The technology of Alan Wake *spawn

[Billy Idol]

Are those 720p caps with 4xAA??
If I remember correctly: 720p+4xAA needs 3 tiles?!
This sounds like a dramatic change to the whole engine if true?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

This apparent decrease in the resolution is probably also one of the reasons why the issue gets so much attention. Some people might feel that Remedy has tried to cheat them or something.

This si something Nintendo alone seemed to have got right by not giving numbers. Both MS and Sony went into this generation with promises of HD quality that the hardware just wasn't up to supporting. They should have just kept their mouths closed and not bandied numbers around that people would then take as promises and grumble about! Last gen had upscaling games and no-one complained, because they didn't know. There's no need to care about resolutions outside of tech interest when all that matters is whether you like the end results or not, which should be decided by looking at them instead of measuring numbers!

Developers should abandon talk of resolutions and AA, and just say if they are aiming for high image quality, or just ignore the issue and talk instead about a 'cinematic experience' or 'realism'.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

It's not just the platform holders' promises, but previous screenshots and ingame movies were all 720p; see the DigitalFoundry preview.
Personally, I still think it's too blurry, but we'll see how it looks on a TV. I'm not much of a horror fan though so I hope there'll be a demo of some sorts...

 

[Billy Idol]

This si something Nintendo alone seemed to have got right by not giving numbers. Both MS and Sony went into this generation with promises of HD quality that the hardware just wasn't up to supporting. They should have just kept their mouths closed and not bandied numbers around that people would then take as promises and grumble about! Last gen had upscaling games and no-one complained, because they didn't know. There's no need to care about resolutions outside of tech interest when all that matters is whether you like the end results or not, which should be decided by looking at them instead of measuring numbers!

Developers should abandon talk of resolutions and AA, and just say if they are aiming for high image quality, or just ignore the issue and talk instead about a 'cinematic experience' or 'realism'.

Do you really think that it is the hardware's fault?
I mean, we have HD games - each dev can make this choice!
Or do you think that the ever demanding gamer (=me) are guilty - who always wants more and more extra bling for the same money!
The problem is that we will never know how a 1080p+4xAA Alan Wake Xbox360 version will look like in comparison to the actual game - so we will never have the informations Remedy has, which means that we have to accept their decision.
The only thing we can do, is compare different games to each other - which is simple a highly subjective task!

 

[Mastperf]

It's time to distinguish personal perception to reality here. I understood to be defensive about the sub hd games, not means bad IQ or bad developers, but really blame the QAA even worsen it's ridicolous now. Loss of details of the QAA is pretty similar between HDMI & component cable definition. & come on now compared even 1080p downscaling to 720p in a full HD on the ps3. Where are finished to gaf here? We are in a technical forum.

Try not to take things so personally. His opinion about QAA isn't worth a useless argument that derails the thread.

 

[assurdum]

There was a time when the game was running at 720p, so your screenshot could have been made at that point. Although it still looks too blurry... Edit: yeah, Quaz has just confirmed it's a case of picking the bad edge for the counting.

This apparent decrease in the resolution is probably also one of the reasons why the issue gets so much attention. Some people might feel that Remedy has tried to cheat them or something.

This story become to absurd to more absurd...the game it's 540p not dynamic resolution from what we know now. Really it's time to talk of the others technical aspect and go on.

 

[2real4tv]

This story become to absurd to more absurd...the game it's 540p not dynamic resolution from what we know now. Really it's time to talk of the others technical aspect and go on.

He's talking about gameplay from an old trailer.

 

[assurdum]

Try not to take things so personally. His opinion about QAA isn't worth a useless argument that derails the thread.

Please don't take my post for what it isn't. If we want to discuss about the difference of QAA blurriness and subhd it isn't a problem. I think it's right to talk of this difference even here; but try to pass an individual opinion for a technical observation to me it isn't correct & I have reported my opinion. Sorry for the ot however.

 

[assurdum]

He's talking about gameplay from an old trailer.

From what I know the game last year was 720p 2xmsaa for this showing the 720p. Then remedy opted for the 540p & 4xFSAA.

 

[PointMan]

This story become to absurd to more absurd...the game it's 540p not dynamic resolution from what we know now. Really it's time to talk of the others technical aspect and go on.

He's referring to the PC version that was previously in development as we all know. Probably in resolutions higher than 720p to boot. I vividly remember Remedy demo this game on PC years ago at an Intel event on an overclocked GPU.

Only now on 360 hardware do we see the native resolution at 540p, screencaps and bullshots were all from the PC build, the same way Capcom kept sending out PC bullshots of Lost Planet 2 and passing them off as 360 screens because they hadn't/haven't confirmed the existence of a PC port.

 

[assurdum]

He's referring to the PC version that was previously in development as we all know. Probably in resolutions higher than 720p to boot. I vividly remember Remedy demo this game on PC years ago at an Intel event on an overclocked GPU.

Only now on 360 hardware do we see the native resolution at 540p, screencaps and bullshots were all from the PC build, the same way Capcom kept sending out PC bullshots of Lost Planet 2 and passing them off as 360 screens because they hadn't/haven't confirmed the existence of a PC port.

Ah sorry.

 

[PointMan]

No worries mate

 

[Dave Glue]

Well if the lower res bothers you so much, then just wait for the PC ver-

Oh...yeah.

