Half-Life 2 XB360 won't be using tiling to achieve A.A.

[Acert93]

So it's impossible to have all this things at once plus MSAAx4 instead of MSAAx2?

Haha I was waiting for someone to spot that Maybe the cost of an extra title for their targetted framerate and features is a little much?

Btw, just like HS, dynamic soft shadows cast and received by every object in complex environment with "good visual quality" (please tell us you are using AF liberally!) sounds exactly like what most of us expected when we signed up for next gen.

Well, minus the fact I still only have a GCN and have not technically signed up for next gen...

 

[TheChefO]

I just looked back at some hl2 reviews and running on a x700xt the game hit 30+fps at 4xaa w/ 4xaf and this while rendering on a card running 475/525 128bit. If the earlier quote was true and there is a way to bypass the embedded dram it seems logical to expect the same kind of performance out of 360 yes?

aside from the hdr of course

 

[scooby_dooby]

So it's impossible to have all this things at once plus MSAAx4 instead of MSAAx2?

Forza 2 will probably have all this, not sure about the soft shadows. I think Forza 2 might be one of the best examples of what the 360 can do, as far as I know it's the only 1st party title using a completely custom engine, probably the first game truly designed for 360 from the ground up.

well maybe viva pinata as well

 

[Acert93]

Forza 2 will probably have all this, not sure about the soft shadows. I think Forza 2 might be one of the best examples of what the 360 can do, as far as I know it's the only 1st party title using a completely custom engine, probably the first game truly designed for 360 from the ground up.

My guess is not on Forza, at least to a degree. I expect it to look good, but Forza 1 came out in May of 2005? That is like a 17 months turn around from start to gold (assuming a November launch) on Forza 2. They are working with a new platform (beta kits/Xenos are about 12 months old now) and are being asked to make a pretty big jump.

I am sure they are leveraging a bit of their Xbox1 work and have had the financial resources to do some nifty stuff, but their dev cycle is pretty short for it to be a completely reworked title from the ground up designed and custom tailored completely for the 360. Not that it will look bad (technically I expect it to surpass PGR3), I just wonder how far they really can go in less than 18 months.

I am still betting on Q4 2007 being the "beginning" of what we should expect for the rest of the gen, as that is when we will begin seeing games that had proper hardware from the beginning of the dev cycle. e.g. Take a team like Bizarre Creations. They cut their teeth on the 360 last year, and their next 'ground up' game should leverage all they learned and be a clean slate design. I guess I am being conservative in my expectations...

 

[scooby_dooby]

Well they're also in the same building as Bizarre, and work extremely closely with that team. For example, the entire Gotham TV feature was lifted and brought over to Forza 2.

It is a fairly short timeframe, but I think it's the best showcase we will see this year.

 

[Acert93]

Well they're also in the same building as Bizarre, and work extremely closely with that team. For example, the entire Gotham TV feature was lifted and brought over to Forza 2.

It is a fairly short timeframe, but I think it's the best showcase we will see this year.

They are in the same building? Why MS has not aquired Bizarre... anyhow, that should be a nice advantage for the Forza team. I had read they were plugging in a number of PGR features... I wish they had taken the cockpit view Even if they only used generic stripped down interiors, I love the intertia and view from the inside. It really highlights HDR iris effects beautifully.

 

[Mmmkay]

Well they're also in the same building as Bizarre, and work extremely closely with that team.

Are you sure about that? Bizarre Creations is based in Liverpool. Isn't the Forza team located on Microsoft's Redmond campus?

NM, found the answer they have a satellite studio there:
http://www.xboxmatch.com/mag/index.php?article_num=49

XM : What is the working relationship with Microsoft been like? How much input has it had ?
B.W : It's excellent. The relationship is very much a partnership. We have a team in Redmond that looks after the key elements on development and our team interacts with the Redmond guys on a daily basis - usually late in the afternoon.

 

[scooby_dooby]

They are in the same building? Why MS has not aquired Bizarre... anyhow, that should be a nice advantage for the Forza team. I had read they were plugging in a number of PGR features... I wish they had taken the cockpit view Even if they only used generic stripped down interiors, I love the intertia and view from the inside. It really highlights HDR iris effects beautifully.

I just remembered something in the weekly blog about going downstairs and visitng with teh PGR guys.

