Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion Archive [2013]

[(((interference)))]

MS should really have invested in better upscaling methods.
MS Research does great work in this area - for example look at this fantastic pixel art upscaler they developed:
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/kopf/pixelart/

 

[Shifty Geezer]

The infamous acceleration you gained from bunny hopping in Quake/Quake 2 was a side effect of higher frame rates. With higher FPS = faster and longer bunny jumps. For Quake 2, if your FPS was high enough you could grapple/bunny hop through windows that were too small for your character to fit through.

Quake's an old game. I know it happened with old games. On the old consoles, when the graphics got busy, the gameplay slowed down. Nowadays, on a well designed engine, the framerate may drop but the passage of time remains constant. This is visible in every DF analysis etc. When they talk about framerates dipping 10-20%, we don't have corresponding slows in the passage of time. The gmae engine is decoupled from the rendering engine. I expect this is true of every middleware out there too. It's certainly true of Unity - you set individual framerates for physics updates and rendering updates.

In Everquest, Everquest 2, and I believe Rift and maybe AoC. If your FPS was high enough (or was it low enough? I can't remember), combined with a little big of lag, you could clip through some geometry in a predictable and easily reproducible way.

That's getting involved with netplay which will be prone to update issues, and it's hard to attribute any glitches to gameplay being tied to screen refresh.

 

[pjbliverpool]

MS should really have invested in better upscaling methods.
MS Research does great work in this area - for example look at this fantastic pixel art upscaler they developed:
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/kopf/pixelart/

My Snes emulator does something similar to those old snes graphics. It can look half decent at high res.

 

[Globalisateur]

Digital foundry Vs. Trine 2 on PS4 article is out:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-vs-trine-2-on-ps4

Really good stuff, you can really sense that the author is impressed by the performance in the game.

- 1080p60fps for 2D
- 720p120fps 3D (720fps60fps for each eye) downsampled image from 1080p120fps processed internally.
- Perfect consistent 60fps for 2D and 3D modes.

Bad stuff:

- FXAA

Spoiler

 

[Lalaland]

I always have a hard time telling FXAA blurriness from the blurriness a lack of decent AF produces, are there any easy ways to tell?

 

[Sigfried1977]

Lovely looking game, if a bit too schmaltzy for my tastes. For the life of me I cannot use the touchpad on the controller to conjure and place objects with any sort of precision, though. It's just way too squirrelly. You're essentially using your fingers as a mouse replacement on a mousepad with a 2-inch diameter.
I seriously hope that Frozenbytes tightens up level design in case they make another sequel. Using the solid in-game physics to "fix" a broken puzzle is fun once or twice, but it really bogs down the pace and quickly ends up getting tedious as a result.

 

[pjbliverpool]

Impressive that they're able to render internally at 1080p and still hit the required 120fps for true stereoscopic 3D. It sounds like they need to lower a few quality settings to achieve that, but still...

 

[Arwin]

Lovely looking game, if a bit too schmaltzy for my tastes. For the life of me I cannot use the touchpad on the controller to conjure and place objects with any sort of precision, though. It's just way too squirrelly. You're essentially using your fingers as a mouse replacement on a mousepad with a 2-inch diameter.
I seriously hope that Frozenbytes tightens up level design in case they make another sequel. Using the solid in-game physics to "fix" a broken puzzle is fun once or twice, but it really bogs down the pace and quickly ends up getting tedious as a result.

Gyro would probably actually have been better than the touchpad. But I did get used to the touchpad after a short while (trying the demo).

 

[pjbliverpool]

Thought I'd give the game a try out of curiosity since it's available as a demo from Steam. All I can say is WOW. The game looks absolutely gorgeous in 3D. Art is the name of the game here and it's done beautifully. While the gameplay isn't something I'd immediately go (although it's clearly very well done) for I'd certainly be tempted to buy the full game just so I can visually immerse myself in that surreal fairytale world. This is playing very close to the screen of course so it practically feels like I'm there in 3D mode.

