nAo talks about Heavenly Sword (You need to read this)

Here is a snipplet of information from the interview.

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?




 
Since this thread is still around would HDR look really different in HD and SD? As in would the "fake HDR" in this game look better on an SD set then on an HD set?
 
nintenho said:
Since this thread is still around would HDR look really different in HD and SD? As in would the "fake HDR" in this game look better on an SD set then on an HD set?

Generally speaking, if the lighting is good, it will look good whether in SD or HD. HD might give you a bit better colour accuracy, but if the lighting in impressive, it will be impressive either way. That's one of the reasons why proper CGI movies and videos look so good even on DVD, because the lighting is just very good. HD will give you a sharper, more detailed image.
 
london-boy said:
Generally speaking, if the lighting is good, it will look good whether in SD or HD. HD might give you a bit better colour accuracy, but if the lighting in impressive, it will be impressive either way. That's one of the reasons why proper CGI movies and videos look so good even on DVD, because the lighting is just very good. HD will give you a sharper, more detailed image.
Well yeah I know HD looks better but how does different HDR look? I'm not trying to troll but I'm just curious about what makes something look like HDR.
 
Someone please get Marco to release a 60FPS games, 30FPS is SOOOOOOOOO last gen !
(Crap, am I the only one to want really smooth motion ?!)
:(
 
nintenho said:
Well yeah I know HD looks better but how does different HDR look? I'm not trying to troll but I'm just curious about what makes something look like HDR.
... i just told you...
sad-smiley-066.gif
 
Ingenu said:
Someone please get Marco to release a 60FPS games, 30FPS is SOOOOOOOOO last gen !
(Crap, am I the only one to want really smooth motion ?!)
:(

Nope... but I'm kinda paranoid of getting more negative rep for being such a framerate whore... but I see it the same too. I'd rather have that extra framerate than the extra eye-candy.... :cry:

*runs and hides* :oops:

PS: Nice interview Xbd & nAo. Excellent read. Thanks!
 
As I say, they should include the option in all games and appease everyone. Probably not very practical, but keeping all the people happy all the time generally isn't ;)

Nintenho : HDR is just a way of producing the scene. The picture that comes out the back of the box is still 8 bits per pixel colour whether on HD or SD. HDMI 1.3 adds the option for HDR output, which might one-day find it's way to driving an HDR TV that can actually do something with greater than 24 bit colour representation (though really HDR sginals want to go the way of CIE Luv - colour and intensity - at which point a standardised NAO32 colour model over a lower-spec'd cable would probably work well enough) but that'll require costly HDR TVs, and games to output HDR signals. Maybe, like GT4's 1080i output, one game on PS3 will do that as a gimmick in the next 10 years?
 
While it would be nice to lower the graphical settings to get 60fps (ala PC), this is assuming the GPU is the only bottleneck. If the game engine (or subsets of it) are targetting 30fps then changing the graphic detail may not be a major gain. e.g. I remember DeanoC saying the flags at one point were very computationally expensive. If NT tossed in enough flags so the engine ran at 30fps and geared the graphics front end for the same, just lowering graphical detail wont increase frequency.

Maybe they should make 2 consoles:

PS3-30
PS3-60

The PS3-60 has 2x the power across the board and makes 30fps game run at 60fps :p I wont disclose the price for a 6.4GHz CELL with a 1100MHz RSX and 6.4GHz XDR and 1.4GHz GDDR3 video memory...

Rest assure you TOO can feel like a PC enthusiest by plopping down over $5K for a state of the art gaming platform!
 
They could get around it by halving everything. At 60fps mode, you get half the enemies, half the buildings, half the number of textures, half the physics objects to calculate...

Or they just do two builds with optimized resources for each and let the gamer slect. BRD's got at least 20 GBs to fill up, so may as well put on two copies of the same game! :p
 
Shifty Geezer said:
They could get around it by halving everything. At 60fps mode, you get half the enemies, half the buildings, half the number of textures, half the physics objects to calculate...

Or they just do two builds with optimized resources for each and let the gamer slect. BRD's got at least 20 GBs to fill up, so may as well put on two copies of the same game! :p

You guys are crazy.:LOL: Would a steady 30 fps really hurt?
 
i'll have more effects and 30fps than 60fps with less detail anyday! things can only get better, as they are barely tapping Cell.
 
Another thing to keep in mind is that from all the impressions I've seen I can't think of one that has said anything bad about the games animation, I'm pretty sure people have said it's some of the best they have seen. I dont recall where I've read this but i'm positive it's been stated, dont feel like browsing previews again.

Am I correct in thinking that FPS normally has an impact on a games animation system? The way i see it, 30 or 60, who cares?? The game has some of the best animation we've seen to date. Just make sure it's a solid FPS and things are fine.
 
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