Will tiling in 360 allow reaching 60 fps performance ?

[Love_In_Rio]

In almost every game out now the frame rate for the 360 is near 30 fps, except for COD2 and ridge racer 6 afaik. Does this happen due to the fact that no tiling ,and so EDRAM beneficts, are used ? Has already used any game tiling ? If not which one will be the first to do so ? Do you thing EDRAM is the magic stuff that will help 360 reach 60 fps marks in its games ?.

 

[Platon]

In almost every game out now the frame rate for the 360 is near 30 fps, except for COD2 and ridge racer 6 afaik. Does this happen due to the fact that no tiling ,and so EDRAM beneficts, are used ? Has already used any game tiling ? If not which one will be the first to do so ? Do you thing EDRAM is the magic stuff that will help 360 reach 60 fps marks in its games ?.

I don't know about 60fps, but for "free" AA, HDR and stuff then yes the edram has to be used. The 60fps has a lot ot do with the developer and what kind of game it is. Many developers will rather have 30fps and more stuff on screen rather than 60 fps and less eyecandy...

 

[pipo]

If anything, tiling means extra overhead, which means a lower framerate. It's all to do with the engine, frame rate / eye candy decisions and polish time.

And all games use the EDRAM, it's probably the only sensible way to get anything on screen at all.

60FPS is just a matter of time / design.

 

[Farid]

Tilling is not related to the screen refresh rate, as the MSAA is.

In other words, no. It's up to the developer, they either create a 60 or a 30 FPS title.

 

[Lysander]

I think tiling will evade some potential BW bottleneck in x360 gpu-mem, so yes I think it means higher framerate. But I`ll always go for eyecandy, instead of high framerate. 60 frames makes me dizzy

 

[pipo]

I think tiling will evade some potential BW bottleneck in x360 gpu-mem, so yes I think it means higher framerate.

Err... Please explain?

 

[!eVo!-X Ant UK]

Quick question : i heard that Tiling does somthing bad to 360's geomatry performance, is this true?? and if so what exactly does it do?

 

[inefficient]

Quick question : i heard that Tiling does somthing bad to 360's geomatry performance, is this true?? and if so what exactly does it do?

You get some wastage because some of your geometry is overlapping onto the next or previous tile. You will end up computing some geometry more than once. But it shouldn't be a huge problem.

 

[!eVo!-X Ant UK]

You get some wastage because some of your geometry is overlapping onto the next or previous tile. You will end up computing some geometry more than once. But it shouldn't be a huge problem.

Thanks, and an extra thanks for explaining it in a way that id understand

 

[tema]

Quick question : i heard that Tiling does somthing bad to 360's geomatry performance, is this true?? and if so what exactly does it do?

I heard the same and it kindof shows.. 360 ideally should have more polys and less normal maps. The Dooms and Unreals are made for PC with x86 general purpose CPUS. XCPU is no Cell, afaics 360 cant push those polys faster than PS3.1

 

[overclocked]

If anything, tiling means extra overhead, which means a lower framerate. It's all to do with the engine, frame rate / eye candy decisions and polish time.

And all games use the EDRAM, it's probably the only sensible way to get anything on screen at all.

60FPS is just a matter of time / design.

How much overhead 60 frame game? it needs three tilling per frame to get 4xAA @ 1280x720 if i remember right from Daves article.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

That depends entirely on the type of geometry. Size and position of poly's affects whether they cross tile boundaries or not. That's a per game, per scene, per frame factor. I don't think there are any metirc estimates (short of ATi's 5% figure) and there likely won't be until a fair few games have implemented 3 tiles and had their averages and variations measured.

 

[Love_In_Rio]

Doesn´t HDR ( as well as AA ) kill the bandwidth ? Doesn´t any actual PC game runs circa 30 fps when HDR is enabled -using the same resolution as 360- ? wasn´t 360's EDRAM put in there to avoid this ?

And i think the frame mustn´t pass through the EDRAM if it´s not tiled because it doesn´t fit in it, it directly goes to the GRR3 module ( if not, please clarify me it ).So i think EDRAM nowadays it is still unused.

 

[blakjedi]

Why are the least informed people both asking and answering questions in this thread... most the answers you seek already exist... use the "search" button along the top of the screen...

 

[TurnDragoZeroV2G]

It can't go to GDDR3, it has to pass through eDRAM. See Dave's article or search.

 

[!eVo!-X Ant UK]

That depends entirely on the type of geometry. Size and position of poly's affects whether they cross tile boundaries or not. That's a per game, per scene, per frame factor. I don't think there are any metirc estimates (short of ATi's 5% figure) and there likely won't be until a fair few games have implemented 3 tiles and had their averages and variations measured.

So in theory, the more tiles you use the more chance there is of geometry overlap??

 

[blakjedi]

So in theory, the more tiles you use the more chance there is of geometry overlap??

No. The geometry is drawn once in z pass. Useless geometry (aka invisible to the scene) is discarded before being tiled and T&L ed.

 

[!eVo!-X Ant UK]

No. The geometry is drawn once in z pass. Useless geometry (aka invisible to the scene) is discarded before being tiled and T&L ed.

If its gets discarted then WTH is all this about then....

You get some wastage because some of your geometry is overlapping onto the next or previous tile. You will end up computing some geometry more than once. But it shouldn't be a huge problem.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

No. The geometry is drawn once in z pass. Useless geometry (aka invisible to the scene) is discarded before being tiled and T&L ed.

??? The first pass populates the z buffer and facilitates culling etc., but rendering of poly's still happens multiple times where they overlap a tile. Consider a rectangular floor with a 2 triangle quad making it's surface. This tabletop stretches the whole width of the image. With two tiles dividing the image into left and right halves, that table top will have to be rendered for both tiles.

In a less theoretical situation where the screen is full of lots of small triangles, only a relatively small percentage will span both tiles. As you increase the number of tiles, the number of polygons that span two (or more) tiles increases and these have to be drawn again for each tile. This is why you can't divided your rendering into any number of tiles at no cost. The more tiles you render, the higher the redundant overhead of rendering duplicate components. Without that limitation MS/ATi could have got away with a 1 MB eDRAM die at much less cost and rendered to dozens of tiles per scene.

As for this comment...

Why are the least informed people both asking and answering questions in this thread...

...I'd expect the least infomred people to ask the questions. If they're already informed, why ask?!

 

[AlNom]

Is the shape of the tile configurable?

Suppose the game was made such that most geometry is on the bottom half of the screen most of the time. In order to avoid some geometry overlap, could you employ horizontal tiles?