Xbox360, so where the hell is the AA?

[London Geezer]

I was kinda curious about this myself.

I saw COD2 running on one of the pods, but it was the pre-release demo and it obviously lacked AA. It didn't detract from the game too much but it was very evident, especially cause the Samsung LCD's highlight these kind of flaws quite well in all their glory.

Does the final game have AA? Cause that would help a lot, the game already looks gorgeous, with AA it would look fabulous. LOVING the smoke effects.

 

[Jawed]

Even with AA turned on, objects in CoD2 such as railings, bushes and barbed wire, because they're textures, show aliasing.

XB360 also supports AA on transparent textures - but it plainly hasn't been implemented in CoD2 - perhaps because it's not in the PC version. The PC version only allows AA on transparent textures by performing a driver override - something that only NVidia 7 series GPUs and ATI R3xx, R4xx and R5xx GPUs support.

I haven't tried AA for transparent textures on my X800XT because with every option turned on (which doesn't include heat haze for some reason), with 4xAF and 4xAA the game is only just playable at 800x600 (normally very smooth, but intense action is a bit laggy).

Jawed

 

[blakjedi]

Ditto. Had my first go on the Xbox360 yesterday and have seen CoD2. They are quite jaggy. Nothing I'd find personally disturbing personally, but something I have noticed none-the-less.

hunh? I'm running CoD2 @ 106" at 720p ... and i cannot find one jaggie unless we have different definitions of jaggie...

 

[ralexand]

Maybe I don't know what jaggies are anymore because when I look at this image of COD2 for the 360, I'm not seeing alot of jaggies.

 

[ShootMyMonkey]

And from what devs have hinted at here, predicated tiling is apparantly not necessarily trivial as a performance hit.

That much is true, which is why the 12 MB figure popped up in a million places (i.e. that with 12 MB, the tiling wouldn't be necessary for AA at 720p).

All the same, even if you'd enabled it, MSAA generally isn't perfect or even very close. To try and "get rid of" jaggies, then 4xSSAA is a minimum, but that actually requires capacities far beyond what would be feasible for eDRAM, unless the pixel pipes themselves internally supersampled and then downsampled prior to the framebuffer write. But as far as I'm concerned, nothing other than some form of actual supersampling is really AA, (and if you look at it from a signal processing point of view, you'll know what I mean).

I personally think that whatever imperfections it carries, they'll become more evident the higher the quality of display you've got. A so-so interlaced SD display inherently hides both positives and negatives. A high contrast bright LCD/Plasma at native HD resolution will show things pretty much as they are.

In any case, they don't say AA is required -- they say something that has that effect is required, and simply that it's a "preferable suggestion" to implement tiling and enable MSAA. Shader-based multisampling or motion blurring or other similar things can still pass.

 

[scooby_dooby]

Is this 4xAA!?
http://media.xbox360.ign.com/media/743/743289/img_3106264.html

Man you posted that exact same pic in another thread and someone told you point blacnk "it's a MULTIPLAYER screen from an OLD BUILD"

Here you are posting the same pic again? Why?

 

[scooby_dooby]

To try and "get rid of" jaggies, then 4xSSAA is a minimum, but that actually requires capacities far beyond what would be feasible for eDRAM, .

Tell that to Kameo. You could literally not find a jaggy in that game.

And for the record, Peter Moore said just a few days ago ALL games require 2xAA.

 

[Tap In]

HDTV (1080i) final release version of CoD2 (not the kisok) here, in my home.... this game is smooth as silk.

I challenge anyone to come look at this game (and play it for days as I have) and find fault with the AA.

It is ON and it is gorgeous.

 

[psp111]

HDTV (1080i) final release version of CoD2 (not the kisok) here, in my home.... this game is smooth as silk.

I challenge anyone to come look at this game (and play it for days as I have) and find fault with the AA.

It is ON and it is gorgeous.

