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

WereKitten on 04 March 2010
AlkamistStar said:
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.

In journalisitc terms, he committed the capital sin of not drawing a clear line between opinions, speculations, and documented facts. He's free to explain his opinions, which many will agree with. I myself agree with the overall sentiment of the piece: too much reliance on middleware has kept back the 360 a lot; thankfully, efforts such as AW and Reach will show much better the capabilities of the hardware.

Technical explanations and citations, though, can't be a mess of hearsay and half-understood jargon placed there to sort of support the opinion part only if nobody looks at them too closely, as they can be factually picked apart. And if -when called out on them- he refuses to amend the inaccuracies, then he's obviously asked for his sources to counter the ones disproving him.

I went and looked it up, actually. I quoted the literal quotes, I linked to the tech pieces. If you found in any of the other "FACT" ridden threads a link proving that Sweenay said that they never used the edram, or proving that its use to help AA and alpha blending is a new idea, granting "for free" 720p full screen 4xMSAA (as that's what Selnor basically said in the OP and some following posts), then please help Selnor and every reader and point us to it.

My point being: there's nothing wrong with not everyone being a tech expert. Nor there should be the need to back opinions up with half-assed numbers and specs just because it looks to an inexpert eye like it makes our e-penis bigger than someone else's. But if you bring out the tech-speak, then you must be able to handle it. Like a gun. Or at least admit what you can't handle and keep discussing in a very civil and clear way about opinions and speculations and those facts you can prove.

 



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

"..." - Gordon Freeman

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dahuman on 04 March 2010
FranTic91 said:
dahuman said:
FranTic91 said:
dahuman said:
I hope those of you who use the word Sandbox really know it's true meaning...... .

Of couse I do. Besides 2-3 of the guys in the Halo Reach Vidoc literally said "This is going to be a sandbox game"...lol You're probably one of the few people who haven't seen that video apparently.

Lets see how close it will be since I have never seen a true sandbox game besides MUD type, not even MMOs are like that.

I hope you're not reffering to Multi User Dungeons. In that case, the closest thing that comes to mind is Crysis, which pretty much gives the gamer the level of creation the developers had...Wonder if Crysis 2 will as well.

MUDs are very low in graphics, so of course this isn't going to be like that. However, the meaning of certain words and concepts can change over time, or even be repurposed or shared with other concepts; This is one of those situations. Heck, certain peopole are appaled that we would call final fantasy an RPG when clearly you need a dungeon master, 12-sided dice, a pen, and lots of paper for a real RPG and, story wise those types of RPGs are...I'm not sure I can think of a direct adjective to describe how linear they are in comparison. Do I care...Of course not...Again there's no adjective/situation I can find for how little I care...No I got one: I care for this as much a Sony cares for Japanese games (Well, at this point in the generation, at least)

 

Either way, bringing this up is rather completely...pointless given that you know exactly what I'm reffering to when I say 'Sandbox'.

 

:)

Crysis is not a sandbox game either, modern game design makes it pretty much impossible to make sandbox games, you are more talking about a huge ass map with a streamlined engine with a good draw distance but still linear objectives that are not user ran and created, in a sense, City of Heroes and Eve are probably the closest to a sandbox game than anything else. Not like my post ended at that one sentence either =P.



dahuman on 04 March 2010
NightAntilli said:

"No more suspense, Alan Wake astonished us from its production to the atmosphere that's been created, but above and beyond all, its technical mastery. Remedy used to be known for its top-notch rendering engines, and they prove again they are worthy of their fame. To be clear, none of the existing Xbox 360 games even compares to it, and even on PS3, which have more real exclusive titles, it's hard to find an equivalent. Killzone 2, Uncharted 2, Crysis, these are the few games which can compete with it. Whether it's the real-time projected shadows produced by the essential flashlight (those were obviously missing in Condemned 1 & 2), the total absence of aliasing (720p 4x FSAA), the breathtaking realistic lighting effects, the huge size of certain levels, SSAO, the atmospheric effects, the humongous size of some moving objects, the vegetation which interacts with characters and wind, or the largely satisfying framerate (with a light tearing that should disappear in the retail version) and many other physical and graphical effects, Alan Wake never ceases to amaze you with relative ease.

This technical mastery leaves us deploring Microsoft's choice not to favor more real exclusive titles for its console, as it shows how powerful the Xbox 360 is and how poor multiplatforms engines can be. But let's stop moaning and let's appreciate this one as it's not only a technical performance but it also comes with an excellent production."


http://gamersyde.com/news_gamersyde_preview_alan_wake-9022_en.html

Maybe the biased people can begin to see the truth with this

If what the article provided for us is true then FSAAx4 would make a lot of sense, not as good as MSAA but gets the job done fine if the game is polished enough to focus on that type of AA.



selnor on 05 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?
Um I posted the preview. Theres a big bit about Even PS3 exclusives your hard to find anything that matches it? Basically saying the only games that can compete are the 2 best looking PS3 games ever made.


newfgamer on 05 March 2010

Huh? thats one site, and no mention of GOw 3 which blows even UC2 out of the water, seriously, Ps3 has the best looking games, why is that so hard to accept? Alan wake is a linear slow paced game with little in the way of large scale battles, sorry, nothing on 360 matches the best looking PS3 games, thats a fact, no amount of spin, or finding one article out of thousands that say Alan wake may be one of the best looking games this gen. Not one other credible site says anything of the kind.