One of the PR guys for Forza, Che, has stated on GAF they wanted to do cockpit but would not be able to make a release date for this winter, he's alluded to it being in Forza 3.

 

[Cheezdoodles]

not that these games are pushing the GFX department ...

Neither is warhawk. I got a 2 year old pc game called Yager on my pc. Which looks and plays about the same on a 9600 Radeon.

Yager screens

Warhawk

 

[Fox5]

Warhawk is at least a 3 fold improvement over that other game. (which puts it roughly in line with the fillrate and bandwidth increase from the 9600 pro to the ps3 I believe)

 

[Rolf N]

Isn't this supposed to be possible on the 360 by locking parts of the cache (or just the other way around using memexport,writing to the cache?). Although you would have to lock quite a big chunk of the already very small cache (166kB/Thread) to do this i guess.

The same is also possible on the PS3 iirc (RSX reading back from SPE LS).

That's what I was referring to. I don't know what exactly memexport can do on the 360 though, but that direction (GPU writing to CPU caches) isn't as relevant anyway IMO. Feeding the GPU interests me more.

This is very OT now ... if geometry is in XDR memory, it needs to "pass through" Cell anyway to reach RSX. If there's an idle SPE somewhere, any on-the-fly processing you can do on there comes effectively for free (throughput; probably adds latency though).
The same isn't so true for the 360. If you want to preprocess geometry on the CPU, it must first pass through the GPU (the only memory controller in the box is there) first. It will be much harder to make geometry savings big enough to justify this.

This is for processing of geometry. Synthesis/on-the-fly decompression looks much more even between the two platforms.

Should probably stop the OT soon, I can't even remember how we got there. If it's (it=~"Culling, software geometry processing making sense today?") interesting enough, maybe a mod could spin it off.

 

[Fran]

So it's impossible to have all this things at once plus MSAAx4 instead of MSAAx2?

Don't know yet. MSAAX2 has few advantages that make it a reasonable choice over MSAAX4.

Fran/Fable2

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Neither is warhawk. I got a 2 year old pc game called Yager on my pc. Which looks and plays about the same on a 9600 Radeon.

Screens...too...big.

It's similar, but then a lot games from previous GPUs to next GPU will be similar. Something Warhawk has is big fluffy clouds and lots and lots of planes, which'll make up a lot more requirements. You can always get the same look by scaling down a bit. Though I myself don't see that Warhawk is a real showcase for improved graphics.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I just looked back at some hl2 reviews and running on a x700xt the game hit 30+fps at 4xaa w/ 4xaf and this while rendering on a card running 475/525 128bit. If the earlier quote was true and there is a way to bypass the embedded dram it seems logical to expect the same kind of performance out of 360 yes?

It looks that way. The x700xt had about 17 GB/s BW in VRAM, so that'd leave you 5 GB/s for the rest of the system, which is likely adequate for the gameplay elements. However, AFAIK the Xenos doesn't have any way to render and filter in RAM. All that work is done in the eDRAM where the ROPS are, whereas the x700xt has the ROPS working on VRAM. It would also be a shocking waste of resources. Is the eDRAM going to be pretty much idle in HL2?

 

[Rockster]

That's what I was referring to. I don't know what exactly memexport can do on the 360 though, but that direction (GPU writing to CPU caches) isn't as relevant anyway IMO. Feeding the GPU interests me more.

This is very OT now ... if geometry is in XDR memory, it needs to "pass through" Cell anyway to reach RSX. If there's an idle SPE somewhere, any on-the-fly processing you can do on there comes effectively for free (throughput; probably adds latency though).
The same isn't so true for the 360. If you want to preprocess geometry on the CPU, it must first pass through the GPU (the only memory controller in the box is there) first. It will be much harder to make geometry savings big enough to justify this.

To be clear, cache locking on the CPU, is to feed the GPU, not for the GPU to write to. The CPU traverses the north bridge to fetch small amounts of data from main memory (like an equation, program, very course geometry) and use those inputs to create LARGE amounts of data. Instead of that data the being rewritten back to main memory only to be fetched again by the GPU which would consume both main memory bandwidth and space; the GPU can fetch the data directly out of the CPU's cache as it's generated, and avoids crossing the bus to main memory all together.

 

[Rockster]

Don't know yet. MSAAX2 has few advantages that make it a reasonable choice over MSAAX4.

