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

[function]

There is no discussion unfortunately.

iroboto is making entirely reasonable points, and being assailed by armies of straw men.

He never said that the Xbox 1 is more powerful than the PS4. He never said that one factor explains every game. He never said that aniso is free on Xbox One. He never said that Xbox one has "cheaper" aniso - that obviously depends on the specific bottlenecks of the games in question.

But he's being accused of saying all these things. And to cap it off, like sweetcorn on a poo, we even have a noob saying iroboto has no common sense because lololololol I turned some sliders up on my PC therefore no tradeoff exists lololololol.

I don't know how he's remained so reasonable.

 

[function]

It's a reach but I wonder if Microsoft have a minimum AF setting among there TRC whereas Sony so not. That's the extent of my input into this ludicrous discussion. We won't know for sure until somebody in the know lays it out.

This is an interesting point. If I were MS, I'd be tempted to say that if you game was below native resolution, then to compensate for the perceived drop in detail that you had to enable a 4 or 8 x aniso to increase the visible detail. Make aniso a condition of upscaling your primary buffer.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

There is no discussion unfortunately.

That's generally what happens when there's no data. Not only aren't they facts to disprove people, but I think arguments get lost among interpretation too, as interpretation is dependent on the vague examples being waved about.

Basically, people are waving unsubstantiated hypotheticals around and can do so till the cows come home, because none are wrong as theories.

 

[TheWretched]

The question of performance would be: Is there a game, running notably worse on X1 with high AF (no matter the rest, i.e. resolution) and runs the same or better on PS4, yet without AF?

Is there a game that has AF on PS4, yet not on X1?
Is there mandated AF for X1 games (i.e. cert requirements)?

Has there been comparable performance benchmarks of the games on PC? You can easily test this with a comparable GCN gpu (well... not the same, but close enough) and measure the performance deltas for those games. Evolve has a PC version. Go and do it now, if you got the game and the GPU. Just try to not be CPU limited whilst testing, as it'd throw off the GPU load measurements.

 

[London Geezer]

Clearly the case here is that each developer will have a different opinion and reason for not enabling it and this is why we have Twitter, so you can ask them directly and quite simply, "Why did you not enable AF on your game?"

You'd be surprised by what you can achieve by asking a simple question directly.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

I don't know how he's remained so reasonable.

Mellow jazz? Bongo drums? Huge bag of weed?

 

[Metal_Spirit]

Prove to me that AF is an SDK bug. Everything else is a straw man argument. I have no agenda here except one:

A-Sony is no incompetent they know how to fix their development kits and they know what AF is.

B-developers are not stupid. They know how to enable AF and they know how to spot it

C- Sony's ICE team and a trip wire dev has explicitly said that there is no issue with AF. ASK the developer.

I thought we had discussed this before....

A - We already agreed on this. And both of us said ,due to it happening on not so heavy games, that it was baffling. You said before that the trade off was an opinion, and yet you defend it as a fact. It's a heavy defense for an opinion! And one I have a hard time accepting after seeing internal not so taxing Sony games with problems.
B - We agree on that! But that doesn't explain why not so heavy and not bandwidth limited games have also AF problems.
C - He said no such thing! He said he was not aware of any problem (there is a diference). Yet AF has problems in lots of games! And in games that do not seem to justify having it! How do you explain this and B at the same time?

You also keep claiming deadlines and other issues. Yet most of the games have no other problems at all, just the AF. Why?

If less taxing games have problems, then we must agree some problem is there. There is no justification for trade offs there. And if a problem is there, why can´t there be more cases?

 

[iroboto]

Thanks Function. Shifty is right, so I'm going to give it a rest. This thread has some posters who are looking at possible avenues to explain the evidence from a tech perspective so it could lead somewhere.

Miscommunication is my fault I should have been more clear that performance has nothing to do with the hardware. PS4 is a more capable machine than XB1, but it could bottleneck differently causing some issue with porting but you summed it up well for me. When I was called out for bias I just played into it.

