Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion Archive [2013]

[taisui]

That doesn't sound like a hardware issue but more of a developer issue. I wouldn't mind 720p if the per pixel quality is better and/or the game looks really good like BF4.

Most likely it'll just be the same thing except lower rez.

 

[Scott_Arm]

That doesn't sound like a hardware issue but more of a developer issue. I wouldn't mind 720p if the per pixel quality is better and/or the game looks really good like BF4.

Well, relative to current gen it's going to be true. Even though it's 720p, you can tell from the gameplay videos that it looks significantly better than current gen. This is also true for BF4. I wouldn't expect the pixel quality to be better than PS4. Like BF4, pixel quality is likely to be the same for both.

 

[djskribbles]

That doesn't sound like a hardware issue but more of a developer issue. I wouldn't mind 720p if the per pixel quality is better and/or the game looks really good like BF4.

It would be illogical to run at 1080p if that meant sacrificing IQ. As taisui said, they're most likely similar IQ wise, just at a lower resolution.

I don't think it's fair to simply say that it's more of a developer issue... it's probably a combination of everything (tools, hardware, developer).

 

[Strange]

The black crush on the 360 had to do with the piecewise gama curve aproximation. If you treated the assets as having a normal gamma curve, you get the crush. The X-One does not have the same issue. This is probably just an HDMI driver issue where it doesn't successfully negotiate a full 0-255 colour space, and falls back to the traditional video 16-235 colour space.

That doesn't make sense. The capture card from DF is capturing the full 0-255. If the bug is the Xbox One outputting 16-235 instead of outputting 0-255 you wouldn't get crushed blacks. Instead you'd get washed out blacks and whites due to the 0~15 and 236-255 missing.

There's something else that's broken there.

 

[Pixel]

Microsoft paid massive massive amounts for the definitive version of BF4 for Xbox One. Not just a bakers dozen million. Considering the small install base both systems will have and the small number of BF4 PS4 titles sold lifetime wise, I wouldn't be surprised if EA intentionally made had DICE scale back the ps4 version with this poor quality scaling or blur filter. Its not enough to disuade any PS4 owners from buying the game, but it is enough to fulfill EA's side of this lucrative EA-MS partnership deal give the leg up on the Xbox One version.

EA would completely fail in its end of the deal if despite having less DLC and exclusive content, ps4 had the graphically superior version. EA had to do something last minute graphics wise to tip the scale back. LoD poly count for some distant objects is also greater on the PS4 version and the great/unfortunate thing about the blur/scaling is it blurs out detail of distant objects.

EA is smarter than this, if they push too hard for one platform over another they risk giving one platform holder a monopoly which is not in their best interest. The issues with blur are being reported by one site, so its likely an issue on their end.

Further more RL called out someone on their team who publicly said somethings about how they captured the images so who knows what is going on at DF but I doubt either DF or EA/Dice is purposely trying to help MS here. Anyone who reads the article on DF can see that over and over they state that the PS4 version is superior to the XB1.

not sure trolling, or just trolling.

The chance of keeping that a secret is minimal at best. And the number of questions EA and DICE would have to answer for the next many years doesn't make the millions worth it

Man i would really like DF to let us know why they have blur, when others apparently doesn't.

Apparently PS4 has a fairly decent hardware scaler engine
http://www.vgleaks.com/orbis-displayscanout-engine-dce/
Each pipeline supports the following features:

- Surface resolutions from 320×200 to 1920×1080

- High quality up and down scalers

- Surface format may be 32 or 64 bits per pixel

- Deep color support (8, 10 or 12 bits per pixel)

- Two cursor overlays (up to 64×64 each, 3-D support).

I know this is from back in Febuary, but starting back in january SemiAccurate has been dead accurate specifically regarding the nextgen console hardware. Could this hardware scaler engine not be true or just be as terrible as poor software scalers? Or hw scaler is possibly not utilized (or not utilized to full extent) in order to rush the software on store shelves for launch? Or something else.....

 

[shredenvain]

That doesn't sound like a hardware issue but more of a developer issue. I wouldn't mind 720p if the per pixel quality is better and/or the game looks really good like BF4.

I agree i dont really see call of duty ghost being as taxing as battlefield 4 on the xbox one.
I also dont see only having 16 rops as the issue. For gods sake the wii u only has 8 rops and it has a few games at 1080p and 60fps.

Seriously who thinks that call of duty ghost is really pushing all 18 of the ps4s compute units as well as its 32 rops?

I think if the difference between the two versions of COD was 1080p and 900p people would be alot more understanding. In my opinion the only logical reason for there being an almost 1000 pixel difference between the two is time and money. Why go into crunch time on the xbox one version when you can put the resolution at 720p and let the scaler do all the work.

