Is AF a bottleneck for Xenos?

[nAo]

Sorry, but whats bad about that in terms of AF? Do you understand what AF is?

Clue - take a look at the road markings. They are staying relatively consistent in thickness and clarity into the screen..

I think you're wrong on this, road markings are being rendered using extra geometry imho.

 

[nAo]

Texture cache is 32KB on Xenos, which is actually quite a lot by many standards.

It's time to raise up standards

 

[tema]

Thanks Dave.

I can tell where the filtering stops in this image.
http://xbox360media.ign.com/xbox360...04/test-drive-unlimited-20060308103319778.jpg

Xenos mipmaps level must be at High Performance settings.

 

[tema]

Its time to raise up the standards

4mb?

 

[nAo]

4mb?

LOL!

 

[Nemo80]

Why does textures on every Xbox 360 game look like they are using trilinear filtering?

They dont even use that. They re using bilinear filtering. A visible ugly banding is obvious in every other game!

 

[Xmas]

Yes, but its also highly inefficient, and undesirable in a console environment where the resources have to be balanced more.

The PC cards are perfectly able to handle it. If Xenos isn't able to sustain at least some level of AF on all textures in those first games, something is seriously wrong.

 

[czekon]

The PC cards are perfectly able to handle it. If Xenos isn't able to sustain at least some level of AF on all textures in those first games, something is seriously wrong.

strange never suspect AF will be bootleneck in xenos

 

[Dave Baumann]

And Dave, this statement:Just doesnt't make much sense.

First of all, most recent PC games request AF themselves, and secondly, there aren't many textures that you don't want to filter anisotropically.

Where resources are much more limited and balances have to be taken into account thn, yes, you want to be much more selective in applying AF. i.e. detail textures that are often going into the viewport are going to want it applied more than blander textures. Even though modern graphics have adpative AF this isn't perfect as we know that there was a performance hit for enabling AF when just simple lookup tables textures were used (see ATI Doom 3 Shader tweak).

I'm not sure I'm aware of that many games that ship out of the box for the PC with AF enabled by default, and actually applied selectively, other than Doom 3.

I think you're wrong on this, road markings are being rendered using extra geometry imho.

Based on?

We're not just talking about the lines here, but other roadmarkings as well. They still appeared to be textured so the same rules appear to apply.

It's time to raise up standards

Well, it did.

 

[nAo]

Based on?

Common sense.
It makes so much more sense in so many different ways, from a performance standpoint to an art pipeline production standpoint.

We're not just talking about the lines here, but other roadmarkings as well. They still appeared to be textured so the same rules appear to apply.

You're not using your imagination enough, meshes come in so many different shapes

Well, it did.

I see, stuff from the past

 

[pipo]

I see, stuff from the past

Mustn't read too much in this...

I'm trying.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

It's time to raise up standards

Having read that, some people are going to be expecting buckets of cache on RSX. But ignoring wishful thinking and just talking hypothetically, what are the costs/benefits of larger caches and why aren't they being used? Let's say 128 Kb cache per quad, perhaps. Would that have a lot of benefit in AF, but create a stupidly expensive GPU, or what?

 

[PeterT]

Where resources are much more limited and balances have to be taken into account thn, yes, you want to be much more selective in applying AF. i.e. detail textures that are often going into the viewport are going to want it applied more than blander textures.

I'm not arguing that AF has no cost, just that if you're so selective in applying it that you don't filter ground textures anisotropically you may as well forego using it entirely. I'm just a bit disappointed at that, I would have expected at least that much from a "next-gen" console.It will be interesting what PS3 and future X360 games do, to see whether it is really a console limitation in general as you seem to suggest, a more specific result of the Xbox360 implementation or just first-gen game troubles.

 

[nAo]

Let's say 128 Kb cache per quad, perhaps. Would that have a lot of benefit in AF, but create a stupidly expensive GPU, or what?

Yep! we know it's all ever about tradeoffs..

 

[Jabjabs]

For some reason I haven't really noticed the lack of AF in 360 games when running although I have only seen then in 480i so that woudl most definetly be the reason.

Stop postingt all these despressing screenshots...

 

[Dave Baumann]

Common sense.
It makes so much more sense in so many different ways, from a performance standpoint to an art pipeline production standpoint.
You're not using your imagination enough, meshes come in so many different shapes
I see, stuff from the past

And how many racing titles are you aware of that do it?

NFS:MW, for instance, it a recent title that is clearly using road textures and the the clarity of the road markings are quite clearly affected significantly with various levels of AF.

 

[Lysander]

suddenly no one is bothered with "lack" of aa on x360 anymore , its all af now
bilinear is primary and for higher it needs additional cycle, it will be solved as everything else

I think x360gpu is thunder

 

[nAo]

And how many racing titles are you aware of that do it?

Racing games were on the market way before anistropic filtering became a viable or even supported feature on 'modern' GPUs

 

[Titanio]

suddenly no one is bothered with "lack" of aa on x360 anymore , its all af now
bilinear is primary and for higher it needs additional cycle, it will be solved as everything else

If it fundamentally boils down to bandwidth, you're not going to find any more over time (unfortunately).

 

[Dave Baumann]

Racing games were on the market way before anistropic filtering became a viable or even supported feature on 'modern' GPUs

That doesn't really answer the question.

If this were the case then they would be far less suseptible to filtering changes when they are applied with through PC control panel options or in game controls, and yet I've never really seen this to be the case.

Looking at the screenshots for Test Drive, I'm not sure there is any other evidence that suggests that they aren't just using higher levels of filtering.