selnor said:
I wrote it. It's not biased. It's all official statements from Remedy, Epic and Bungie. Where have you been? |
Let's call your game:
1) you wrote in the OP
Tim Sweeney from Epic Games is quoted saying " Unreal Engine 3 is not optimized as a 360 engine. We do not utilize the specialized EDRam chip on the Xbox 360 for example at 'ALL'.
Fact check:
1a) While it's true that the Unreal Engine 3 was not designed as a 360 engine and thus not as optimized as a ground-up coding effort, it's obviously somewhat optimized. Actually at Epic they stated that their transitional multithreaded model owes a lot even on PC to what they lerned by optimizing it for the 360 (link):
Tim Sweeney: The Gears of War experience on Xbox 360 taught us to optimize for multi-core, and to improve the low-level performance of the key engine systems. This has carried over very well to PC.
1b) what Sweeney really said about AA back in 2006 (link):
Sweeney- Gears of War runs natively at 1280x720p without multisampling. MSAA performance doesn't scale well to next-generation deferred rendering techniques, which UE3 uses extensively for shadowing, particle systems, and fog.
Please note that it's not like they didn't know or care or use the edram, it's that their engine works in a way that could not make the most of it in 2006. Later they surely optimized their engine further, as Gears 2 -for example- sports some AA.
2) you wrote in the OP
Further apparent is UE3's multiplatform design looking at both ME1 and Mass Effect 2. The former recieveing no AA and the later recieveing 2xMSAA on all except transperencies and effects.
Fact check:
From the Digital Foundry tech analysis (link):
Another interesting element is the removal of anti-aliasing. The first Mass Effect included Unreal Engine 3's somewhat selective 2x multi-sampling AA. ...
For Mass Effect 2, BioWare appears to have turned off the anti-aliasing completely, presumably saving memory and GPU cycles in the process. Depth of field and bloom are used instead, doing a surprisingly good job.
Bold is mine. I find it intriguing that you called ME2's graphics "the best ever on consoles", though it went (feature-wise) in the opposite direction to what you claimed and in the opposite direction to what you want to see in Alan Wake and other engines (more AA).
3) you wrote in the OP (about Alan Wake)
Most impressively though is that the game runs with 4XMSAA on the entire picture, including shadows. ...
The fact that the EDRam has been able to give this free on 360 is 'HUGE'. ...
One thing for sure is Alan Wake will be the clearest crispest game yet on game consoles.
Fact check:
3a) I could not find any official statement about 4x Full screen MSAA from Remedy. The closes thing is this declaration on the remedy forums (link):
I'm pretty sure you'll be very happy with our shipping solution. We hate dithering and aliasing just as much as you I think. Hardware 4xAA on the Xbox360 is nice for a lot of things - it did take us a while to get the most out of it (E.g, refactoring the renderer quite a few times).
which talks about 4xAA, but doesn't say it's full screen 4xMSAA. Nor does it make it sound as if they are getting everything from the embedded ram for free. Merely that they were able to design their engine to get some great benefits out of it, which sounds like having to cope with the limitations of it being only 10MB.
3b) "crispest"? AA goes in the opposite direction of crisp: jaggies are pixel-grid crisp. AA is basically a selective blurring process.
4) you wrote in the OP
Then theres the 2nd to utilize EDRam this year. Reach boasts 720p, 30 FPS and 4xMSAA on entire image. But more impressively is what that free chip allows the devs to add to the rest of the game, 60+AI + Vehicles + flying = most impressive fights in an FPS on consoles.
Fact check:
4a) Halo Reach is not the 2nd game to utilize the edram this year. Nor in the 360's history of course. Actually the majority of 360 games were designed to squeeze some low-impact AA out of the 10MB edram. Too many links, really... just browse all old Digital Foundry's face-offs for multiplatform titles and you'll more often than not find something on the lines of "on PS3 the game sports no AA (or QXAA), while on 360 it does thanks to the edram"
4b) As far as I can tell, there's no official statement from Bungie on the AA technique used in Reach. Much speculation abounded as it certainly looks very good, but the best analysis I could find of the available videos seem to actually indicate a clever use of depth-of-field and edge blur to achieve better antialiasing, nowhere in sight was an official "free thanks to the edram" 4xMSAA statement.
Ironically you slammed edge blur previously in this thread, when it was advanced as a SPE based solution in the PS3 version of Saboteur (it's not MLAA as you kept stating, go read the updated article on DF)
Conclusion: I'm really glad that people like Remedy or Bungie are spending their energies on creating engines that truly optimize to the archtecture and capabilities of the 360, and what they are going to put out seems to be some of the best the machine has displayed yet, and quite better than the run-of-the mill UE3 based games.
But there's no magic bullet here. There's no magic edram chip that nobody utilized before. There's a lot of honest hard work from good developers to make the best out of known quantities, whose final results look excellent right now and we will judge with our eyes in a not distant future. You did the same in a previous discussion, only back then your magic bullet was called "multithreaded engine" and you claimed that AW was the first game on the 360 to have a multicore-optimized engine, and games that were to use several times more CPU power than every old game were to follow. You were demonstrably wrong back then, but you are falling into the same pattern again.
There's a lot any 360 enthusiast should be happy and even hyped about with these new games but by making up technical facts, and official statements, and distorting quotes, you're not doing these coders any favours, nor are you being helpful to fellow gamers.
If you can provide links to the official statements of which you speak of and that I might have missed, I'll be thankful.