 

[BoardBonobo]

I agree i dont really see call of duty ghost being as taxing as battlefield 4 on the xbox one.
I also dont see only having 16 rops as the issue. For gods sake the wii u only has 8 rops and it has a few games at 1080p and 60fps.

Seriously who thinks that call of duty ghost is really pushing all 18 of the ps4s compute units as well as its 32 rops?

I think if the difference between the two versions of COD was 1080p and 900p people would be alot more understanding. In my opinion the only logical reason for there being an almost 1000 pixel difference between the two is time and money. Why go into crunch time on the xbox one version when you can put the resolution at 720p and let the scaler do all the work.

At this rate the WiiU will (does?) have more 1080p@60 games than the XB1 has. If devs are just willing to cut corners to reduce cost then it might well be that 720p becomes the norm unless MS has to step in to say otherwise.

 

[Boxercide]

I agree i dont really see call of duty ghost being as taxing as battlefield 4 on the xbox one.
I also dont see only having 16 rops as the issue. For gods sake the wii u only has 8 rops and it has a few games at 1080p and 60fps.

Seriously who thinks that call of duty ghost is really pushing all 18 of the ps4s compute units as well as its 32 rops?

I think if the difference between the two versions of COD was 1080p and 900p people would be alot more understanding. In my opinion the only logical reason for there being an almost 1000 pixel difference between the two is time and money. Why go into crunch time on the xbox one version when you can put the resolution at 720p and let the scaler do all the work.

Wow, lazy dev excuses already? Next generation isn't even out yet!

You seem to have it all figured out. Tell us about the programming of Ghosts. And how the Wii U games' use of 1080 is related to the XBone's, proving...some...thing.

 

[DrJay24]

I agree i dont really see call of duty ghost being as taxing as battlefield 4 on the xbox one.
I also dont see only having 16 rops as the issue. For gods sake the wii u only has 8 rops and it has a few games at 1080p and 60fps.

Seriously who thinks that call of duty ghost is really pushing all 18 of the ps4s compute units as well as its 32 rops?

I think if the difference between the two versions of COD was 1080p and 900p people would be alot more understanding. In my opinion the only logical reason for there being an almost 1000 pixel difference between the two is time and money. Why go into crunch time on the xbox one version when you can put the resolution at 720p and let the scaler do all the work.

You mean 1.1m pixels right? Why not just put the PS4 at 720p and let the scaler do all the work? You are trying to explain away a difference but made no coherent arguement.

 

[bkilian]

That doesn't make sense. The capture card from DF is capturing the full 0-255. If the bug is the Xbox One outputting 16-235 instead of outputting 0-255 you wouldn't get crushed blacks. Instead you'd get washed out blacks and whites due to the 0~15 and 236-255 missing.

There's something else that's broken there.

The renderer thinks the range is 0-255, but the HDMI driver is incorrectly falling back to a 16-235. As a result, you get crushed blacks and whites. I've seen exactly this happen before.

 

[shredenvain]

Wow, lazy dev excuses already? Next generation isn't even out yet!

You seem to have it all figured out. Tell us about the programming of Ghosts. And how the Wii U games' use of 1080 is related to the XBone's, proving...some...thing.

I just stated my opinion sir also i never said anything about devs being lazy. (Your putting words in my digital mouth). You dont have to agree with my statement but you dont have to be rude either.

I posed a simple question in that post and instead of being rude you could answer the question and enlighten me to why my opinion is wrong.

I never claimed to be a programer or developer.

 

[Cyan]

The renderer thinks the range is 0-255, but the HDMI driver is incorrectly falling back to a 16-235. As a result, you get crushed blacks and whites. I've seen exactly this happen before.

I am quite pragmatic about it and I have set the Reference Levels of the Xbox 360 to Standard. I mean... switching to Expanded might sound cool, but I have realised how futile that is on the Xbox 360.

Aside from that I don't even know if my TV is compatible with Full RGB and I prefer both systems to handshake and negotiate the standards rather than fiddling with something I don't fully understand when it is prone to be buggy on the X360.

In regards to the Xbox One, that seems to be an entirely different matter.

 

[shredenvain]

You mean 1.1m pixels right? Why not just put the PS4 at 720p and let the scaler do all the work? You are trying to explain away a difference but made no coherent arguement.

Im not trying to explain away anything. Im just trying to state my opinion.
Evidently from the complaimts ive read over the entire internet what ever they are using to upscale the ps4 version of BF4 isnt doing that great of a job. (Vaseline on the lense)
So im just looking at the whole Cod ghost situation from what ive read about other 1st and 3rd party nextgen titles on both systems. So far we dont have another example of a multiplat game with this big of difference in resolution.

