Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion Archive [2013]

[Alucardx23]

That gun is going to be mostly static (even with random idle animation) even if the rest of the scene is in motion. That should stick out like a sore thumb in theory.

Regards,
SB

They could always render the gun at a higher resolution, right

 

[Arwin]

Doesn't seem to stand out. I haven't noticed any of the resolution changes whilst playing. It all just looks really slick and yummy, like chocolate

Agreed, as someone else put it, this feels more like a PS3 game than Uncharted: Golden Abyss. I can understand why some reviewers rated it as such, rather than as the amazing portable FPS it is.

 

[Billy Idol]

Don't know why using a dynamic resolution hasn't become standard by now, especially as you go higher than 720P for next gen.

Inside Killzone: Mercenary

"The engine also engages the dynamic resolution modes in specific conditions where the player is less likely to notice the impact to image quality. If the camera is still, the engine maintains native resolution and frame-rate is allowed to drop - the player is not engaged with the game and visually the lower performance is not so noticeable. It's a really impressive technique, allocating system resources to what matters most at any given moment.

"It is our belief that players are less likely to notice the temporal effects of the resolution reduction when they are in motion (indeed, many of those effects are likely to be shorter-lived if one is moving through the scene). When static, compromises to image quality are likely to be much more noticeable than frame-rate drops - particularly in screenshots," Matt Porter says with a smile."

That seems to be quite smart!

 

[BRiT]

That seems to be quite smart!

If you think that's smart just wait until you see foxels!

 

[Billy Idol]

If you think that's smart just wait until you see foxels!

What is foxels? I don't get the joke?

I think it is smart to maintain framerate for gameplay (while moving) and keep eyecandy at max while looking

My Vita should arrive tomorrow...can't wait to test KZ out.

 

[AlNom]

I hear it's a furry voxel, but my memory is a tad foggy. :3
---

Kudos to the art & programming team.

 

[Graham]

Fyi I'm pretty sure the foxel stuff is under strict NDA. Rys will have your head if he is about

That seems to be quite smart!

Cheers Internally it works by generating a tiny frame difference image, based on luminance change of a downscaled version of the frame buffer (deep within the post chain). This then is used to compute the desired minimum frame rate. Was pretty simple and just something I was mucking about with one afternoon.

They could always render the gun at a higher resolution, right

While this superficially may make sense, it'd actually end up being rather expensive.

Problem is, if you were to render the gun separately at native, then you'd need to add another step in there, upscaling the dynamic render target up to native before the downscale for q-native rendering. This is where you'd render the gun. So you'd take a memory hit, but also by having to render and write out another half million pixels per frame, you'd take a perf hit too. It doesn't sound like much but it adds up really fast. Also, anything behind the gun will be rendered redundantly (which would require quite some work to avoid - further adding overhead). So you'd likely end up in a situation where the extra overhead will negate the advantage of reducing the resolution, so you'd probably end up running slower.

 

[Alucardx23]

Problem is, if you were to render the gun separately at native, then you'd need to add another step in there, upscaling the dynamic render target up to native before the downscale for q-native rendering. This is where you'd render the gun. So you'd take a memory hit, but also by having to render and write out another half million pixels per frame, you'd take a perf hit too. It doesn't sound like much but it adds up really fast. Also, anything behind the gun will be rendered redundantly (which would require quite some work to avoid - further adding overhead). So you'd likely end up in a situation where the extra overhead will negate the advantage of reducing the resolution, so you'd probably end up running slower.

Well since you are allocating more resources to always keeping the gun at native res, it is expected for it to lower the performance of the game a little more, the question would be is if it’s worth it or not, if it really helps to give the perception that the game is not lowering the resolution as much, I think it would help. I would also like to see if always keeping the gun at a native res, would help to lower the background resolution even more, without being as noticeable as lowering the resolution of the whole screen, this would apply even more when where are taking about higher resolution. This sounds a lot like this display planes discussion thread.

 

[Npl]

Fyi I'm pretty sure the foxel stuff is under strict NDA. Rys will have your head if he is about

Dont think GPUs have canine shaders yet... atleast neither Sony or MS anounced them.

Anyway I already thought about doing graphics more along the way weigthing in formats like jpeg/h264 work - course in the reverse.
Pixels is a rather weak measure of quality - constructing the scene and looking at the amount of spatial vs temporal detail (ie fine detail vs amount of motion) and then deciding how much work to put into each section.....
Thats the theory - Im unable to pick up from here . The basic idea is that you could just copy sections over if they are "static" enough and divert more quality to other things. of course there is a quite big problem recursively generating further fetail with traditional rendering - namely it quikly perform worse than doing everything in 1 step

 

[London Geezer]

Pretty neat tech, if you ask me...

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Where did you get that image from? I didn't expect it to leak this early. Heads are gonna roll.

 

[BRiT]

Fyi I'm pretty sure the foxel stuff is under strict NDA. Rys will have your head if he is about

Oh come on, it's not like I posted about it on the front page.

Even so, he prob will be livid about it; I best smooth things over with some imports.

 

[jonabbey]

I guess a dev team like Housemarque would try to use the cloud tec for something new and refreshing.

They eventually got Super Stardust HD running at 1080p60 on the PS3, squeezing the Cell until it screamed, with a truly frightening number of rocks and enemies swarming around.

 

[hesido]

They eventually got Super Stardust HD running at 1080p60 on the PS3, squeezing the Cell until it screamed, with a truly frightening number of rocks and enemies swarming around.

They also got it running 720p120, used the performance for the 3D and split screen mode.

 

[London Geezer]

Where did you get that image from? I didn't expect it to leak this early. Heads are gonna roll.

I put my own existence on the line. But people need to know.

 

[Arwin]

Pretty neat tech, if you ask me...

What the ...

This now needs to be a game.

 

[Jedi2016]

They also got it running 720p120, used the performance for the 3D and split screen mode.

Awesome 3D in that game, too, I can only dream that they've made Resogun 3D-capable.

 

[SlimJim]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-grand-theft-auto-5-face-off

It took them long enough, that's for sure. Though I can finally be a proud owner of a Rockstar game (on PS3)
The best part is that the 50 million dollar MS 6-month exclusive GTA5 DLC deal probably paid for about half of the development costs (the 170 million dollar number includes advertisement costs).

In any way, I guess this should put to rest the general consensus that PS3 is only good at Uncharted while 360 excels in open world games.

 

[KKRT]

Terrible framerate, if my PS3 wasnt broken, i would buy GTA 5 yesterday.
Glad that this generation is almost over.

 

[Arwin]

Despite only having played GTA IV right up to the first mission that had a shoot-out, I have a hard time not buying this one again. Will probably get bought tonight.