The technology of Alan Wake *spawn

[Shifty Geezer]

Seems since PC games run at countless resolutions, it cant be obscenely difficult.

They may well be able to set a render resolution by changing a few variables, but the whole balance of the rendering engine would be impacted. Setting resolution to 720p may cripple some finely-tuned aspects of the engine, rather than just introduce a bit of turning. Remember these developers are working on sub-millisecond budgets of processing time, whereas a PC developer can't care about such efficiencies due tot the range of hardware that may be playing their game. In the PC's case, the solution is to provide options and let the user decide, which is an inefficiency and complexity the consoles can do without. Supporting 1080i has already proven a nuisance!

 

[Neb]

On a PC game though, you can choose from many resolutions, all native?

All native unless game has support for SSAA (Arma 2) or even upscaling, IIRC UT3 with "screen percentage".

 

[Laa-Yosh]

On a PC game though, you can choose from many resolutions, all native?

Yeah; but if you don't have enough VRAM on your graphics card, then the game will start to drop into single digit frame rates - even on a PC game.

The difference is that you can buy a new graphics card with more VRAM on a PC. Consoles are kinda struck with what's included, so devs can't just go around changing resolutions whenever they feel like it. They set memory requirements and then have to stick with it.

Or they can also set it lower and add upscaling as a last minute fix, but then they get roasted on the tech/gaming forums of the internet...

 

[joker454]

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.

There is no personal perception here whatsoever, it's purely technical. Quinqunx blurs the image, that's what it does. If you don't think so then read the tech docs but rest assured, it blurs it. Likewise for tv upscalers, most are cheap and blur the image. Again if you don't think so then do the research, there is a reason there is an entire market for external upscalers because the ones in tv's are typically terrible. I'm going to guess that you don't see the blur, something that astonishes me because it's so obvious to my eyes. But then again I suspect that I'm in the minority and that most people really aren't anywhere near as sensitive to blur as they think they are (during play), and I'd wager that some even prefer it.

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:

Yeah I find it hard to believe that they could just change it given all those render targets. Seem like it would take some planning to get all that working just right. Then again maybe they had it all working for 720p, couldn't meet performance goals, then just downsized everything. I hope they do a tech summary someday, I'm curious as to what's going on behind the scenes.

EDIT: Actually now I'm thinking it may have never been 720p. They are using so many render targets, meaning that for performance they would have wanted to batch those as much as possible, piggy back as many off the same shader as possible. So for best performance they probably would have had to use four mrt's as often as possible. But 10mb of edram isn't enough to hold four 1280x720 mrt's. Maybe they tried 1280x680 at some point with three mrt's but that didn't cut it for performance, so then they just dropped resolution even lower so that they could use four in the 10mb of edram.

 

[Alucardx23]

Yes, depending on what the post-processing effects are. Things like colour grading aren't going to make any visual difference if applied at 720p or 540p and upscaled, but there will be a processing cost, whereas actually drawing pixels in post (eg. grain), rendering in 720p will add fidelity. Without any idea what post effects are being applied, typical use suggests post effects will be being applied on a 540p backbuffer. Regards the dev quote...
The HUD is probably the only thing not being upscaled. The cost of upscaling (probably on GPU rather than CPU) is needed to maintain fidelity in the UI. If they didn't care about a blurry UI, which really does look rough, then they could have composited a 540p UI and had Xenos upscale through the principle video pipeline as normal. If they want a 720p UI, there's no other choices beyond render a 720p backbuffer or upscale a lower-resolution backbuffer to 720p via software before overlaying UI.

Thanks for the answer, so does that mean that Final XIII is also upscaling the image on CPU for the same reason as Alan Wake?

 

[JB9861]

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.

Alan Wake can be a fine looking game irrespective of resolution. Games in similar situations turned out just fine. However, I'm not going to consider Alan Wake better than a Resident Evil or an Uncharted that is meeting the expectations of IQ, fidelity, and complexity people come to expect.

 

[assurdum]

There is no personal perception here whatsoever, it's purely technical. Quinqunx blurs the image, that's what it does. If you don't think so then read the tech docs but rest assured, it blurs it. Likewise for tv upscalers, most are cheap and blur the image. Again if you don't think so then do the research, there is a reason there is an entire market for external upscalers because the ones in tv's are typically terrible. I'm going to guess that you don't see the blur, something that astonishes me because it's so obvious to my eyes. But then again I suspect that I'm in the minority and that most people really aren't anywhere near as sensitive to blur as they think they are (during play), and I'd wager that some even prefer it.

