Prey demo on Xbox Live Marketplace

[BenSkywalker]

Not on my 360 or in the 360 shots in this thread.

It looks pretty clear that it is enabled on the 360 screenshots in this thread, it is simply choking on certain angles. It appears that the sampling pattern is OG as it is handling 45 degree angles particularly well and having trouble with near vertical and near horizontal edges.

 

[Dot50Cal]

It looks pretty clear that it is enabled on the 360 screenshots in this thread, it is simply choking on certain angles. It appears that the sampling pattern is OG as it is handling 45 degree angles particularly well and having trouble with near vertical and near horizontal edges.

Are you looking at the same screenshots as I am?

 

[Mintmaster]

Let me just segway for a sec; if you meant DOOM 3 the game that is correct, but Quake 4 for instance already shifted more skinning work to the GPU.

I assume you're talking about the 360, right? You need the skinned vertex positions before doing silhouette extraction on the CPU, so I don't see how that could possibly be done on the GPU unless they're using MEMEXPORT on the 360 (or unless there are no shadows, of course).

 

[BenSkywalker]

Are you looking at the same screenshots as I am?

Zoom in on the resgister or crowbar in the shot from the bar, it is clear that AA is enabled, it just doesn't work too well on certain angles(it appears that it may be using 2x OG MSAA). In that same shot you can look to the girls arms. Her forearms are horribly aliased, but her elbows are quite smooth. Her forearms are near horizontal while her elbows are on a ~45 degree angle.

 

[scooby_dooby]

Zoom in on the resgister or crowbar in the shot from the bar, it is clear that AA is enabled, it just doesn't work too well on certain angles(it appears that it may be using 2x OG MSAA). In that same shot you can look to the girls arms. Her forearms are horribly aliased, but her elbows are quite smooth. Her forearms are near horizontal while her elbows are on a ~45 degree angle.

No there's jaggies everywhere, AA is not enabled. This is based on an hour of play not screenshots.

The game looked noticeably better on my PC, textures much crisper. Still seems like a decent game though, the MP was nothing special at all imo, very run of the mill.

 

[kyleb]

Ben, that isn't AA you are looking at there, it's just JPEG compression.

 

[Richard]

I assume you're talking about the 360, right? You need the skinned vertex positions before doing silhouette extraction on the CPU, so I don't see how that could possibly be done on the GPU unless they're using MEMEXPORT on the 360 (or unless there are no shadows, of course).

I was talking about the PC version though, if the PC can do it the xbox version should be able to as well.

 

[BenSkywalker]

No there's jaggies everywhere, AA is not enabled. This is based on an hour of play not screenshots.

I've played through the demo twice on the 360 and once on the PC. AA is clearly enabled. I think the most obvious spot to check it out is when you travel to the area where your run into your granfather's spirit and he teaches you about spirit walking- when you are still outside take a look around- particularly at the rocks. There is massive aliasing on the normal maps, horribly bad- but some sort of OG MSAA appears to be enabled everywhere.

Ben, that isn't AA you are looking at there, it's just JPEG compression.

JPEG doesn't increase the amount of color gradients.

 

[scooby_dooby]

I've played through the demo twice on the 360 and once on the PC. AA is clearly enabled. I think the most obvious spot to check it out is when you travel to the area where your run into your granfather's spirit and he teaches you about spirit walking- when you are still outside take a look around- particularly at the rocks. There is massive aliasing on the normal maps, horribly bad- but some sort of OG MSAA appears to be enabled everywhere.

Well I dunno, I'm no expert on the matter obviously. All I know is this game has jaggies everywhere, while Kameo which i'm "assured" has 0xAA has nowhere near this level of jaggies.

How can this have AA enabled and not Kameo, this is much much.....much worse.

 

[kyleb]

JPEG doesn't increase the amount of color gradients.

Which is why it is obvious that there is no AA in the 360 shots even with the blending that comes from the heavy JPEG compression.


And the lack of AA isn't so obvious in the place where you meet your granfather's spirit simply becuase there isn't many straight edges, but if you look at the sraight edges that are there it is obvious that there is no AA.

 

[Mmmkay]

Zoom in on the resgister or crowbar in the shot from the bar, it is clear that AA is enabled, it just doesn't work too well on certain angles(it appears that it may be using 2x OG MSAA). In that same shot you can look to the girls arms. Her forearms are horribly aliased, but her elbows are quite smooth. Her forearms are near horizontal while her elbows are on a ~45 degree angle.

Aliasing is most noticable on 'high contrast' near horizontal and near vertical edges. You should not be looking at ~45 degree angles for proof of anti aliasing.

It appears that the sampling pattern is OG as it is handling 45 degree angles particularly well and having trouble with near vertical and near horizontal edges.

That doesn't sound like OG to me. A 2x OG MSAA implementation would always favour either horizontal or vertical edges in terms of IQ. A 4x OG MSAA implementation provides a higher quality vert/horiz edge IQ than 2x RG MSAA so that can't be what you mean either. Smoothish ~45 degree angles are even exhibited when there is no anti aliasing present.

4xOG MSAA:


2xRG MSAA:


2x1OG AA:


0xMSAA:


These Prey 360 screenshots do not show any kind of blending on near horizontal or near vertical edges and resemble more the patterns shown in the 0xMSAA pinwheel. I have also played the 360 demo and my observations are the same as everyone elses that there is definitely no AA [currently] present in the game.

