xbox360 kiosk + CoD2 - FSAA - Aniso + Trilinear

[Junkstyle]

That's not trilinear interpolation. If you have this feature enabled and functioning properly, it will actually fade (interpolate, as the name suggests) between MIP levels without leaving a visible seam.

Ouch! The seam was there and moved as i moved-- Bilinear? This better be some kindof "demo" issue and not in the real shipping game.

 

[expletive]

Widescreen 480p uses about 1/3 the pixels of 720p. 4:3 480p uses even less and would cause the display to stretch the image. Depending on the display, i think its pretty safe youll lose quite a bit of detail at 480p. Depending on the display, the scaling solution inside could also add to the problem.

Of course the absolute disaster is someone setting it up to run at 480i, 4:3.

EDIT:agree though that this process should have been completely 'on rails' leaving no room for human error. This is could turn out ot be a mess, especially if these are the same kiosks going EVERYWHERE.

http://joystiq.com/entry/1234000890064780

"When Nick arrived at the kiosk he was shocked to find the output settings locked on 480i resolution (4:30 screen ratio)—on a 720p native LCD (it’s ugly, folks). Not exactly the way to attract consumers… Microsoft had better straighten out their reps—and give Wal-Mart employees a crash course while they’re at it! "

My worst fears realized.

 

[fearsomepirate]

There were these 2 invisible lines that moved in front of you changing blurry textures into focused textures. It was pretty obvious on walls.

That sounds like poorly done mip-mapping, but maybe I'm just full of crap.

 

[one]

Anyway - what did it get by turning off FSAA? Framerate?

 

[KimB]

That sounds like poorly done mip-mapping, but maybe I'm just full of crap.

No, it sounds like just normal bilinear filtering.

 

[Junkstyle]

I got a chance to play the other 2 games on demo: King Kong and Kameo. Both didn't have FSAA. Kameo had FSAA only for the cutscenes and intro. Looks like Xbox360 games are going to be a jaggyfest 3/3 games displayed no FSAA. What gives? kameo was also trilinear filtering not Anisotropic. And CoD2 bilinear.

 

[Titanio]

Looking at screens for a while now, I've wondered about filtering. Oblivion X360 shots seem to display a great lack of texture filtering, those were what initially stuck out at me.

Dave's article on Xenos mentions:

Each of the filtered texture units have Bilinear sampling capabilities per clock and for Trilinear and other higher order (Anisotropic) filtering techniques each individual unit will loop through multiple cycles of sampling until the requested sampling and filtering level is complete.

The hit for trilinear or ansio can't be that great, can it?

 

[KimB]

The hit for trilinear or ansio can't be that great, can it?

You wouldn't think so. There's nothing on paper that differentiates the texture units of the Xenos from those of ATI's R3xx or R5xx lines.

 

[seismologist]

heh I honestly didn't think they were THAT ugly. I run my PC games on medium so that's about what I'm used to seeing. I know you PC guys love to nitpick though.

I posted a thread here a while back about how AA wasn't noticeable at high enough res and got murdered for it.

 

[Nite_Hawk]

heh I honestly didn't think they were THAT ugly. I run my PC games on medium so that's about what I'm used to seeing. I know you PC guys love to nitpick though.

I posted a thread here a while back about how AA wasn't noticeable at high enough res and got murdered for it.

As well you should have.

Nite_Hawk

 

[Mintmaster]

Other than that, I thought that Microsoft was "mandating" 720p with 4x FSAA, and that the Xenos could do 4x FSAA at that res with no penalty?

The current theory is that because you need to do tiling for 1280x720 w/ FSAA (the eDRAM is only 10MB), the devs simply haven't got around to fiddling with that aspect of XBOX 360 yet.

 

[Junkstyle]

The current theory is that because you need to do tiling for 1280x720 w/ FSAA (the eDRAM is only 10MB), the devs simply haven't got around to fiddling with that aspect of XBOX 360 yet.

At E3 there was all this preaching about how 4x FSAA is virtually "free", but I guess they didn't tell the full story. I would really be interested in a real interview with Allchin or some other xbox360 rep and have them answer real questions like why all the demos aren't FSAA'ed, instead of "what is your favorite Xbox360 faceplate".

