Forza 2 Interview + Wireframes

[Xeinon]

Once and for all. The garage in PGR3 is exactly the same as when playing. Same models, same lightning engine, same everything.

And thos forza models look superb. Things look a little bit more rounded off than in PGR3.

 

[Bad_Boy]

slapnutz, might want to resize that image.

 

[zed]

FWIW i just made a wireframe screenshot of one of my programs, 268,000 polys (but less since wont be onscreen, say 250,000)

 

[darkblu]

Comparisons to PGR3 frame rate shouldn't be made since the rendering engine for PGR3 was complete before they had the info they needed to implement tiling.

and tiling would have speeded up their engine exactly how?

they had no tiling, ergo no 4xMSAA, but that does not give their engine any speed disadvantage compared to if it had tiling.

The guys at Bizarre have said that if the game was released 3 months later it would have been running at 60 FPS instead.

that with or without FSAA? : )

anyhow. i do agree that as pgr3 was one half-baked launch title which did not do justice to the platform (despite all the fanbase ohhs and ahhs), i can't see how parallels to it can be used for distinguishing anything 2nd gen.

 

[Powderkeg]

and tiling would have speeded up their engine exactly how?

they had no tiling, ergo no 4xMSAA, but that does not give their engine any speed disadvantage compared to if it had tiling.

Haveing the rendering engine optimized for the hardware would obviously result in performance improvements.

Or are you taking the opposite view, which of course would suggest that any game designed around the 360 and then ported to the PS3 would require no additional optimization as it would result in no improvements.

 

[hey69]

good for them. had they included at least one in-engine/in-game screenshot it would have been truly great. not that i don't appreciate real-life photos of ferraris on the track and source-assets wireframes, but i'd have appreciated more at least one shot relevant to the talk from the interview.

probably there is still a lot of work to be done. they showed a cgi trailer at E3

i hope they arent rendering at 600p like pgr3 did

 

[darkblu]

Haveing the rendering engine optimized for the hardware would obviously result in performance improvements.

you somehow missed my question. which was:

tiling would have speeded up their engine exactly how?

you also missed the hint i gave you:

PGR3 rendition fits nicely in the available EDRAM as it is.

 

[mrboo]

probably there is still a lot of work to be done. they showed a cgi trailer at E3

i hope they arent rendering at 600p like pgr3 did

Apparantly the Forza 2 engine is the first real engine that suports tileing. So 4XMSAA+HDR+720P here we come.

 

[Hardknock]

probably there is still a lot of work to be done. they showed a cgi trailer at E3

i hope they arent rendering at 600p like pgr3 did

Supposedly using in-game assets and all that Jazz

 

[Powderkeg]

you somehow missed my question. which was:

tiling would have speeded up their engine exactly how?

you also missed the hint i gave you:

PGR3 rendition fits nicely in the available EDRAM as it is.

I didn't miss anything.

I guess you missed the part where I said

The guys at Bizarre have said that if the game was released 3 months later it would have been running at 60 FPS instead.

Of course if you disagree I'm sure the guys at Bizarre would love to hear you tell them they are wrong and don't know what they are talking about.

As for your suggestion that the game "fit nicely" into the EDRAM without tiling I would like to know if forcing the game to run at a reduced resolution internally and then upscaling the output is your idea of "fitting nicely."

 

[ihamoitc2005]

Fit nicely

I didn't miss anything.

I guess you missed the part where I said



Of course if you disagree I'm sure the guys at Bizarre would love to hear you tell them they are wrong and don't know what they are talking about.

I think maybe what Bizarre says is they have CPU limitation not GPU limitation. So with little bit more time they can have better CPU "utilization" so they can have more GPU performance. Remember another developer (MotoGP) also says they think they make perfect graphics scaling engine design before final dev kit but have CPU limitation surprise.

So now we know (probably) why many Xbox360 do not have full Xenos graphics power no? I feel PGR4 will have much better graphics because they will have better CPU utilization.

Also, tiling is different issue, no? It is not for making game more fast but for AA only.

As for your suggestion that the game "fit nicely" into the EDRAM without tiling I would like to know if forcing the game to run at a reduced resolution internally and then upscaling the output is your idea of "fitting nicely."

For 10MB EDRAM, PGR3 resolution (~600P) is perfect resolution for little bit AA (2x), no? Also (if there is no CPU limitation) lower resolution is good for better frame-rate and more shaders. If Forza 2 and PGR4 can have same shaders (as PGR3) and 720P and 60fps then it will have 3x PGR3 shader performance. I dont know, we must wait to see. If it is true then probably PGR3 has very large CPU limitaion!

 

[darkblu]

I didn't miss anything.

no, i guess you did not care to make sense in the first place so i guess my question flew over your keg anyway.

As for your suggestion that the game "fit nicely" into the EDRAM without tiling I would like to know if forcing the game to run at a reduced resolution internally and then upscaling the output is your idea of "fitting nicely."

performance-wise - absolutely.

