Forza Horizon 3 [XO, XPA]

[Clukos]

Is there any way to buy this game other than that Windows Game store? That thing is just.....i dunno. Even origin and Uplay feel better. Why not put it on Steam? is there any plans of this coming to Steam?

No, i think it is just windows store for now, and i agree that it is pretty bad in comparison to Uplay/Origin/Battlenet/Steam but not bad enough for me not to play FH3

There's a patch today on PC side as well (maybe Xb1 too): http://forums.forzamotorsport.net/t...a-Horizon-3-10-4-16-Update-Release-Notes.aspx

 

[Cyan]

Mustang, Audi R8 and Lamborghini, Xbox One S editions.

There is nothing more to say.

 

[Clukos]

One thing they can improve upon with the next installment is to go the tssaa route. The game has some serious problems with shader/geometry aliasing even when down sampled from 4k. MSAA just doesn't quite cut it anymore. Fortunately, some cars suffer less than others (depending on the material and geometry of the car). But the IQ overall is pretty nice, it's nowhere near as bad as something like Alien Isolation w/o taa

 

[iroboto]

Agreed. For a series could use a year+ lull and remake significant portions of their engine to be ready for next generation hardware.

Every year has been a forza franchise title without break. And while I do appreciate their ability to deliver on time, we could use a small break as F6 and FH3 are great titles in their own respects and could use some time to mature while they work on a superior successor.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[AlNom]

I feel like a temporal solution would not be as beneficial for this sort of game with this much foliage & movement etc.

Sure it makes sense for photomode or car viewing.

 

[CSI PC]

I feel like a temporal solution would not be as beneficial for this sort of game with this much foliage & movement etc.

Sure it makes sense for photomode or car viewing.

Does the Xbox One have the hardware benefits of forward+ rendering with MSAA like the recent AMD GPUs?
It is interesting to note that all recent console ports using MSAA and especially forward+ rendering seem to work much better with AMD GPUs, there was one exception but after the patch it ended up faster than the comparable Nvidia.
Cheers

 

[AlNom]

Does the Xbox One have the hardware benefits of forward+ rendering with MSAA like the recent AMD GPUs?
It is interesting to note that all recent console ports using MSAA and especially forward+ rendering seem to work much better with AMD GPUs, there was one exception but after the patch it ended up faster than the comparable Nvidia.
Cheers

Hardware benefits?

They used clustered forward for FH2, so it's probably still using something based off of that. They still use 4xMSAA on console as well.

 

[iroboto]

Does the Xbox One have the hardware benefits of forward+ rendering with MSAA like the recent AMD GPUs?
It is interesting to note that all recent console ports using MSAA and especially forward+ rendering seem to work much better with AMD GPUs, there was one exception but after the patch it ended up faster than the comparable Nvidia.
Cheers

No hardware benefits for Xbox using Forward+, but likely less disadvantages.
Forward+ becomes more computationally heavy as I understand it, but it offsets the memory footprint. For XBO where ESRAM is limited in size (32MB), Forward+ is a good fit for XBO. MSAA has less dramatic impact on performance with F+, but that's debatable from what i understand. Sebbbi often writes about deferred vs F+, in the end i think he prefers deferred today, though as with any improving technology, that could change in the future as well.

 

[CSI PC]

Hardware benefits?

They used clustered forward for FH2, so it's probably still using something based off of that. They still use 4xMSAA on console as well.

I mention hardware benefits because back in 2013 AMD was presenting for the 2xx GPUs additional hardware level MSAA with Forward+ rendering capabilities, this was something AMD was directly pushing above deferred rendering; but I am not sure if this is also applicable to the hardware in the consoles.
And it is surprising just how many of the very recent AAA games developed on Xbox One and coming to PC are using MSAA and for quite a few the Forward+.
I would say it is fair to lump clustered forward plus into the same context that I raised.
This is what they said about using the clustered forward plus technique:

