Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion Archive [2011]

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corduroygt said:
A 2009 game vs. a 2011 beta. Do you really think KZ3 vs C2 will be any different? KZ3 will be judged to be the better looking game by a vast majority, unless it's the PC version of C2 of course.
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Sure, a lot of people will believe so. But this is a tech forum, it's not about what you believe, it's about the facts, what you can prove and demonstrate. It's not about game X > game Y. I think it's more about understanding what the games are actually doing under the hood. So comments like "X has more than Y because that's what I see and it's my opinion bla bla" are really out of place.

Of course, I could be wrong :smile:

corduroygt said:
For each "Exclusive fan coming out of the woodwork to defend against a challenger", there's a Sony/PS3/Blu-ray hater who makes it his life mission to shit on each and every PS3 exclusive, so you can't really say that or know which group has more members.
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This is quite the misconception. Threads go like this:

PS3 fanboy: OMG Best graphics evah!! Generational leap!!!!
Regular poster: Looks good, but I don't like this/that
PS3 fanboy: OMG TROLL!!!

:LOL:
 
(((interference))) said:
No, theatre mode definitely adds proper MSAA instead of TAA, it's far cleaner than gameplay.
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Then why is ghosting still present in theatre mode? Because of the TAA that's why.

Also, Bungie has said that they used theatre mode to help find performance spikes. Why would they add something to theatre mode that would further hinder performance? Their reason for avoiding MSAA during gameplay still applies to theatre mode, unless you believe they add tiling support for theatre mode only.

Theatre mode is the same in Halo 3, ODST, and Reach. They take game code recorded during your play session and play back that code in real time. This isn't like a replay mode from a racing game where they do add on AA at the cost of half the frame rate.

corduroygt said:
For each "Exclusive fan coming out of the woodwork to defend against a challenger", there's a Sony/PS3/Blu-ray hater who makes it his life mission to shit on each and every PS3 exclusive, so you can't really say that or know which group has more members.
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Now this is silly. I don't see anyone hating on anything in regards to the ps3.

Besides a certain individual (who I won't name) dragged down the Crysis 2 thread, just to start this stupid comparison and debate here when the Crysis 2 article got posted. I can't believe, even after Shifty's reminder about the fanboy bickering going on, that this debate is still taking place.

I am in no way a PS3 hater, but at the same time, I don't think the system is without peer in terms of tech or it's games are flawless jewels. The way I see it, and hey maybe I'm wrong here, these "haters" could be trying to bring some perceptions down to a more realistic level.

Besides I really hate the idea of separating people into "groups". A gamer is a gamer to me regardless of preference or opinion. I don't consider people more interested in fighting some meaningless war true gamers. They see a great looking or playing game on another platform and for some reason get defensive. Me? I think it's awesome that we have multiple great looking and great playing games instead of just one.
 
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L. Scofield said:
Sure, a lot of people will believe so. But this is a tech forum, it's not about what you believe, it's about the facts, what you can prove and demonstrate. It's not about game X > game Y. I think it's more about understanding what the games are actually doing under the hood. So comments like "X has more than Y because that's what I see and it's my opinion bla bla" are really out of place.
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You really don't know what a game is doing under the hood unless the developers explain it themselves, and in the end it does not matter. What matters is how the end product looks, because that's how it's judged by the masses, who don't know anything about basic stuff like resolution and framerate, let alone concepts like GI, MLAA, etc. The masses have judged KZ2 to be superior looking to C2 in this case, and since KZ3 looks even better than KZ2, there's no contest.

Who cares if a game has GI, if it's not really using all of GI's advantages, than the developers made a bad trade-off. In the console graphics industry, you win by taking shortcuts unless the more intensive method has benefits that you're fully going to take advantage of.

Last I checked, this wasn't a forum to report forum trolling on the other parts of the internet, either.
 
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kagemaru said:
Then why is ghosting still present in theatre mode? Because of the TAA that's why.

Also, Bungie has said that they used theatre mode to help find performance spikes. Why would they add something to theatre mode that would further hinder performance? Their reason for avoiding MSAA during gameplay still applies to theatre mode, unless you believe they add tiling support for theatre mode only.

Theatre mode is the same in Halo 3, ODST, and Reach. They take game code recorded during your play session and play back that code in real time. This isn't like a replay mode from a racing game where they do add on AA at the cost of half the frame rate.
Click to expand...

Well, in Halo 3 they definitely added MSAA in theater mode because it was way cleaner than gameplay. Reach theatre mode also looks cleaner, I'm pretty sure they run with tiling in theatre mode, it's possible in Reach that they use a combination of TAA with 2x/4xMSAA which is why you're still seeing ghosting
 
2real4tv said:
I thought I read somewhere that MLAA doesn't blur textures?
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It can blur details in the current incarnations of it. Mlaa looks for contrast differences that fit certain patterns. When it finds them it considers those areas as 'likely' to be an edge and smooths them. Unfortunately it doesn't really know for sure if it's actually dealing with an edge since it doesn't know where on a polygon the given pixel data is. So in some cases it correctly finds an edge, but in other cases it will mistakenly smooth out actual texture detail that is in the middle of a polygon. How often that happens is very dependent on the art style of the game and the aggressiveness of the mlaa approach, which is one of many reasons why mlaa is more suitable for some games than others. This should be a fixable issue though, hopefully someone will sort that out. The trickier issue to solve is dealing with lack of sub pixel data, but some smart dude someplace is probably working on that one as we speak :)
 
joker454 said:
The trickier issue to solve is dealing with lack of sub pixel data, but some smart dude someplace is probably working on that one as we speak :)
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Nvidia seems to be on the way.