 

[scooby_dooby]

The 4xAA is still virtually free, but only if the game engine is built to take advantage of Xenos.

They may have been slightly misleading, since it's not free 4xAA for all game engines across the board.

But that doesn't change the fact the hardware does have the abilitiy to implement free 4xAA.

 

[Titanio]

The 4xAA is still virtually free, but only if the game engine is built to take advantage of Xenos..

i.e. build your engine to work around what penalties it does incur...? Some of the stuff, like the duplicate vertex work on tile edges, I'm not sure how you'd get around it without reducing vertex complexity. But I guess there is a certain level of penalty you'd be willing to accept, and I guess that may be within the bounds of what you might consider to be "virtually free" (whatever that means).

 

[Tap In]

it's been said time and again, "free AA" was/is referring to the typical bandwidth penalty.

Ultimately though someone always wants to argue the definition of "free".

 

[scooby_dooby]

i.e. build your engine to work around what penalties it does incur...? Some of the stuff, like the duplicate vertex work on tile edges, I'm not sure how you'd get around it without reducing vertex complexity. But I guess there is a certain level of penalty you'd be willing to accept, and I guess that may be within the bounds of what you might consider to be "virtually free" (whatever that means).

I don't see how it's a workaround. It's more about taking advantage of the hardware, i.e. using it to it's full potential.

Well, as Dave has said it changes from being a Bandwidth hit, to being a geometry hit.

ATI has stated at 3 tiles, you can expect 3-5% performance hit which is precisely what everyone means by "virtually" free

 

[Titanio]

I don't see how it's a workaround. It's more about taking advantage of the hardware, i.e. using it to it's full potential.

Taking advantage of the hardware often entails that (minimising "problems", maximising strengths, in this case, maximising the bandwidth strength at cost elsewhere). But that's my point, really.

ATI has stated at 3 tiles, you can expect 3-5% performance hit which is precisely what everyone means by "virtually" free

That's where definitions break down though. It is being picky, as said above, there'll always be someone who wants to argue the definition of "free" in 3D. But the biggest sticking point here is that you can't just cover the penalty with one figure (or a range like that) - as discussed previously it'll vary from game to game. In fact it'd vary from frame to frame. The ATi figure is a neat soundbite, their expectation perhaps, probably a realistic one in most cases, but ultimately it's the numbers devs see with their games that matter, and that'll be different for everyone, and perhaps more critical for some than others (even taking 3 or 5%, that could make all the difference in the world for one game, for example, in terms of reaching an acceptable framerate, or going from 30fps to 60fps even).

 

[Laa-Yosh]

I got a chance to play the other 2 games on demo: King Kong and Kameo. Both didn't have FSAA. Kameo had FSAA only for the cutscenes and intro. Looks like Xbox360 games are going to be a jaggyfest 3/3 games displayed no FSAA. What gives? kameo was also trilinear filtering not Anisotropic. And CoD2 bilinear.

Way to go, judge all future games based on 2 multiplatform titles and a Nintendo conversion, that are all launch games as well...

 

[fearsomepirate]

No, it sounds like just normal bilinear filtering.

Well, since I dont' know, can you explain why bilinear filtering has that abrupt line? I've seen it in games like Serious Sam and source ports of Doom 3, but I don't recall seeing it in Quake 2 or the majority of current-gen console games I've played (haven't played much PS2, so that's Xbox and Cube).

 

[fearsomepirate]

Well, since I dont' know, can you explain why bilinear filtering has that abrupt line? I've seen it in games like Serious Sam and source ports of Doom 3, but I don't recall seeing it in Quake 2 or the majority of current-gen console games I've played (haven't played much PS2, so that's Xbox and Cube).

Since I'm too stupid to figure out how to edit my own posts, can you explain in terms of the mathematics? My field is scientific computing, so while I don't know everything about graphics-specific algorithms and hardware, I'm quite comfortable with dot products, scalar multiplication, matrix products, linear and spline interpolation, etc.