The Game Technology discussion thread *Read first post before posting*

[assen]

Mod: This is not a battle ground for fanboy factions! Even friendly joking about is evoking bad attitudes. As a Tech Forum thread, discussion should focus on the technical (and business) reasons for cross-platform choices, and not dabble in the psychology of gamers.

 

[Dr. Nick]

Snip.

Even GOW3 will drop frames when need be.
http://www.psu.com/God-of-War-III-ru...0006792-p0.php
I'm sure if we analyzed more 60fps games we would find out that many of them drop frames or slowdown. It is just that most of us can't see it. Especially when it doesn't negatively affect gameplay.
.

 

[Neb]

The answer is simple: How does the God of War 3 team do it? and that game looks much better than Bayonetta, all at 60fps unlocked. I don't want to talk down Bayonetta but that is simply the truth.

Last time I read it was barely 30fps at latest gameshow (by people that had hands on experience). IIRCdevs say they target to have upto 60fps.

.. even Crysis still cannot render water splash properly (it looks freaking bad). But what really matter is the visual impact in the end.

No it doesn't look "freaking bad" but it isn't super either. Same goes with Far Cry. However despite that still amongst the best but 'no eye-brow riser' regarding this effect.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

like using the Cell to have more filter effects on the textures, just like team Ninja did it on Ninja Gaiden Sigma 1 and 2 (by the way they confirmed that they used the Cell to have more effects on the textures when NGS1 came out. I can't find the reference now because it was in one of the interview videos). Team Ninja did not have to lower the texture resolution to have better looking textures than the 360.

Just what are you talking about here? "Effects on textures"?? What does that mean?

 

[marcus_rocks]

Even GOW3 will drop frames when need be.
http://www.psu.com/God-of-War-III-ru...0006792-p0.php
I'm sure if we analyzed more 60fps games we would find out that many of them drop frames or slowdown. It is just that most of us can't see it. Especially when it doesn't negatively affect gameplay.
.

I did mention "unlocked" and Bayonetta is also unlocked so I don't know what the deal is here.

Just what are you talking about here? "Effects on textures"?? What does that mean?

Like texture filtering? to reduce shimmering, blockiness and smooth degradation of texture quality according to the view distance?

No it doesn't look "freaking bad" but it isn't super either. Same goes with Far Cry. However despite that still amongst the best but 'no eye-brow riser' regarding this effect.

haha, I just did rise an eye-brow in the water splash. As I said what really matter is the visual impact in the end, no one game can best every other games in every single department. I don't know what the deal is here.

Let me quote TB

If you have lots of overdraw, e.g. from particle systems, the Xbox wins, hands down. If you repeatedly switch a buffer from being a render-target to being a texture, the PS3 will beat up your Xbox and take its lunch money.

 

[joker454]

The answer is simple: How does the God of War 3 team do it?......Why don't we utilize the advantages of the PS3 via the Cell? like using the Cell to have more filter effects on the textures, just like team Ninja did it on Ninja Gaiden Sigma 1 and 2...

Neither game you mention has as much detailed overdraw as Bayonetta. Both Gow3 and Ninja Gaiden use low frequency art for blended stuff, a common practice on PS3, so that large amounts of blending can be done on low bandwidth hardware.

That's not really a simplification, but an attempt to construct a biased argument

What bias? Whoever did the Bayonetta port had to deal with that very issue, it was reality for them not a fabricated scenario.

So far the responses have been interesting. What I have deduced is that people are quick to make bold statements like "bad port", "lazy devs", etc, but then when questioned they hide behind the "I'm not a dev" shield. That's fine, I don't expect everyone to know the hardware. But if you don't know the hardware, then how do you know that it's a bad port?

 

[zed]

So, suggestions?

yes, you ditch the 2d blended particle effects that we've been using since games ~began

and go for a true 3d volumetric FX / particles

Result practically no overdraw + far far better quality to boot (near movie cgi quality)

So why arent ppl doing this already?

A/ requires lotsa CPU power (hello SPUs)
B/ blended 2d stuff is easier, ppl usually choose the easy way

 

[liolio]

Wow that discussion about Joker has happened twice in no time. But I understand it surfaces again, people doesn't want to understand what Pros and Cons mean. Systems are close and have strength and weakness, that's it but it doesn't mean they are equal in every situations. A "Con" of a system is not necessarily maked up by a pro of the same system. Sometime when compare to another system a con turns into a weakness, that's it, that's the limit of the politically correct "system are close or more or less equal".

