No tiling=why Gears of War looks so good?

Yep, 30fps is their stated goal and they obviously aren't even manageing to hold to that yet.

 

Not surprisingly because this is one of their UE3 promotion games..everything for the graphics. Risk is that other aspects of the game fall short but we'll have to see.

 

I will ask him about the predicated tiling today via email when I thank him

 

About framerate its something we always hear, "in 4-6 months when we ship x title we are hitting a stable 30 or 60 fps" and i think it turns out right about 5% of the times.

Imo a great flow is very important and many times i think that it either brake or make a game. Im lacking 60fps games and also 30fps games where it doesnt drop to single digit numbers constantly. Just my thoughts..

 

Thank you very much.

 

Please, making this game 60FPS isn't going to make this game play any better. Making it 30 isn't going to make it play any worse. Some of you people way overemphasize the framerate issue. As long as the framerate is rock-solid, that's all that matters.

All of that fretting over UE3 on 360 not using tiling turned out to be much ado about nothing. The game is one of the most incredible looking games at E3.

 

Rock solid and fast enough. Or do you think a Rock-solid 3fps would do?

 

By rock solid he means smooth, without big drops. Doesn't that go without saying?

 

Some of us do notice the difference between 30 and 60fps, and given the choice, i don't think anyone would naturally prefer the former.

 

It depends of the choise . If i have to chose between a game at 60 fps and the same game locked at 30 fps with more geometry , more effects more thousands objects at once in the screen , more , more.... then i choose the second hands down

 

A developer would choose a target framerate that he deems sufficient for the type of game he is developing, and add/remove effects such that the target framerate is achieved. The GoW developer has decided that the target is 30fps, for this shooter. I guess it is a matter of preference, but for me, fast paced action probably deserves a bit more.

 

Did'nt EPIC say that if they found they was close to 60fps they would add more efects to the game and run it at 30fps?

 

Yep, i'm pretty sure they said that at last year's E3. According to Rein, it was more about the eye candy than 60fps.

You cant really put that statement in vacuum because youre always gaining something visually by going from 60 to 30.

Some people would rather have parallax mapping (or whatever) at 30 than no parallax at 60.

 

And you can probably gain even more by going from 30 to 15. There has to be a minimum before one gets put off, and I guess for you (and perhaps a lot of people) it is 30.

 

Actually 30 just happens to be the magic number with alot of televisions. 60Hz = 60/2 which equals 30FPS (TV refresh = half framerate). Something like a monitors V-Sync. No TV set is below 30, as in you cant feasibly lock the framerate below that number. Alternatly you can force 60 which nvidia did years ago at the launch of the Xbox and it does look better as far as fluidity. Lets just say if you were playing the same title at 30 and at 60, the 60 one would feel better. But if you cant compare you wont notice so it doesnt matter.

http://amo.net/NT/02-21-01FPS.html

 

As much as hate to say it, this post perfectly outlines why the Myst series even had some rate of success back in the day.

I would love to do an experiment one day in where we take a video footage of a game captured at 60 fps and then throw out each 2nd frame just to show what a difference 60/30 framerate does to a game. Not even does the former look much more smooth, it also is likely to play much more solid and precise since you're getting twice the visual feedback per second.

As for GoW - I'd have to play it, but at the moment, it just looks to darn slow to me, while at the same time not being particularly impressive on the animation either. In screenshots, it does look very nice indeed - but who really plays screenshots?

 

Here you go man.

Jacob- Will UE3.0 support predicated tiling to make use of 4xAA on Xbox 360?

Sweeney- Gears of War runs natively at 1280x720p without multisampling. MSAA performance doesn't scale well to next-generation deferred rendering techniques, which UE3 uses extensively for shadowing, particle systems, and fog.

 

Who really plays FMV's or Cutscenes for that matter, yet the comparrisons between this and other games (usually MGS4) keep coming up. yet nobody looks at these other games in the same way. I've watched the video fo GOW and for the most part it stays at 30 and is pretty smooth. sure it's dips below that but they are doing seamless loading, so that could make having a stable framerate less likely when it occurs. We'll have to wait and see how it turns out as I'm sure the builds people were playing at E3 were running on debug units and not release hardware.

