@ NightAntilli

I think he was referring to Halo 3 using FP16 for the buffer. It gives all the 16 bits of precision for each RGBA components and the Xenos supports multisampling with it, but it needs double the memory than a "normal" 8-bit RGBA space. That means that if you want the bandwidth by staying inside the 10MB eDRAM you'll have to cut on AA and resolution (that's what Halo 3 did) or resort to tiling, which many other games did. Plus, I think Xenos doesn't support alphablending in FP16.

The 360 offers a different option that is almost penalty free: the FP10 render target format. In theory the limted range per component (10 bits versus 16) can cause artifacts when the image is toned down to the visible range, in practice it's often "good enough" and it can be used with MSAA. That's what most 360 games use, but I suppose that's what some consider not a "true HDR".

On the PS3 (but you can do the same on the 360 if you have enough free pixel shaders budget available) engines such as Uncharted have moved to using a format called NAO32 (pioneered in Heavenly Sword) instead of FP16 that AFAIK stores the logarithm of luminance in 16bits (thus a full HDR luminance range) of an RGB8 space and the other chrominance components in the remaining 16bits. It solves bandwidth/memory problems and I understand that it works well with AA, filtering and shader-based postprocessing, but it requires some extra decoding/encoding phases in your shader pipelines and extra work for alpha.

Which HDR method AW employed is a mystery to me, and I'm not sure how (if?) FP10 artifacts would show given the heavy use of (deferred) postprocessing for lighting and bloom effects or how bad the absence of hardware blending would hit the choice of FP16.

Anyway, I for one don't like the notion of "true" HDR as needing 16 bits. If it works for the eye (and HDR is all about mimicking our perceptual space) given the game's overall visual style, and if the artifacts are not too detrimental to the image quality then it's real enough for me. That said, the Luv encoding in NAO32 is closer to the real perceptual meaning of HDR than the standard "flat" FP16 solution or its downgraded FP10 cousin.

@ NightAntilli

http://www.naughtydog.com/docs/Naughty-Dog-GDC08-UNCHARTED-Tech.pdf

The Halo 3 HDR method is very unorthodox. It wouldn't suprise me if they dropped this for Halo Reach and opt for 720p with anti-aliasing instead.

Her being female probably doesn't mean a whole lot (all though these games typically aim at young males) but her past reviews do. Getting this girl to review AW is a lot like getting Gabe Newell to review Carnival Games (or non-fat cakes). To assess whether a game as huge and anticipated as Alan Wake has what it takes, it'd certainly be relevant to have some experience in the genre, or at the very least on the platform. She lacks both. Of course, reviews are subjective but people are always going on about how people who do not like certain games shouldn't be reviewing them. The score in itself isn't that bad all in all but her comment that the visuals were "decent" was a low blow and certainly false according to other reviews and, well, have you seen the thing in motion? There really isn't a whole lot that looks better than this.

It actually has nothing to do with any "power" of the X360, rather with the way that the hardware processes code.
As an example, you can't say the HD4870 is weaker or has less power than an HD5450 because the lack of DX11 in the 4870 while the HD5450 does have that feature.
As an older and maybe better example, you can't say a X850XT PE is weaker or has less power than a 6800GS/GT because it only has SM2.0 instead of SM3.0..

Thanks. That's the explanation I was looking for.

@ NightAntilli

WOW! They used Linux a lot! 

Posted already ?

Alan Wake Res Analysis (FINAL) :

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=21130355&postcount=1020

@ Sh1nn

960 x 545, so about 400K (or about 43%) fewer pixels rendered than in a normal 720p game.

MikeB said: @ NightAntilli As an example, you can't say the HD4870 is weaker or has less power than an HD5450 because the lack of DX11 in the 4870 while the HD5450 does have that feature. It is not weaker due to a lack of DX11 support. It's easy to imagine a much stronger GPU lacking DirectX 11 support and it's also easy to imagine a weaker GPU with DirectX 11 support. DirectX 11 is just a Microsoft API.

That's why I said the 2nd one is a way better example.. And yeah, DX11 is just an API, but you need a certain set of hardware to support it. If the hardware does not have that certain feature, it will not be able to perform certain instructions, but it says nothing about how much power the hardware has. And that's the same story with HDR on the X360 vs HDR on the PS3. But then again, you're usually looking for ways to undermine the X360 so yeah, what else could I expect... But meh, whatever floats your boat.