 

[slapnutz]

slapnutz, might want to resize that image.

oops, i guess i should have read the faq. Sorry. However this may sound noobish.. but i cant find the "edit button"... I'm presumming it should appear within my Post window as long as i'm logged in???

I checked the faq and yup, i should be seeing an Edit button? Mods... can you help please?

 

[slapnutz]

oops, i guess i should have read the faq. Sorry. However this may sound noobish.. but i cant find the "edit button"... I'm presumming it should appear within my Post window as long as i'm logged in???

I checked the faq and yup, i should be seeing an Edit button? Mods... can you help please?

opps x2... i just discovered that I am not allowed to Edit my posts. (according to my Posting Rules).

I guess its gonna stay up there for all to see my shame until the Mod changes it (or kicks me out)

 

[Powderkeg]

no, i guess you did not care to make sense in the first place so i guess my question flew over your keg anyway.

Hmm, I'll be sure to let the guys at Bizarre know that you know more about programing their game than they do. I'm sure they will be sending that job application right to you since you are such an authority on how their game works, being the uber-developer that you are.

 

[a688]

I think maybe what Bizarre says is they have CPU limitation not GPU limitation. So with little bit more time they can have better CPU "utilization" so they can have more GPU performance. Remember another developer (MotoGP) also says they think they make perfect graphics scaling engine design before final dev kit but have CPU limitation surprise.

You mean the postmortem where they admit they made "mistakes" in creating the rendering engine because of guesses they made with incomplete information? They had a call overhead problem, not a CPU problem.

 

[Acert93]

http://forzamotorsport.net/devcorner/pitpass/pitpass12.htm

Q: Right, so something we're obviously not seeing in these wireframe images are all the post-effects your team will be applying to each car. Can you talk about that?

JW: We're really harnessing the power of the 360 to do some cool things on the rendering side. On Forza 1 we were limited to calculating our lighting and reflection effects "per vertex" (basically each point on the wire mesh). This meant that you would see funny distortions as light and reflections moved across even smooth surfaces of the car. Now we're doing everything "per pixel" so you get incredibly smooth lighting and reflections that showcase the subtle curves and styling cues of these incredible machines. Along with higher fidelity damage effects we're also adding dirt effects so your car will look like it's been in an epic battle at the end of the race even if you don't touch a wall. Combine all this with HDR lighting effects and spherical harmonics (the car picks up lighting from the track environment) and you get cars that are getting pretty darn close to photo real.

This has also been an important week for the graphics and systems devs in getting much better numbers out of game performance. Framerates are hopscotching at regular intervals toward the magical number of 60, while more and more post-effects are turned on in the graphics department. Animating 3D crowds, animated 3D grass, and high dyynamic-range lighting are just a few of the elements that have recently been activated in the game... which coincides really nicely with the fact that art director John Wendl has just finished up capturing another batch of really impressive screenshots for yet another big print gaming magazine. It won't be long now folks.

Nice to hear about development. The fact they are holding out soooo long on SS... I hope it doesn't let us down!

 

[ihamoitc2005]

Cpu

You mean the postmortem where they admit they made "mistakes" in creating the rendering engine because of guesses they made with incomplete information? They had a call overhead problem, not a CPU problem.

They say they have no problems except very high call overhead problem. This is because directx API call overhead has too much CPU cycles, no? If they can make less call overhead for CPU and have more CPU "utlization" also then I think this is why PGR3 "guy" says 3 more months is enough for 2x performance. Remember, many developer says they do not have full 3 core performance because of short development times. So maybe soon we can see Xbox360 games with 2x PGR3 graphics!

This article can explain Directx9 call overhead problem for CPU bottleneck and Directx10 benefits:

http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTA0NSwyLCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA==

 

[zed]

i believe the call overhead only really applies on pc's with d3d9 + lesser ie not for consoles running d3d

 

[Acert93]

i believe the call overhead only really applies on pc's with d3d9 + lesser ie not for consoles running d3d

It appears that the overhead for draw calls is something the Xbox 360 was (is?) facing until an update to the Xbox D3D API is released.

Now, I’m a console programmer as are most of my colleagues. It’s been 10 years since I released a PC game. This lack of PC experience led us to overlook something that would have been obvious to a PC coder. The single biggest performance drain on MotoGP’06 wasn’t the number of vertices or textures but the number of draw calls.

In November 2005 our game was running at 12fps, with the render loop taking nearly 2 frames.

That month news came through from Microsoft that the changes to the Xbox360 SDK that would allow us to circumvent these draw commands wouldn’t be ready in time for our launch. We were in very serious trouble indeed.

So like the PC there was/is an overhead for draw calls, and this will be/was resolved with an API update which came too late for MotoGP to utilize. I am wondering if this was part of the big API update in May that also resolved a number of issues like predicated tiling and whatnot. Sounds like the Xbox API was/is still very much a work in progress, especially if they are going to continue to port over some D3D10 API attributes and behaviors.