Are you sure your TV isn't processing the image to get from 720 up to 1080?

 

[Tap In]

Are you sure your TV isn't processing the image to get from 720 up to 1080?

the X360 scaler is outputting the image to my TV at 1080i according to my X360 display settings

 

[zidane1strife]

Bill:

I see what you mean, but that's not a problem of the kiosks but the software that is being run on them. I can't vouche for the CoD2 demo I've seen played in the kiosk and how representative it is to the final game, but as I said, I did notice the lack of anti-aliasing (which IMO as I said, isn't an issue given it's not bad at that resolution). Having aliasing on a 480i/p display is another thing though.

As for my impressions of CoD2: I must say I found it very underwhelming - not because of the anti-aliasing - but rather the art-direction that is IMO too PC background flavoured. To be more specific, the game looks very low polygon (houses are very blocky) and sharp edges but boast high resolution textures and bump-mapping. I'd rather prefer a high polygon look with less emphasis on high quality textures and bump mapping, or simply more emphasis on air/wind effects like seen in the MGS4 demonstration. IMO, when you start to play around with sun glare, wind effects and a much more sophisticated lighing system, you can get away with worse textures and less bump mapping without the player even noticing (because the player won't see the those things as clearly because the wind is too strong or the sun is shining in his direction bluring his field of vision). This is what I'm expecting from next-generation games. All IMO of course.

Indeed we've just to look at the extremes, the pc'ish look extreme would be a box covered with high-rez pictures or maybe even a photo-album, while if we took polys towards the extreme you'd have something that'd look cg'ish if not photo-real.

When you see something like the FFVII demo(which goes even further than MGS4 in regards to going away from relying on high-rez textures on characters and towards better animation/physics/etc.), you see the future, you see something that is truly next-gen. When I see every npc and pc feature cloth/fluid physics, I'm just awed to no avail, this goes beyond any mere high-rez texture, or any normal map, this is the future!!! That is something I did not see-the future-when I saw the Unreal engine demo on ps3.

 

[Belmontvedere]

hello umm have you guys seen the screenshots for MGS4 maybe I'm thinking of a different game? I mean look at this screenshot and tell me MGS4 doesn't have good textures...

both PS3 and X360 have 512MB of memory and both use compareable if not identical methods of texture compression. both support bump mapping/normal mapping and both are capable of compareable if not identical shader effects. IMO neither will have the advantage when it comes to textures.

 

[Dave Baumann]

Well (taking the RSX ~= G70 assumption) a couple of memory size differences to consider is that Xenos has a higher compression ratio on Normal Maps, if used, and Xenos also has no RAM penalty AA (if its used).

 

[one]

Man you posted that exact same pic in another thread and someone told you point blacnk "it's a MULTIPLAYER screen from an OLD BUILD"

Here you are posting the same pic again? Why?

So you conveniently ignore my reply to the post
http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showpost.php?p=623164&postcount=92
The point is, it's NOT old. You think 1 month before the launch is old? Then I suspect your definition of 'old' is a bit deviated from common use.
Gamespot has a bunch of probably newer in-game images but they are not even 720p. But you can see aliasing clearly.
http://img.gamespot.com/gamespot/images/2005/318/reviews/927725_20051115_screen009.jpg
http://img.gamespot.com/gamespot/images/2005/318/reviews/927725_20051115_screen027.jpg

Also can you elaborate how multiplayer net code, which only adds some latency and not at all related to GPU, affects AA?

 

[Nesh]

I disagree, just as I disagreed with people who thought MGS3 looked great. It looked fugly because it had low quality textures and no mapping on objects. Tastes differ I guess, and it's a good thing that XBOX360 and PS3 appeal to different tastes. I very much prefer the detail I saw in the Gears of War E3 demos to the MGS4 demo.

