i want to open a new tread because i see that many 1st party titles as 3rd ones suffer of framerate and tearing issues...everybody remember what EA and Ubisoft said about XBOX360 to PS3 conversions (madden in primis) and many people complained these devs are lazy....but now that 1st party titles are ready on the line they are showing the same issues (HS, Lair and Uncharted GC demo)....anywhere here you can read about cell power and innovative spe's usage...but why we still have to bear chops and tearings? where is the bottleneck? is it something PS3 can handle or is it just a dream to have decent graphic and phisic with no issues?
Question for developers... PS3 and framerate
- Thread starter jobboy
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"Nerve-Damage"
Regular
You baited, I bit.
Heavenly Sword & Lair don’t suffer from frame-rate issues, maybe the occasional V-Sync hiccup (i.e. Gears) like so many console games tend to have. I can’t comment on Uncharted since it’s still in development; however the current videos are pretty awesome.
Anyhow this thread isn’t going to get far, for so many reasons.
Heavenly Sword & Lair don’t suffer from frame-rate issues, maybe the occasional V-Sync hiccup (i.e. Gears) like so many console games tend to have. I can’t comment on Uncharted since it’s still in development; however the current videos are pretty awesome.
Anyhow this thread isn’t going to get far, for so many reasons.
Perhaps it is that the devs have a vision of how they want their game to look like. The scope of the environment, and stuff going on. But it seems the hardware is still not there to fullfill these visions without heavy LOD or tearing/framerate issues IMO.
Heavenly Sword & Lair don’t suffer from frame-rate issues, maybe the occasional V-Sync hiccup (i.e. Gears) like so many console games tend to have. I can’t comment on Uncharted since it’s still in development; however the current videos are pretty awesome.
Anyhow this thread isn’t going to get far, for so many reasons.
This thread can be discussed in a civilized and intelligent manner so yes this thread can get far as long and we don't lose that.
My answer would have to be that no its not really "developer lazyness" (not trying to defend devs) merely it is that it will just depend on the game being made, what its displaying on screen, expericence with dev tools, dev tool revisions, etc.
I would like to point out that in the 3d gaming console world many other console games for other platforms have suffered from occasional framerate slowdown issues/hiccups.
Sega Saturn
Nintendo 64
Sony Playstation
Sony Playstation 2
Sega Dreamcast
Microsoft XBox 1
Microsoft XBox 360
Basically some games, and sometimes even if its a game made by an experienced dev in that platform or platform specific game title may have framerate issues (not V-sync tearing) depending on the gaming stage or situation.
One example I can speak of is Turok series on N64, Turok Rage Wars was like the third game specific to that platform and it had some framerate issues depending on what was going on.
On the other hand a game dev that is very experienced and very familiar with the game tools or platform (specific or not) may make many games that play buttery smooth with no issues what so ever.
In the case of your question just keep in mind the past for what is going on in the present because it will also happen in the future.
The Playstation 3 in comparison to previous generation consoles is ridiculously powerfull in terms of tech specs numbers alone but just because some new game may have a slight framerate issue do not dismiss or discount the new console's architecture because all of the new games are displaying stuff that the old consoles could not and some game devs are pushing their own limits on what they have managed to display on the screen out of a given console.
One good look at a screenshot in Lair and you can tell that its a very busy screenshot with lots of things being displayed. Same goes with Ratchet and Clank ToD.
Now its true that some games purposely hide things to prevent people from noticing 3d engine flaws in pretty games and the best example I can think of is only PC Doom 3 for making many of its enemy vanish from the stage after death as opposed to Call of Duty 1 PC where the screen can be littered with dead enemy soldiers (again different games/3d engines/etc)
Looking at PS3s first parties i cannot see any framerate issues in Resistance, Motorstorm, F1, Genji, HS or Warhawk.
According to most reviews, Lair definately has framerate issues.
That is what I have seen in videos/reviews to, and not only framerate issues but also screen tearing. I wonder if they should have reduced the amount of AA or even disable it to be able to enable vsync to prevent screen tearing atleast.
Rainbow Man
Veteran
Ehm.
Heavenly Sword is greater than ANY madden game in terms of draw distance and complexity and shading by about a factor of a magnitude. If it suffers from the occasional framerate judder or vsynch tearing (and the downloadable demo certainly does) it's quite understandable.
That game's a graphical tour de force. Anyone can see that quite easily.
