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

overall its alot better then halo 3. Jaggies are alot less noticeable.
the increased resolution plus nice blur effects help alot.
 
Scott_Arm said:
Reach is really weird. When I stand still, lines look really sharp. When I start moving, even very very slowly, aliasing suddenly appears and starts crawling. Otherwise, the game looks great.
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I played around in the theater a lot while waiting for a friend to finish his download. The AA really does turn off as soon as you have a slight bit of motion. I think they also base it a bit on scene complexity because if I went high up and only looked at the geometry beyond the level it would still have some AA. If I was lower to the ground with other parts of the level in view it would be more aliased.

Other things I noticed off the top of my head include greatly enhanced texture filtering, I'm guessing a decently high level of AF, but I'm not 100% on that. It is definitely not bi-/trilinear. It's kind of jarring now to see the textures stay sharp on any given geometry and watch the edges shimmer so much. Shadows are fairly sharp close up, but I'm guessing they are half resolution at best. The extinction range for shadows is also pretty short, maybe 15-20 feet depending on the scene. I also noticed something with the flags dropping to a lower res shadow when there was no action around, but just going extinct when players were.

Particles everywhere! Any time a bullet or plasma hits a hard surface there is a mix of sparks at high resolution and debris at a lower resolution. Lots of transparency going on with smoke trails from grenades and the explosions themselves. The bloom does some odd things around corners at times, even saw it go through a floor at one point, but it's a beta. Overall the lighting is still great; very Bungie.
 
Very very slight horizontal scaling then? I think that's OK, definitely not as noticeable as it would be with scaling along both axes. Curious choice though; IIRC they're doing deferred lighting, but I wonder how they're handling HDR...

And the motion blur / DOF / other post processing is also included on almost everything, so it probably won't look as aliased as Halo3.
 
On the AA front, I'm a bit intrigued with Scott's description of the blur. The frame-by-frame captures that were sent to me support that something peculiar is going on, and I suspect it has to do with their motion blur sampling. Fairly certain they are not using MSAA.

hmm... yeah, the HDR & RT setup & deferred lighting is curious... e.g. Light Pre-Pass: with an 1152x720 resolution, padded to 1200x720 (80x16 pixel tiles), you can fit 3 buffers within the 10MB eDRAM. The lighting accumulation is a separate pass, but who knows what's going on. Their particle buffer is full res too...
 
On that map, yes. But on the outdoors map, the AA effect is much better.

Anyways, the motion blur does look kinda weird in the frame-by-frame sequence. :s
 
The image quality is noticeably better than that of Halo 3 / ODST, but I am curious as to what temporal AA exactly is, and how it compares to traditional aliasing methods like MSAA.
 
From memory, doesn't temporal AA cause issues when the engine drops frames? Now, I know most videos have shown a pretty consistant 30fps framerate but its kind of impossible to account for some of the scenarios that can happen in multiplayer shooters so its going to be dropping frames at times no matter what Bungie do.

Either way I'm definitely pleased that Bungie are implementing some form of AA. The image quality was definitely the biggest issue in Halo 3 for me, better texture filtering, an increased rendering resolution plus this temporal AA solution (along with more post effect and a more muted colour pallete) should produce some seriously improved image quality. All of that plus bigger scale battles, SSAO, per object motion blur and they're still keeping the excellent 4 player split mode, that's some impressive work if you ask me.

Can't wait to try it out for myself in a few days! :D
 
brain_stew said:
From memory, doesn't temporal AA cause issues when the engine drops frames?
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Different definition of "temporal". ATi's temporal MSAA would switch the MSAA mask (R3xx-R4xx) to effect a doubling of sampling even though it was truly half that. So yes, in that case, the framerate does matter. Here we mean that they are frame-blending in some manner (offset) or simply switching on 2xMSAA. On the indoors map, it does indeed look like 2xMSAA, but in the outdoors map, it's much more than that when no pixels are moving.

One of the sets of images I received was interesting in that the far distant objects still retained an element of anti-aliasing whilst the nearby objects would lose such an effect, hence my suspicion with the motion blur, which itself is kinda weird.
 
the lighting on halo reach looks pretty similar to the HDR on halo3 do you think that they're combining two buffers at different exposures again?
 
