Will next gen consoles finally put an end to ugly low res textures?

COD games =/= ALL (or even the majority of) current gen games

COD games unlike the vast majority of current gen games are rendered at twice the framerate of the rest (60fps as opposed to 30 fps) hence the sacrifices to achieve that framerate. COD games are not typical of current gen games but are the outliers.

Look at games like Halo Reach, Red Dead Redemption, KZ3 to name a few, to see some very nice textures that don't "fall apart" up close. Your example is bad and thus your argument falls apart.

I'm also quite sure that Halo1's textures up close are still no where near the fidelity of most current gen games' up close. Your statement was pure hyperbole.

I agree that there are alot of games this gen with horrid textures, and i agree that next-gen needs to bring sufficient RAM to solve that issue, but i don't agree with sensationalist, hyperbolic statements about last-gen games that are simply not true.

 

Honestly texture quality appears dreadful on console because they are so old. In the same time everybody and his brothers think that +7 years before their replacement is fine. They don't stop there as they can't disput the fact that +7years lifespan without replacement is a sucky thing due to necessity and sucky decisions from MS and Sony, they think that next gen consoles should push the bar even further than this gen did so they can last who konws? 10 years. Manufacturers should be ready to loose any amounts of money in the first years for the sake of lasting 10 years and may be make money in the long run. 10 years is a too long, imagine being stuck in front of the competition with a ten year business plan that involve only one product... I'll tell you they are lucky Nintendo weren't aggressive enough in surfing the Wii wave, because they had their pants down and couldn't react before imho at least two years.

Basically this is a fucked-up way of thinking, it somehow looks logical as it takes in account causality not a chain of causalities.

Form a technical POV virtual texturing for the win, then it's a matter of how much space your optical support can store and even more importantly how much can you install on the HDD.

 

Uncharted and Killzone games have some kick ass textures, Up there with the best on PC imo...

 

Many games can now have 3 times and more the texture use compared to the previous gen. Normal maps , diffuse etc.

Also shadows often use large buffers, some games use lightmaps, HDR frame buffers, render targets for all kinds of things, MSAA buffers. We do suffer from not enough ram that is for sure. Also consider S3TC/DXT compression helps, but also hinders in that it can cause some textures to look even lower than the actual textures are. We could add detail textures, but that has become more of a problem, if you add micro detail it needs to look correct for that surface. But surfaces have become more complex with lighting, normal maps and specular + cubemaps, the cost of adding a detail map that also contains normal mapping that looks just right etc. Just means more memory, pixel cost and authouring / managing.

4gig or more would be nice (currently we would die for) and a fast realiable streaming source (eg. not slow error prone optical)

 

Only if in next gen the texture artists suddenly become talented to the very last man/woman, and agree to work for free 24/7.

 

A well designed virtual texturing system doesn't even need 100 MB of memory. And it allows you to have basically limitless texture detail. The only problem is that texture storage (hdd/disc) becomes a bottleneck really fast. For example a single 4096x4096 texture takes as much storage as 64 512x512 textures (the most common texture resolution currently). I dont expect discs that can hold terabytes of data next gen (and 64 x DVD isn't an option either). Digital distribution makes things even harder, since you can't expect players to download 100+ gigabyte sized games in the near future. The internet infrastructure just isn't ready for that yet.

Virtual texturing isn't limited just for certain game genres or styles. Many are confusing it with unique texturing (since Rage has both). They are different things. Virtual texturing is just a really fine grained texture streaming system that analyses the screen to determine texture pixels that are visible and it allows you to keep roughly one texel in memory for each screen pixel (constant texture memory requirement). Virtual texturing shares some limitatios with deferred rendering (alpha blending needs more work), but that isn't anything major.

Art cost doesn't scale up that much with improved texture resolution. For example our artists always create their work assets in 2x2 or higher resolution, because that allows them to edit and scale them better if requirements (for example view distance) change during production. More texture variation (or unique texturing) is of course another matter, and can require lots of extra work.
I agree with the points made about detail textures. It was an easy trick back in the time when textures contained only color data. Dynamic lighting (normals and per pixel material properties) has made tricks like this harder (acceptable quality and performance).

 

more game should make use of high frequency detail, or is it call it detail texture? Its just like random texture pattern on top of decent, some time low res like KZ3 character to make it looks very detail. Works great on fabric especially.

 

SSD would help, maybe consoles could go back to "cartridges" (Memory Sticks), not sure how expensive they are but that would be better than optical drives, and digital distribution. I don't see PC doing that though.
I'd like to try recording texture 'stamping' from the artists then compositing that in realtime would help in regards to variety/details, w/o requiring massive storage increase. (as is the case for unique virtual texturing a.k.a. MegaTexture)
(ie have a set of stamps/textures and record how they are applied in-order on top of existing layer(s))

Yes that's detail textures.

