Image Quality and Framebuffer Speculations for WIP/alpha/beta/E3 games *Read the first post*
- Thread starter Farid
- Start date
mm... pretty certain it's just their post-AA variant. Need shots with better contrast. (Plus, if they were using MSAA, they should sacrifice that if they want to hit 60fps at all times.)
Well I'm very bad when it comes to saying anything useful about AA
I just barely know how to count some pixels for resolution. But I didn't notice any typical pixel crawling or such, and the image looked quite clean in movement, so I guessed MSAA from there.
The jungle level is generally pretty low contrast, so pretty good for edge aliasing.
Sometimes I wonder if console gamers would prefer first-person shooters with no antialiasing with perfect framerates, or antialiasing with fluctuating framerates?
Just watched one Halo 4 gamersyde video. I think they are using a good variant of FXAA. It's definitely not MSAA but the image quality is good.
From what I could tell on this level, except for the 1080p native resolution, the assets, texture filtering and the simple lighting are very similar to those of the X360 game.
Unfortunately judder is regularly felt during the whole video (confirmed by frequently repeated identical frames). It's definitely not a solid 60fps.
From what I could tell on this level, except for the 1080p native resolution, the assets, texture filtering and the simple lighting are very similar to those of the X360 game.
Unfortunately judder is regularly felt during the whole video (confirmed by frequently repeated identical frames). It's definitely not a solid 60fps.
What do you extrapolate from that? You manage to surprise me, it all looks like a blurry mess to me.hm....
Wow!!!!!!!! Colour me impressed.
343i admitted themselves that the assets of Halo 3 were so high quality, they were surprised by that, but I didn't expect the game to look this good.
It makes you wonder what's wrong with games as of currently, since games that run at 60 fps and are using assets from the past, look incredible at the same time despite the 60 fps.
This seems to be the result of the optimisations developers had to go through in the past,
when they had to work to evade limitations. Sometimes those limitations can spur on your imagination to find a solution.COPS N RAPPERS
Regular
Wow!!!!!!!! Colour me impressed.
343i admitted themselves that the assets of Halo 3 were so high quality, they were surprised by that, but I didn't expect the game to look this good.
Looks amazing. About halo 3, did it originally run at 60 fps, or was it 30fps? I read somewhere it ran two frame buffers internally.
30fps.
The dual render targets were used for the lighting pass to increase dynamic range (different exposures, then combine) since Xenos couldn't blend with FP16 and they didn't like the other buffer formats at the time. I assume Ruffian switched over to a single FP16 target for the MCC though.
Dunno yet. Possibly a framebuffer upscale & reconstruction using a temporal component (similar to KZSF or maybe even FC4 ala HRAA), but without the alternating fields artefact. *shrug* Hard to say.
On Xbox 360, Halo 3 uses a backbuffer of 1152x640 and runs at 30fps.
You can read about the two buffers thing here, but the gist is that it was an exotic way to get good HDR depth. If the 360 had supported hardware alpha blending for FP16 buffers, Bungie probably would have gone with that, but it doesn't. Halo 3 uses two integer RGBA8 buffers: one is in the normal LDR range, the other is 7 stops less exposed, allowing it to capture luminances up to 2^7 times brighter than the LDR white level.
For a seventh-gen game, Halo 3 is excellent at doing stuff with snazzy lighting without clamping or desaturation, which means that they're not letting their bright and extremely expressive (Cook-Torrance!) lights go to waste. The drawbacks are that framebuffer access is slow (since blending and such has to be done on both render targets), and the buffer format takes up a lot of space in eDRAM.
Ninja'd.
With respect to Ruffian: yeah, I'd certainly be surprised if they were still using 8-bit integers. Considering how similar the ports look to the originals, I have to wonder if they're not counting modified buffering as part of the "improved shading."
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Edit: Random note, Halo 3 unlocks its framerate if you fast-forward in replay mode. Most of the time this doesn't mean much, but if there's nothing happening and the current graphical load is low, the game can spit out 60fps.
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Edit #2: The image that Cyan and COPS AND RAPPERS are responding to is a Halo 4 shot, by the way.
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Would be semi-interesting to see if there are any tangible differences, though I'm struggling to think of where there'd be good spots to check.
That said, I'm still wondering what sort of renderer Halo 4 is. :s
Do you think they will be able to replicate the lighting of Halo 3? Because I don't think so! I mean, given the crazy amount of bandwidth the Xenos' EDRAM had..., and they seemed to use it all for that lighting which was a technical prowess for Halo 3... :smile2:
In fact that's something I am most curious about the Halo 3 TMCC conversion.
Thanks AINets, some terms like HRAA still sound all greek to me, but I understand what you mean.
Yup, all the underlying tech should be pretty much carried over. What we're speculating for the FP16 format should give significantly higher precision, though I'm not too sure what impact that'll really have as the shaders/exposure levels were built around the dual-target setup. It should mean less white clamping with the overall lighting (as Htupolev mentioned above).
I'm a bit curious to see Floodgate - good contrast of darkness & lighting - and maybe even when Scarabs go boom. Maybe comparing exposure levels in theater mode might be worth a gander, pause during an explosion and fly in with the camera
The footage the press have been allowed to show looks pretty much what you'd expect - hard to tell if anything's changed really aside from 1080p60.
I actually wouldn't be surprised if the XB1's architecture is better-suited to Halo 3's lighting than the 360's is. The native FP16 blending support means they should be able to get better HDR depth while using the ROPs more efficiently (no need to double up ROP operations for two buffers), and Halo 3's lighting is very heavy on ALU and/or TMU (the balance depends on how much prefiltering Bungie used), which the XB1 should excel at compared with the 360.
Yeah, it might not mean much in practice. Halo 3's HDR is very robust, despite the game's heavy contrast. You should check out the door from Dutch's drop pod at the start of Uplift Reserve, I wonder if they juiced up the response on it just to mess around with how much the engine could take.
Absolutely.
I make fun of everything it does poorly, but it's very impressive, and there should be an interesting story of tradeoffs and techniques behind it.
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Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare PS4:
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Native 1080p with Post-AA?
Yep. Confirmed native 1080p (horizontally and vertically) + Post AA.
Post effects can do that. Trying to gauge a resolution by how sharp/soft it looks isn't practicable any more.
Edit: Also, unlimited AA (shader AA, temporal AA, basically the same as a video of real life) will make images appear softer than zero AA. With far lower contrast, the sense of sharpness will be reduced. Ultimately, that pin-sharp 1080p quality should be a thing of the past as a 'softer' but more natural and realistic and better defined quality replaces it. In motion, essential for resolution as your brain perceives information based on accumulated info, it'll be nigh indistinguishable anyhow, save for lack of aliasing artefacts which are a form of sharpness).
Edit 2: That said, those shots are very blurry, but they're also heavily compressed.
