Shinen is using triple buffering for the gbuffer on Fast Racing Neo, bandwidth is not a problem

[zarx]

megafenix said:

yea, i read the tweets again and most likely are triple framebuffers. As for deffered rendering being used in ps3 and 360, well, from what i have read there were not vastly used and developers would have to do some workarounds to get it to work, in ps3 they used the spus(seems they had to use 5 in killzone)

http://www2.disney.co.uk/cms_res/blackrockstudio/pdf/BlackRockStudioTechnology_Deferred_Shading.pdf

 

Here some developers had to dismiss the deffered rendering as the gbuffer required 12MB of edram and xbox 360 only had 10MB of it, no to mention that those 10MB were needed for the framebuffer of 720p

 

 

here is another article were they seemed to have acheved the deffered rendering in ps3 nd 360 but by using some implementation tricks to reduce the memory bandwidth requirements but  that could mean more shader power that would normallybe required if you did it in the normal way

http://webstaff.itn.liu.se/~perla/Siggraph2011/content/talks/18-ferrier.pdf

 

I am not saying that its impossible to use this technique on the last consoles, but clearly the implementation isnt stright forward and could mean that they would use more shader power as they are using to many spus(ps3 is using 5 spus for this techqiue) and the xbox 360 is using parallelism in the gpu and hep from the cpu. In a normal implementation of this tecnique you would not require this much shader power, the implementation in this way may still be better than forward rendering and would still save up shader power, but doesnt look like it would have the performance that it would give in a console with enough memory bandwidth to use it without these workarounds

If Shin'en weren't using similar tricks I would be very suprised. They would be stupid to do a straight implementation when there are so many ways of improving it depending on what the specific requirements of the game are and the hardware it's running on. If they didn't it would be leaving easy optimisation on the table, and I very much doubt a studio like that would do that. As for it being hard yes there are issues with using it, but there are for forward rendering as well. And if DICE USA could do it on the OG Xbox with a licensed Shrek game it's clearly not that big a problem.