 

Cost of a fast flash storage per game would be too high. Makes more sense to have an SSD as standard in the box and cache the disc contents.

 

That's pretty much how we do it in our new engine. It works very well, and keeps game download size manageable (a really important thing in digital distribution). I am going to describe our system in more depth, when we get the game ready and I have time to write a post mortem of it.

 

$80 Budget (newegg):

60GB SSD
250GB HDD 5400RPM
16GB DDR3 1600MHZ ($100 24GB DDR3)

Including any one of these technologies as a standard I'd think would drive up the baseline cost for nextgen console beyond where Sony/MS would want them to eventually be.

Barring that, I was under the impression SSD still has issues with premature death of performance. Especially in a heavy use environment like a NG console shifting gigabytes of data constantly.

No?

Another angle, if there is a large fixed cost of alternate storage, would Sony/MS not want to leverage the online distribution angle and put this budget toward larger storage?

The last option, 16-24GB of Ram, would definitely help in quickly handling a ton of data, but the MB complexities would also be considerable. But, with how close the GB/$ is between DRAM and SSD, and how much faster Dram is, you'd have to consider it.


edit: one more option: Multi-laser bluray disc drive.

Increased throughput, potentially lower seek times, potentially cheaper cost to the alternatives above.

 

How can you use DRAM for mass storage in a console? It's volatile memory. Once you turn off the console you'd have to redownload all your songs,movies,games etc when you boot up again :-s

Unless i'm misunderstanding you and you really mean have a large pool of DRAM for game data to help texture stream systems and such. In which case however you still need to fill that RAM and so you'd have excessive load times waiting for your console to fill up 16-24GB of DRAM before you're ready to start playing your game... no thank you.

 

Yes.

There are ways around that. Low power "standby" to save the ram state and power the secondary ARM processor for background tasks.

Another would be to start streaming and filling the ram space from the point the disc is inserted and loading initial stage area first.

Another is the multi-laser diode BRD to increase transfer rate.

 

Including any 'extras' increases cost. But if the choice is 4GB fast RAM, big GPU, slow HDD, or 2GBs fast RAM, moderate GPU, fast SSD and slow HDD, and the SSD model gives better real-world performance on less powerful processors because it renders the techniques of the day more effectively, then it's a better investment.

Balanced systems aren't just about the most powerful single components or biggest numbers.

 

Some higher-quality texture filtering would go a long way to improving image quality. Hopefully Shifty is right, but I also wonder when the bottleneck becomes the artists or they tools they use. I can't imagine how long artists spend working on a game like Skyrim now, let alone next gen.

Also, what do you guys think of the Battlefield 3 "HD textures approach" next gen. Will game companies ship games on disc with a standard texture set, with the option to download higher quality texture packs (maybe for $)? It was a little different with Battlefield, because the HD textures were on the disc, but the idea of having the upgrade as an add-on, might take off in situations where devs hit the disc limits.

 

Well, if you remember back to mid 2005 when this thing was launched, it was much more powerfull than any pc could handle, 512mb gddr3 was silly for the time and was extremely expensive.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/1680

The xbox 360 was very advanced from many standpoints, especially considering a price point of £300.
It brought a graphics oriented, in order 64bit 3 core cpu, @3.2ghz.(when pcs were only moving to duel core 2.0ghz OoO)

It brought the highest amount of next gen gddr3 graphics memory seen, and with an innovative (but restrictive) 10mb edram, and superior unified memory arch.
It brought a gpu that was at least 2 times as powerfull as a 6800ultra when it as anounced (the most powerfull pc gpu)
As well as starting the dx 10 feature set, which included unified shaders, and even a simple testerlator and mexeport to main memory.

To put the performance/£ into perspective....
My pc i bought 1 year previous was considered reasonably high end, it was custom built, so was much more expensive that the parts would cost normally, still it had an un heard of 1gb ram, and a Nvidia geforce 5800 class 256mbgddr ram gpu...it cost me about £1300, that was also with a 32bit single core processor (OoO yes, but 1 thread, and 2.0ghz).

The 360 was many times more powerfull than that..for £300 quid..bargain!

I would argue that the worst decision was not including a hddvd drive+Hard drive with every console, that and say another 256mb of ram would have made a massive difference IMHO, but would have cost microkia a small fortune to implement.

Maybe they could have held back and done some proper testing to avoid the RROD, maybe that money would have paid for it...then again they would have lost the head start with sony....