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

[french toast]

Those XDR2 pages really are old news around here, and we've all seen them. Sadly all we have for XDR2 is paper specs. There are no chips in a device showing it works. Now the case was pretty much the same for XDR, and that worked out, so I'm hopeful, but we can't compare XDR2 to other options when there's no way to evaluate cost. Heck, for ages we've had talk of bus width adding to board costs etc., but noone's ever presented actual number so we know how much by! Less chips means squat for lower costs in the license fees are sky high, or you can only get one supplier and they are adding a hefty margin for your niche component. There's no way to compare XDR2 to GDDR5 regards cost/performance.

Sorry i have only been seen round these parts for a month or so!.

Well i beg to differ, i know it is not easy, and will not be directly comparable, but for instance, if xdr was available 6/7 years ago in ps3 in a healthy 256mb dose..then we can speculate that Rambus is not going to design something that is too difficult to make/license compared to xdr..else that would be suicide,and well very foolish indeed.

They are available in chunks of 4mbit/and very high bandwidth per pin..which doesn't guarentee anything..but is certainly a nice tick to have when discussing costs..
Of course as you point out, no one manufactures the things at all..so whoever would agree to it could charge a handsome premium for doing so....unless console makers get clever and try to play manufacturer against another to drive costs down..you would expect that is standard practise anyhow..

The controller width for gddr 3 was 128 bit also 6/7 years ago, so using the same logic that would be cheaper to implement now also, you could probably cram (gddr5) 256 bit/386 bit bus in there for a similar cost now..which lets face it would make the whole edram/xdr2 argument void

 

[TheChefO]

They did talk about that kind of architecture/specs being reasonable in 2017 or in 5 years. Would that be enough time to make something working?

I think it's safe to say that with that timeframe, the tech will be more in-line with a ps5 than a ps4.

 

[Turok]

Is using tiled detail textures RAM intensive? Halo 3 and Reach use them in spades, but they seem to fade out when you're 2 feet away from a surface or character that has them.

 

[AlNom]

Is using tiled detail textures RAM intensive? Halo 3 and Reach use them in spades, but they seem to fade out when you're 2 feet away from a surface or character that has them.

Actually, I recall you posting a picture of the hexagonal pattern on the Elite armour (also used on other Covenant surfaces) - Could be a procedural shader as the hexagons aren't a fixed size.

edit: You posted this awhile back:

The scratches though should be a pretty cheap detail texture to blend in there.

 

[mikiex]

Is using tiled detail textures RAM intensive? Halo 3 and Reach use them in spades, but they seem to fade out when you're 2 feet away from a surface or character that has them.

Its just another texture, its going to fade out with mipmapping, to the lowest mip pretty quick.

But its another texture to worry about and decide how to combine it, takes another texture slot.
Reasons for not doing it are partly time and you are stuck with that detail texture all over that material, you could mask it - but then thats more expense. Say you have a nice single drawcall, to change detail texture you would need a new call (unless you add more detail textures to your shader , complexity of authouring and pixelshader cost starts escalating)

Also you need UVs to define where the detail texture is, you could have multiple (more authoring time)- or mutply the UVs to give some tiling.

 

[mikiex]

Actually, I recall you posting a picture of the hexagonal pattern on the Elite armour (also used on other Covenant surfaces) - Could be a procedural shader as the hexagons aren't a fixed size.
.

Very much doubt that, its probably just the size of UVs, even if it was procedual it would need to use UVs, which then makes it pointless using procedual as textures are going to be faster.

 

[Nesh]

Actually, I recall you posting a picture of the hexagonal pattern on the Elite armour (also used on other Covenant surfaces) - Could be a procedural shader as the hexagons aren't a fixed size.

edit: You posted this awhile back:

The scratches though should be a pretty cheap detail texture to blend in there.

Are these procedural shaders an independent layer on top of the real texture similar to the "noise" effect we see on fabrics or leather that give the illusion of high texture detail? They size and shape seem to ignore the normal maps. Are procedural shaders post-processed?

 

[Nesh]

Very much doubt that, its probably just the size of UVs, even if it was procedual it would need to use UVs, which then makes it pointless using procedual as textures are going to be faster.

Are there other benefits to using procedural though? I remember an old discussion about Killzone 3's textures on characters and some observed that the actual texture was low res in many instances for some models, but they looked very detailed because the developers added "noise" (procedural shader?) to mimic the detail of fabric. Considering how much that was used for some K3 characters and the memory limitations of the PS3, I think it was a solution to bypass them.
Are procedural shaders intensive in terms of processing but less intensive in terms of storing high detailed textures in memory? If yes they could be a good alternative solution to storing detailed textures to memory for some cases

 

[almighty]

Are there other benefits to using procedural though? I remember an old discussion about Killzone 3's textures on characters and some observed that the actual texture was low res in many instances for some models, but they looked very detailed because the developers added "noise" (procedural shader?) to mimic the detail of fabric. Considering how much that was used for some K3 characters and the memory limitations of the PS3, I think it was a solution to bypass them.
Are procedural shaders intensive in terms of processing but less intensive in terms of storing high detailed textures in memory? If yes they could be a good alternative solution to storing detailed textures to memory for some cases

Yep, My god did I get a bashing for saying they looked good!