Madden in comparison is shit put in tin cans assdembly-line fashion by EA, marginally modified and recycled year from year. If they have any complaints in that regard it's because they seem unable to squeeze their shit into said tin cans as fast as they'd like.
Peace.
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Game development isn't an exact science and it's a very fluid process. Despite the way you see it presented sometimes there are no "X polygons ay Y fps" magic numbers.
People on the technical side usally make educated guesses based on tests they've run, and artwork gets built, sometimes the artwork is over spec, sometimes it's on spec and the engineer was just too optimistic, and sometimes the design evolves to require more stuff on screen. More often than not it's a combination of all three.
Engineers are commonly overly optimistic early in consol lifespans, because they're vision of the hardware is incomplete.
My experience is that frame rate just doesn't get the day to day love during development that it used to. Some of this is team size and budgets and the pressre to get features in, with the assumption the performance issues can be addressed later. Sometimes this works out, and sometimes the pressure to ship means performance issues persist.
I've spent many a month before E3 (that was) trying to get games to run in the memory footprint of the console in question (rather than the devkit), and at a reasonable framerate.
Sometimes as a developer you don't realise the performance impact of a feature when you put it in, this is especially true if the game is very data driven. A feature can be invisibl on profiles right up to the point where an a artist checks in a piece of content for it that the engineer hadn't envisioned.
It's never a hardware issue alone, you could perfectly reasonably write a 60fps highres PS1 game, if you made the right set of compromises, and made the framerate and resolution a priority in development. Similarly you can make any piece of hardware look like it sucks if you don't play to it's strengths.
People on the technical side usally make educated guesses based on tests they've run, and artwork gets built, sometimes the artwork is over spec, sometimes it's on spec and the engineer was just too optimistic, and sometimes the design evolves to require more stuff on screen. More often than not it's a combination of all three.
Engineers are commonly overly optimistic early in consol lifespans, because they're vision of the hardware is incomplete.
My experience is that frame rate just doesn't get the day to day love during development that it used to. Some of this is team size and budgets and the pressre to get features in, with the assumption the performance issues can be addressed later. Sometimes this works out, and sometimes the pressure to ship means performance issues persist.
I've spent many a month before E3 (that was) trying to get games to run in the memory footprint of the console in question (rather than the devkit), and at a reasonable framerate.
Sometimes as a developer you don't realise the performance impact of a feature when you put it in, this is especially true if the game is very data driven. A feature can be invisibl on profiles right up to the point where an a artist checks in a piece of content for it that the engineer hadn't envisioned.
It's never a hardware issue alone, you could perfectly reasonably write a 60fps highres PS1 game, if you made the right set of compromises, and made the framerate and resolution a priority in development. Similarly you can make any piece of hardware look like it sucks if you don't play to it's strengths.
"Nerve-Damage"
Regular
Don't know much about phisic.
Good frame rate (and big scenes) = LOD + visibility culling.
The PS3 can handle LODs and I'm sure we'll see amazing stuff during its life time.
visibility culling, I don't know... It require an awful lot of RSX sync... Or maybe a lot done in the SPUs... Don't know.
my 2 pennies worth.
Betanumerical
Veteran
I was reading something on EDGE and they mentioned using one SPU to do triangle culling @ 60FPS.
I would think its just a matter of learning the CELL, new tech takes time to learn. Year one for PS3 was as good as 360's best of almost 2 years learning its hardware, UT3 will prove this.
Actually it is still trailing behind in some games, compromises are made. About UT3 we will have to wait until it is released or more ss/videos are released of both versions.
Well I can use Resistance instead
It runs smooth and is just as impressive as anything else when you consider multiplayer handles 40 people.
So it has to be just a matter of learning the CELL and making sure framerate will work just like IW and COD4.
We make heavy use of spu's for geometry culling, they process millions of triangles before they even hit the gpu. The bank of spu's are basically our "vertex pipe A", and rsx is "vertex pipe B". The 60% culled number in that slide is a bit optimistic though, although your results will vary. We're seeing around 17% average culled by spu's.
Speak about PR
Joker, I find the official EDGE numbers a little confusing. If you don't mind answering, in your case;
Is it backface culling only?
How many SPUs are dedicated to culling?
What is the input triangle rate?
750K triangles/s/SPU seems a little low for backface culling, even with the local memory hurdle.
Weird, bf culling alone should give you more than that on common geometry
ShootMyMonkey
Veteran
As unnaturally high as 60% sounds, 17% also sounds unnaturally low... Do you just have a lot of planar and/or two-sided geometry or something such that BF culling has little effect?
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