The advantage of Forward+ for us is that it just works with MSAA, at any level, whereas deferred techniques struggle to maintain decent anti-aliasing. Secondly you get the other benefits of forward shading such as allowing complex material types such as carbon fibre and car paint that are difficult to achieve using deferred techniques. We found that we could easily 'plug-in' Forward+ to the existing shaders which were already designed for forward rendering. The advantages of the Clustered approach to Forward+ for us were that semi-transparent surfaces did not need special consideration and most importantly we did not need to render a depth pre-pass.
........
It does seem sometimes that we are going in a different direction to the majority of games that are pushing for deferred rendering with FXAA or other combined anti-aliasing approaches. For us, image quality is highly important, and we found that we can achieve that best with the benefits of Forward+ lighting combined with MSAA. In terms of resource allocation, this is factored in during the planning phase of the project to make sure we spend the right amount of time balancing the cost versus quality trade-offs involved. In some respects this decision gives us more flexibility, as we don't have to spend time investing in custom anti-aliasing solutions as some other approaches might require.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2014-the-making-of-forza-horizon-2

Putting FH3 aside, the latest game releases (especially those with DX12) seem to be mostly MSAA orientated apart from say RoTR, and quite a few of them using Forward+ technique.

I am wondering if this is because to get the most out of the Xbox One they use this, and several AAA ports do not have any other options.
Cheers

Edit:
I should had also mentioned that re-reading historical article makes it pretty clear there is benefits for the latest consoles in terms of hardware and MSAA/forward rendering techniques.
In the interview they talk about the Xbox One demo/ESRAM/EQAA/etc.

We were actually running with EQAA for a large part of the project, but we found that our best cost/quality trade-off was firmly with 4x MSAA. Due to the way the GPU compresses the MSAA data, it's usually not 4x the bandwidth for 4x MSAA, and with a forward-only rendering path, the GPU is rarely bottlenecked by bandwidth, especially if the majority of the render target data is in ESRAM. We found that EQAA with a lower number of depth samples than 4x MSAA improves performance, but also lowers image quality because the hardware can't properly resolve certain polygon edge configurations. In a racing game, where the focal point is often in the mid to far distance, this difference can be crucial.

 

[AlNom]

I mention hardware benefits because back in 2013 AMD was presenting for the 2xx GPUs additional hardware level MSAA with Forward+ rendering capabilities, this was something AMD was directly pushing above deferred rendering; but I am not sure if this is also applicable to the hardware in the consoles.

http://www.slideshare.net/takahiroharada/forward-34779335 ? Or a later one?

I'm not sure it was so much specific HW for it as it was just that AMD had buckets of compute, and then deferred MSAA was/is simply trash for Radeons (e.g. Frostbite).

edit:
Ah nevermind, that was for pre-GCN. From CryEngine 3 Graphics Gems:

NV/AMD (GCN): Export Cost = Cost(RT0)+Cost(RT1)..., AMD (older hw): Export Cost = (Num RTs) * (Slowest RT)

And it is surprising just how many of the very recent AAA games developed on Xbox One and coming to PC are using MSAA and for quite a few the Forward+.

Putting FH3 aside, the latest game releases (especially those with DX12) seem to be mostly MSAA orientated apart from say RoTR, and quite a few of them using Forward+ technique.

I am wondering if this is because to get the most out of the Xbox One they use this, and several AAA ports do not have any other options.
Cheers

I haven't kept track of recent games with F+ & MSAA wrt ports.

There was the GDC update on tiled rendering last year:
http://www.slideshare.net/mistercteam/advancements-intiledrendering

 

[CSI PC]

http://www.slideshare.net/takahiroharada/forward-34779335 ? Or a later one?

I'm not sure it was so much specific HW for it as it was just that AMD had buckets of compute, and then deferred MSAA was/is simply trash for Radeons (e.g. Frostbite).



I haven't kept track of recent games with F+ & MSAA wrt ports.

There was the GDC update on tiled rendering last year:
http://www.slideshare.net/mistercteam/advancements-intiledrendering

It was part of the 2013 and GPU 14 presentations (possibly part of gaming evolved) and re-iterated afterwards by various AMD staff, been trying to find if any site has the slides bah
Definitely relates to the 2xx and beyond GPUs (hardware level MSAA), which I appreciate does not necessarily reflect being in the custom APUs used with the consoles.

Yeah keeping track of what games are doing and ports is a nightmare
I just did it the other night for the recent DX11/DX12 ones and surprised with what I saw, which is why I was mulling over if this is due to the Xbox One.
Cheers

 

[CSI PC]

Thought I was going mad as I could not find any references to the hardware MSAA support until just now lol.
Well AMD do present Forward+ and MSAA hardware support at the 2013 GPU 14 but they did not go into details beyond the slide back then.
It is at 1hr30mins.

