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

selnor on 04 March 2010
WereKitten said:
selnor said:
Staude said:
this is very biased who wrote it ? it draws conclusions from nothing and assumptions.

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.

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?



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WereKitten on 04 March 2010
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.



"All you need in life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure." - Mark Twain

"..." - Gordon Freeman

NightAntilli on 04 March 2010
FranTic91 said:
restored_lost said:
its interesting im starting to notice a pattern in your posts

its like you don't even think the ps3 exists at all or it doesnt count as console for some reason
im curious if you have one tho?

you seem to be really into graphics uncharted 2 and killzone 2 look great, might be worth checking out.

(alan wake does look amazing, a technical achievement)

I think the real reason here is that we've seen the capabilities of the PS3 and have a good idea of what to expect.

The console's power has been explored and touted often. The thing is: we already know this. Not many people know of the graphical capabilities of the 360. They just see the exclusive games that have come out up until this point and see these capabilities not as such, but rather as limitations. This couldn't be farther from the truth and, again we know the PS3 has good graffickz.

He is trying to spread awareness that the 360 can do visuals just as well. The PS3s largest asset is it's cell processor...But most people for some reason believe that this is an all purpose processor and does just about everything.

And I can agree with him that it's unfortunate MS has not taken the opportunity to show of its capabilitiies until now. Sony has a proprietary engine; as far as we know Microsoft does not.

QFT. Somehow people feel the need to brag about the PS3 because it's something "special", but it really isn't anything extraordinary compared to the X360. It has some benefits, but the X360 also has some benefits. Depends on what you're doing. And yet somehow, people still refuse to believe that the X360 is a very capable machine. MS simply has had a different focus. While Sony has usually been about graphics and graphics alone, MS has been focusing more on community etc.



Truth does not fear investigation

restored_lost on 04 March 2010

im just saying anyone in here whose super into graphics may be worth checking out the ps3, if alan wake U2,KZ2 and crsis2 are apparently the best looking games you can play(gamersydes comments as statistical evidence alone lol) then half those games are ps3 exclusive, i personally don't know what an Edar chip is but if you do then that probably means you like graphics and it might be worth checking out the ps3 since is has half the games listed by gamersyde. I feel like all these posts are selnor rying to prove that xbox can compete with any console in graphics, and it clearly can, but at least acknowledging naughty dog and sony santa monica goes along way for reducing flame wars.



"even a dead god still dreams"

 

huaxiong90 on 04 March 2010
CGI-Quality said:
selnor said:
WereKitten said:
selnor said:
Staude said:
this is very biased who wrote it ? it draws conclusions from nothing and assumptions.

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.

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?

Can you post a link to this so people will stay off your case?

Well, as far as I'm concerned, John Carmack and Square Enix have stated the PS3 is more powerful.

http://www.vgchartz.com/forum/thread.php?id=99645

http://img16.imageshack.us/img16/2279/img0007med.jpg



Rockstar: Announce Bully 2 already and make gamers proud!

Kojima: Come out with Project S already!

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Lord Flashheart on 04 March 2010

If people are really that into graphics then they would do away with the PS3 and get a PC.
Why is the PC always ignored when talking about graphics?
Moving the goalpost a little?



Official member of the Xbox 360 Squad

AlkamistStar on 04 March 2010

Another group of people downplaying what the Xbox 360 is capable of, jeez it never stops here.

selnor finally brings out a thread in which he states FACTS...let's read that again..."FACTS"! Yet somehow it's downplayed. As for providing links...why? Go look it up. Matter of fact, there has been numerous threads on the homepage linking to the FACTS that selnor brought out in the OP. If only positive X360 threads stayed up for more than 5 minutes, maybe half of you looking for links, and post, etc would have read this already.



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huaxiong90 on 04 March 2010
Lord Flashheart said:
If people are really that into graphics then they would do away with the PS3 and get a PC.
Why is the PC always ignored when talking about graphics?
Moving the goalpost a little?

Wish it was like that (I'm a PC gamer too).

 

While I respect selnor, he worries too much about PS3 and 360 graphics. I don't know how many threads he's made hyping one thing in an Xbox 360 (console) exclusive: graphics. Not only that, but when he's debating, he's usually attempting undermine the PS3's graphical ability.

 

Like you said, if anyone wants eye candy, they should go to the PC. My PS3 and 360 are strictly for gaming purposes.



Rockstar: Announce Bully 2 already and make gamers proud!

Kojima: Come out with Project S already!

Lord Flashheart on 04 March 2010

I think Selnor does it deliberately as a responce to all the PS3 threads doing the same thing but people haven't twigged.
He is right about there being a lot more graphically to come out of the 360 and we are starting to see some of that.

Gaming on my PC is for 3D mostly.
Just need a new graphics card and processor.



Official member of the Xbox 360 Squad

huaxiong90 on 04 March 2010
Lord Flashheart said:
I think Selnor does it deliberately as a responce to all the PS3 threads doing the same thing but people haven't twigged.
He is right about there being a lot more graphically to come out of the 360 and we are starting to see some of that.

Gaming on my PC is for 3D mostly.
Just need a new graphics card and processor.

@Red: Definitely true. I just wish people would quit arguing over exclusive game graphics which will never, ever, be resolved, since there is no major difference between the two games (i.e. Alan Wake and Uncharted 2).



Rockstar: Announce Bully 2 already and make gamers proud!

Kojima: Come out with Project S already!