No tiling=why Gears of War looks so good?

[sonyps35]

To me this title looks head and shoulders above every other 360 title. So why?

Is it Unreal Engine 3.0?

Full time use of full powered dev kits?

Or..

I have heard UE3.0 doesn\'t use AA for some reason, and MS gives them a pass for technical reasons (something about the way the engine works makes it prohibitive). Therefore theoretically, Gears doesn\'t need tiling to work. I am most curious if this might be the real reason for it\'s technical superiority?

Also, if the game doesn\'t use AA, why does it not feature noticable jaggies (as a side question)?

 

[Hardknock]

Nobody knows if UE3 has been updated to use tiling and there have been plenty of games already released that don't use tiling.

So basically what I'm saying is tiling has nothing to do with how good GoW looks, UE3 is just a very powerful next-gen engine.

 

[TurnDragoZeroV2G]

Allow me to speak out my butt and say, I don't know why lack of tiling would make it that much superior. What does not tiling really save you? The Gears models are more reliant on normal maps than geometry for detail, IIRC.

As for lack of aliasing: Careful artists?

Edit: By "really" I mean, if many games today leave the relatively few vertex shaders idle for significant amounts of time, and your engine manages tiling in an intelligent manner (i.e., recalculate geometry crossing tiles, not everything), then how much of a real impact will some extra work make?

 

[sonyps35]

Well, it supposedly saves you a geometry hit.

Not being a dev, I have no idea how much. But ERP and others have hinted it\'s not entirely trivial.

Just seems like it would leave a lot less to worry about.

What other games are confirmed to not use tiling Hardknock?

Didn\'t PGR3 not? 600P and 2XAA? PGR3 was a great looking game as well. Not sure it\'s near the level of Gears though.

 

[Phil]

I'll probably get flamed for this, but IMO, while it looks good, I'm still very displeased with the framerate and the bad animation. I downloaded a quick trailer of the game (HD resolution). Perhaps someone can point me to a better direct feed video in HD? Thanks in advance...

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I saw one clip of gameplay, where the protagonist ducks right past a gap between two walls, and the framerate was poor, as I remember from E3. But I think from the games forum discussion there's a much better view of the game that doesn't have this low frame rate. Big file though for me and my limited BW and I haven't decided to take a look yet. I'd like a smaller video. IGN will hopefully oblige at some point.

 

[Eleazar]

Is it possible the current graphics are just pumped up to look nice for the show. I know some games have looked amazing at E3, but then they tone down the graphics in the release so it runs at playable framerates.

I also remember one tidbit about the developers needing to build their engine from ground up with tiling in mind. Otherwise they couldn't make full use of it later on. That doesn't mean it can't be implemented, but just that it won't have its full "glory".

 

[AlNom]

jakUp over at nvnews.net got the chance to meet Sweeney. As a suggested question, I was asking if predicated tiling would be implemented into UE3.0... unfortunately, he didn't pose that question, but here's a link to the relevant thread (video and transcript).

The funny thing is very few people in the industry have been willing to come out and say that the Pentium 4 architecture sucks. It sucked all along. Even at the height of it's sucking, when it was running at 3.6GHz and not performing as well as a 2GHz AMD64... People were reluctant to say it sucked... so IT SUCKS!

(Sorry for OT)

 

[expletive]

The game is still 6 months away so i'd put the framerate concerns in our back pockets until its final. The tiling question is a good one though, MS would do well to work with Epic on getting some sort of middleware support in UE3 if theres not something there already.

I recall Mark Rein saying somethign at GDC about multithreaded support not being implemented yet, maybe that code is not in or not final/optimized?

What i'm REALLY concerned about is the vertical tearing if they cant get the framerate stabilized.

 

[AlNom]

perhaps they should have a framerate cap at 30fps ala Halo given what Rein said about 60vs30fps.

 

[expletive]

perhaps they should have a framerate cap at 30fps ala Halo given what Rein said about 60vs30fps.

I think it would look fine at a solid 30

 

[czekon]

The game is still 6 months away so i'd put the framerate concerns in our back pockets until its final.

it reminds me Frorza motorsport almost every single video what i saw had some minor problems with framerate until final realase and was solid 30. It would be strange if the creators of UE3 couldn't make it smooth.