 

[marcus_rocks]

Neither game you mention has as much detailed overdraw as Bayonetta. Both Gow3 and Ninja Gaiden use low frequency art for blended stuff, a common practice on PS3, so that large amounts of blending can be done on low bandwidth hardware.

Your single argument is that the 360 has an advantage in overdraw thus the 360 is superior. What about texture filtering, which is superior in the PS3? Why were they not implemented by the PS3 Bayonetta team to give an advantage in that department? You can draw your own conclusion here.

Do you know what texture size used in Bayonetta? Is it 1024x1024, 512x512, or 128x128? If you can answer this question then I will lead you to the next question.

 

[AlNom]

Affiliations/biases/whatever... that is all off-topic.

What about texture filtering, which is superior in the PS3?

Keep in mind... Texture sampling will use up one of the ALUs in each shader core on RSX.

 

[obonicus]

Wow that discussion about Joker has happened twice in no time. But I understand it surfaces again, people doesn't want to understand what Pros and Cons mean. Systems are close and have strength and weakness, that's it but it doesn't mean they are equal in every situations. A "Con" of a system is not necessarily maked up by a pro of the same system. Sometime when compare to another system a con turns into a weakness, that's it, that's the limit of the politically correct "system are close or more or less equal".

I'm not arguing that, if you're referring to me. My main issue is the same I had with Ghostbusters; why are we using games that aren't great technically anywhere as a case-study for the PS3's frailties?

Think of it this way: If studio X creates a game for 360 that uses every single feature the PS3 is weak at, the PS3 port is going to suck. No question about it. The question becomes, then: why did they use all those features the PS3 is weak at? Is it to make the game great technically, or simply to make it suck less than the PS3 version? If it's the latter, it doesn't seem like a worthwhile tradeoff. If it's the former, hey, knock yourself out. In this case I really don't think we're talking about the former.

 

[marcus_rocks]

Affiliations/biases/whatever... that is all off-topic.



Keep in mind... Texture sampling will use up one of the ALUs in each shader core on RSX.

Al, I'm talking about the textures that would have been pre-processed on the Cell. That is where the PS3 is at.

 

[AlNom]

I'm still not following... procedural textures

 

[marcus_rocks]

I'm still not following... procedural textures

nada, to reduce shimmering, blockiness and to increase smooth degradation of texture quality according to the viewing distance

 

[joker454]

yes, you ditch the 2d blended particle effects that we've been using since games ~began

and go for a true 3d volumetric FX / particles

Result practically no overdraw + far far better quality to boot (near movie cgi quality)

So why arent ppl doing this already?

A/ requires lotsa CPU power (hello SPUs)
B/ blended 2d stuff is easier, ppl usually choose the easy way

Particle effects that need volume but have little detail, like a misty ground cover, smoke, fire, dirt clouds, etc, have the barest amount of detail in them. So just render them 2d to a 1/16th size particle buffer, apply a smidge of post process on that buffer, and presto lots of overdraw for a reasonable price. I did that already on a shipped PS3 game. It would fail under the B3D microscope, but when you play it the effect looks pretty cool. Gow3 would do perfectly fine with that as well. From what I saw at E3, its blended stuff had little detail, like smoke, a glowing flame of orange, etc, so they may be doing that already. As far as I know, all PS3 games do this. No need to go volumetric, the spu's may have been neglected back in 2006, but they are darned busy now.

Bayonetta though has some unique requirements that volumetric particles would not fix. First, they have these huge dudes you fight and they often obscure the camera. So it draws their meshes in transparency when that happens. Bam, that's a massive performance spike when it happens (on PS3) but it has to be accounted for. You have to run at 60fps when things are at their worst. So even if you can render the entire environment in 5ms it doesn't mean squat if that jumps to 20ms when there are two full screen transparent characters and a bunch of other blending going on. Other games like Gow3 or Ninja Gaiden get around this with camera design that doesn't let large characters obscure the camera, or they just don't switch the meshes to transparent at all.