Wait a minute , I haven't said the QAA or 1080p downscale to 720p not cause blurriness, but simply the subhd it isn't comparable to QAA or a dowscaling in a blurriness (in a decent tv). Said this it isn't technical matter but subjective perception. Just that.

 

[Dungeonscaper]

Maybe they should 'remedy' the geometry buffer to 720p native har har

 

[Lycan]

http://uk.xbox360.ign.com/dor/objec...interview_042210.html;jsessionid=1cryuirrdctp

In the posted link, the game looks blurry indeed. But I'm uncertain whether to blame it on the video quality ?! :smile:

 

[Scott_Arm]

http://uk.xbox360.ign.com/dor/objec...interview_042210.html;jsessionid=1cryuirrdctp

In the posted link, the game looks blurry indeed. But I'm uncertain whether to blame it on the video quality ?! :smile:

The developer seems to be rendered sub HD. He should go back to the drawing board and reinvent himself. Next time he's back he should look a little sharper for the camera.

 

[AnttiApina]

Hi! Hopefully this won't be a douple post, seems like my first mesasge didn't arrive.

Anyway, a handful of new screens are available at GameReactor:
http://www.gamereactor.se/bild/?textid=22161&id=210435

Hopefully this will settle the resolution debate. I suggest you look into these pictures, becaues they are from a different source and seem rather sharp compared to the VideoGames.De screens.

Could someone do a quick calculation on one of these pictures?

Thank you!

 

[AlNom]

Could someone do a quick calculation on one of these pictures?

We can move on (really!).

 

[LightHeaven]

Hi! Hopefully this won't be a douple post, seems like my first mesasge didn't arrive.

Anyway, a handful of new screens are available at GameReactor:
http://www.gamereactor.se/bild/?textid=22161&id=210435

Hopefully this will settle the resolution debate. I suggest you look into these pictures, becaues they are from a different source and seem rather sharp compared to the VideoGames.De screens.

Could someone do a quick calculation on one of these pictures?

Thank you!

I can't pixel count, but those sure look like upscaled, though indeed they look better then the previous ones. And seems to hold up pretty well, it only looks really bad on the cars (but they already don't look that great no matter the res, so XD)... probably the higher contrast areas will be more affected.

 

[ultragpu]

They look upscaled to me, the water almost look pixelated and the textures look definitively blurry but the aliasing are pretty much gone. Still a pretty looking game if you ask me.

 

[2real4tv]

Are those direct feeds or captures from a video?

 

[corduroygt]

Very obvious that it's not 720p from those shots, but why should you care as long as it looks good.
I'm playing a subHD game at the moment (Ratchet and Clank) and I still enjoy it.

 

[ShadowRunner]

To be fair this is a technology discussion. That said the res has been confirmed many times no need to keep going over it, though it would be interesting to know the technical reason for them going for 540p rather than 580 or 500p etc. wether it was purely a performance/quality balancing act and 540p was the best or if there was anything else influencing the descision like scaling issues or something.

 

[Quaz51]

Hi! Hopefully this won't be a douple post, seems like my first mesasge didn't arrive.

Anyway, a handful of new screens are available at GameReactor:
http://www.gamereactor.se/bild/?textid=22161&id=210435

Hopefully this will settle the resolution debate. I suggest you look into these pictures, becaues they are from a different source and seem rather sharp compared to the VideoGames.De screens.

Could someone do a quick calculation on one of these pictures?

Thank you!

all 540p

 

[LittleJohnny]

To be fair this is a technology discussion. That said the res has been confirmed many times no need to keep going over it, though it would be interesting to know the technical reason for them going for 540p rather than 580 or 500p etc. wether it was purely a performance/quality balancing act and 540p was the best or if there was anything else influencing the descision like scaling issues or something.

540p is probably easier to scale to 1080. 540x2=1080.

I still would rather wait until the final game is released and tests are done with a gold copy.

 

[AlNom]

540p is probably easier to scale to 1080. 540x2=1080.

As noted before, the framebuffer is software scaled to overlay the 720p HUD, so the integer factor scaling argument would be irrelevant.

I still would rather wait until the final game is released and tests are done with a gold copy.

I wouldn't hold too much expectation on res, but the rest of the analysis ought to be interesting. Situation with tearing? framerate drops? where and why? texture aliasing? where the MSAA fails if it does? shadows... alpha to coverage... does fog receive colour lighting? how's the geometry LOD transition? water techniques? etc.

Resolution isn't the only technical aspect.