 

[ERP]

We're back to the difference between good looking and technically impressive.

IMO the only technically impressive thing about Unreal Engine 3 is the quality of the tool chain. It's not particularly well tailored to either platforms strengths, there is nothing new or revolutionary in the tech.

But I've said this many times before, a Great artist with great tools and average tech will produce a better looking game than a great artust with poor tools and great tech.

I think the primary reason that UE3 games look better than much of the competition so far is that they have a head start on good tools, and not much else.

 

[expletive]

We're back to the difference between good looking and technically impressive.

IMO the only technically impressive thing about Unreal Engine 3 is the quality of the tool chain. It's not particularly well tailored to either platforms strengths, there is nothing new or revolutionary in the tech.

But I've said this many times before, a Great artist with great tools and average tech will produce a better looking game than a great artust with poor tools and great tech.

I think the primary reason that UE3 games look better than much of the competition so far is that they have a head start on good tools, and not much else.

Do you think MS would ever make their own "UT3 Engine" specifically taileroed to the 360? I'm wondering what the technical pros and cons might be as well as how itt might impact their relationships with Epic, etc...

EDIT: If not a totally new engine it seems like it would behoove MS to work closely with Epic on some layer that lets UE3 work really well with the 360's EDRAM, etc

 

[Platon]

Do you think MS would ever make their own "UT3 Engine" specifically taileroed to the 360? I'm wondering what the technical pros and cons might be as well as how itt might impact their relationships with Epic, etc...

EDIT: If not a totally new engine it seems like it would behoove MS to work closely with Epic on some layer that lets UE3 work really well with the 360's EDRAM, etc

I don't think that would be a problem and I would expect them to do it. If they have licensed it they have the right to modify it to mett thei needs. It has been done before, were dev teams have modified angihnes so much that most of the code in the end is their own and not from the licenced engine. I don't know why Epic should be pissed...

 

[ERP]

Do you think MS would ever make their own "UT3 Engine" specifically taileroed to the 360? I'm wondering what the technical pros and cons might be as well as how itt might impact their relationships with Epic, etc...

EDIT: If not a totally new engine it seems like it would behoove MS to work closely with Epic on some layer that lets UE3 work really well with the 360's EDRAM, etc

It's a large undertaking and hard to do right. Even if MS did no cross platform developer would use it without a PS3 version so it's pointless. Middleware engines by their very nature are far from optimal.

UE3 works fine with the EDRAM, what it doesn't work well with is MSAA in general, because they do their shadows in screen space before the downsample, the cost of them is multiplied by the amount of AA.

They could probably downsample the Zbuffer and do the shadow processing in final screen space, but there would be artifacts because of Zbuffer averaging, and shadows would not be antialiased.

I'm guessing they've tried this and the results are unacceptable.

 

[AlNom]

That doesn't sound encouraging at all. So the only realistic way of getting AA to be used is if they change shadowing methods entirely?

 

[Acert93]

That doesn't sound encouraging at all. So the only realistic way of getting AA to be used is if they change shadowing methods entirely?

While the eDRAM offers more benefits than just cheap AA if designed around, it does raise some eyebrows. MGS is using the engine for a number of internal and sponsered projects. Lost Odessey, Crackdown, Too Human, Mass Effect, etc. not to mention MS's big game of 2006 (Gears of War). And this does not even begin to touch on the number of important 3rd party titles using the software (BiA3, Rainbow Six: Vegas, and so forth). On the other hand UE3 is mainly a tools oriented solution that puts a lot of work on the artists and designers. Just look at the number of UE3 games coming in Q4 2006 and Q1 2007. Its like a furious storm of high quality games. I guess it is the tradeoff.

I personally cannot wait until we see more platform-specific solutions... in late 2007!

 

[Eleazar]

Hopefully theres a chance this game will run closer to 60FPS rather than 30FPS. I like my twitch games to be higher FPS. Even if only SDTV got the 60FPS I would be happy.

 

[Acert93]

Hopefully theres a chance this game will run closer to 60FPS rather than 30FPS. I like my twitch games to be higher FPS. Even if only SDTV got the 60FPS I would be happy.

Kill that idea now. Mark already said that if it was at 60fps or well above 30fps they would add more detail (I read that as "job done!") because they are aiming for a stable 30fps. Nothing more.