 

[steampoweredgod]

...or XDR2 ( 12800Mhz ) on a 128bit memory interface would generate ~200Gb/s.

This would be the reason to invest in XDR2. Save costs on board traces and reduced size on chip mem controller pinout for future die size reduction.

Another question regarding XDR2 is whether it too is low latency like XDR1, and how that would affect cpu performance in a nextgen console unified architecture. How about physics code, is it seriously affected by memory latency, or can it be efficiently run from high latency memory(Ageia Physics unit was said to be an efficient use of silicon for physics and the cell was said to be somewhat similar, on the other hand we've gpgpu running physics, not sure how they'd compare given similar process and silicon budgets).

Gpu's are also said to be tolerant of high latency, would there be any performance benefits on the gpu side from lower latency? or have the measures to deal with latency done away with any performance loss related to latency?

 

[almighty]

Another question regarding XDR2 is whether it too is low latency like XDR1, and how that would affect cpu performance in a nextgen console unified architecture. How about physics code, is it seriously affected by memory latency, or can it be efficiently run from high latency memory(Ageia Physics unit was said to be an efficient use of silicon for physics and the cell was said to be somewhat similar, on the other hand we've gpgpu running physics, not sure how they'd compare given similar process and silicon budgets).

Gpu's are also said to be tolerant of high latency, would there be any performance benefits on the gpu side from lower latency? or have the measures to deal with latency done away with any performance loss related to latency?

I suppose if you've only got milliseconds to generate each frame then having low latency to certain parts of the GPU would help to add more effects in that short amount of time?

 

[Nesh]

Yep, My god did I get a bashing for saying they looked good!

Well the overall result did look good. The "noise" did a pretty good job
Besides not all characters had low res textures with "noise" to compensate. Some others had damn good detail

 

[AlNom]

Very much doubt that, its probably just the size of UVs, even if it was procedual it would need to use UVs, which then makes it pointless using procedual as textures are going to be faster.

Yeah, was having a think over it. Probably just the one hex tiled to heck. And since you only really see it when it's in your face, they skip any costs during regular gameplay although you can still walk up to them and zoom in. It's not a theater mode exclusive.

Gpu's are also said to be tolerant of high latency, would there be any performance benefits on the gpu side from lower latency? or have the measures to deal with latency done away with any performance loss related to latency?

GPUs deal with latency as they have thousands of little jobs they can do work in the interim due to the nature of how they render. Not sure there'd be a particular benefit to lower latency for the GPU.

On the CPU side, you don't have nearly as many jobs being scheduled, so the lower the latency from the last level cache to main memory, the better - think of it in terms of clock cycles that the CPU may have to wait before doing anything as it needs to access the memory/cache pools.

On GPUs, they can be busy processing pixels or other while waiting for texture accesses/ops/sampling etc or other main memory access to happen.

 

[mikiex]

Are there other benefits to using procedural though? I remember an old discussion about Killzone 3's textures on characters and some observed that the actual texture was low res in many instances for some models, but they looked very detailed because the developers added "noise" (procedural shader?) to mimic the detail of fabric. Considering how much that was used for some K3 characters and the memory limitations of the PS3, I think it was a solution to bypass them.
Are procedural shaders intensive in terms of processing but less intensive in terms of storing high detailed textures in memory? If yes they could be a good alternative solution to storing detailed textures to memory for some cases

There is not much use of procedural shaders , It does happen, shader code vs sampling a texture in all but simple cases the texture wins. There are some very simple common ones, for instance a gradient is a really trivial , it might be considered procedural. There are more a bit more complex ones.

But more complex things like a tiled hexegon that must filter (dont forget you must antialias high frequency procedural), its so much easier to use a texture

 

[Cyan]

we are getting there! Finally.

 

[cheapchips]

This gens greatest legacy is possibly really lovely food rendering.

 

[Vega86]

The last pic would've looked more great if it weren't for those green garnish.

 

[Cyan]

This gens greatest legacy is possibly really lovely food rendering.

 

[Mobius1aic]

They eat Chocobos in FF15? I'm horrified!

 

[Theeoo]

This gens greatest legacy is possibly really lovely food rendering.

Final Fantasy cooking VR game using the move controller?