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

Having had my own tech decisions mindlessly criticized by people on this forum without complete (or even any) knowledge I'm inclined to give Valve the benefit of the doubt.

Portal 2 may not be as flashy as other games, but this doesn't mean anything. They're solving different problems. They have to render parts of the game world at least 3 times in some situations. I'm sure there are a thousand other challenges they ran into. There always are.

The answer as to why the antialiasing or FB resolution in Portal 2 doesn't work the way you think it should is the same answer as always: because there was a trade off and Valve made the decision they thought was best, based on their collective years of experience and knowledge of their engine, game requirements, and schedule.

 

Ahem, Portal isn't using a deferred renderer nor is it pushing anywhere near as much stuff as Reach or Crysis 2.

They didn't tile because they weren't interested in putting the effort into the 360 SKU, not because of anything else.

Does Portal 2 has better IQ than L4D2? I just downloaded the 360 demo and it isn't pretty - are they using a blur filter there too? It would seem not as they're jaggies everywhere.

If they couldn't tile they could have gone with temporal AA, it does a pretty decent job in Reach

Oh and further evidence that they weren't really interested in utilising the most of the 360 is the fact that the PS3 has less RAM, split between two pools AND they're running the Steam client which would take up some more MBs and yet we don't see any higher resolution textures etc on the 360.

 

Orange Box had no AA but it had the same cheap looking motion blur that Portal 2 has.

Also your post doesn't make much sense, you're saying that they aren't lazy about their 360 versions but they still use the same motion blur technique from their first 360 game (Orange Box), they haven't improve their AA solution from the first L4D game (which kinda makes more sense not using MSAA in it considering the big number of enemies on screen and them targetting a steady 30fps at almost all times) and now they take out effects from certain parts of Portal 2 (motion blur is absent in some levels as pointed out by DF) when at the same time the game runs at 30fps with tearing in the overscan area which I don't recall being apparent in their previous 360 games.

As much I love their games Portal 2 on 360 should have been better...their previous titles on 360 sold almost 7.5m copies - considering the amount of money they got from these basic ports I think that the 360 community deserves something better and that the problem to get tiling in the 360 and improve their engine in every way is more than worth it.

It's pretty clear that both of those games that you mention are doing a lot more than Portal 2 in almost every way tech-wise so why get angry at Crytek or Bungie? they're both don't use tiling because they're pushing the system a lot when on the other hand we have an old engine like Source not using tiling/having a proper AA solution when at the same time doing a lot less.

Crysis 2 and Reach are running at 30fps at sub-HD, if RE4 HD comes out this fall and runs at sub-HD with temporal AA at 30fps will it be ok just because Crysis 2 and Reach are doing the same? No because we don't have the same requirements from all games & engines.

 

I don't think The Orange Box had motion blur on 360.

Both PC and PS3 are using the same motion blur as they had in The Orange Box as well. It's a high quality effect.

We don't know if the AA technique hasn't improved. It might have looked better in conjunction with the heavy film grain of L4D.

Again, I don't believe this is something that was specifically removed from Portal 2 but from The Orange Box years ago.

As you can see in the analysis of The Orange Box the 360 version has a few framerate drops (though obviously not as many as the PS3 version). Surely a few unnoticable tears is better than framerate dips?

 

Some of the early "HDMI captures" of 360 Portal 2 made it look plain bad, but actually it doesn't look that bad at all. Sure, I don't like the blurring, and the 360 version is the worst (depending on the particular PC someone might be using) but one version always has to be and it's not as if Valve has given anyone the shaft.

Absolutely, but couldn't issues like pushing Steam and Valve's bridge building with Sony influence things like requirements and allocated resources? I don't think it would be wrong if they did. Of course it could be nothing to do with this, and this could just be unjustified (and ignorant) speculation.

If it turned out that Valve hit limitations with fitting buffers in edram and with cpu performance (for example) then I guess that's just tough luck for the 360.