I've jot got in the BETA and the AA solution really does have some curious properties as mentioned. When you're stood still it works incredibly well, it looks about equivalent to ~4xmsaa? When moving the quality definitely degrades and there's noticeable "crawling" I'd say it seems about equivalent to 2xmsaa in these circumstances.

Kasersky said:
the lighting on halo reach looks pretty similar to the HDR on halo3 do you think that they're combining two buffers at different exposures again?
Click to expand...

Noticed this as well.

The SSAO is incredibly subtle with a very small darkening radius and its damn near artifact free, its a very good implementation, the best I've seen on the 360 thus far, much better than UE3's implementation imo.

Particles and transparency effects are usually high resolution and used liberally. Texturing and models seem better, there's heavier use of post effects and there's a decent amount (by console standards) of anisotropic filtering. I'm very impressed so far, its a huge upgrade from Halo 3.
 
Curious. Somebody from Bungie mentioned just a few weeks ago that SSAO didn't make it into the public beta build.

Noticed the Crackdown-window parallax mapping that popped up in ODST seems to be used again in some areas ( or at the very least for drain plates. heh)

Is there any good writeup on the temporal AA method that seems to be involved here?
 
Yeah, the AO comment is peculiar. SSAO is rather evident in some scenes of the beta. Not sure if they meant the complete baking of the level or a more final rendition. Either way, it does make me wonder what tweaks there may be.
 
Here's the exact quote from one of the bungie.net updates:
And since we’re still all kinds of work in progress, it also means that in the most recent batch of screenshots, and in the Public Beta, you might come across a few rough edges here and there. For example, in current builds there’s a subtle application of Ambient Occlusion being layered into the scene that adds a nice touch of depth into each map’s nooks and crannies, but it’s not something that made the grade in time for the Beta or for our recent batch of screenshots.
Click to expand...
http://www.bungie.net/News/content.aspx?type=topnews&link=BWU_041610
 
brain_stew said:
I've jot got in the BETA and the AA solution really does have some curious properties as mentioned. When you're stood still it works incredibly well, it looks about equivalent to ~4xmsaa? When moving the quality definitely degrades and there's noticeable "crawling" I'd say it seems about equivalent to 2xmsaa in these circumstances.

Noticed this as well.

The SSAO is incredibly subtle with a very small darkening radius and its damn near artifact free, its a very good implementation, the best I've seen on the 360 thus far, much better than UE3's implementation imo.

Particles and transparency effects are usually high resolution and used liberally. Texturing and models seem better, there's heavier use of post effects and there's a decent amount (by console standards) of anisotropic filtering. I'm very impressed so far, its a huge upgrade from Halo 3.
Click to expand...

Well after reading your impressions the game sounds like it's definitely improved mainly because of the reduced jaggies and thank god the better AF which was my main complaint with Halo 3's visuals...now the weird thing is that a lot of people saying that they are disappointed with Reach in terms of graphics and IQ...jaggies & motion blur is on top of their list.

Does the slightly higher vertical res (which is almost 100.000 more pixels) have any impact on the game's IQ in terms of clarity and crispness? also I read somewhere in this thread that Reach has object motion-blur...is that true? :eek:
 
The extra pixels due to higher vertical resolution would help indeed, but tbh resolution wasn't the worst part about Halo 3 since 640p is pretty darn close to 720p. I believe it was the shaders,aliasing & texture filtering which made Halo 3 pale in comparison to other games.
 
nightshade said:
The extra pixels due to higher vertical resolution would help indeed, but tbh resolution wasn't the worst part about Halo 3 since 640p is pretty darn close to 720p. I believe it was the shaders,aliasing & texture filtering which made Halo 3 pale in comparison to other games.
Click to expand...

I completely agree that the lack of AA and AF were the worst parts of Halo 3 but more clarity is always welcome especially now that Bungie almost took care of the jaggies and the texture filtering.

Also I just read the very good digitalfoundry article on the beta and there's object motion-blur in the game which is really interesting - the main problem with the beta seems to be the frame-blending because of the temporal AA which causes ghosting a la PS3 DMC4, hopefully Bungie will improve this.
 
i really don't like that temporal aa technique :/
it makes me feel sick, i can not play more than few minutes without feeling bad...

that temporal aa makes the game look inconsistent too. extremely clean while standing still and tons of ghosting/aliasing while moving :cry:


besides of that, the game is impressive. very beautiful animations, lighting, polygon count & draw distance, particles, etc
i'd like to see the game running with no aa at all
 
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