I don't want to say developers are at fault for the lack of AF. I hate the term lazy dev. Many of my friends a have been laid off at one point in time in their lives after flying cross country to the studio to work and taking housing leases for the year. A few don't get paid well for their hours they put in. The studio may not have had the incentive to correct things in time as Shifty says. I do not believe that they could have freely enabled it but decided not to. All developers want their game shown in the best possible light. With smaller games where profits are projected o be less there could be less desire to ship a perfect title. I do not believe the SDK issue - even today no dev has stepped forward.

When I did my game there is a forum for SCEA to developers to talk and discuss and there are engineers to ask help if you need help. You submit your code and they assist where they can. There are usually more than 1 version of the SDK available to download and accompanying tools. I haven't had the chance to work with PS4 but i doubt much has changed. If there was a AF problem that would be the first place i would read of it as a developer. Unfortunately I cannot.

So this is what I have.

A - https://twitter.com/postgoodism/status/440665342025539584

B - https://twitter.com/Terry_Hendrix/status/566631530039365633

Terry Hendrix II‏@Terry_Hendri
Newsflash for neogaf posters. Artists are the ones that typically drive texture settings per platform, however some engine ports are shit.

Cort ‏@postgoodism Feb 14
@Terry_Hendrix Actually, I'm pretty sure most sampler settings are dictated by the publisher's marketing team these days.

- this might explain MS btw.. so good call.

Cort ‏@postgoodism Feb 14
@Terry_Hendrix "Tweens responded favorably to bilinear in A/B tests", We need a strong clamp-to-border title for our Q3 lineup", etc.

Terry Hendrix II ‏@Terry_Hendrix 21h21 hours ago
@AlexiousWF Can't speak for specific games, but it can be as simple as uninformed choice by the person editing texture groups for the title.

Last quote does scare me, it is maliciously unfair to PS4 users.

London Boy's has the best idea here. Im sure the answer is often more convoluted than we all believe.

 

[iroboto]

I'll be honest in that I'm not going to be dead on with Trilinear filtering vs Trilinear and 2X AF. Both are not common anymore, but we're certainly doing better than bilinear otherwise you'd start seeing abrupt texture changes IIRC. I guess trilinear is still considered noxAF by definition.

I'll try some games and see what I can do for you force setting at 2xAF.
In the other thread I've also posted another tweet that the marketing departments could be setting the sampling rate - such that Tweens from testing found bilinear to be the best looking in an A/B test.

That would also be a perfectly legitimate reason around the performance discussion.

 

[Globalisateur]

Clearly the case here is that each developer will have a different opinion and reason for not enabling it and this is why we have Twitter, so you can ask them directly and quite simply, "Why did you not enable AF on your game?"

You'd be surprised by what you can achieve by asking a simple question directly.

You'd be surprised of how obstinately we get zero simple and genuine answer to this simple question from any developer involved since the beginning of this problem. Many people have being asking this simple question to the developers (including me) since almost 1 year ago (with Thief).

Not one direct answer from the people directly concerned.
Not one patch rectifying the problem with maybe ~10 games with reduced AF.

Zero answers, nothing, not a word.

That is partly why I now favor an API / SDK problem.

 

[Jwm]

So we are dealing with a closed box, but for the most part already aging GPUs. On a box that I have a 7870 in, it struggles at 1080p unless I start dropping things to find a sweet spot to target stable frames at least above 30.

What if 1080p (for PR reasons) is really what is causing the lack of AF or in some cases other detail loss? Not that the console is not able, but for whatever reason AF causes enough of a performance hit that it is one of the first things to drop? Focus group testing maybe has also shown that it does not impact the avg player over dropping overall IQ or other effects.