"The result of the Z-only pass during tiling doesn't fill onlt the z buffer but also the Hi-Z buffer that is used for early rejection of fragments before the fragment shader is run. The buffer reserved to Hi-z Zs not big enough to hold all information at 720p 4x, that is a Z-only pass for each tile is required. At 2xMSAA, the hi-z buffer is big enough to hold all information thus only one Z-only pass is required for all tiles. When this mode is activated, a single DIP is predicated against the tile and is also predicated against occluders: basically you get hw occlusion culling "for free" in the sense you don't write code, which is nice and simple, especially if you can layer your scene to render big occluders first (the landscape for example).

Fran/Fable2"

Is this why? Has anyone experimented with the image quality when rendering to two 540 fields to generate 1080i. Perhaps a reasonable trade off for 4xAA would be a 960x540 frame-buffer rendered as fields. It could hold all HiZ and need only 2 tiles for rendering each field.

 

[Acert93]

It looks that way. The x700xt had about 17 GB/s BW in VRAM, so that'd leave you 5 GB/s for the rest of the system, which is likely adequate for the gameplay elements.

You can get away with less than that I have a P4 single channel with only 3.2GB/s of system memory and HL2 runs above 60fps with a nice GPU (likewise when I was running DDR333 it was above such as well).

Interestingly, the 7600GT with 8 ROPs and only 22.4GB/s of bandwidth averages about 58fps at 1280x1024 with 4xAA 8xAF.

We all should be very, very disappointed if HL2 cannot be ported (with or without AA) and run with all the features enabled and hit a solid 60fps at 720p. If there was ever a game that could run at 1080p and look good this is it based on the 7600GT benchmarks (49fps with AA/AF; 61fps without AA/AF). Seeing as RSX has 'more of everything' sans ROPs and video memory bandwidth there is little reason to believe with some tweaks and optimizations that the PS3 version could not hit 60fps at 1080p, and maybe even with some AA!

Of course my bet is we end up with a 720p 30fps port

 

[ZiFF]

Now explain why Madden and several other 3rd party games look better on 360 than PS3 (and yet EA has had dev kits for each system the same amount of time)? Resistance does not have AF and neither does several titles slated for launch. Nor do a lot of games have AA. And I'm curious, what PS3 launch games look better to you than 360 launch titles? COD2 looks better than Resistance plus it's 60fps compared to 30. DOA4 looks much better graphically than Tekken 6 and VF 5. PGR3 looks much better than Motorstorm (both are 30 fps). Where are these unbelievable PS3 launch titles that you speak of?

Are you for real? Uh-oh..

You just cant wait for the final products, do you?

 

[Rolf N]

To be clear, cache locking on the CPU, is to feed the GPU, not for the GPU to write to. The CPU traverses the north bridge to fetch small amounts of data from main memory (like an equation, program, very course geometry) and use those inputs to create LARGE amounts of data.

That's what I was referring to when I wrote "synthesis/on-the-fly decompression". There are other uses for dynamic geometry though.

Instead of that data the being rewritten back to main memory only to be fetched again by the GPU which would consume both main memory bandwidth and space; the GPU can fetch the data directly out of the CPU's cache as it's generated, and avoids crossing the bus to main memory all together.

Sure. I certainly didn't want to suggest anything else.

 

[TheChefO]

You can get away with less than that I have a P4 single channel with only 3.2GB/s of system memory and HL2 runs above 60fps with a nice GPU (likewise when I was running DDR333 it was above such as well).

Interestingly, the 7600GT with 8 ROPs and only 22.4GB/s of bandwidth averages about 58fps at 1280x1024 with 4xAA 8xAF.

We all should be very, very disappointed if HL2 cannot be ported (with or without AA) and run with all the features enabled and hit a solid 60fps at 720p. If there was ever a game that could run at 1080p and look good this is it based on the 7600GT benchmarks (49fps with AA/AF; 61fps without AA/AF). Seeing as RSX has 'more of everything' sans ROPs and video memory bandwidth there is little reason to believe with some tweaks and optimizations that the PS3 version could not hit 60fps at 1080p, and maybe even with some AA!

Of course my bet is we end up with a 720p 30fps port

Hey why so negative? COD2 ported very early at 720/60fps! At this point in 360 development, we should expect the same levels and aa and MB and DOF!

then again I'd be happy with the above at 30fps