 

[Alucardx23]

I think we should stick to calling it the framebuffer getting upscaled. If the opaque geometry framebuffer is being rendered at 540p, it's kind of a waste of resources to render other less notable layers of content like particle buffer at a higher resolution. The one layer needing to be 720p for cripsness is the UI. Everything else that is being composited into frame is highly probably being rendered at 540p. Strip away the UI, and the backbuffer will be 540p. This is upscaled to 720p, upscaling all the rendered pixels, and composited with the UI before being output.

Could there be a case where the opaque geometry framebuffer is being upscaled to 720P and then combined with the other higher resolution post processing effects? I was thinking about this, because what’s the point of upscaling the image to 720P using CPU resources, isn’t the upscaler on 360 free?

At least that’s what I think when I read this statement.

"Alan Wake's renderer on the Xbox360 uses about 50 different intermediate render targets in different resolutions, color depths and anti-alias settings for different purposes. These are used for example for cascaded shadow maps from sun & moon, shadow maps from flashlights, flares and street lights, z-prepass, tiled color buffers, light buffers for deferred rendering, vector blur, screen-space ambient occlusion, auto-exposure, HUD, video buffers, menus and so on. In the end all are combined to form one 720p image, with all intermediate buffer sizes selected to optimize image quality and GPU performance. All together the render targets take about 80 MB of memory, equivalent in size to over twenty 720p buffers.""

 

[Rangers]

He's referring to the PC version that was previously in development as we all know. Probably in resolutions higher than 720p to boot. I vividly remember Remedy demo this game on PC years ago at an Intel event on an overclocked GPU.

Only now on 360 hardware do we see the native resolution at 540p, screencaps and bullshots were all from the PC build, the same way Capcom kept sending out PC bullshots of Lost Planet 2 and passing them off as 360 screens because they hadn't/haven't confirmed the existence of a PC port.

How do you know all the AW screencaps were from the PC build? And how do you know the same for Capcom's LP2 shots? Also LP2 is PC, PS3 and 360, not only PC/360.

My fear is that Remedy made a dumb technical decision somewhere, at least dumb in the sense that now people are freaking out over the 540P. Even if for all we know 540P 4XAA looks better than say 720P 0XAA here. Now, if the game couldn't come close to running at 720P on Xbox with these level of graphics, I can accept that. But if at some point it was 720P on Xbox, it was running ok, and they changed it, say to just make it run a little better, that bothers me.

But it is pretty funny how in all these cases nobody really knows the res until a pixel counter comes along. I mean nobody was saying AW looks like low res or bad before this. The same pretty much goes for most sub HD games.

Anyways I'll be interested in the sales, I hope it sells well because it still looks great on balance and I hope to see Joe Public not care about the resolution, which I think is a safe bet.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Do you really think that it is the hardware's fault?
...
Or do you think that the ever demanding gamer (=me) are guilty - who always wants more and more extra bling for the same money!

Yes, these combined. These are finite boxes with limited RAM, bandwidth, and processing capabilities. They just plain can't do everything! Very few games manage 720p 4xMSAA 60fps. There are compromises all over the place. Sure, some developers will manage to eek out more performance from the hardware than others, but it's unrealistic to expect every game to hit some high levels of IQ, especially when what's going on under the hood that isn't visible in the rendered graphics can be so varied. eg. Uncharted 2's controlled environments and streaming means it has a very different visual budget than Alan Wake, even if superficially they seem very similar (the protagonists even look the same!). Thus it would be wrong to extrapolate, "Uncharted 2 is 720p with 2xMSAA, so Alan Wake should be to." Anyone blaming the developer for not trying or not managing enough is not judging them failure, because there just isn't enough information to go on. We have no idea what the limiting factors are or the compromises, whether the code is optimal or not.

The disucssion around Halo3's resolution had the benefit of public papers on their choice of HDR, so we knew where the limitations were and could decide whether we considered their choices the right tradeoffs or not. But here we have nothing other than a resolution and the rendered pixels. It is quite possible that no amount of further investment or design could improve the resolution keeping everything else as it is, because the XB360 is just being maxxed out. If you want high quality visuals at high resolutions with high IQ, you need to use rendering hardware that isn't 5 years old with only 512MBs total RAM to work with!

 

[Rangers]

Too be fair also, Remedy is a very small team compared to some of these other studios. Around 50 people. Though, they had a long time on the game as well.

 

[Lycan]

Pardon my ignorance, but if the game was running at 720 p not so long ago, how could Remedy have changed it ? I mean is there a "switch" to modify resolution that could be turned on and off at will, even at the latest stage of development ? :smile:

 

[Trejser]

Pardon my ignorance, but if the game was running at 720 p not so long ago, how could Remedy have changed it ? I mean is there a "switch" to modify resolution that could be turned on and off at will, even at the latest stage of development ? :smile:

This could have been pc version with 360 controller/UI, it's nothing new in the industry

 

[PointMan]

@ Ranger

I was following the PC version of AW first, maybe that's how I'd never seen an actual 360 screen, After 5 years and next to no info other than this light weakens that man, or everything he had written in novels were coming to life... it get very tiring following such things religiously.

You didn't see the tremendously huge high res LP2 screenshots coming from Gamersyde that Capcom sent out to them, they were like 2160p - (exagg) lol.

Also yeah often times the layman simply can't tell the difference in terms of the resolution being sub-HD or not but you got to admit that something would be iffy if the game looked like that 720p screen that Quaz dismissed as up there. The hud is flawless, the image is so-so.

I hope it's not the case.