So just another angle, PR reasons have led to a higher resolution becoming more a requirement over the competition. (loose theory naturally)

 

[iroboto]

You'd be surprised of how obstinately we get zero simple and genuine answer to this simple question from any developer involved since the beginning of this problem. Many people have being asking this simple question to the developers (including me) since almost 1 year ago (with Thief).

Not one direct answer from the people directly concerned.
Not one patch rectifying the problem with maybe ~10 games with reduced AF.

Zero answers, nothing, not a word.

That is partly why I now favor an API / SDK problem.

I made an album of trilinear to 16xAF on deus ex revolution. I apologize for not having a real game on hand, but if you look at the lines under the woman, you can see how they resolve.

Album
http://imgur.com/a/Egbko

It's hard for me to replicate the DF screenshots for thief without the game, there is so much tesselation going on, so I don't know if tesselation is what is keeping the lines in tact, or there is a high enough AF.
I tried to keep the same horizon line as this thief shot:
http://images.eurogamer.net/2013/ar...ew_PS4_004.bmp.jpg/EG11/quality/90/format/jpg

 

[shredenvain]

All the 3rd party titles released with this issue on the Ps4 have a PC version released. This means the games are more than likely developed from the ground up on DirectX. As stated before this could be some sort of issue when porting the titles over to the Ps4. Exclusives should not be involved in this discussion. They are completely irrelevant because they have no possibility for direct comparison. People seem to still want this discussion to be some sort of "my console is better so it can't be a bandwidth issue and if you say otherwise you have an agenda". Seriously the only reason performance is being brought up is because the comparison platform is running lower res as well as effects in most cases. Thus making it a possibilty.No one knows the answer. That's why it is being discussed.We are less likely to discover anything if we turn a blind eye to things that we may not like the looks of.

 

[Metal_Spirit]

Unfinished Swan is also not 100% internal. Giant Sparrow and Armature Studio were involved.
Driveclub is a diferent case. That one is 100% internal. But in that one I accept it may be a bandwith limitation.

 

[upnorthsox]

You'd be surprised of how obstinately we get zero simple and genuine answer to this simple question from any developer involved since the beginning of this problem. Many people have being asking this simple question to the developers (including me) since almost 1 year ago (with Thief).

Not one direct answer from the people directly concerned.
Not one patch rectifying the problem with maybe ~10 games with reduced AF.

Zero answers, nothing, not a word.

That is partly why I now favor an API / SDK problem.

Maybe this is a simple case of RTFM, and once they did there was nothing to say.

 

[London Geezer]

You'd be surprised of how obstinately we get zero simple and genuine answer to this simple question from any developer involved since the beginning of this problem. Many people have being asking this simple question to the developers (including me) since almost 1 year ago (with Thief).

Not one direct answer from the people directly concerned.
Not one patch rectifying the problem with maybe ~10 games with reduced AF.

Zero answers, nothing, not a word.

That is partly why I now favor an API / SDK problem.

Well that's a bit rude. Did you say please?

 

[Globalisateur]

I made an album of trilinear to 16xAF on deus ex revolution. I apologize for not having a real game on hand, but if you look at the lines under the woman, you can see how they resolve.

Album
http://imgur.com/a/Egbko

...

Your effort is commendable but it's really hard to compare AF on 2 very different kind of textures from 2 different games like here. We absolutely need real PC pics of Thief, Evolve and Dying light!

Well that's a bit rude. Did you say please?

I don't think it's rude, why would it be? And I always try to ask politely.

 

[London Geezer]

I don't think it's rude, why would it be? And I always try to ask politely.

I mean it's rude not to respond

 

[Scott_Arm]

I don't really understand how porting a title from PC to PS4 would be an issue that could cause the developer to either not be able to enable AF or force them to drop it for performance reasons. Ultimately, you have to port your game to the native PS4 APIs. Different games could have different reasons for it being disabled, but I still don't see any connection to DirectX.

 

[Delta9]

Since it can't be easily explained,it sounds like a case of devs giving xbox a bone.