5th year of Xbox 360 : The Unreal Engine Effect.

[selnor]

WereKitten said:

selnor said:

All I have to say is this:

Staude this is to you to.

My article was well researched and well thought out. And 5 days after I write the article what happens. Gamersyde say EXACTLY the same thing after physically playing Alan Wake. In fact they put it above any 360 game by miles and say the only PS3 games that compete are KZ2, U2 and PC game Crysis. They are very clear about wanting to see more propietry engines for 360, instead of multi ones. They literally say the 360 can do everything the PS3 can do, and right now takes the cake.

Source?

See my Gamersyde Alan Wake preview thread. And yes, noone has utilized the EDRam chip before. If you do some research you will know that niether UE3 or UE2.5 ( which most good looking 360 games use ) do NOT according to Sweeney use the chip. After the fantastic Technical achievements praise Alan Wake is recieving, the doubters to both my article and the 360 power must feel silly. No?

The fact that Gamersyde found AW technically impressive is nice for all those who will enjoy the game.

It means squat, though, when you say that Remedy did some official statement and then you don't provide links. Or when you say that Bungie did use a certain AA technique, but you don't provide references.

I'm not debating how technically good AW or Reach will be, I'm sure they will. I'm asking you to stop posing as facts some speculations of yours regarding technical aspects with which you have absolutely no confidence.

Last but not least: stop saying totally unfounded things such as "noone has utilized the EDRam chip before". Either you're in good faith, in which case you need to do way more research, or you're spouting the same falseness again and again because you don't want to admit how silly the claim was in the first place.

From Digital Foundry - there's plenty of articles that touch on how the edram is employed, I'll just link the first few google will bring up

Ninja Gaiden 2 vs Sigma face-off:

Team Ninja's original performance quest was so completely single-minded that it actually resulted in a game that ran at a sub-HD resolution on Xbox 360. Native 720p was dumped in favour of an 1120x585 resolution combined with 2x multi-sampling anti-aliasing. Using a 32-bit pixel format and a 32-bit z-buffer, the frame could be entirely rendered within the Xbox 360's ultra-fast eDRAM before being copied out to main RAM. Indeed, if our maths is right, Team Ninja's selected framebuffer format uses 99.975 per cent of the available eDRAM.

Tekken 6 PS3/360: the resolution game

Namco's methodology here is to smooth off edges by rendering at a higher resolution then scaling down ? the developers have done it before, not just in Soul Calibur IV, but also in Ridge Racer 6. It's an attempt at some form anti-aliasing without needing to tile video data out into main RAM. At 1365x768 with no AA, everything remains inside the 360's 10MB eDRAM, ensuring maximum performance.

 

And last but not least:

Final Fantasy XII: how will it work on 360?

Due to the 10Mb of onboard eDRAM directly connected to the Xenos GPU, alpha blending has far less of an impact on performance with the 360...

While the eDRAM gives the 360 tangible advantages over the PS3 (it’s the reason why so many cross-format titles have anti-aliasing on 360 while it is omitted on the PS3 versions), 10Mb isn’t really enough for a full 720p framebuffer with the added overhead of anti-aliasing. Instead, developers switch memory in and out of the eDRAM in a process called ‘tiling’. This incurs an increased geometry cost for polygons that span more than one tile. In plain English? Realistically we expect the 360 version to match the 720p and 2x multisampling anti-aliasing of the PS3 game, but at a cost – the HDR lighting in the PS3 game will most likely be pared down from high range to medium range dynamic rendering.

Few games on 360 run with ‘proper’ HDR. Halo 3 is one of them, but this comes at a cost of a sub-HD resolution and no anti-aliasing.

Please note the bolded: "so many cross-format titles". Which is what I already said in previous posts. Please also note the reference to the memory limits and Halo 3's HDR, which again people already told you, and the fact that the edram helping with alpha blending is nothing new at all.

Now, you either show relevant links to prove your thesis, or stop spouting the same thing again and again as if repetition would make it true.

Ok. Lets do this. Firstly there is no way Digital Foundry know how an engine use the system. Example. Digital Foundry state GeoW 1 has partial AA. Epic state it has no AA. If I were you I'd listen to devs more than some guys in a basement.

2nd, your FF13 article is a myth article. It talks about PS3 demo and 'perhaps' what the 360 could do to handle the game. Nothing about any official statements of how the engine is used on 360. They talk about what EDRam may do for FF13 not that it is used.

Here is a straight question to Sweeney that proves Digital Foundry often get things wrong:

Jacob- "Will UE3.0 support predicated tiling to make use of 4xAA on Xbox 360?"

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.

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=2a2cdbfa9f935a60371587e9b684e6f4&t=70056

Further here is Remedy's official comments on their 'OFFICAIL Forums' just in case anyone thinks it's made up. You know to suit their theory that EDRam gives bugger all free.

Heres the comment reffering to hardware AA and free alpha blends. Also if you know how much alpha blends can tax a system you would know having them and not actually having to use them is incredible.

"We like 4xAA. Due to the alpha-to-coverage feature on the Xbox 360 GPU, it's one of the key reasons we can render a lot of "alpha test" foliage like trees and bushes without them starting to shimmer or dither (as alpha-to-coverage with 4xAA effectively gives us 5 samples of alpha "blend" without actually using alpha blend). Of course that leads into a lot of interesting ways how to get the the other "standard" z-buffer based rendering schemes to not alias, but let's not get into that discussion right now."

http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?hl=de&ie=UTF-8&sl=de&tl=en&u=http://forum.alanwake.com/showthread.php%3Fp%3D60357&rurl=translate.google.de&usg=ALkJrhiWwBc4YXXqgcDkxIRUL3dYSC4ATg#post60357

So there you have it. Actual developer info. Not basement boys or a hypothetical article.