 

[fearsomepirate]

The lighting is hideous. Truly hideous. The way that surfaces are shaded is a jarring contrast with how those super-sharp volumetric shadows look.

 

[Subtlesnake]

"I can't see anywhere this has been mentioned, but the textures in the 360 demo were reduced in size from those used in the full game, in an attempt to keep the download size managable"

http://forums.3drealms.com/vb/showthread.php?t=19343&page=2

 

[Skrying]

"I can't see anywhere this has been mentioned, but the textures in the 360 demo were reduced in size from those used in the full game, in an attempt to keep the download size managable"

http://forums.3drealms.com/vb/showthread.php?t=19343&page=2

Pssh, that's rather hard to sallow no matter who it comes from.

I'm frankly still extremely weirded out at why the Xbox 360 demo is so freaking huge, while the PC demo is tiny, even in comparison to other recent demo's.

Why reduce the textures? Seriously, you're just hurting you're GREATLY by doing something like that, then even more so by not mentioning it to those who download it.

 

[BenSkywalker]

Which is why it is obvious that there is no AA in the 360 shots even with the blending that comes from the heavy JPEG compression.

The amount of color gradients are significantly INCREASED on the near 45 degree angles in those screenshots.

Aliasing is most noticable on 'high contrast' near horizontal and near vertical edges. You should not be looking at ~45 degree angles for proof of anti aliasing.

Before I started working in the business world I spent several years working with 3D viz. Actually, how I ended up joining these forums in the first place was to point out a few issues that the white paper Dave Barron and Kristof published for 3dfx on their AA implementation had in it. You need to look at a rather large range of different elements if you are attempting to determine what level, type and pattern of AA is being utilized.

Aliasing is most noticeable in textures- period. With no type of 'anti aliasing' being utilized at all you wouldn't notice edge aliasing as the screen would be just a giant mess of aliasing(check out point sampled games for a good example). What you are talking about is edge aliasing in particular.

A 2x OG MSAA implementation would always favour either horizontal or vertical edges in terms of IQ.

Of course that is completely wrong. For evidence of this let's take a close look at your wheels. The 2x1 OG AA shot demonstrates that near 45 degrees fifty percent of edge disturbances are being blended, as opposed to less then 33% of the near horizontal or vertical lines. Check it yourself. Compare it to the RG shots where roughly 60% of all edge disturbances near horizontal or vertical are blended while less then 20% of those near 45 degrees are. Just open up Photoshop and zoom in to 1600% and you will have no problem seeing exactly what is going on in the shots you provided.

When talking about optimal angles for AA near horizontal and near vertical tend to be the most noticeable, that is why everyone favors RG sampling patterns(well, until we can get stochastic in hardware with decent performance).

 

[Nightz]

"I can't see anywhere this has been mentioned, but the textures in the 360 demo were reduced in size from those used in the full game, in an attempt to keep the download size managable"

http://forums.3drealms.com/vb/showthread.php?t=19343&page=2

Then why'd the Xbox360 download be more than twice the size of the PC download?

 

[Mmmkay]

Aliasing is most noticeable in textures- period. With no type of 'anti aliasing' being utilized at all you wouldn't notice edge aliasing as the screen would be just a giant mess of aliasing(check out point sampled games for a good example). What you are talking about is edge aliasing in particular.

Of course I am talking about edge aliasing, that's the subject of the conversation. Personally I think you are trying to obfuscate the issue here. The objective was to discern whether there is any edge blending occuring at all, we don't need sophisticated detection methods to decide exactly what implementation is being used. If there are no blended near horizontal or vertical edges, that says more to me than analysing ~45 degree edges which are significantly more difficult to analyse given the analog filtered screenshots we have.

Of course that is completely wrong. For evidence of this let's take a close look at your wheels. The 2x1 OG AA shot demonstrates that near 45 degrees fifty percent of edge disturbances are being blended, as opposed to less then 33% of the near horizontal or vertical lines. Check it yourself. Compare it to the RG shots where roughly 60% of all edge disturbances near horizontal or vertical are blended while less then 20% of those near 45 degrees are. Just open up Photoshop and zoom in to 1600% and you will have no problem seeing exactly what is going on in the shots you provided.

I think you misunderstood what I was saying. A 2x1 OG will blend vertical edges much better than it will blend near horizontal ones (if even not at all), vice versa with 1x2. The statement you made in determining that OG patterns were being used was that it was "having trouble with near vertical and near horizontal edges." At the very least, OG will provide adequate blending for one of those, depending on the orientation of the pattern surely?

When talking about optimal angles for AA near horizontal and near vertical tend to be the most noticeable, that is why everyone favors RG sampling patterns(well, until we can get stochastic in hardware with decent performance).

Exactly, that was my criteria for observations. If these are not blended (as seen clearly in these shots and in game) then it is hard to find any implementation except reaching for the exotic. Occams' Razor has to step in and suggest that there simply is none.

 

[kyleb]

Hey Ben, how much AA do you see here?

 

[Sis]

Then why'd the Xbox360 download be more than twice the size of the PC download?

My guess would be that the PC version "installs" while the Xbox 360 version needs to be able to just run, perhaps with on-the-fly decompression.

But that's just my guess...

 

[kyleb]

The PC version installs at 456MB, 447MB being the PK4 file which is compressed from 937MB. Still a good bit shy of the 1.17GB 360 demo.