RAGE: That's actually what you do when trying to get the PC version to work

[Silent_Buddha]

If OnLive worked well, it could've been perfect for that.

Eh? With OnLive, even if it worked perfectly, you'd never notice the difference between the default texture pack and a 1 terabyte texture pack. The real time compression required to produce a smooth enough gaming experience on the types of broadband most people have while taking into account unavoidable latency situations would ruin any potential gains in higher base textures.

Personally I'm still looking forward to playing this eventually. I realize the indoor textures and upclose textures aren't going to be comparable to some other games, but that's not why I was interested in the game in the first place.

I'm absolutely in love with the fact that the world itself for the most part will be uniquely textured without repeating textures. Even in games that do a good job of hiding repeating textures, once you get a large enough distance away, repeat textures are still incredibly noticeable.

Just out of curiousity is there a lot of wide open expanses available for viewing? That show, for example, at least a mile or two of terrain? Or is it mostly canyons and other such situations that limit your view?

Regards,
SB

 

[sebbbi]

Does D3D11 have any features that could help iD over the OGL implementation? Aside from obviously the IHVs having better D3D drivers.

I am not sure about the state of most recent OpenGL extensions, but in DX10/11 you have separate texture buffers and views. This allows you for example to implement your own DXT texture compressor using pixel shaders (write to a view with 16-16-16-16 integer format, and read from a view of DXT5/BC3). This same technique can of course be used on consoles to efficiently compress DXT files on fly. Also DirectCompute could help them (cross platform GPU transcode), since the current CUDA implementation is Nvidia only. DX10 also introduced new resource memory model. I am not sure how much more efficient it is compared to the old model when moving data in/out of GPU, but at least it works very well (staging buffers have been extensively used by DirectCompute applications, and are likely very much optimized and tested because of that).

 

[Man from Atlantis]

while i was digging Anand's Bulldozer review, i saw a benchmark cmd for RAGE.. vt_benchmark 8 ..
interesting 9800gt is slower than cpu and doesnt scale well more than 3 threads..

Capital Prime
GTX460 - 0.27 seconds
Q9650@4GHz - 0.43 seconds
9800GT - 0.48(3Threads)

9800GT transcoding only, GTX460 @675/1350/3600, 9800GT@625/1563/2200

 

[hoho]

A high res texture pack would be what? A 50 GB megatexture?

More like 80-150G I hope. Just put it to a torrent and you'll pretty much have free hosting for it.

If they were to say release a hi-res pack with double the texture res (eg. 16kx16k instead of 8kx8k ..or whatever it is atm), wouldnt the data size be ROUGHLY around x4 the current texture data?
As mentioned earlier, hopefully it wont cause tex streaming issues.

I've got 8G ram that can be used as pretty decent-speed cache, I see no problems with it

And they couldn't increse resolution but they could reduce compression if they were to release a larger dataset.

I remember from somewhere that the raw dataset for the megatexture was somewhere around 1-1.5TB in size. Pretty sure that one has much higher resolution than what is in game at the moment and they can just re-do the preprocessing to get decent resolution textures with higher quality for the DLC texture pack.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Only some of the background elements are downsized that the player's not supposed to get close to. So don't expect the textures in corridors and floors to get magically more detailed.

It also seems that some of the environments have no normal and specular layers at all, so that allows them to drop 2/3 of the source data too.

Also, they are using 1:50-1:60 compression, so that 19 GB of textures shipped is equal to about 1-1,2 TB, and that's not counting the downsizing or the diffuse only areas. Altogether it can easily amount to 2-3 TB of pre-compile textures.

 

[tabs]

Eh? With OnLive, even if it worked perfectly, you'd never notice the difference between the default texture pack and a 1 terabyte texture pack.

Well that's two that didn't get what I was saying, I must have not made myself clear. I completely agree with you. In my view if OnLive did work perfectly, the compression would not be at all noticable at good gaming resolutions. One day, it could be possible, but not soon.

 

[swaaye]

while i was digging Anand's Bulldozer review, i saw a benchmark cmd for RAGE.. vt_benchmark 8 ..
interesting 9800gt is slower than cpu and doesnt scale well more than 3 threads..

