*Game Development Issues*

[nAo]

Wow, that's impressive. Isn't it higher than actual vertex setup on RSX?

Maybe you're talking about triangle setup. But Joker didn't measure that.

 

[Dr. Nick]

Wow, that's impressive. Isn't it higher than actual vertex setup on RSX?

I might be mistaken but the vertex setup is in the 250,000,000 range.

 

[betan]

You are doing something no one else I know (including Naughty dog who use spu's on Uncharted to help geometry) is capable of doing.

Is this an insider info or are you making an assumption based on ICE team's involvement?
In any case, what's the geometry Uncharted is pushing and how are they using spu's?

FYI in case anyone is intersted, yes the game does look better with all these "wasted" verticies.

At least one person is interested in your pixel shader load for this actual game.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think anybody is questioning Xenos' vertex capabilities or the goodies edram brought, but one also wonders why 360 exclusive first/second party games don't seem to be pushing any geometry. I would think pixel shaders would be the first thing that comes to mind but what would I know.

 

[scificube]

I think it worth pointing out that Heavenly Sword, while it looks very nice in stills, suffers from major technical issues, most importantly a very dodgy framerate and excessive screen tearing.

It was also originally scheduled to launch with the PS3, and recieved over an 8 month delay.

So, while it was a good attempt at creating an exclusive technical showpiece, NinjaTheory definately bit off a little more than they could chew.

In your opinion. Especially with yours being in the minority it is hardly definitive. I would challenge your points but it would divert the direction of this discusssion. I will plainly say that this was not needed...and really scooby_dooby this is beneath you.

 

[scooby_dooby]

In your opinion. Especially with yours being in the minority it is hardly definitive. I would challenge your points but it would divert the direction of this discusssion. I will plainly say that this was not needed...and really scooby_dooby this is beneath you.

It's not my opinion at all.

Take a look at the HS thread at GAF, it's fairly unanimous that the technical aspects mar the game signifcantly, and that framerate is a major issue:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=185334&page=51

Ehh the framerate kinda stinks in this game imo. The visuals are gorgeous but the framerate brings that down quite a bit for me. If they could get the sequel looking the same and running at a smooth 60 frames per second it'd be jaw dropping. Even a smooth 30 would be better than what they have now

- I hate to admit it, but the lack of technical polish (or maybe the fact that Ninja Theory simply bit off more than they can chew) has REALLY bit this title in the ass.
the framerate is almost NEVER running at 30fps in a large majority of areas and they way NT decided to have the engine "grab" content off the harddrive constantly only makes things worse...much like running a title on the PC when you don't have enough ram....
At times it really is fucking gastly the way the shit just "jumps" all over the place...and the constant tearing doesn't make things any more tolerable
Shadows are also flat out ugly most of time, with the exception being during Nariko monologues/stage select sections....obviously done because not that much is having to "balanced" as far as rendering budgets are concerned...

- THE BAD
Ummm...framerate, screen tearing, all the stuff that has been mentioned ad nauseum. Technical issues really do undermine the overall effect.

While it's a shame that the game is short and that there are techincal issues like long load times and framerate drops/tearing, I definitely think that everyone should at least rent the game and check out what the game has to offer.

Now, I'm not trying to troll Nao at all, he was only brought in at the tailend of the project, and I'm sure he did everything he could do.

But the fact remains, Heavenly Sword suffers from major technical issues, and a lengthy delay, so it's hardly a shining example of what can be done on PS3. Or at least, it demonstrates the trade offs necessary to reach something with that level of IQ.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

My 2c on this, from my personal experience at the tail end of last gen development, had last generation gone on much longer say a couple more years PS2 would have been lead SKU in name only on a lot projects...

With this and your last post, and the middle-ground consensus of the two rivalling POVs on PS3 development, it seems to me MS are very much in the right mind targeting development ease over everything else. It's far too much a minority of enthusiasts working in the industry (to earn a living) to hope for the industry to embrace the 'fun' aspects of your eclectic architecture. Console designs should be developer centred, from a business perspective. Nintendo went this was (in a bad way!) and MS in a good way. Sony's choice has had a major impact on their system. One wonders what a developer designed console would look like?

That said, if Sony's long-term strategy is a 'consistent' development platform going forward (Cell + GPU) then they may not be in a such a bad place next gen. From that perspective, MS's choice might be very limited. I can't imagine them going the complex-to-code-for route, which may hamper performance in their hardware choices. If PS3 is something of a stop-gap solution - a system that bridges a couple of key technologies - then it's market performance now won't be as much of a concern as future platform efforts. They won't need to spend $2 billion creating the next version or the next lot of tools. Though in all honesty, I think we will mostly all agree that much of PS3's problems come from being designed by a technology enthusiast rather than a shrewd businessman.