That slide at 1hr30mins I think also ties into the AMD Leo demo from 2012 as well that covered lighting and I thought Forward+/MSAA so a stepping stone.
This functionality was integral to 2xx onwards from some kind of hardware support/acceleration level, after all that live stream is around Hawaii and indirectly 'next gen' consoles (touches very briefly about synergy with 'next gen' consoles).
You could say this ties back to early Beyond3d topics regarding hardware support for MSAA such as: https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/hardware-msaa.50797/
Since 2013 seems AMD was pushing MSAA with forward rendering techniques as a practical solution, which is seen in a few recent games from Xbox One, more so the 4xMSAA.
However there are public examples where developers stated they were avoiding hardware MSAA such as CD Projekt with Witcher 3 to maintain 'technical parity' - context was when they discussed all platforms including console.
Cheers

 

[Cyan]

The lighting's photorealism reminds me of the glory days of Gran Turismo.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I get an 'uncanny valley' response myself. The sky is beautiful, and some of the lighting, but then things like the plant life are a considerably lower quality that just doesn't fit.

 

[Cyan]

I get an 'uncanny valley' response myself. The sky is beautiful, and some of the lighting, but then things like the plant life are a considerably lower quality that just doesn't fit.

Not even these two manage to confuse you and make you believe they could be perfectly real images? I am having a hard time with some of them in order to find flaws --I am on a small 11,6" hybrid laptop

 

[Clukos]

Alright, i finished the main campaign, although i'm far from over with the game. This must be the best open world racing game I've played this gen, so much fun

It may help that i haven't played much of FH2 and don't feel any franchise fatigue but this is a very well made game and the setting is just perfect.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Not even these two manage to confuse you and make you believe they could be perfectly real images?

Nope.

Sky is very convincing (it should be!) and the horizon in silhouette. But the moment the bushes come into view, it's clearly fake. Or someone's pasted fake bushes over a photo.

[/QUOTE]Car and sky are very good, but the terrain is as naffy computer graphics as computer graphics have been for years. Flat, shadowless clump-of-grass sprites and assembled 2D foliage with baked highlights. And no reflections on the water - it's immediately 'off' without any investigation.

 

[Clukos]

Car and sky are very good, but the terrain is as naffy computer graphics as computer graphics have been for years. Flat, shadowless clump-of-grass sprites and assembled 2D foliage with baked highlights. And no reflections on the water - it's immediately 'off' without any investigation.

Maybe the problem is that you can't scan foliage (i think DICE mentioned that in one of their battlefront presentations) and iirc Forza Horizon 3 is using scanned materials for the landscape. AO and reflections aren't its strongest suit either but it looks quite good when playing overall, i can't think of a better looking open world racing game.

 

[CSI PC]

Nope.



Sky is very convincing (it should be!) and the horizon in silhouette. But the moment the bushes come into view, it's clearly fake. Or someone's pasted fake bushes over a photo.

Car and sky are very good, but the terrain is as naffy computer graphics as computer graphics have been for years. Flat, shadowless clump-of-grass sprites and assembled 2D foliage with baked highlights. And no reflections on the water - it's immediately 'off' without any investigation.

Are they using the same technique for the trees as those bushes, they seem to have less of that flat 2D foilage rendering effect, they are further back (which also helps I bet) but even at a distance the foilage bushes still look very 2D artificial IMO.

Cheers

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Maybe the problem is that you can't scan foliage (i think DICE mentioned that in one of their battlefront presentations) and iirc Forza Horizon 3 is using scanned materials for the landscape. AO and reflections aren't its strongest suit either but it looks quite good when playing overall, i can't think of a better looking open world racing game.

You don't need to scan foliage for it to look realistic. It just needs lots of resources. FH3 looks like Speedtree to me - static 2D sprites for clusters of leaves painted with highlights towards the top. And that's not a criticism of its look. It's an open-world racer and of course compromises are made, just as they are in every racer. I'm simply responding to Cyan's images and examples with my own personal response. The Uncanny Valley should probably be expected TBH.

And I'll add that if flitting through the images and letting the eye gravitate naturally to the car without looking at the scenery, it does look very like a photo.