PGR3 : MS's attitude towards graphics actually supports Nintendo!

[scooby_dooby]

By forgetting tile-rendering, they ought to be able to have transferred all the codebase to 360 without major hack if you believe J Allard et al said about the friendliness of the new XDK that enabled Rare to port Kameo from Xbox 1 to 360.

It's not that simple, from what I understand if the engine is not built from the ground up for predicated tiling, 4xAA can take up to a 10% hit, instead of the 2-5% hit normally associated. (courtesy of an MS dev on TXB)

So they probably WERE able to add tiling but it still had a big hit on performance since it was an 11th hour addition.

 

[Powderkeg]

Please look at my first post in this thread. I mentioned Ridge Racer 6. (Or DOA4, as Itagaki bragged about its 60fps.) Isn't it a rushed job, even more so than PGR3?

You mean Ridge Racer 6:

And the DELAYED DOA4?


Let's see, one game with mediocre graphics, the other is delayed. Yeah, I would say they are rushed too. The question is, which would you have preferred? Cutting down PGR3's graphics to Ridge Racers low-detail, or delaying the game?

 

[onanie]

It's not that simple, from what I understand if the engine is not built from the ground up for predicated tiling, 4xAA can take up to a 10% hit, instead of the 2-5% hit normally associated. (courtesy of an MS dev on TXB)

So they probably WERE able to add tiling but it still had a big hit on performance since it was an 11th hour addition.

The current theory is that they managed to fit a 1024x600 frame with 2xAA exactly in 10MB of EDRAM, so tiling was not used (see the last of page this thread http://www.bizarreonline.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=157200&highlight=#157200)

If that is the case, we could assume that at least the game is not currently bottlenecked by tiling. The current performance would be identical to a hypothetical situation where tiling has 0% overhead, as long as cpu factors remain constant.

One is proposing that if this were the case, then PGR3 would have difficulty going beyond 30fps, even if they managed to implement 100% efficient tiling for higher resolutions.

 

[one]

It's not that simple, from what I understand if the engine is not built from the ground up for predicated tiling, 4xAA can take up to a 10% hit, instead of the 2-5% hit normally associated. (courtesy of an MS dev on TXB)

So they probably WERE able to add tiling but it still had a big hit on performance since it was an 11th hour addition.

4xAA is not at all related to the situation I described.
It's about

(no tiling + 2xAA = 30fps) or (tiling + 2xAA = X fps)

and the former is the actual non-720p PGR3 and the latter is what it was supposed to be (720p).

 

[Powderkeg]

The current theory is that they managed to fit a 1024x600 frame with 2xAA exactly in 10MB of EDRAM, so tiling was not used (see the last of page this thread http://www.bizarreonline.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=157200&highlight=#157200)

If that is the case, we could assume that at least the game is not currently bottlenecked by tiling. The current performance would be identical to a hypothetical situation where tiling has 0% overhead, as long as cpu factors remain constant.

One is proposing that if this were the case, then PGR3 would have difficulty going beyond 30fps, even if they managed to implement 100% efficient tiling for higher resolutions.

Only because he is ignoring the fact that the frame rate is LOCKED at 30 FPS, not limited to 30FPS.

If you were to unlock it, and find that 95% of the time the frame rate really exceeded 60FPS and only 5% did it drop noticably lower, would people still think it wouldn't be possible to fine tune the optimization and get the 60 FPS frame rate and 720p?

Somehow, I doubt it.




On'e biggest mistake is assuming that the 30 FPS is a hardware limit, rather than a restriction the developers chose to maintain a steady frame rate on a fairly unoptimized game.

 

[expletive]

And didn't they also say they wanted to rebuild their entire game after getting the X360 GPU? Sometimes you gotta use a little spit and bubble-gum to patch these things up and work within tight timelines.

Forgot about this, and imo it should really put an end to the speculation as to whether or not PGR3 was developed/released under 'optimal' conditions.

 

[onanie]

On'e biggest mistake is assuming that the 30 FPS is a hardware limit, rather than a restriction the developers chose to maintain a steady frame rate on a fairly unoptimized game.

