"Yes, but how many polygons?" An artist blog entry with interesting numbers

[COPS N RAPPERS]

Personally, I do not see Durango's memory system changing too much. Microsoft obviously spent some time on getting good performance with DDR3 RAM by setting up the ESRAM and Data Movers. Microsoft seems to be doing its best to get great performance without using premium material. Thanks to that, Microsoft may be able to market the system at a more attractive price than what Sony may be able to do, and that may be more important than being the most powerful system.

Back on topic, I suppose we should expect most next-gen character models to start off close to the high-end current-gen games (30-50k), and that number should increase a bit once developers get more experience with using tessellation. Laa-Yosh already gave out good reasons why shouldn't expect character models to be well beyond what we have now. The key difference with be the more advance shading and lighting.

i think the xbox 360 is the best answer to a perfect price point as microsoft is going to get. it seems to be a perfect answer to the WII-U in terms of specs, it delivers HD graphics, and it's got lots of games for the skepticals about the gaming selection.

the xbox 360 is still selling remarkable because it contains essential needs to affordable consumers who also have HD tvs (or don't). with that in mind they can also introduce a new high-end platform to the hardcore audience.

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now, for the PlayStation 4 on tessellation, i'm not yet certain on the use of it or on the characters. it should be there but killzone: shadow fall isn't using it when characters hit certain focal points. knack isn't using it, that tech demo for quantum dream's old man wasn't using it either; it was mostly a test showing off the lighting and shaders, since hair was rendered through alpha channels.

the ps4 shows good use of DX11 like features but i'm not sure if it's using DX11 per se since it's pioneered by microsoft. i'll have to check out the UE4 demo and the rest of the tech demos if tessellation is uttered in their conference. Don't know if there's an open GL emulation of it or if it's possible to emulate it.

 

[3dcgi]

OpenGL 4 supports tessellation. Sony won't use DirectX and they don't need to. If Sony wants to they can provide their own API that exposes every feature of the hardware. Whereas DirectX doesn't support everything a chip can do.

 

[COPS N RAPPERS]

OpenGL 4 supports tessellation. Sony won't use DirectX and they don't need to.

hmmm, makes plenty of sense, though why tessellation had no part in the presentation left it to be a question in this thread. i watched the presentation of all the demos and physics was the number one topic.

If Sony wants to they can provide their own API that exposes every feature of the hardware.

it may be necessary since no tessellation of any iteration was present in the ps3 with the CELL or the GPU.

IWhereas DirectX doesn't support everything a chip can do.

it goes both ways because my APU inside of my PC lacked openGL extensions to run APU crossfire compared to running games in Direct x mode. both Direct X and Open GL need updates and extensions to be utilized correctly.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

hmmm, makes plenty of sense, though why tessellation had no part in the presentation left it to be a question in this thread.

I've already made a lengthy post about all the issues with tessellation and displacement somewhere, those are probably behind the lack of this feature in the presentation.
In short, using it isn't necessarily a good thing, the results may not be worth the price.

 

[Lalaland]

I've already made a lengthy post about all the issues with tessellation and displacement somewhere....

Are these the posts in question? I ask as I've been waiting for tessellation to really transform a game for me and it doesn't seem to have happened yet. These posts are from 2008 though, has your reasoning changed or is this still largely the case?

Subdivision surfaces for characters, what's the hurdle? Post #3
The thing is, why would subdivs (I presume 'subdivs' = tessellation here?) be better on their own, without displacement? All they can do is smooth out curves to create unnatural surfaces and silhouettes, and they usually add to the modeling time because of extra requirements. Also, tiny polygons will ruin the efficiency of the quad pipelines, and subdivs can't provide continous LOD for terrain and such either.
So it's not a clear win-win situation, and that's probably the reason why they aren't really used yet. Once we have adaptive tesselation and displacement, they'll probably pick up some momentum, but it needs another large increase in processing power and memory to get there...

and

It doesn't help that most of today's game art - thanks to the coming of Zbrush - has amazing amounts of geometry detail in the normal maps, which would take insane amounts of polygons to replicate in order to get accurate silhouettes and such. Simple, smooth curved surfaces are reserved for cars, pipes and all the stuff in the kitchen...

 

[lwill]

I've already made a lengthy post about all the issues with tessellation and displacement somewhere, those are probably behind the lack of this feature in the presentation.
In short, using it isn't necessarily a good thing, the results may not be worth the price.

My impression is that for good use of tessellation, you would have to design the polygon models with tessellation in mind. The Wii U, Durango, and the PS4 can use tessellation in more useful ways than it was possible with current-gen consoles, but it will probably be some time for developers to make assets that would take good advantage of that.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Are these the posts in question?

These posts are from 2008 though, has your reasoning changed or is this still largely the case?

