HD problems in Xbox 360 and PS3 (Zenji Nishikawa article @ Game Watch)

I'm pretty sure it was an ATi spokesperson who said something along those lines...

[edit]
http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showpost.php?p=593755&postcount=78

 

Who knows how accurate this is though. We do know ATI's PC chips are a lot better at dynamic branching compares to NV's chips, and it seems Xenos should be as well (but only have paper specs and no tests to see how the architecture really performs). Xenos is a bit different than the X1800/X1900 architecturally, so... That said, Toy Shop is not a very relevant comparison to begin with because it uses a number of formats and compression techniques not found on G70/G71. I know they used 3Dc quite a bit. Further, if you were designing such a demo on G70/G71 you would go about some things different to get similar effects. I believe the ATI rep even noted such. It is even harder to make any RSX comparisons until we know all the changes and refinements of the hardware.

 

Thanks a lot for the link! For the lazy:

One thing I found curious that I didn't notice before is that ATi allows people to run their demos on Nvidia hardware, while Nvidia locks their demos and won't let them run on ATi's. Why is this? ATi seems to be a bit more confident with their performance claims compared to NV.

 

Ati had a Ruby Tech Demo running on Xenos at E3 2005.

 

No, they don't. That person I believe was talking about testing POM in general and he didn't mention the comparative performance 'Toy Shop' itself would have on an nVidia architecture. As Acert said, the person went on to clarify that the demo could not be viably executed on nVidia hardware without fundamental changes to the way it was made.

 

And for being such a quick port (something like 2 weeks) it ran pretty well as well (30fps @ 720p if I remember correctly... looked smooth enough in motion with no major hiccups).

It will be nice seeing more platform specific software. I guess the PS3 will be seeing some come this fall. That was one advantage of going with NV with already existing SM3.0 hardware + SLI and the initial kits having a CELL processor (albeit slower at 2.4GHz). We may see some 360 specific engines/software come 2006 (Viva Pinata?) but it seems most this fall is PC (Rainbow Six, Splinter Cell, Medal of Honor) or UE3 (Too Human, Mass Effect, Gears of War, Crackdown, Brother in Arms, Huxley).

2007 seems to be when we will see more console-specific software. Which makes sense compared to dev time (~24-28+ months) and when the dev kits with final chips were made available. I know it takes time to test hardware and then engineer a game engine to best utilize the hardware and then design a game to the hardware/engine strengths and then create an art scheme and art assets to push it all the way. I guess this is why 2nd gen software always looks significantly better, especially if it was designed from the beginning with a good feel for the hardware's strengths and weaknesses.

I guess this is one area Nintendo's Wii wont have to worry about! Fall 2007 should be pretty big IMO with some very nice looking software.

 

Okay, but I don't think they made many compromises on Xenos to accomodate it. Without eDRAM they'd have to put a lot more cache as well as all the compression/decompression logic as well. The memory controller would be more complex also (remember that it's handling requests from the CPU as well).

True, but I was thinking more along the lines of leaving less frame time for everything else. If you spend 30% of your frame time on post-processing due to bandwidth limitations (whether on Xenos or RSX), the rest of the scene must be rendered 43% faster than a scene without post-processing in order to get the same net framerate.

Well, I don't think I'll be that surprised, given my heavy disappointment with what's on the PC so far. I fully expect RSX to pump out very good graphics, and I've said so many times. I also believe developers are so far behind the technology curve that their talent (along with that of the artists) is much more important than hardware capability difference. I just think having more bandwidth would make graphics visibly better, all else being equal.

 

Why panties in bunches?

Why are we getting are panties in a bunch over a bunch of numbers. Clearly, if any of us have actually played the Xbox 360, we can see that the likes of GRAW, Oblivion, and Call of Duty 2 look just fine with the degree of AA and resolution they are currently at.

I don't know why we somehow take our eyes for granted, but I'm playing games on my VGA monitor at 1280x720 and it looks about as sharp as any PC game at the same resolution.

WHy the hubub. It's not the end of the world. It's still freaking "HD"

 

You want me to answer you question? Okay I will.

It's because people were told that 2xAA is totally free and 4xAA was free with only like a 5% hit with effects turned on. That doesn't seem to be the case now.

That's as plain as I can make it.

 

We were more than told, it was beaten over our heads day in and day out, as being the GPU from heaven. Personally I don't think it such a big deal as both Xenos and RSX are alright in my books. Too great chips, with different ways of doing things.