Depends to what game you compared it with

edit: Btw what he was trying to say is that games showed so far on PS3 placed textures wherever they were needed instead of replacing every crack, bumb, depth or muscle with normal mapping/high quality textures.Its true that textures are important but its best to use polygons instead of textures in many areas than replacing most surfaces with textures.They should be used wherever they are needed.

The example of MGS3 isnt good because it lacks at both polygons and textures compared to lets say many XBOX or GC games and especially compared to PC games.

Compare Timesplitters2 with Killzone of Medal of Honour or even Halo though and you will see that Timesplitters2 is almost as good if not as good or better looking because they arent overdoing it with textures.They place polygons and textures wherever they fit best

Also take Doom3 and HL2.Both superb looking but HL2 has a more realistic feel unlike DOOM3 which has the plastic look and overdoits with bumped textures

 

[Mintmaster]

Lol. The reduction wouldn't do much as far as jaggies are concerned, even if the framebuffer were 1280*720 w/o AA. As it stands, PGR3 is using 2xAA on a 1024*579 framebuffer [to avoid tiling]. Verification? Screen grabs via dev kits.

Upsampling would be a lot more apparent than what we see in Powderkeg's 720p screenshot. Going from 579 to 720 is a big difference. I don't think they're doing this. Robofunk's link from the bizzare forums is further evidence.

Regarding screenshots, why wouldn't Bizzare do 4xAA in them if they're switching resolution and doing a "photo mode"?

AFAIK Bizzarre did NOT manage to implement predicated tiling into PGR3. Since they are employing at least 2xAA, the MAX res the Xbox360 could possibly be rendering is 1024*576 (for 2xAA). Again, the Xbox can output at whatever res it whats (with the arbitrary limit of 1080i), but internally the max res it can push @ 2xAA is 1024*576. A framebuffer size of 720p would require 14.0MB @ 2xAA. One thing to note: with a decent scaler, you will most likely not be able to tell the difference between 576p and 720p (56% fewer pixels). Much less of a difference than between 640*480 and 720p (~300% fewer pixels).

For 2xAA, I don't think predicated tiling is necessary. You only need to send the geometry twice and use clip planes or a scissor test each time. I doubt that doubling the geometry will slow down the game that much.

 

[Mintmaster]

both PS3 and X360 have 512MB of memory and both use compareable if not identical methods of texture compression.

Well unless RSX wants to sap bandwidth from Cell (which I suppose is possible), it only has 256MB to play with for textures. With AA, the framebuffer will occupy a chunk of that 256MB as well. I would think that the added latency of accessing textures through FlexIO would have a performance impact as well. The memory controller in Cell is probably not tuned to efficient texture access the way RSX would be.

This actually may be a reason that people are seeing the textures/polygon difference (though this observation seems highly suspect to me). It's natural to store the geometry in the XDR and textures in the GDDR3 on PS3, but for XB360 there's no need for a cap on either geometry or textures.

Personally, I think if you make good use of the geometry tesselator then you don't need high poly models (most of the time, at least), and high res textures make a much bigger impact on realism.

 

[nAo]

Well (taking the RSX ~= G70 assumption) a couple of memory size differences to consider is that Xenos has a higher compression ratio on Normal Maps.

What compression format are you talking about? 3Dc?

 

[Dave Baumann]

Yeah, ish. 3Dc has a 4:1 compression ratio at best, NVIDIA have been exposing 3Dc on the PC but converting to a particular texture format that has a 2:1 compression ratio.

 

[nAo]

Yeah, ish. 3Dc has a 4:1 compression ratio at best, NVIDIA have been exposing 3Dc on the PC but converting to a particular texture format that has a 2:1 compression ratio.

On G70 you can have the same compression ratio and the same quality of 3Dc storing normal components in the alpha channels of 2 DXT5 textures, using at the same time the RGB channels to store color diffuse, specular, and so on (since you're mostly going to need that kind of data anyway)
Having a full hw support for N channels textures with DXT5-alpha like compression would be nice though