Rechecking Beyond3D pixel counters

3

365

Newcomer
Hello there.
I used to unconditionally entrust to Beyond3D pixel counters, but some games can cast doubt on it.

For example.
List of Rendering Resolutions says that Heavenly Sword runs in 1280x720 with 4xAA

I can see no AA at all.
check yourself

sorry for the quality

tech info:
PS3 Fat + Samsung LE40M86BD in 720p mode (this game doesn't support upscale to native resolution)
but Samsung LE46F86BD, Sony Bravia 46Wxxxx and LG42LH3000 show pretty much the same.

in HS there's "AA" only in movies between levels, but this one doesn't count.

Can you direct me what screenshots were used to determine that Heavenly Sword has 4xAA?

Thank you. :p

P.S. and I'm waiting for Heavy Rain results.
P.P.S. if you have any doubts in B3D counting result, feel free to post.

ModEdit: fixing up the images with the thumbnails... there is a reason ImageShack provides the feature automagically.
 
You're wrong, HS has 4xAA. All you're seeing is that the colour space we use doesn't have linear blending which sometimes gives incorrect colours. Overall it was better to have sometimes wrong 4xAA than not have AA (it occurs because to save GPU time we used linear resolve rather than the correct unpack, blend, pack code).

Also almost all the movies were rendering using the ingame engine with exactly the same AA settings.

Deano
(one of the said developers)
 
Also if you look more closely at your third screen shoot, you can clearly see the AA at the bottom of Nariko's leg, the error in the linear blend most happen in places of large luminance difference, there where it blends between two more similar colours it produces results close to a standard linear colour space.
 
/// sorry for mistype.
can somebody rename it to: Rechecking Beyond3D pixel counters

DeanoC
Movies are shown when the game is loading. Captured on in-game engine but still it's movie file not ingame render. You can even see compression artifacts here
 
DeanoC said:
Also if you look more closely at your third screen shoot, you can clearly see the AA at the bottom of Nariko's leg, the error in the linear blend most happen in places of large luminance difference, there where it blends between two more similar colours it produces results close to a standard linear colour space.
Click to expand...
It looks more like 'nonnative' resolution artifacts. ghosting or something like that.

but anyways. Can we see the original screenshots were used?
 
365 said:
/// sorry for mistype.
can somebody rename it to: Rechecking Beyond3D pixel counters

DeanoC
Movies are shown when the game is loading. Captured on in-game engine but still it's movie file not ingame render. You can even see compression artifacts here
Click to expand...
Yes I know ;) but still rendered using exactly the same AA settings. If you seeing any better 'AA' its not AA just the low frequency blurs that occurs before movies compressors run. I've seen them run real-time rememeber so I know exactly how they look before and after compression...

Maybe it worth stating... I was the Lead Programmer on Heavenly Sword and Nao (Marco) implemented the AA in the game, so were not guessing, we are stating what it does... no need for screen shots unless you beleive were lieing?

Deano
 
I definitely can see Nariko face in movies nice and smooth with no jugged edges.
but ingame I see this.



It isn't so hard to add motion blurs and "AA" to the movie. The before putting it to the disc. I would do that
 
DeanoC said:
Maybe it worth stating... I was the Lead Programmer on Heavenly Sword and Nao (Marco) implemented the AA in the game, so were not guessing, we are stating what it does... no need for screen shots unless you beleive were lieing?
Deano
Click to expand...
No. I believe you. But later I will take a photo of another game with 4xAA. It looks completely different.
 
365 said:
I definitely can see Nariko face in movies nice and smooth with no jugged edges.
but ingame I see this.



It isn't so hard to add motion blurs and "AA" to the movie. The before putting it to the disc. I would do that
Click to expand...
We wanted the movies to be as close to the run-time as possible, so they are untouched. The main reason for them to be movies, is so we didn't have to load the assets (load time savings)
 
365 said:
No. I believe you. But later I will take a photo of another game with 4xAA. It looks completely different.
Click to expand...

Why is that unusual, AA (in terms of MSAA/SSAA we are talking about here) doesn't do anything but linear blend between pixel based on a coverage mask. Whether the blend produces correct colours is entirely a factor of the colour space of the pixels pre-blend.
In our case we do our blend in a non linear HDR colour space, relatively unusual among games. Other games are likely using either a linear RGB space or an sRGB space, interestingly linear blending in sRGB space is also wrong but many game do it...

Going back to HS, our colour space which covers a much greater range than most frame buffer colour spaces, unfortunately when blending between vastly different lunimance values doesn't follow the correct linear curve. This is most obvious standing in front of the sky and sun, as they are relatively bright.

Hopefully thats a deep enough explaination to understand why it looks different and indeed sometimes wrong, however as you've noted for the faces most of the time it works well and gives better results then no AA for close to the same rendering cost.
 
It's been a while since we talked about nAo's incursions into "new" colour spaces. Did the term coined by Deano NAO32 picked up with the dev community?
 
Farid said:
It's been a while since we talked about nAo's incursions into "new" colour spaces. Did the term coined by Deano NAO32 picked up with the dev community?
Click to expand...
A little, LogLuv is most known name for it but NAO32 is used in places :D

Easier to remember the funky colour space (its original internal name hehe)
 
Quick, somebody needs to update the Wikipedia page on the Logluv/NAO32 with this new piece of info: it was first known as "funky colour space!"
 
365 said:
I definitely can see Nariko face in movies nice and smooth with no jugged edges.
but ingame I see this.



It isn't so hard to add motion blurs and "AA" to the movie. The before putting it to the disc. I would do that
Click to expand...

Looks really like TV sharpening.
 
ok I got the idea.
so HS has 4xAA but basically this is not msAA and it looks THAT wierd compared to other games with msAA.


Here are some other screen photos (you can see matrix seeds)

VF5 4x msAA

remember this one is downscaled to 720p and upscaled to 1080p, so in theory there can be some artifacts, but game looks absolutely gorgeous.


SF4 2x msAA


still better huh?


Bayonetta 360 noAA


and still for me it looks less jagged in static or in dynamic eather.


So in this case I would like to see this info on Beyond3D list next time. What AA method game uses. MSAA or NOT (aside from temporal, qAA). For me as a player it looks more like temporal or noAA at all.

thank you guys.
 
Btw, 2D HUD art is usually overlayed on top of the final rendered image; its quality is up to the art itself and isn't MSAA'd. Also, VF5 doesn't have AA. It's being scaled from 1024x1024. You're going to get blur in both dimensions from any scaling. This is not MSAA.
 
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