What's up with the texture pop ups in Unreal 3 Engine games?

[DeadlyNinja]

I don't know if this applies to PC, but I took a glance at a 360 game, I think it was Mass Effect, but I notice the textures look like they aren't loaded unless you walk up to the characters or something. Is this a result of Unreal 3 Engine, or is it just some random problem with one or two games, or is it defective 360 doing this?

 

[Mize]

It's because PS3 RULZ!

Sorry, couldn't help myself this being consoles and all. Are you talking about abrupt changes in the clarity of a texture or pop-in at a distance?

 

[DeadlyNinja]

The characters look like weird clay models without textures and it seems like it takes a while before the textures and stuff loads up. It's weird. I don't own the game so I'm not sure what's the deal. I heard my friend complaining about it being pretty bad.

 

[Rolf N]

The engine minimizes texture footprint in memory by loading only smaller mipmap levels of textures where some heuristic determined they aren't needed at full detail. That heuristic may be too aggressive in some instances. In other cases it may simply not be possible to get the full working set into memory, so some tradeoff is made out of absolute necessity.

The other aspect is that the engine starts with low mipmap levels when it streams in content (or loads a level). The philosophy here is to avoid the load screen, to let the user interact with the game as early as possible, even when full content fidelity hasn't been achieved yet.

 

[DeadlyNinja]

I played the badly optimized Turok on PC and I never noticed this. I played Bioshock as well, and I'm pretty sure I never noticed it on the PC version.

What I saw today was completely jarring and annoying.

I'm not sure if that's such a good thing. I can understand the hate for loading, but having low polygon textureless models around isn't going to make things any better.

 

[Mize]

Could his optical drive be borked and loading textures with more errors, thus more slowly?
I've played Gears1 on the 360 and never noticed major texture problems.

I started to play Mass Effect but got bored. Still I didn't notice untextured models at any point and I think I would have. I think normal "texture pop-in" is due to either rendering horizon or poor mipmap filtering.

 

[Neb]

I played the badly optimized Turok on PC and I never noticed this. I played Bioshock as well, and I'm pretty sure I never noticed it on the PC version.

What I saw today was completely jarring and annoying.

I'm not sure if that's such a good thing. I can understand the hate for loading, but having low polygon textureless models around isn't going to make things any better.

Only part wher it could be visible on PC is first time save load for some seconds but after that no. Even with increased detail settings beyond menu config it doesn't ever happen bar the first few seconds when loading a save/map for first time (ME/UT3). IIRC think it got to do with CPU time scheduled for texture streaming.

 

[warb]

I had a dodgy 360 DVD drive, and Mass Effect textures took forever to load when the drive was struggling.

It isn't very noticeable in the Bioshock games for 360, it happens more often in Gears and Mass Effect. Textures fading in for 10 seconds is preferable to an extra 10 seconds of load screen. Load times are very short in Gears 2, and that's great.

 

[DeadlyNinja]

Only part wher it could be visible on PC is first time save load for some seconds but after that no. Even with increased detail settings beyond menu config it doesn't ever happen bar the first few seconds when loading a save/map for first time (ME/UT3). IIRC think it got to do with CPU time scheduled for texture streaming.

Yeah, upon further digging on google, it seems like it is an Unreal Engine 3 problem on the consoles. So you trade load times for some really jarring and weird texture loading and low polygon models. Seems like you either have to take one or the other.

 

[BoardBonobo]

I've seen this in Gears on my 360 and quite a lot in Borderlands on the PS3, you get a moment where it looks like there are no textures loaded and then suddenly they just kind of grow into being, as in the details creep in rather than just appearing. It's just got to be how the UE3 handles texture loads. It's only annoying when it breaks the game continuity.

 

[AlNom]

Btw, in Gears 2 & Batman, they blend between mipmaps as they load in rather than having the immediate popping.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

The strange thing is that Mass Effect 1 does a lot of this even when it's installed on the X360 hard drive. I would have thought that loading speeds should at least double, but apparently it's not the case.

Then again, I can live together with it...

 

[jlippo]

The strange thing is that Mass Effect 1 does a lot of this even when it's installed on the X360 hard drive. I would have thought that loading speeds should at least double, but apparently it's not the case.

Saw rare case where a character textures were constantly being swapped between mipmap levels during a conversation.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Now -that- would be terrible to see. Ouch. I hope the sequel's better...

 

[Colourless]

Mass Effect on the PC has pop in too. However Bioware did something for Mass Effect 2 (they even said as mucH) and I didn't notice any pop in.

 

[DeadlyNinja]

Wait, so this isn't really a problem with the Unreal 3 Engine, but rather the speed of today's storage medium, correct? Let say in an alternate reality, we have carts that can hold a zillion gigabytes of data for games and the speed of carts, would this problem be eliminated?

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Yes, of course.