Its been mentioned that what ever scaling solution is used in the xbox one does a fairly good job.
So if i was a developer and one platforms tools and drivers were behind at launch therefore putting development behind knowing the systems scaler does a god job I would drop the resolution to 720 and easily solve several issues. I dont get why thats such an offensive thing to say.
As for my question. Do you really think cod is using all of the ps4's resources?
People were blaming the 16 ROPS for the 720 resolution on X1. Do you really think if the ps4 only had 16 rops that cod ghost would be 720p? NO.
One system is easy to program for and the other is a little more difficult. Add to that the talk of dev tools and drivers being behind can cause the games development to lag. Im not making excuses for the X1 im just trying to use common sense to understand such a big difference in resolution on a launch title.
Excuse me for having an opinion. The rude responses aren't necessary,

 

[trainplane]

At this rate the WiiU will (does?) have more 1080p@60 games than the XB1 has. If devs are just willing to cut corners to reduce cost then it might well be that 720p becomes the norm unless MS has to step in to say otherwise.

Hopefully they're not settling on 720p or 900p even, given what PC's can do. I mean, it'll truly be embarrassing if in 3 years, MS own Surface with some 10nm Cannonlake processor plays COD at 1080p/60 and the XB1 can't. This whole thing is starting to become a laughingstock for the Xbox division and I'm hoping they are aware of that and working to get 1080p/60 on their future multiplatform games (without resorting to Gouraud shading of course).

 

[taisui]

Hopefully they're not settling on 720p or 900p even, given what PC's can do. I mean, it'll truly be embarrassing if in 3 years, MS own Surface with some 10nm Cannonlake processor plays COD at 1080p/60 and the XB1 can't. This whole thing is starting to become a laughingstock for the Xbox division and I'm hoping they are aware of that and working to get 1080p/60 on their future multiplatform games (without resorting to Gouraud shading of course).

I wouldn't worry about that, the iPads are far from the PS3/360 qualify.

 

[hesido]

I'm betting the "extra CUs" on the PS4 could be used to apply very high quality custom upscaling on a multiplat. Sony: release them compute libraries!

 

[DJ12]

Is it really that likely the scaler in the Xbox is different to the one in the ps4? I would guess they are both standard parts of gcn.

Let's wait and see how blurry the box one version is with hbao enabled. Right now we aren't comparing like for like.

 

[Arwin]

Is it really that likely the scaler in the Xbox is different to the one in the ps4? I would guess they are both standard parts of gcn.

Let's wait and see how blurry the box one version is with hbao enabled. Right now we aren't comparing like for like.

Yes, there is a good chance they have different scaling solutions. There was an interview with the 360 designers that I think pointed out they have a really 'high-end' scaling solution.

Andrew Goossen: We've chosen to let title developers make the trade-off of resolution vs. per-pixel quality in whatever way is most appropriate to their game content. A lower resolution generally means that there can be more quality per pixel. With a high-quality scaler and antialiasing and render resolutions such as 720p or '900p', some games look better with more GPU processing going to each pixel than to the number of pixels; others look better at 1080p with less GPU processing per pixel. We built Xbox One with a higher quality scaler than on Xbox 360, and added an additional display plane, to provide more freedom to developers in this area. This matter of choice was a lesson we learned from Xbox 360 where at launch we had a Technical Certification Requirement mandate that all titles had to be 720p or better with at least 2x anti-aliasing - and we later ended up eliminating that TCR as we found it was ultimately better to allow developers to make the resolution decision themselves. Game developers are naturally incented to make the highest-quality visuals possible and so will choose the most appropriate trade-off between quality of each pixel vs. number of pixels for their games.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-the-complete-xbox-one-interview

 

[Betanumerical]

Yes, there is a good chance they have different scaling solutions. There was an interview with the 360 designers that I think pointed out they have a really 'high-end' scaling solution.


http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-the-complete-xbox-one-interview

I would expect the GCN scalar to be better then the 360 on no?. It seems to me all they are suggesting is that its better then the 360 (which was a software solution?).

 

[Strange]

The renderer thinks the range is 0-255, but the HDMI driver is incorrectly falling back to a 16-235. As a result, you get crushed blacks and whites. I've seen exactly this happen before.

So the renderer renders 0-255, the HDMI driver mistakens the range and only takes 16-235, throwing away 0-15 and 236-255, then it outputs it to the DF capture card which captures 0-255.

So ya, I don't see anything wrong with DF. The Xbox One software is at fault here.