 

There is no such thing as a free lunch.



If you want, though, you can always beat up the neighbor's kid and take his.

 

Can anybody explain to us how Heavenly Sword and Warhawk (2 games that could possibly be day 1 launch games at best launch window games at worst) have both HDR and AA? I read a lot of the NAO 32 material and it basically makes sense to me in a small way, but what about Warhawk?

I take it that both of these games are internally rendering the game at, at least 720p so what are the devs doing to make it happen? Is it the hardware or is it more just very talented devs that making this happen?

If you were to read forums 9 months ago you would have thought that HDR + 4xAA on the PS3 was almost an impossible to get at 720p. I'm just very curious because it wasn't long ago that the Xbox 360 was known to have "free" 2xAA and basically free 4xAA, yet it doesn't seem to be that way (obviously at 720p or higher).

I just don't get it. I had prepared my mind for non AA games on the PS3 with higher resolutions yet now everything that I learn is know false. Can somebody please explain before I ramble myself to death?

Oh and does anybody think that MGS4 will use 2xAA when released because it's obvious that they are using a nice deal of HDR?

Thanks everyone.

*Disclaimer: This is in no way a diss to the Xbox 360 or its developers. Just need more understanding on what was said months ago (pre GDC) and now (post GDC).

 

If you're asking because it's HDR and AA, well, it's not FP16 HDR + MSAA due to lack of blending.

If you're asking because it's not "free": just because it has a cost associated with it doesn't mean it costs too much to implement. Games on PC do fine with high resolutions, with at least so much blending and AA.

You're just not going to be able to go to such extremes as would be possible with Xenos.

Meanwhile, we've known that it wasn't free 4xAA for Xenos in terms of writing the engine for.... so long it's insane. Until there's been time for engines to be written that could take tiling into account.... it's a little annoying. What new news has come about regarding it? Not much except that it's easy to take statements of facts, or comments about some difficulties to mean that the end of the world is coming (I'm looking at the whiners about Carmack's comments right here) instead of exactly what was said. But, that's ranting and whining itself, so I'll shut up.

 

Hmmm, nobody knows what level of AA or HDR any of these games are using...

 

I wouldn't assume anything about HS's launch yet simply because nothing's been said. Similarly, though both devs have mentioned AA being used at one point or another, things can change between now and when the products ship, if they trade that feature off against something else again in the meantime. HDR&AA is possible on PS3, of course, I don't want to say otherwise.

Keep your mind prepared for that. Even as some studios may find creative solutions to allow for both, or to allow for AA etc. IMO there'll still be plenty of PS3 games without AA.

Xenos won't go to this extreme either

 

Sorry..cache for what?

That's probably true. At the same time I don't think that a 32 GBytes/s bus that connects the main die with the edram die comes for free..

It's not about RSX, it's about programming in a closed enviroment and being able to make many assumptions a 'PC videogames programmer' can't make.
I stand my opinion, you will be surprised, I have no doubt sooner or later (ok..maybe later.) you will think: god..how did they do that?

Marco

 

Yes, kinda hard without blending support for that format.

I was speaking regarding how heavy blending is, and where the framebuffer formats don't have very good compression on PC chips (Xenos being uncompressed anyway), requiring even more bandwidth.

 

It wasn't a specific Xenos demo and we're unlikely to get any, which is a shame. I think back to the 16 bit era and the demoscene, where you really got to see what your ST or Amiga could do when pushed. Some platform specific demos would be very cool and a great promotion for the hardware.

I wonder if PS3 will have an advantage in this representation if there's a serious homebrew ability there? The Demo scene was strongest with closed hardware where all the demo creators had the same amount of hardware to work with and had to really push it to compete with each other. PS3 should be a good toy for them, and they'd find the very best tricks to max out the hardware. That'd create a great showcase and if such demos were available to download (though without the swearful greets ) be a great promo tool, while potentially contributing a lot of free research to software development on the platform. Any ways to exploit platform specific features are more likely to be found from the homebrew/demo scene than developers tied to deadlines and finite funding, I think.

 

I liked that the PS1 came with the demo disc with some tech demos on, like the T-Rex demo. I hope PS3 comes with a demo disc with the Rubber Ducky demo. Maybe have the thousand fish demo as a screen saver?

 

The Warhawk developer Stated in the GDC video that the game use's 4xAA