Every site around is praising GOW 3 amazing spectacle and graphics for a reason.

 

U got developers hyping up their own game? No way, when it comes from third parties, then ill take it seriosuly sorry, that's laughable.  Of course remedy will say that about their own game, how long have u been gaming? It's called building hype. u dont see sony praising god 3, they dont have t, the game speaks for itself, IGN, GAMESPOT, every site that has seen gow 3 say one thing, nothing else touches its graphics and sheer scale.



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selnor on 05 March 2010
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.



newfgamer on 05 March 2010

Again remeedy makes Alan Wake, sweemey makes Unreal 3 and a 360 exclusive, unitl third parties start saying anything about alan wake, its jysta bunch of dev hype, they are biased about their own game.

No where there does it say it looks betetr then UC2, MGS4, and definitely GOW 3, thats a fact.

Also, you make like the 360 is the only console still bewign tapped into the Ps3 is newer and the best looking game on the market  is UC2, until GOW 3 is released, only uses 60-70% of the PS3. Despite this PS3 already has a graphics advantage over the 360.

Your constant need to keep trying to build up the 360 graphics capabilities does not chnage the facts, not the current console picture.

 

Posting links how Remedy is using new techniques proves squat, Ps3 is alos constantly beign tapped into, and currentlyS3 has the top exclusives graphically, and GOW 3 is certainly widening that gap.



selnor on 05 March 2010
newfgamer said:

Again remeedy makes Alan Wake, sweemey makes Unreal 3 and a 360 exclusive, unitl third parties start saying anything about alan wake, its jysta bunch of dev hype, they are biased about their own game.

No where there does it say it looks betetr then UC2, MGS4, and definitely GOW 3, thats a fact.

Also, you make like the 360 is the only console still bewign tapped into the Ps3 is newer and the best looking game on the market  is UC2, until GOW 3 is released, only uses 60-70% of the PS3. Despite this PS3 already has a graphics advantage over the 360.

Your constant need to keep trying to build up the 360 graphics capabilities does not chnage the facts, not the current console picture.

 

Posting links how Remedy is using new techniques proves squat, Ps3 is alos constantly beign tapped into, and currentlyS3 has the top exclusives graphically, and GOW 3 is certainly widening that gap.

Reread your post. You say Remedy are biased to there engine, but state GOW3 uses only 60-70% of PS3. Um shouldnt you be saying that comment is also biased to their engine?

And again, my constant need is no different than the constant need for PS3 fans to justify the PS3 graphics capabilities. Changing facts and not the picture in 2010.



selnor on 05 March 2010
newfgamer said:

Huh? thats one site, and no mention of GOw 3 which blows even UC2 out of the water, seriously, Ps3 has the best looking games, why is that so hard to accept? Alan wake is a linear slow paced game with little in the way of large scale battles, sorry, nothing on 360 matches the best looking PS3 games, thats a fact, no amount of spin, or finding one article out of thousands that say Alan wake may be one of the best looking games this gen. Not one other credible site says anything of the kind.

Every site around is praising GOW 3 amazing spectacle and graphics for a reason.

 

U got developers hyping up their own game? No way, when it comes from third parties, then ill take it seriosuly sorry, that's laughable.  Of course remedy will say that about their own game, how long have u been gaming? It's called building hype. u dont see sony praising god 3, they dont have t, the game speaks for itself, IGN, GAMESPOT, every site that has seen gow 3 say one thing, nothing else touches its graphics and sheer scale.
1. Have you played GOW3?2. Loads more sites have played GOW3, as it's out this month. Loads of sites are yet to sit down with Alan Wake in preview form of the latest Alan Wake. GOW3 has gone gold. Alan Wake has another 7 weeks of polish to. I expect many more previews of Alan Wake to say the same thing. Huge levels, amazing textures, no aliasing whatsoever etc etc.


newfgamer on 05 March 2010

These same sites have played alan wake, you ever hear of previews? its out in jyst a couple of months. again, if u think 360 is the only system that is always being tapped into, you have no clue, this is not new, its a constant thing with console games, you try and make it sound liek this is a 360 only thing, please, everyone knows PS3 is newer, and has not been tapped as much, there is a reason Crytek stated they will max out the PS3, because no one has done it before. UC2, only used 70% of the PS3, and it is far and away the best looking console game.

 

The small linear levels, and lack of scale, large battles means AW wont touch GOW 3. The detail and scope of GOW 3 is unparallelled.

 

In other words you dont know, but its your prediction that they will say that about AW? Pure specuation.. 7 years in the making actually points to an older engine, games they change so much through its lifecycle usually suffer, it was first announced as a PC only game. Then they changed it from sandbox to linear, all the while other games kept making betetr looking games.

 

Huge levesl, I suggest u do some research, they scrapped the open world for a linear approach, AW does not come close to the epic scale and chaos going on nor the texture detail of GOW 3. Aw has smaller linear levels with lite action compare to the scope of the battles on GOW.

 

the same sites that have sat down and played AW, IGn, GMESPOT, never said anything about its graphics, where as, they have all said one thing, GOW 3 is a new landmark in console graphics and sheer scale.

 

Im nor defending anything, the PS3 speaks for itself, GOW 3 speaks for itself.