Image Quality and Framebuffer Speculations for WIP/alpha/beta/E3 games *Read the first post*

Arwin said:
There is some weird stepping on the gun though? On the right side it's best visible, where the light metal contrasts with the dark/plastic/wood? Or is that normal? Especially in the second shot it stands out.
Click to expand...

Do you mean blocking artefacts? Could be either the jpeg or... maybe they have a slight DOF applied that's bugging out with low res depth buffer.
 
HTupolev said:
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."

//======================

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.

//======================

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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Thanks for the detailed explanation. Yesterday I saw your post, was about to reply but then mysteriously, there was nothing, but I can see now you were going expanding on it. Thanks for sharing your wisdom.

Ah btw, yup, I got the graphics of the map mixed up with the first level of Halo 3, but obviously it isn't.

AlNets said:
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.
Click to expand...
At first I thought I'd be highly surprised if it happened, but after reading HPTupolev's "productive" post and yours, it kinds of make sense that maybe they didn't only managed to make the classic lighting of Halo 3 work but improved on it.

If so, some instances of the game could be even more spectacular. Does it have to do with HDR? I mean, HDR to me was always about getting the light to mimic the behaviour of the human iris when your eyes get used to new light conditions.

And Halo 3 seemed excellent to me at that.
 
Thanks for the detailed explanation on halo 3, from all of you guys! the game had some remarkable effects and lighting. I think the master chief collection pretty much nailed it, it does look a little lighter but the xb1 doesn't even break a sweat handling it at 1080p 60fps.

Gamersyde has 12 minutes of it.
http://www.gamersyde.com/download_halo_the_master_chief_collection_halo_3_gameplay_1-33399_en.html
http://www.gamersyde.com/download_halo_the_master_chief_collection_halo_3_gameplay_2-33400_en.html
http://www.gamersyde.com/download_halo_the_master_chief_collection_halo_3_environments-33398_en.html

looks great.
 
So a gaffer found a full album of ACU ps4 version, tho compressed, they look very much like 900p sadly:(.
jrVdN0E.jpg

opA5zHM.jpg

http://imgur.com/a/Kfagt
 
Looking at the photos over at GAF, this game looks rough. Sure, the pictures are compressed, however missing shadows and a few other weird anomalies, isn't solely a compression issue. Must be an early Early EARLY build... right now as it stands, it has that Watch Dogs "What happened to the graphics" thing going on.
 
hm...Missing shadows?

The sun shadows are pretty well filtered for the most part at least.

edit: Ah, right. I suppose the characters could use a slightly stronger AO when they're already in shadow to give more depth to the scene. Wonder how the HBAO+ on PC looks.

edit2:

Looks like they have some amount of AF, more noticeable indoors. Harder to tell outside. Probably depends on the scene.
 
Mind you I can see my shadow now in a poorly lit room... this is unacceptable if this is the not the case (early build).

ACUnity-PS4-Leaked-6.jpg
 
AlNets said:
mm... is that rooftop already in shadow? They don't have separate shadowing from the sunlight, so they'd have to go with AO.
Click to expand...

I'm not going to judge it to hard... I can't tell what lighting/shadowing systems are going on truthfully. Trying to apply what happens in real-life to gaming on "how it should look like", maybe a mistake on my part.
 
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