 

[Arwin]

It is my favorite 3D game on PC with some distance. Zen Pinball 2 on PS3 comes in second, but is hampered by lag and not having a perfect convergence setting. It looks quite amazing too though. But Trine 2 is just beautiful, really great showpiece. Played the game quite far.

 

[pjbliverpool]

Pinball Arcade is also pretty cool in 3D if you like Pinball games.

 

[Cyan]

MS should really have invested in better upscaling methods.
MS Research does great work in this area - for example look at this fantastic pixel art upscaler they developed:
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/kopf/pixelart/

That looks pretty cool, but I wonder how would that work with 3D.

Still I think your post would be more suited to the corresponding upscaler thread.

On stereoscopic 3D, I can't wait to try new proper 3D games on the console soon.

 

[Gitaroo]

MS should really have invested in better upscaling methods.
MS Research does great work in this area - for example look at this fantastic pixel art upscaler they developed:
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/kopf/pixelart/

only works for 2D games, you can do that with a lot of emu applying 2X super sai to everything, whenever you play video it looks wrong. Those filter can also destroy a lot of detail, I can't imagine it won't destroy all the high frequency detail in higher resolution.

 

[Jogi]

only works for 2D games, you can do that with a lot of emu applying 2X super sai to everything, whenever you play video it looks wrong. Those filter can also destroy a lot of detail, I can't imagine it won't destroy all the high frequency detail in higher resolution.

There are lot of very good scaling methods available that could be possible to do realtime if enough will and money put there.. my favorite is http://www.alienskin.com/blowup/blowup_example-3.aspx such nice and crisp output... of course it cant remove aliasing but shapes and edges are just amazing.

But mayby that just would cost much more than faster GPU..and budget was what it was, x1 was all we got from MS

 

[Wynix]

Bad stuff:

- FXAA

I will never understand why developers think this vaseline filter is better than no AA.
It's an option in Guild Wars 2, makes the game look like it's been upscaled to 720p from 480p when you have res set to 1080p.

 

[Globalisateur]

I will never understand why developers think this vaseline filter is better than no AA.
It's an option in Guild Wars 2, makes the game look like it's been upscaled to 720p from 480p when you have res set to 1080p.

I won't either. And in this case particularly, it is completely unjustified. I mean, they can process the game internally at 1080p120fps (uselessly because PS4 can't output this resolution) but they choose to destroy sub-details with a blur?

Do they even know some similarly (roughly) cheap, more effective and better solutions exist in 2013? And FXAA itself is not free and would require some GPU time...What a waste for the PS4 hardware, 120 times by seconds the shiny and immaculate PS4 will repeatedly and tragically blur such a beautiful game.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

That's getting involved with netplay which will be prone to update issues, and it's hard to attribute any glitches to gameplay being tied to screen refresh.

The lag from netplay played a factor but it wasn't alone. It also required either a too low or too high FPS on the client machine (I can't remember). If the FPS was in the 30 fps region it was impossible to clip through certain terrain.

And thinking about, I think it was tied to low FPS. As it was usually either people with their graphics turned up too high for their machine, or older machines that couldn't handle the new graphics.

Regards,
SB

 

[(((interference)))]

only works for 2D games, you can do that with a lot of emu applying 2X super sai to everything, whenever you play video it looks wrong. Those filter can also destroy a lot of detail, I can't imagine it won't destroy all the high frequency detail in higher resolution.

Sigh, yes, I know - I was using that as an example of the kind of great work MS Research do in this area and that they should have leveraged for the XB1's scaler.

 

[Steve Dave Part Deux]

According to Goosen the One has better scaling hardware than the 360. Which provides more than adequate results. So what's the problem exactly? I'm also trying to figure out how the system with the more exotic architecture and more diverse functionality is supposedly cheap.

 

[Shortbread]

According to Goosen the One has better scaling hardware than the 360. Which provides more than adequate results. So what's the problem exactly? I'm also trying to figure out how the system with the more exotic architecture and more diverse functionality is supposedly cheap.

Seriously, do you believe they would say the opposite?

Anyhow, the XB1 scaling capabilities should (will) improve in due time…