Image Quality and Framebuffer Analysis for Available/release build Games *Read the first post*

That's not 1280 for sure, no sharp pixels anywhere at all. Every edge has the obvious ghostly look of an upscaled image.
 
Is there a slight difference regarding AF by any chance in that game? The walls to the left and right seem to have a little more filtering on PS3 than 360. Ground seems to show similarities.

Or could it just be a different viewing angle?
 
Nesh said:
So whats the image quality of Gears 2?

720p 2xAA?
Click to expand...

It's somewhat a mystery as to how they are achieving AA, but there is some form of edge AA going on that is rather inconsistent just as in Gears 1. It could be a problem in the rendering pipeline with post-processing and AA resolve, however, as it's not an uncommon problem in PC games.

Where the AA is noticeable, it is no more than 2xMSAA in appearance.

On a related note, I was wondering if the resident coders might comment on this blog post with respect AA and MRTs (found via google!):
http://oles-rants.blogspot.com/2008/08/making-some-use-out-of-hardware.html

  1. render everything (including lighting) as usual including the final shading/combine pass, but not including the post-processing stages.
  2. re-render all the on-screen geometry to MSAA-RT while projecting and sampling the texture from stage #1 using either a) the cheap way - use the direction obtained from the difference of interpolated texture-coordinate and the same texture-coordinate with "_centroid" modifier applied, or b) interpolate fragment depth as well and search closest Z in the nearby samples
  3. resolve your MSAA-RT and continue as usual
Now the downsides:

2.a. suffers from the hardware trick/cheat/bug all IHVs I know have implemented. When your pixel/fragment actually covers just two sub-samples the centroid modifier will correctly give you location between whose two. Obviously one covered sub-sample is correct as well. But when your fragment covers three sub-samples out of four, they give us not the actual centroid position, but center instead! Shame on them!

Another downside is polygon intersections. In that places the algorithms behaves exactly as nVidia CSAA, and you'll got little-to-no AA there.

2.b. suffers from precision, for it to work correctly the depth values from nearby samples should be really precise. FP16 doesn't work. FP32 / D24X8 works, but you still have to slightly bias/scale difference towards current/center sample to avoid a lot of artifacts of incorrectly selected samples. A little side note: all IHVs provide us with some way to directly read depth-buffer under DX9, although that's "cheat" territory of graphics programming.

...

But on DX9 HW (or X360) the method 2.a. is relatively cheap and looks good. 2.b. looks better but is too slow for some hardware (X360 for example). For PS3 its probably faster to use the DX10-style 2X-AA, because the cost of re-rendering the whole visible geometry again would be too high for it.
Click to expand...
 
Isn't the perceived AA in Gears, mainly due to the depth of field effect, that blurs everything in the distance?

Other no-AA games like Halo 3 should have used a similar method, especially since the H3 engine already supports DoF.
 
vanquish said:
Isn't the perceived AA in Gears, mainly due to the depth of field effect, that blurs everything in the distance?
Click to expand...
No, there are surfaces that are without the depth of field effect that exhibit classic MSAA.

There are examples in Mass Effect where the problem seems to be pointing towards an MSAA resolve issue as well.
 
AlStrong said:
No, there are surfaces that are without the depth of field effect that exhibit classic MSAA.

There are examples in Mass Effect where the problem seems to be pointing towards an MSAA resolve issue as well.
Click to expand...

So are they doing multiple geometry passes, and applying MSAA to only the geometry close to the player, and letting DoF smooth out edges further away?
 
I find it odd for a new 360 game that would run at native 1080i but no 1080p stated, most likely just upscale to 1080i.
 
It's certainly the case for PS3 and I'm all but certain it's the case for 360 that both 1080i and 1080p require a 1920x1080 frame buffer, so if you do 1080i, you get 1080p 'free'.

It has to be said that Xenos scales 720p 4xMSAA up to 1080p very nicely indeed.
 
grandmaster said:
It's certainly the case for PS3 and I'm all but certain it's the case for 360 that both 1080i and 1080p require a 1920x1080 frame buffer, so if you do 1080i, you get 1080p 'free'.

It has to be said that Xenos scales 720p 4xMSAA up to 1080p very nicely indeed.
Click to expand...

Regarding the X360, I have my output set to 720p even though I have a 1080p set. I don't really notice any difference between the 2 settings, but I've heard that there may be a performance difference with a few titles.

I run this through my VGA cable since I have a launch X360.
 
Hi everyone, my first post here.

I have a question, can you update the sticky list with new games ? It's been along since Jan 2008. :smile:
 
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