Fully dynamic and realtime shadows, 24h dynamic lighting, POM for certain effects (car tire marks and some forms of deformation, bullet holes), millions and millions of polygons to render city with huge amount of dynamic and static objects, advanced animation system, lots of characters and cars with advacned properties, lots of soft particle in effects with sparks that bounces on everything (terrain, static, dynamic), 3D deformable water with realtime reflections and refractions, 100's of dynamic lightsources, working city system that brings life to it, cars reflecting surrounding and not just a singel car doing it, some building windows reflecting city in realtime, at night tons of moving lights to simulate cars at distance and much more.
The Technology of GTA IV/RDR *Rage Engine*
- Thread starter babcat
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Fully dynamic and realtime shadows, 24h dynamic lighting, POM for certain effects (car tire marks and some forms of deformation, bullet holes), millions and millions of polygons to render city with huge amount of dynamic and static objects, advanced animation system, lots of characters and cars with advacned properties, lots of soft particle in effects with sparks that bounces on everything (terrain, static, dynamic), 3D deformable water with realtime reflections and refractions, 100's of dynamic lightsources, working city system that brings life to it, cars reflecting surrounding and not just a singel car doing it, some building windows reflecting city in realtime, at night tons of moving lights to simulate cars at distance and much more.
The ability to fly around with a helicopter in GTA4 kinda invalidates that point...
I thought those were just glows instead of being actual lights.
Also many of the things you mentioned there are either completely absent or done at a much smaller scale (like number of NPCs & physics on moving objects/vehicles) in RDR , yet its the exact same story as GTA4: Episodes, on PS3. Though volumetric lighting,improved shadowing & larger draw distance (at the expense of a huge loss in density & verticality) are in.....but that's pretty much it !
I thought those were just glows instead of being actual lights.
Didn't say they where dynamic lights and even if so at such distance they would have been LODed to not be dynamic ones. Though the thing is the glowmap needs to be rendered, there is tons of em and they are moving. Also the lights are 2x2 on each simple 3D car mesh and there is 100's of cars (probably upwards 1000) moving unless it is different for console version (car mesh)?
But I doubt their engine would perform worse/worse IQ than it did with PS3 GTAIV. If anything it must have been tweaked and improved and then there must be something in RDR that eats perfomance or makes HW limitations come to play that didn't come out as obvious or at all with GTAIV. Calculation wise they should be able to do atleast as much as they did with GTAIV.
TheWretched
Regular
Seems to me, there's a window on the opposite side wall. But... why it is there on one console and not the other beats me. Maybe they just forgot to switch it off on PS3
First of all thanks for the answer.
I agree with you a lot, R* put a lot of stuff into RAGE but when it comes to performance, I think it fails. PCs don't have tight resources, did GTA4 perform well even on high-end PCs? No.They chose putting lots of stuff into the engine but at the same time they reduced the quality a lot. Look at GTA4, it is blurry as hell.
RAGE is not optimized. That's why I don't take it as a technical marvel.
Yes but not satisfactory nor optimal when lower settings did give you worse perfomance in some cases, leaks etc. But they patched some stuff. Though they increased detail a lot for lots of things taking it far beyond console versions but destroyed image clarity by having same crappy low-res "DOF" fullscreen blur filter which also has motionblur tied to it. Then for such a game DX10/DX10.1 would have been far more optimal handling all draw calls aswell as allowing MSAA. Though
Funny thing is in the begining with just a few patches out the game had with medium' texture setting delayed texture loading as if VRAM was saturated on my 1GB graphic card yet VRAM use was around 800MB. The bizzare thing is that setting texture detail to 'high' upping VRAM requirement to ~1.4GB resulted in no delayed texture loading!
It is supposed to be the other way around!
Problem was with 'high' texture settings the game leaked constantly until all RAM was consumed and I had it hitting 5.5GB of RAM use.