That is one of two ways to look at it. I would think that if PGR3 achieved 60FPS with ease, the lock would have been at 60FPS.

 

[one]

The question is, which would you have preferred? Cutting down PGR3's graphics to Ridge Racers low-detail, or delaying the game?

Well, that question should be directed toward MS marketing guys who advertised mandatory 720p like shooting themselves in their collective feet Anyway, can you put gamer's preference aside and just talk about the technical feasibility in future 360 games?

 

[BTOA]

You gotta love that scaler chip in the Xbox 360.

If you can't do it, just scale it.

 

[Powderkeg]

That is one of two ways to look at it. I would think that if PGR3 achieved 60FPS with ease, the lock would have been at 60FPS.

Like I said 3 times now, it didn't have time to be fully optimized.

They had it running at a steady 50+ FPS except for a few heavy situations. A steady 60 FPS was easily achievable if they had had another 2-3 months to finish optimizing and tweaking it.

 

[Powderkeg]

Anyway, can you put gamer's preference aside and just talk about the technical feasibility in future 360 games?

Shouldn't you be asking yourself this?

There are 360 games running in 720p native resolution with 4X AA and at 60 FPS RIGHT NOW. What in the hell makes you think it wouldn't be feasible in the future?

 

[BTOA]

Shouldn't you be asking yourself this?

There are 360 games running in 720p native resolution with 4X AA and at 60 FPS RIGHT NOW. What in the hell makes you think it wouldn't be feasible in the future?

Please do list these games.

 

[avaya]

Please do list these games.

COD2 is one

 

[Farid]

It's just graphics. I dont understand the focus.

You posted this already quite a few times...
This is a technical forum, and by technical I mean 3D rendering technolgies, for the most part.

The word 3D is in the URL, actually.

 

[Inane_Dork]

Whatever is best for image quality is good for me. MS's stance seems mollified, which is good. Requiring 720p is not necessarily best for image quality.

Nintendo's stance, however, is immoveable. No HD, period. And it doesn't matter if HD would make the game look better. So no, I don't think PGR3 is evidence that MS's stance lines up with Nintendo's.

 

[Mythos]

Whatever is best for image quality is good for me. MS's stance seems mollified, which is good. Requiring 720p is not necessarily best for image quality.

Nintendo's stance, however, is immoveable. No HD, period. And it doesn't matter if HD would make the game look better. So no, I don't think PGR3 is evidence that MS's stance lines up with Nintendo's.

Specially when in the beggining MS was totting...welcome to the HD era! were X360 is revolutionary because of the HD era.

 

[PC-Engine]

Please look at my first post in this thread. I mentioned Ridge Racer 6. (Or DOA4, as Itagaki bragged about its 60fps.) Isn't it a rushed job, even more so than PGR3?

You're comparing the development time and resources put into PGR3 to RR6? Are you serious? PGR3 has buttloads of real geometry and real textures from actual cities. That alone requires much more work and time than some generic scenery. Then you add all the extra stuff going into PGR3 and it becomes obvious RR6 requires less development time.

 

[scooby_dooby]

Specially when in the beggining MS was totting...welcome to the HD era! were X360 is revolutionary because of the HD era.

If i'm not mistaken, every single game I buy for my X360 next week will render on my HDTV at a beautifuly crisp 720p. So I fail to see how MS has not lived up to it's promise.

They've released ONE game at slightly lower than HD resolution, which just happens to look jaw dropping anyways. What's the big deal?

This just shows MS is being flexible, they are concentrating on image quality instead of arbitrary resolutions and that's what really counts. Gamers don't care what the resolutions are, as long as it looks good on their TV (and HDTV as well).

As an HDTV owner, the fact MS is making sure every single game looks drop dead gorgeous on my screen is enough for me.

 

[BTOA]

COD2 is one

You have a link for that?

 

[avaya]

You have a link for that?

http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showthread.php?t=25685

Apparently it looks better than the PC version, for it to do that it would need that 4xAA.