Capital Prime
GTX460 - 0.27 seconds
Q9650@4GHz - 0.43 seconds
9800GT - 0.48(3Threads)

9800GT transcoding only, GTX460 @675/1350/3600, 9800GT@625/1563/2200

I've found that my 8800GT runs the game a lot better if I turn off transcode. This is a EVGA 8800GT superclocked (650/1625/950). The game doesn't seem to do well with its transcode autobalancing with the card, maybe because it's just that slow at it.

 

[Richard]

Been away for a few days but good news about the possible D3D port of the renderer for DOOM!

Weren't D3D11 compliant drivers supposed to implement virtualised memory addressing? If so id could take a look at those and bypass some amount of overhead with the manual management. OTOH, implementations will likely be immature.

 

[hoho]

Been away for a few days but good news about the possible D3D port of the renderer for DOOM!

Not sure how good it would be. Carmack sure seemed to be worried about d3d efficiency for megatexture.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Not sure how good it would be. Carmack sure seemed to be worried about d3d efficiency for megatexture.

I may be wrong, but I think that's because they would have been targetting DX9

 

[tabs]

But why would they? The target hardware is DX10 capable.

 

[Scott_Arm]

But why would they? The target hardware is DX10 capable.

They did start on the game a LONG time ago, and 360 is sort of like DX9++ from my understanding. That's probably why they're considering DX now, because 10 is pretty much standard. I'm just guessing, of course.

 

[tabs]

Ah, I see what you're saying. Thought you meant that they would be targetting DX9 now.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Hopefully the next game using the engine has some good upgrades, either from DX10,11 API, or just from improvements through learning experience. I seem to remember John Carmack outlining some improvements he could have made to the caching systems, that would have been to drastic to implement late in Rage's dev cycle. He's pretty open about those kinds of things, which is always nice.

 

[Svensk Viking]

Does porting the engine to D3D mean a significant longer developing time?

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Apparently Carmack plans to do this for Rage as a side project. Most of the dev effort on these games is probably concentrated on content creation and not engine development...

 

[Richard]

Not significant, but it will add development time. OTOH, since they are basically using a shipped engine it means they should have more programmer team hours to use up. Also, even before this announcement, JC had said they'd be looking to improve the renderer for DOOM while everything else in id Tech 5 would stay roughly the same so maybe there's some efficiency to be gained here.

Playing Devil's advocate here but if JC really meant what he said about the PC not being worth additional dedicated development time then this latest revelation seems to be a contradiction. Hmmm... could just be that they took a hit on sales but it seems a bit premature to base decisions on. Perhaps this topic surfaced during those id-AMD discussions.

 

[Sxotty]

Well I finally finished it though I will probably go back and do the vehicle jumps I missed. I did enjoy it a lot actually.

Spoiler

I don't have a problem with the story and in fact I think the result is actually pretty darn good (better than most).

However the level design was too reminiscent of the HL2 citadel, Halo libray and other repetitive boring junk in regular games. I realize the artists were trying to say look how the authority is all organized and militantly perfect, no scratches anywhere etc... but after playing the rest of the game and seeing the beautiful stuff there it was really a let down to play the repetitive texture base level that one is used to.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Yeah, all the tech discussion sidelines the fact that it's actually a quite good game.
I can see how some of their decisions may not appeal to many people and I could probably list a lot of stuff that I don't like either. But the general level of polish and balance is quite impressive IMHO - there's always something to do, and always something new as well, you keep on getting new stuff to play with and yet the fights remain challenging (at least to me).

I was pretty interested in the graphics but the game itself manages to keep me playing, too. I think if it wasn't for id and the virtual texture tech it'd still get some attention and good reviews, but probably not as much interest and sales.

 

[tabs]

Opinions on the gameplay? What I'm hearing a lot of people saying is 'bland'. Have to agree with them personally, but to each their own. I bet most wouldn't love some games I couldn't put down, like Rogue Trooper and Area 51 (the one with Duchovny, not Blacksite).