I also watched the MGS4 video a few times and it did indeed look great, but it too suffers from framerate fluctuation. yet I didn't see anyone pointing that out. Anyway I see lot's of people comparing non playable scenes with playable games over and over again. to be honest it's not a fair comparrison at all.

Me personally, would rather have a steady 30 then a fluctuating 60, or a 30 with more detail. Sure 60 will look smoother, but that is something I think people only notice if they are looking for it. meanwhile eveyrone notices the visuals on screen and how detailed they are. That will stick in your head farlonger and immerse you better than seeing twice the fps. I also don't think most people can tell the difference unless they could see a side by side comparrison.

 

Kudos Confirms ERP's analysis.

 

It is a market issue as well. A number of developers have complained that they have targeted 60FPS and consumers in general do not care. Games with a lower framerate, but nicer graphics, sell better in general. SK had an interview with IGN last year where they explicitly stated this and were very dissappointed.

Personal sensativity aside, the fact is some games can benefit a bit from 60fps, whereas other games don't as much.

But your not playing screen shots.

Further, it is a tactical FPS with an emphasis on immersion. It is NOT a run and gun game like CoD2 or Resistance. The focus is on taking cover, flanking your enemy, etc. You cannot even run and shoot at the same time. Thus you are standing still a LOT more.

When you are immobile for significant amounts of time the detail in the world around you sticks out more. When you are zipping through a game TimeSplitters style not so much.

As much as I prefer 60fps over 30fps, one problem with the 60fps crowd is the general tendancy to ignore gameplay style and its relationship to framerate. For many, many consumers it seems that 30fps in games like Splinter Cell is fine. And as far as I can tell, in those more plodding tactical games the lower framerate does not impact gameplay significantly. It may be annoying to some people, but 1/2 the graphical detail for 2x the framerate also turns off many consumers as well.

I think it is best to take games on a game-for-game basis in regards to whether framerate affects gameplay. There are games at 30fps that doubling the framerate would not impact gameplay in any meaningful way because the pacing & controls and general design of the game don't require 60fps to succeed.

Not that Gears has won me over. I am still waiting for 720p direct feed, but from what I saw the game seems very over the top arcade. Seeing Rainbow Six: Vegas and seeing them use the cover system, tactics, and seeing the guns do one-shot-kill is a BIG contrast in play style. I prefer Rainbow Six in that regards. Because of the amount of damage players can take it seemed less tactical (of course this was on easy, sooo... disregard). The animations were a lot better. Not perfect, but then again this is basically a FPS and the classic problem is: Spot on animation/transition and lose control OR complete twitch control with some odd, unavoidable animations/transitions. You cannot have it both ways without losing the fine grained twitch control. The main character's voice acting was poor I thought. There were some framerate issues as well. On the other hand graphics are great, gameplay looks solid, it has online, it adds some new twists to the genre (i.e. no shooting while running), and based on some past media there are a number of massive monster-bosses that look as good, if not better than anything else so far seen in realtime. The UE3 2004 demo and the little creatures crawling out of a sewer as a big huge monster comes by with all kinds of neat lighting and reflections coming from the sewer hole is still at the top of my "next gen graphics" list. The game also has online which seems to be team based and tactic oriented.

FPS are a hard cookie to break. While style and art are important, in the end for longevity you need some killer gameplay. I am a JADED FPS fan. I am about as excited for Free Radicals Haze game as this at this point. Until you play it, and see how good it really is, and the longevity of the game it is hard to measure. Like Resistance, a lot of potential here. But just as Reistance has to stand out from CoD2 and a large crop of run-and-gun FPS, Gears is facing up against GRAW, Rainbow Six: Vegas, and Brother in Arms 3. Epic makes great software tools, but gameplay always worries me with them. This is their first SP FPS in a while. The game is gonna sell VERY well, but the question is how great will it be in the long run?

Fence sitting I shall continue.