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=59443

Subpixel Reconstruction Antialiasing (SRAA) combines single-pixel (1x) shading with subpixel visibility to create antialiased images without increasing the shading cost. SRAA targets deferred-shading renderers, which cannot use multisample antialiasing. SRAA operates as a post-process on a rendered image with superresolution depth and normal buffers, so it can be incorporated into an existing renderer without modifying the shaders. In this way SRAA resembles Morphological Antialiasing (MLAA), but the new algorithm can better respect geometric boundaries and has fixed runtime independent of scene and image complexity. SRAA benefits shading-bound applications. For example, our implementation evaluates SRAA in 1.8 ms (1280x720) to yield antialiasing quality comparable to 4-16x shading. Thus SRAA would produce a net speedup over supersampling for applications that spend 1 ms or more on shading; for comparison, most modern games spend 5-10 ms shading. We also describe simplifications that increase performance by reducing quality.
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corduroygt said:
the masses, who don't know anything about basic stuff like resolution and framerate, let alone concepts like GI, MLAA, etc. The masses have judged KZ2 to be superior looking to C2 in this case, and since KZ3 looks even better than KZ2, there's no conteer.
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Those masses you speak of must be a bit blinded by Killzone's exclusiveness. The blurry looking textures alone have always made me wonder why the game is seen in such high regard. Killzone 3 appears to be improved though, it looks less muddy.
 
ct03 said:
Those masses you speak of must be a bit blinded by Killzone's exclusiveness. The blurry looking textures alone have always made me wonder why the game is seen in such high regard. Killzone 3 appears to be improved though, it looks less muddy.
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I never found them to be blurry than any other fps,and the ones that got extra work are real good some of the best I have seen on console.
 
ct03 said:
Those masses you speak of must be a bit blinded by Killzone's exclusiveness. The blurry looking textures alone have always made me wonder why the game is seen in such high regard. Killzone 3 appears to be improved though, it looks less muddy.
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Because game look gorgeous? And actually muddy look with heavy post-processing effect make it more CG like than other games, because it hid many imperfections. Still game looked stunning, especially two years ago and in motion.

Some direct feeds.
http://strony.aster.pl/kakarotto/kz_a/KZ2_img006.jpg
http://strony.aster.pl/kakarotto/kz_a/KZ2_img001.jpg
http://strony.aster.pl/kakarotto/kz_a/KZ2_img002.jpg
http://strony.aster.pl/kakarotto/kz_a/KZ2_img003.jpg
http://strony.aster.pl/kakarotto/kz_a/KZ2_img004.jpg
http://strony.aster.pl/kakarotto/kz_a/KZ2_img005.jpg
http://strony.aster.pl/kakarotto/kz_a/KZ2_img007.jpg
http://strony.aster.pl/kakarotto/kz_a/KZ2_img008.jpg
http://strony.aster.pl/kakarotto/kz_a/KZ2_img009.jpg
http://strony.aster.pl/kakarotto/kz_a/KZ2_img010.jpg
http://strony.aster.pl/kakarotto/kz_a/KZ2_img011.jpg
http://strony.aster.pl/kakarotto/kz_a/KZ2_img012.jpg
http://strony.aster.pl/kakarotto/kz_a/KZ2_img013.jpg
http://strony.aster.pl/kakarotto/kz_a/KZ2_img014.jpg
http://strony.aster.pl/kakarotto/kz_a/KZ2_img015.jpg

"blinded by Killzone's exclusiveness" - definately :)
 
ct03 said:
There may be the occasional good texture, but for the most part I have to disagree. In this example, only the floor looks to have an adequate amount of definition:
http://ps3.ign.com/dor/objects/7484...lzone-2-20081209055142421.html?page=mediaFull

The face and some of the rocks are alright, everything else is muddy:
http://ps3.ign.com/dor/objects/7484...lzone-2-20090129014103325.html?page=mediaFull
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Don't forget that Killzone 2's textures are also QAA'd, which basically blurs everything, not just the edges. That doesn't happen in Killzone 3 thanks to MLAA, so the quality of the textures can be appreciated quite a bit better. Some of the ground textures in Killzone 2 were still very good though.
 
Arwin said:
Don't forget that Killzone 2's textures are also QAA'd, which basically blurs everything, not just the edges. That doesn't happen in Killzone 3 thanks to MLAA
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Right, that would certainly explain some of the differences.

And @KKRT: I had not seen your post before, but most of those screenshots exhibit exactly what I was talking about.
Take your screenshot 004: You're using this to show off texture definition :?:
 
There are bad textures in every game, even in Uncharted 2. Most KZ 2 textures are good and great, but whole screen is blurred because of QAA and post-processing effects.
 
I dont get though why multiplatform games like ME2 gets thumbs down for texture IQ yet exclusives with worse texture IQ balance gets thumbs up. For exclusives the limited spots with great textures are put into focus, for multiplatform the limited spots with lowres textures are put into focus. I dont think I've ever heared anyone highlight the upper tier textures of ME2 before when doing comparisions. And there are many especially the detailed mapping/detail layer the closer yo uget to textures.

http://www.abload.de/img/me2pc6ny64.jpg
http://www.abload.de/img/me2pc89lx2.jpg
http://www.abload.de/img/me2pc12myn7.jpg
http://www.abload.de/img/me2pc7vztn.jpg
http://www.abload.de/img/me2pc7qe6.jpg
http://www.abload.de/img/me2pc29szg.jpg
http://www.abload.de/img/me2pcmmjl.jpg
http://www.abload.de/img/me2pc8mlgd.jpg
http://www.abload.de/img/me2pc3dlyu.jpg

To bad for armor.
http://www.abload.de/img/me2pc6pyxz.jpg
http://www.abload.de/img/me2pc9b9td.jpg
 
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