Encyclopedia Brown & The Mysterious Case of the PS4 and the Missing Anisotropic Filtering

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TheWretched said:
EDIT2: Way to be disingenuous...

The subtitle to the pic above is:

Changing lighting and environmental conditions results in variable light and shadow positions across all three platforms.
Click to expand...

Or maybe you could simply watch the videos and other screenshots? What I posted is a Screencap from DF's video winch contains several other scenes where the PS4 has simply ZERO environmental shadows casted from the main light source. All platforms have exactly the same TOD in all the scene I've seen contrary to what the DF caption says. The specular highlights are identical etch..
 
Ike Turner said:
Or maybe you could simply watch the videos and other screenshots? What I posted is a Screencap from DF's video winch contains several other scenes where the PS4 has simply ZERO environmental shadows casted from the main light source. All platforms have exactly the same TOD in all the scene I've seen contrary to what the DF caption says. The specular highlights are identical etch..
Click to expand...
easy easy ;)
I had to thoroughly scour DF's article for all their screen shots and I read very carefully all their comments. It is 'confusing' actually, as I wrote earlier PS4 has no shadows, even at times Xbox has better shadow drawing over PC. I'll post the images.
 
TheWretched said:
I would guess this is a bug... not even the fence to the left is casting a shadow on PS4 (as the tree behind the player might be culled for performance reasons).

EDIT: Does this game have time of day?

EDIT2: Way to be disingenuous...

The subtitle to the pic above is:

Changing lighting and environmental conditions results in variable light and shadow positions across all three platforms.
Click to expand...

I have to agree that showing this picture intentionally and out of context is being quite disingenuous.
Shadows on PC vs XB1 is also different.
 
How about this one:

X1 and PC shadows are in the exact same position..nothing on PS4
nSnb.jpg


Another one from DF's video:
jfgyYMf.jpg


One more where the TOD seems to be identical:

EZoJ9YG.jpg
 
edit: the triple screen shot is a waste of time. Right clicking on the DF images and seeing it in full really tells the whole picture here.
 
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You'll also notice that the picture with the wood deck, on PS4 it does not cast shadows onto itself, it looks like it's being illuminated from below.

This particular image is the one I needed to use to discredit the possibility that shadows and lights were being casted as different times of the day. You'll notice that PC will draw the first shadow closest to the player, missing on PS4. But fails to draw the one in the distance.

BIf9J7E.jpg
 
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I dunno that we can simply ignore the comments from DF. I looked at their video and the 'lack of shadows' appears on both platforms.

uploadfromtaptalk1423946969907.png

I took a screenshot on my phone, so excuse the quality.
 
Billy Idol said:
But this is very weird: the PS4 has much higher resolution, why don't they go to lower res to enable AF and shadows...as they did with X1?

There must be more to it!
Click to expand...
I'm not sure if shadows are a trend, but AF appears to be. We are over 1 year post launch now, all excuses really need to be cast aside here.
The only notable difference without diving into a non technical debate is the memory architecture. X1 shares in common with PC, 2 separate pools, whereas PS4 has a truly unified one. I'm not sure how that can affect AF, but it just might - at least have a more pronounced impact to performance over the other two.
 
AF on PS4 is really strange. Could these game engines really all be bugged? Some issue with the SDK? Strange that there are games that support it, and a bunch of multi platforms that don't.
 
Behold the power of the balanced PS3!
Don't be afraid of the un-bottlenecked RSX!
Be humbled by the PC-ish architecture of the contention free and low latency GDDR3 ram!
Beware of the gigabytes of textures displayed by The Unfinished Swan...only the PS3 could apply Anisotropic Filtering on them without performance penalty!

15485977828_c7210f2842_o.gif
 
Globalisateur said:
Behold the power of the balanced PS3!
Don't be afraid of the un-bottlenecked RSX!
Be humbled by the PC-ish architecture of the contention free and low latency GDDR3 ram!
Beware of the gigabytes of textures displayed by The Unfinished Swan...only the PS3 could apply Anisotropic Filtering on them without performance penalty!
Click to expand...
Is that real? what the heck... this is starting to be really weird. haha. I wish someone would just break the NDA for the SDK and outright tell us.
 
Scott_Arm said:
There has to be some kind of SDK bug.
Click to expand...
They've been developing games on said SDK well before launch and has had weekly 'stability' patches since launch. We're over 1.25 years post launch now of constant AF bitching and it's _still_ an AF bug? A bug, that has seemingly gone unnoticed all this time? Really, I have a hard time believing that.

Cerny writes here:
http://gamingbolt.com/ps4-ice-team-...16xaf-new-asm-for-faster-offline-asset-baking
Cort Stratton, a senior programmer on Sony’s ICE Team has revealed a few interesting tid-bits about the PlayStation 4’s graphics capabilities. First of all he revealed that the PlayStation 4 has no issues in supporting 16 X Anisotropic Filtering, a method by which in game textures look great even when viewed at an angle. But certain games like Thief use the less impressive Trilinear filtering which led some users to raises questions whether the PS4’s GPU is capable of supporting 16 X AF.
Cort stated that there are no hardware issues restricting 16 X AF that he is aware of. “No hardware/SDK issues that I’m aware of. Sounds like a question for the developer.”
Click to expand...

No issues supporting it. No hardware or SDK issues restricting it that he is aware of.
 
Hm... so we have images with shadows on either system, as well as images with either version missing them... maybe more shadows are missing on PS4 (or rather, more regularly), but... I don't think this is intentional.

As for AF... this needs to be fixed. If last gen games have it, then a PS4 port cannot, for performance reasons, need to have it removed.
 
There has to be something preventing devs from using it. Technical ability is not a believable answer, so it's either an sdk bug or it's performance. I can believe one game engine being bugged, not many.
 
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