Anyway considering the visuals increase is pretty much tremendous going past low-med it wasn't that bad but the blur filter destroyed a lot of the IQ. With MSAA/SSAA it would end up as one of the best looking titles. Problem is disabling blur filter reveals the dither vegetation which looks bad.
http://img689.imageshack.us/i/defaultbluron.jpg/
http://img687.imageshack.us/i/defaultbluroff2.jpg/
http://img10.imageshack.us/i/defaultbluroff.jpg/
And SSAA for post-processing and billboard rendering which was actually quite playable as it was not fully SSAA for everything though latest patch doesn't work with the mod and latest patch got huge improvements. XD
http://img200.imageshack.us/i/newbluron.jpg/
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=47845&highlight=gta&page=26
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Billy Idol
Legend
Thanks!
TheWretched
Regular
In Lens of Truths Head2Head, the exact same "artefact" presents itself too... I somehow doubt, that both site, GT and LoT, managed the same times for their plays.
Really strange.
That's BS. Rockstar just didn't give a damn about PC performance, considering that the game sold less then 10% of the console versions' numbers on the platform.
It runs at a quite stable 30fps on the X360, so it is well optimized.
Probably a strange pop in in 360 version; I don't think in a coincidence at this point. However if 360 it's better in transparencies & resolution not means necessarly everything on ps3 it's worsen.
Is she standing by a window? If so, the PS3 version is correct and it's a lighting issue on XB360. If not, the light isn't being occluded in PS3 and it's the XB360 that's correct. There was a lot of shadow pop-in that I saw in RDR last night (first viewing) and I noticed sunlight passed through hills in some cases. I don't know how that compares, but lack of shadowing may be an explanation.
TheWretched
Regular
IIRC, the camera turns around in that scene showing windows... I can't say if it was that window letting in the light, but there definitely are several windows in that room, and it's not just that lighting visible on PS3, but several, that are missing on 360.
Its not exclusive to that version though.
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I think he's just pointing out that the 360 version is not missing any of the lighting that comes in through windows.
I liked your post and I can understand this. I don't have a PS3, personally, but the port might be a good one if the differences are due to memory limitations of the operating system and both games look so close.It's actually a hard question to answer. It's not one specific thing I can point to and say 'that!' (as is the case with a lot of other games).
Perhaps technical marvel isn't the right term. As a combined, coordinated effort for a team I feel GTA4 is unmatched. While I'm not all that keen on the humor, or even the core gameplay and game design, I feel you can look at any specific area of the game and see work that is absolutely top class across the board, especially when considered the exceptionally tight resource and performance restrictions.
The stand out for me is the audio.
It is simply mind boggling in it's scope and quality (when you really listen to it).
The animation and physics in the game is top class too. However taken as part of a huge game world, with a large number of characters and vehicles on screen at all times - where they probably only get a tiny slice of memory, cpu and streaming time - then it's simply exceptional.
The vehicle physics alone have a sense of weight and realism you rarely see (which, ironically, is probably why most people didn't like them). Look carefully and they are even properly modeling the clutch, etc.
Something as simple as bumping into another pedestrian while walking along the footpath.. An absolutely trivial event, yet it's handled as well as any other game. The technical details of such a small event are actually quite vast - touching on many, many areas of the engine.
On top of a simply staggering amount of content, fitting within less than 7GB and streaming in response to the player's unpredictable whims.
The slight added blurriness of the PS3 iteration of the game might be caused by the inherent use of Quincunx AA, not a limiting factor of the hardware.
However I would go with a different approach when porting the game. In my opinion they better go with 720p+AAx4+60 fps on the PS3, no matter the sacrifices!!!!
If they managed to keep the draw distance with no popping then it would be perfect, and also reducing the level of detail in some areas it could be a great version.
720p+AAx4+60 fps should be mandatory for a lot of games, in my opinion. Neither Sony or Microsof encourage this, sadly.
I'm a sucker for 60 fps games and it's really sad this generation most games run at 30 fps. One of the good things about the PS2 is that it had a lot of games running at 60 fps.
The difference is night and day, as I am pretty sensitive to frames per second.
Sorry to use your post to explain this long rant. Oooh, cheers!