 

[ShootMyMonkey]

However, I would expect that with VSM, doing the actual rendering is faster on Xenos since it has high precision filtering (32-bit integer) whereas RSX doesn't, and I know from personal experience that VSM with FP16 is ridiculously limited. You'd have to do it all in the shader.

32-bit integer? Either way, we typically only use VSMs for indoor lighting, so depth range isn't really enough for FP16 (using -1..1 range) to be a problem and there are ways of fighting it even when it does become an issue.

Also, on my own little experiments with gradients and LoG filtering actually produce more admissible results without hardware filtering anyway.

I'd like to see some games doing SAT-VSM on PS3 via SPUs

Sounds doable... with no more than 1 shadow-casting light. But hey, you can claim that you have "global illumination" that way since a single lightsource would be used "globally".

Indeed. And ideally you'd have the people needing to mess about with PS3's innards being the people who enjoy it, rather than those who'll complain! Maybe they're aren't enough of those?

Maybe. It's also entirely possible that it's just that the people who'll complain are the ones who'll appear on forums and scream bloody murder on their blogs. The people who enjoy will probably just stare at the SN debugger and and not tell you anything about the nostalgic feel of instruction latency.

Eliciting reactions from them might actually require something of a higher order of stupidity than we'd get on a board like this one.

 

[Dr. Nick]

Snip

If the 360 can "waste" resources doing that why is titling still an issue? Sorry if I'm getting off track. After reading Swifty's post about Sony Continuing on the same development track ,and they should or go with something extremely simple next time, I also think that Microsoft should stick to edram next generation as well.

 

[Jesus2006]

It's not my opinion at all.

Take a look at the HS thread at GAF, it's fairly unanimous that the technical aspects mar the game signifcantly, and that framerate is a major issue:

I have not experienced any framerate issues at all.
Some people complain that for them framerate sometimes seems to be "choppy" at worst, mainly in cut-scenes, but that could have many reasons, including 24p output setting, harddisc fragmentation etc. (see HS thread).

Btw. i have a different opinion than you and the 4 guys you quoted, now does that prove anything? No.

 

[scificube]

It's not my opinion at all.

...snip...

You know as well as I that I can find just a many forum posts that say the exact opposite.

Further, whether you feel HS is a technical marvel is irrelevant to this discussion and a delay is proof of nothing. You know not whether they were having problems or adding features. When JC says "the game is done when it's done" do you assume he's having problems on the PC or trying to work something he wants in...in? This is neither the time nor the place to get into this but if you deem it necessary to continue this discussion PM me.

 

[scooby_dooby]

You know as well as I that I can find just a many forum posts that say the exact opposite.

Further, whether you feel HS is a technical marvel is irrelevant to this discussion and a delay is proof of nothing. You know not whether they were having problems or adding features. When JC says "the game is done when it's done" do you assume he's having problems on the PC or try to work something he wants in...in? This is neither the time nor the place to get into this but if you deem it necessary to continue this discussion PM me.

Actually, if you feel the need to explain to me why you think my posts are off-topic, you can feel free to PM me.

I feel it's entirely on point, since the entire discussion is about PS3 development issues, in the context of timelines, budgets and realworld issues.

If one of the premiere PS3 titles, which was delayed and launched with significant technical issues, then it is certainly relevant to the discussion at hand.

If you want to pretend these issues don't exist, be my guest. I think that attitude only gets in the way of a meaningful discussion however...instead of discussing WHY the title had these issues, you want to debate whether or not they actually exist. I don't feel that is really up for debate, since the VAST majority of user reviews I'm seeing cite these issues. But you've made your opinion known so you can leave it at that.

 

[scificube]

Actually, if you feel the need to explain to me why you think my posts are off-topic, you can feel free to PM me.

I feel it's entirely on point, since the entire discussion is about PS3 development issues, in the context of timelines, budgets and realworld issues.

If one of the premiere PS3 titles, which was delayed and launched with significant technical issues, then it is certainly relevant to the discussion at hand.

If you want to pretend these issues don't exist, be my guest. I think that attitude only gets in the way of a meaningful discussion however...instead of discussing WHY the title had these issues, you want to debate whether or not they actually exist. I don't feel that is really up for debate, since the VAST majority of user reviews I'm seeing cite these issues. But you've made your opinion known so you can leave it at that.

