a 360 exclusive dev.

It's definitely not like the PS3 where you have half a dozen or more studios all pushing the system

 

[AlNom]

Well, besides Remedy and Bungie who is? (and multplat titles like RDR)

What do you consider pushing? PGR4, Forza 3, Dirt 2, Metro 2033, Crysis 2, Epic Games titles, Trials HD, Framework Engine titles, Mass Effect 2, Splinter Cell Conviction, Need For Speed Hot Pursuit/Shift for instance have their qualities. Even the Fable series has merits if you consider what the engine is doing under the hood keeping track of all your actions and modifying the world & NPCs with a day/night cycle in place.

 

[Rangers]

First party (or even third party deved exclusives) "pushing it" still seems to be in a sad state from MS though, and getting worse (hell Bungie is gone). Well, we'll see what 343 and Forza 4 bring. And Codename Kingdoms.

It's always been the case that if you name the most aggressive hardware pushing titles for PS3 it's mostly a bunch of exclusives, and on 360 sadly it's more multiplatform games doing the pushing. Although MS's hardcore first party seems in a sad state right now anyway, by their choice.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Huh? Fable 3 and Halo Reach are selling pretty well, got good reviews, Gears 3 is in the making. What else do they really need? Sure there could be more first party titles, but you got to have a LOT of spare time if you think you can play them all. I'm still trying to catch up with this year's stuff...

 

[Lucid_Dreamer]

Well, besides Remedy and Bungie who is? (and multplat titles like RDR)

And Bungie is no longer a 360 exclusive dev.

It's definitely not like the PS3 where you have half a dozen or more studios all pushing the system

Turn10.

It's not about how many studios are pushing the 360 to it's limits however possible. It's about the 360 being pushed to it's limits period. Obviously, MS is not going to have half a dozen 1st party studios pushing the system, because they don't have that many 1st party studios. However, their 1st party studios are pushing the hardware to it's limits. It's been MS's push (getting the most out of the system) since the beginning, as shown in numerous dev slides and their actual game examples.

 

[Gitaroo]

thought COD BO pushed the 360 to its limit, wasnt everything done on the system first. I would think that Gear 2 pushed the system pretty far, Gear 3 looks better but that from the UE3 upgrade. A lot of 3rd party games push the system pretty far I thought.

 

[(((interference)))]

What do you consider pushing? PGR4, Forza 3, Dirt 2, Metro 2033, Crysis 2, Epic Games titles, Trials HD, Framework Engine titles, Mass Effect 2, Splinter Cell Conviction, Need For Speed Hot Pursuit/Shift for instance have their qualities. Even the Fable series has merits if you consider what the engine is doing under the hood keeping track of all your actions and modifying the world & NPCs with a day/night cycle in place.

PGR4 was pretty impressive, Bizarre seem to be more capable technically than Turn 10 (which is why MS should buy them out), IIRC Turn 10 even got their real time bonnet reflection method for F3 from PGR.

As others have noted, most of the other graphically impressive titles are multiplat (like RDR, AC, Crysis 2) or are from third parties (eg Gears).

And Microsoft first parties like Rare, Lionhead, Turn 10 are more interested in gameplay rather than technology and Kinect will only further shift their focus away from games that are technical tours de force.

It's silly to think that the quantity and quality of Sony's first & second party devs don't have an impact on the quality of exclusives - it fosters both cooperation (eg. MLAA) and even competition between studios such as Team Ico, Polyphony, Naughty Dog, SCE Santa Monica, Zipper, Studio Liverpool, Evolution Studios, Guerilla Games, Media Molecule, Sucker Punch, Insomniac, ThatGameCompany, Quantic Dream, Novarama etc.

Their titles also push the hardware in a variety of different ways, they're not all FPS and racing games, you have 2D platformers (LBP), futuristic arcade racers (Wipeout), augmented reality (Invizimals), 256 player online FPSs etc.

Turn10.

However, their 1st party studios are pushing the hardware to it's limits..

How do we know that? For example Halo 3 was a pretty poor effort technically, sure Bungie did well with Reach but it's nothing like Naughty Dog who are now on their third iteration of what is even now an impressive engine.

And Remedy is a tiny team and the tech for Alan Wake is more impressive (and better leverages the 360's strengths) than big, first party exclusives like Fable (which doesn't look good or even have smooth framerate). They have also said that they could free up something like 30-40% of CPU time by implementing some optimisations that were too big to do for Alan Wake.

The fact that arguably the most technically impressive platform exclusive is from an independent developer with 40 developers! is not a good sign.

 

[nightshade]

I agree that games like Black Ops, Gears 2 and RDR pushed the 360 to its limits, but you have to see that the both are all three of them are built using multiplatform engines and one of them is still using a legacy code (COD). In case of PS3 we have a set of developers building their technology specifically for their requirements and built for one particular console....that way they make the most out of a particular machine.

Now I know that this isn't a very economical way but we aren't talking about that right now.

 

[AlNom]

I can't believe you guys still think that graphics and art style are the only indicators of whether a game engine pushes a platform. The engines are what they are in terms of features beyond graphical prowess, and you continue to see 360 multiplatform titles generally having advantages, if at least on par, over the other one when we're already 5 years into the cycle and still showing improvements from the same developers.

Does it matter if Unreal Engine 3 is multiplatform if it's still a showcase engine? Capcom's Framework Engine? Cry Engine 3? Frostbite? We've already got examples of how the former two perform on the 360 as the lead development platform, so suggesting they aren't taking advantage of the hardware is plain ignorant and closed-minded.

If it's simply a question of what developers might do if they didn't have multiplatform concerns, it's a bit of a moot point since even platform exclusive devs continue to make improvements throughout the generation. That's not to say that 3rd parties don't explore what other devs have already done in hardware based off of game development presentations (GDC, Microsoft's Gamefests/shared technology group) or behind-the-scenes collaborations.


Edit:

As an aside, and purely out of curiosity, what would you say about Rockstar's engine for GTA4/RDR or Vivendi's Saint's Row engine against say Sucker Punch's engine for Infamous, which is itself platform exclusive

 

[2real4tv]

Edit:

As an aside, and purely out of curiosity, what would you say about Rockstar's engine for GTA4/RDR or Vivendi's Saint's Row engine against say Sucker Punch's engine for Infamous, which is itself platform exclusive

Isn't that a bad comparison Prototype is a better one. Rockstar is someone who been building their game engine since psone vs sucker punch who biggest title before infamous is sly cooper.

 

[Arwin]

Infamous was also originally designed as a multi-platform engine I believe. SP said as much afaik and also pointed out that for Infamous 2 they've started to optimise parts of the engine for SPEs now. So I'm thinking it may not be an engine designed for SPEs on the outset even for Infamous 2.

 

[Ruskie]

I was wondering...looking at Infamous(and Infamous 2),it seems like the game was designed so there was not much draw as in GTA for example.View distance was quite small.Building blocks were placed so that you cant really get to see whole city,they always blocked your view,than less geometry has to be rendered.It is probably their design choice,but R* made different one.

Looking back on GTA IV it was never the case...You could get in to heli at night and you could practically get a view on whole city,sure buildings had lower LOD but there was still a lot of polygons and light sources to draw,eh?Plus there are some awesome physics and animations in R* games...lots of a.i,lots of cars,hundreds of light sources and that was their first next gen title,3 years old,made by 3rd party.Good job if you ask me

 

[Boxercide]

Grandmaster- Can we look forward to a Mass Effect 2 face-off?

PS3 demo drops on the 21st and the full game about a month later.