 

1. Orange Box 360 (and PS3 I assume) was the first game based on Source that had HDR and motion blur, the PC version got updated with these effects some months later with a patch IIRC.
2. I wouldn't call it a high quality effect, looks rather cheap IMO when compared to the latest motion blur techniques that are used by most games these days.
3.Having played all the Valve games on the 360 including of course Portal 2 I can say that the blur edge effect looks worse on Portal 2 than both the L4D games...especially on the distant objects.
4. Portal 2 and Orange Box on 360 have the same motion blur effect as I said earlier...the weird thing is that they removed the feature in some spots in the SP campaign of Portal 2 as DF already mentioned.
5. Orange Box is a 2007 title and Portal 2 is a 2011, is it normal for Valve to not maintain a constant v-synced 30fps with this visual quality on an engine that they're working almost 4 years now and with no tiling? this doesn't sound like proper optimization to me.

 

No matter how well optimised your code is, if you ask too much then performance will suffer. If the engine benefits from large amounts of video memory and a fast CPU it could run better on the PS3 even if considerable time had been spent on the 360 game.

Removing motion blur on certain levels could be nothing more than a simple way to maintain performance.

 

In what way do you believe Portal 2 is demanding much from the CPU aside from MLAA? I would argue that MLAA's inclusion is evidence that they aren't.

 

I don't know, I'm just thinking out loud.

I was wondering if there might be a significant advantage to doing lots of visibility testing and culling on the different view volumes. I mean, the ones through the portals wouldn't even be truncated pyramids if you projected the volume from the oval portal entrance. Probably wouldn't be worth doing anything too clever, but I dunno.

 

It's more like they put effort into getting it just running on the PS3. It's just like they put effort into getting it running on the 360 with their first 360 game.

 

The PC version of Half Life 2: Episode 2 and Portal shipped with the same engine as The Orange Box on console (which used the same engine for all 5 games, and there is no Orange Box game on PC, the games are all seperate applications). A few months ago Half Life 2 and Episode 1 were updated to have the same engine features as Episode 2 on PC. Episode 1 was the first Source game to have HDR.

The motion blur effect is high quality (high number of samples) camera effect, it's not object motion blur like some games have but is still a good effect. I'd say it's one of the best looking camera effects I've seen, but personal preference I guess. Is it disabled all the time or only in certain scenes on 360? It should always be in effect for any fast camera movement, falling from portals, etc.

 

No - well EA did that (just got it running) with the PS3 version of the Orange Box and it didn't work out so well.

You have to put more effort into a PS3 port to get it to run as well as it's 360 counterpart (porting code to SPUs to make up for the deficit of PPU cores, dealing with the memory issues etc.)

 

In summary, is everyone in agreement that it's extremely curious that Valve, with a high profile title like Portal 2, is unable to at the very least provide visual parity on a title that seemingly does very little in the way of pushing the performance envelope relative to its contemporaries. If there is a legitimation technical reason then fine, but at this point in time, its not obvious what in the world that might be.

I think this definitely calls for a DF dev interview. They can't say no if you don't ask.

 

EA is not Valve. Are you saying that you know EA gave that ported code over to Valve to reuse?

 

I thought the discussion was about blur vs no blur. Are people expecting other benefits over the ps3 version? Because I thought that was the only thing that differed between the two?

 

Sigh - no, I meant EA did what you said "put effort into just getting it running on PS3" and it didn't turn out well, because you need relatively more effort to get PS3 titles to perform equivalently to their 360 counterparts.

 

There's the blur, the missing motion blur, and apparently a slight difference in colour range. The difference in colours is slight and doesn't show up in DFs comparison shots, however I was able to take caps from their head-to-head vid that highlight it.

 

Actually, the first Source game using HDR was the HL2 Lost Coast level. It was more of a tech demo than an actual game, but still...

 

No, the first source game that used HDR was Day of Defeat: Source.

 

Wasn't Wreckless (double steal) the first HDR game (2002)?

oh: source game