These would be pretty similar actually, but the ones I've meant were more recent... Maybe I'll dig them up sometime later.

But again, it doesn't make sense for characters without displacement; and displacement requires many vertices, resulting in far too small triangles ruining the GPU pipeline efficiency.
Also, it would require a significant re-engineering of the content creation pipeline, and increase production costs somewhat further.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

My impression is that for good use of tessellation, you would have to design the polygon models with tessellation in mind.

That's also right, and especially true for models of cars, weapons, battle armor etc. - in short, most man-made objects. It'd mean different modeling techniques, higher base polygon counts and so on.

 

[COPS N RAPPERS]

well, APU's main strength is it's physics computational abilities.

besides that tessellation is very much in high demand for the luminous engine with their characters. If the ps4 can show more footage on it handling one of these high poly characters on a given close up; then that would answer many questions on the importance of how it would play a roll in character development.

the luminous engine's characters running on the ps4 jumped to a few places in my top interests of this E3.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Smooth manga faces are easy to tessellate, realistic human faces wouldn't be the same. If you're only interested in FF and Magna Carta art styles, well, good for you.

 

[COPS N RAPPERS]

it isn't the faces that interest me about the engine, it's the hair. the hair in FFXIII wasn't all too good. with the luminous engine they've switched their methods of rendering it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nad3TOxkuLc

they've been going about what their engine can do for at least a year, and i'd like to see how much of it is actually true with the ps4.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

That hair is still just a bunch of alpha textured polygons and not individual hair strands. Doesn't look bad, but not good either - not sure if this gen can pull it off though.

 

[COPS N RAPPERS]

That hair is still just a bunch of alpha textured polygons and not individual hair strands. Doesn't look bad, but not good either - not sure if this gen can pull it off though.

for the tech demo they used tessellation for the hair.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9xhFpuIMX4

for the girl they rendered her hair in two formats, tessellation and old alpha maps to compare.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYElBF9JHVo

If they can pull off a High rez Mesh with this level of tessellation for the ps4 then the engine proves it's no typical SquareEnix leg puller, that's all i'm looking for.

I normally don't like tech demos because games usually take a lot out of the processing power and end up looking off on the target. but any controllable tech vid showing off advanced hair tessellation i'm very much interested in.

 

[jlippo]

That hair is still just a bunch of alpha textured polygons and not individual hair strands. Doesn't look bad, but not good either - not sure if this gen can pull it off though.

They seem to use combination of both techniques, old tech for volume and few hair strands for detail.

 

[lwill]

That's also right, and especially true for models of cars, weapons, battle armor etc. - in short, most man-made objects. It'd mean different modeling techniques, higher base polygon counts and so on.

On the flipside, things like bricks, rocks, mountains, smooth objects, and maybe trees should be alot easier to tessellate without bizarre complications. We may probably see more of that technique with games that take place more rural or pre-modern environments (Monolithsoft's "X", Witcher 3), and anime/manga influenced (Squarenix) at first than with modern/future war theme games, correct?

 

[Laa-Yosh]

If they can pull off a High rez Mesh with this level of tessellation for the ps4 then the engine proves it's no typical SquareEnix leg puller, that's all i'm looking for.

That just means they also tessellate the alpha mapped poly strips that they use for the hair. It's a trivial use of the technique to remove the jagged edges seen on current gen solutions, at run time.


I'm honestly not that impressed by this, but again, if it pleases you...

 

[Laa-Yosh]

On the flipside, things like bricks, rocks, mountains,

vs

smooth objects,

The ones you listed, and also trees, and the fantasy environments, are all NOT smooth at all. That's where displacement would have to be used - but that tech doesn't work well without very small triangles.

 

[lwill]

vs



The ones you listed, and also trees, and the fantasy environments, are all NOT smooth at all. That's where displacement would have to be used - but that tech doesn't work well without very small triangles.

Wow..that makes it even more troublesome than I thought. For unsmooth objects, a dev may have to rebuild the model again. Most current-gen assets probably will not work so well with tessellation, so for I guess it is best to not expect that much of it during the next few years..

 

[Laa-Yosh]

You'd have to rebuild everything from the ground up anyway, add extra edges to control bevel widths etc.

 

[COPS N RAPPERS]

That just means they also tessellate the alpha mapped poly strips that they use for the hair. It's a trivial use of the technique to remove the jagged edges seen on current gen solutions, at run time.

there really aren't many titles that use this technique per se to pass it off as hardly useful. some games don't even use alpha maps in general as trivial as it is; like knack for instance.

I'm honestly not that impressed by this, but again, if it pleases you...

I'm not expecting real human hair on polygonal characters. but this would defiantly be a change in the static hair meshes with low definition i've been accustom to seeing.