Also, a lot of the transparent stuff in Bayonetta is indeed 2d stuff, not volumetric stuff. Stuff like UI hud items drawn see through, in game text messages, billboard items, etc, they went nuts with transparency. It looks cool when you play because it makes the game seem chaotic, compared to Ninja Gaiden which seems tame in comparison because you can tell they really scaled back overdraw on that game.

Think of it this way: If studio X creates a game for 360 that uses every single feature the PS3 is weak at, the PS3 port is going to suck. No question about it. The question becomes, then: why did they use all those features the PS3 is weak at?

Well, my original question was does that make it a bad port like people are claiming?

 

[marcus_rocks]

Now lets make a U turn and ask Joker454 what he would have done differently in the case of Ninja Gaiden 2 and Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2. It's also a port.

 

[obonicus]

Well, my original question was does that make it a bad port like people are claiming?

Did I ever say that? I said that it doesn't seem like that great a first-effort by PG (based on how it runs on its target platform), for all I know Sega's efforts were heroic. At least it's playable and still looks pretty okay.

 

[joker454]

Did I ever say that? I said that it doesn't seem like that great a first-effort by PG (based on how it runs on its target platform), for all I know Sega's efforts were heroic. At least it's playable and still looks pretty okay.

Ok, progress I didn't say you did, but that was my original question to those that called it a bad port, what would they have done different. Then (shockingly) it all veered away as I struggled unsuccessfully to get people to answer my original question. I usually let 'bad port' / 'lazy dev' comments slide 99% of the time now. But the games biz is very small, most of us know people at many other companies, and we all know how many hours it takes to make these games and how dedicated you have to be. So yeah, sometimes I do get irritated when I read an entire studio being written off as noobs just people some people believe the PS3 or 360 for that matter are infallible pieces of hardware capable of rendering the entire universe 3 times.

The first thing that hit me like a ton of bricks when I played the PS3 Bayonetta demo was that this game was clearly not designed for the PS3. That much is 100% clear to me. If someone suggested that much blending in the early game design meetings, and wanted to ship 60fps on PS3, I would have sent them home for a sick day. I don't know much about this game (just recently tried the demo), I don't know the history of it, nor do I know anyone at this studio. But the design of this game clearly favors the 360, so I'm guessing the PS3 was not on the radar in the beginning. It looks like some other poor studio got stuck with the port later, and were faced with getting the PS3 to do what it was not designed to do. Given that, the game doesn't seem bad to me on PS3, it's definitely playable, although I haven't tried the 360 version.

It's interesting that you mention Ghostbusters as well. I just finished that game (cool game btw) and what the demo doesn't indicate is that Ghostbusters also has a retarded amount of transparencies, many screen fulls sometimes. I think they even exhaust edram bandwidth, because I believe I spotted half res transparency buffers even on the 360 version, at least for some effects. I missed most of the hoopla when that game came out, but now that I finished it it's pretty clear to me why they dropped the res on the PS3 version at ship.

In some games, like Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2, you can design the problem away. But in other games like Ghostbusters, what are you gonna do? There are ghosts everywhere, it would be kinda silly to draw them opaque. The later ghost battles make the demo seem like a walk in the park. Likewise for the ghost traps, plasma streams, spooky effects, etc, you can't design away blending in those cases. Which leads me to...

Now lets make a U turn and ask Joker454 what he would have done differently in the case of Ninja Gaiden 2 and Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2. It's also a port.

Not much, from what I saw in the demo it looks like a 60fps game designed for the PS3, with overdraw and blend effects kept the barest minimum. I think it makes the game look sterile personally, I like the look of Bayonetta way better, IMHO. But NGS2 designed the problem away, at the expense of aesthetics.

 

[assurdum]

I'm not try to flame more Bayonetta discussion but really where is this large amount of high buffer use who joker talking compared to, for example, ngs 2 on the ps3? I can't see so much difference honestly.

 

[Dr. Nick]

That has always been the thing about Ninja Gaiden and I have always wondered why they didn't draw the characters as transparent(Xbox1-Xbox 360) When people get mad and say the an enemy attacked them from off screen the truth is the enemy turns invisible(not transparent) when it is blocking the camera. That is how people often get hit by enemies they can't see.

I'm going to make a play through video of Bayonetta tonite and try to post it if anyone is interested it will be in the Bayonetta thread once they reopen it.