I didn't state what my opinion was one way or the other and certainly didn't say what does or does not exist.

1. A game need not be a technical marvel for developers to have issues getting it out the door.
2. Opinions differ on what is a major technical issue is as to what is and is not acceptable.
3. There is confusion on what the technical issues are...i.e. framerate confused with sync issues or intentional vs. unexepected slowdown.
4. Lack on insight as to why things turned out the way they did.
5. I don't see how it is relative to this discussion if Ninja Theory "bit off more than they could chew" as this would pertain to one studio's performance/misjudgement (not saying this occurred) when the topic of discussion are issues the affect the entire development community.
6. There is nothing helpful in what you say as you outline no particular issue anyone can address.

I think that's enough. Let's leave this alone.

 

[Nesh]

It's not my opinion at all.

Take a look at the HS thread at GAF, it's fairly unanimous that the technical aspects mar the game signifcantly, and that framerate is a major issue:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=185334&page=51

You mean just like the countless of other GAF threads making a huge deal out of nothing?

 

[joker454]

You're measuring the number of vertices that are going through the GPU (for example it's easy to multiply your figures by over a factor of 5 on RSX and 360 with an ad-hoc benchmark), while what you want to measure it's the number of post transformed vertices cache misses per frame.

I can't measure that alas ;( The gcm tools crash when you deal with that many verticies. Pix can process it, but it reports the bottleneck by far being "system bandwidth" with that measurement totally off the scale, and all other measurement numbers are snapped down to zero. So I can't get an accurate read on vertex cache misses on either platform. It did get 92.61% visibility so it wasn't a bogus test scene, most of those verticies made their way through the whole pipeline. It was a typical scene you would see in replay all the time, just with lod's off.

f the 360 can "waste" resources doing that why is titling still an issue?

Don't really know. I was getting 95.6% predicated tiling success on that pix grab, so only 4.4% waste. Pretty sweet I don't know why others don't tile. It's so easy. Split the screen in two, figure out whats above and whats below the tile line. Presto, tiling complete and you get very fast 4xmsaa as a bonus. I mean sure, I would rather not tile if I didn't have to of course! But it's pretty easy to do.

 

[ERP]

I suspect tiling or the lack of it has as much to do with preconcieved notions as it does actual performance.

But even 5% is 5%, you have to trade it off against something.

 

[nAo]

I can't measure that alas ;( The gcm tools crash when you deal with that many verticies. Pix can process it, but it reports the bottleneck by far being "system bandwidth" with that measurement totally off the scale, and all other measurement numbers are snapped down to zero. So I can't get an accurate read on vertex cache misses on either platform. It did get 92.61% visibility so it wasn't a bogus test scene, most of those verticies made their way through the whole pipeline. It was a typical scene you would see in replay all the time, just with lod's off.

Pix and GcmReplay are not the only way to profile, you know, you can actually write a few lines of code to get that number
Anyway, for well formed geometry I think you're going to measure between 5 and 6.5 milion vertex shaded per frame. I guess you render indexed triangle lists, which mean the GPU is setting up 150-200 Mtriangles per second, which is not bad at all!

 

[Betanumerical]

Is this an insider info or are you making an assumption based on ICE team's involvement?
In any case, what's the geometry Uncharted is pushing and how are they using spu's?

Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, PS3, 2007
Main characters - ~20,000-30,000 polygons
Drake - ~30,000 polygons
Pirates - ~12,000-15,000 polygons

Assuming Drake and 3 pirates on screen = 30,000 + (3x 13,000) x 30.

= 2.07 million polys / second for the pirates + drake only, unfortunately we don't have any numbers on environments.

My maths could be wrong though, (highly likely )

 

[nAo]

it's much more than that..characters have to be rendered in the shadow maps as well, and maybe even in a zprepass (dunno if they use it or not)

 

[scificube]

I assume backface culling etc isn't accounted for either.

 

[betan]

Assuming Drake and 3 pirates on screen = 30,000 + (3x 13,000) x 30.

= 2.07 million polys / second for the pirates + drake only, unfortunately we don't have any numbers on environments.

My maths could be wrong though, (highly likely )

Your notation is definitely wrong (multiplication has precedence you know), but more importantly next MLB 2K is typically pushing around a million polygons/per frame @ 60 fps.
That is 60 million polygons/sec. You need environments to compare.