mckmas8808
Legend
Here is a snipplet of information from the interview.
Link
Great interview. 8xAF + 4xMSAA + great HDR and animation is a day one purchase in my book. But beyond just the game what do you guys think about the technical aspects of what nAo just gave out?
Thoughts?
PSINext: People have come to associate high dynamic range lighting with on-chip hardware support for either FP16 or FP32 HDR rendering. How does Team Ninja implement NAO32, and can it be considered 'real' HDR?
Marco: Unfortunately, these framebuffer formats are inherently slow because they require more memory bandwidth and increased memory space: an FP16 720p image with 4X anti-aliasing requires about 30 MBytes of memory! My final answer is totally positive: NAO32 can be considered a real HDR format.
PSINext: The advantages of reduced space and preserved quality seem like they would have merit in a number of environments. Do you think there may be a place for NAO32 on the desktop, or even on Microsoft or Nintendo's offerings?
Marco: Dunno about Nintendo's offering, but it might have merit on Microsoft's console if developers wanted something that takes the same storage space as an FP10 render target, but with a much higher level of quality. NAO32 on Xenos would cost developers shading power relative to FP10, however, and they would lose the ability to use the eDRAM for blending as well. So at this time, I believe something like NAO32 makes more sense on RSX than on Xenos.
PSINext: After getting to play the game at E3, it's clear that a number of intensive effects such as HDR - courtesy of NAO32 of course - and full soft shadowing are in place. What can you tell us about the levels of anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering, if any, Ninja Theory is utilizing for Heavenly Sword?
Marco: Yep, shadowing is completely dynamic and everything can cast/receive shadows. Soft shadows are achieved taking 12 jittered samples per pixel. Antialiasing is set to 4X (multisampling), but quality wise is not as good as it could be; we need to work on it, and hopefully it will improve over the next several months.
Anisotropic filtering is being used on some specific meshes (floors, walls, etc...) and AFAIK is set to 8x + trilinear.
PSINext: Have any internal resolution and frame-rate targets been set yet for HS?
Marco: Our target resolution for Heavenly Sword is 720p with 4x MSAA, which we've already achieved. The frame rate target is not something completely set in stone at this time. Though our E3 demo was running at over 30 frames per second, I'm willing to bet the final game will run at 30 FPS. Hopefully this will allow us to push even more effects on screen.
PSINext: As previously discussed, beyond it's high quality one of the primary reasons for the use of NAO32 is that it saves bandwidth in a bandwidth-hungry environment. In the future do you feel RSX will be at a disadvantage to Xenos when it comes to framebuffer effects due to the 128-bit bus and lack of eDRAM?
Marco: Not at all; in fact for many framebuffer effects I believe RSX will have an edge over Xenos. Don't want to go into details, but let me just point out that RSX is connected to two seperate buses, not just one.
Link
Great interview. 8xAF + 4xMSAA + great HDR and animation is a day one purchase in my book. But beyond just the game what do you guys think about the technical aspects of what nAo just gave out?
Thoughts?