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Forums - Nintendo - FAST Racing NEO powered by 2nd generation engine for Wii U supports and uses 4k-8k textures

zarx on 22 November 2013

Good old Demosceners always pushing crazy tech that pushes the boundries of what is possible within their limitations.

 



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curl-6 on 23 November 2013
fatslob-:O said:
curl-6 said:
fatslob-:O said:
The real question here is the game going to show all 4K-8K textures at once ? I presume that they won't because the WII U is severely lacking memory bandwidth, memory size, as well as TMUs to even attempt showing every detail of the texture. The engine that they have is probably modified to support john carmacks megatexture technology to dynamically stream textures at a different resolution.

Shin'en have said on twitter that memory size was not a problem, as they could compress a 4k texture down to 10MB.

As for memory bandwidth they previously said that:

"Theoretical RAM bandwidth in a system doesn’t tell you too much because GPU caching will hide a lot of this latency."

Just how many 4-8K textures are they going to use then ? Once you get alot of objects on screen the complexity increases. 

As for shin'en's over statement about memory bandwidth, there's only so much you can do with 32MB. See the reason as to why bandwidth was important in the first place was to feed the GPU otherwise functional units will start to get under utilized. TMUs, shaders, ROPS, and everything else in the GPU is exetremely dependent on it. The reason as to why the X1 wasn't able to achieve 1080p for some of multiplatform titles or exclusives has to do with the main memory bandwidth being a bottleneck. (Aside from the lowered amount of ROPS ofcourse.) How else does the GPU get fed with alot of other data ? You can not keep constantly relying on the eDRAM to feed the GPU much like how the X1 relies on the eSRAM! It has to eventually access the main memory and only the main memory because it likely has the most data being resident on it. The purpose of caching is to SAVE BANDWIDTH by storing frequently accessed data. It was not meant to COMPLETELY FEED THE GPU. 

Now don't get me wrong! I'm not saying that the WII U isn't capable of handling 4-8K textures but it shouldn't be able to handle it at a regular basis given that it likely has a lack of TMUs and everything else I stated before. Do not fret about this issue. There are other ways of about solving this issue like I had said before. The megatexture technology introduced by john carmack in RAGE will resolve alot of issues regarding the WII Us lack of bandwidth and TMUs by trying to only stream the required highest resolution textures for a certain assests of a scene so that it can conserve alot of texture fillrates ad bandwidth so that the level of detail gets scaled back when objects are far away while also being scaled up too where the objects near the camera will have the highest level of detail. 

Of course eDRAM is not going to completely feed the GPU completely, but it should take a big load off main RAM bandwidth.



fatslob-:O on 23 November 2013
curl-6 said:
fatslob-:O said:
curl-6 said:
fatslob-:O said:
The real question here is the game going to show all 4K-8K textures at once ? I presume that they won't because the WII U is severely lacking memory bandwidth, memory size, as well as TMUs to even attempt showing every detail of the texture. The engine that they have is probably modified to support john carmacks megatexture technology to dynamically stream textures at a different resolution.

Shin'en have said on twitter that memory size was not a problem, as they could compress a 4k texture down to 10MB.

As for memory bandwidth they previously said that:

"Theoretical RAM bandwidth in a system doesn’t tell you too much because GPU caching will hide a lot of this latency."

Just how many 4-8K textures are they going to use then ? Once you get alot of objects on screen the complexity increases. 

As for shin'en's over statement about memory bandwidth, there's only so much you can do with 32MB. See the reason as to why bandwidth was important in the first place was to feed the GPU otherwise functional units will start to get under utilized. TMUs, shaders, ROPS, and everything else in the GPU is exetremely dependent on it. The reason as to why the X1 wasn't able to achieve 1080p for some of multiplatform titles or exclusives has to do with the main memory bandwidth being a bottleneck. (Aside from the lowered amount of ROPS ofcourse.) How else does the GPU get fed with alot of other data ? You can not keep constantly relying on the eDRAM to feed the GPU much like how the X1 relies on the eSRAM! It has to eventually access the main memory and only the main memory because it likely has the most data being resident on it. The purpose of caching is to SAVE BANDWIDTH by storing frequently accessed data. It was not meant to COMPLETELY FEED THE GPU. 

Now don't get me wrong! I'm not saying that the WII U isn't capable of handling 4-8K textures but it shouldn't be able to handle it at a regular basis given that it likely has a lack of TMUs and everything else I stated before. Do not fret about this issue. There are other ways of about solving this issue like I had said before. The megatexture technology introduced by john carmack in RAGE will resolve alot of issues regarding the WII Us lack of bandwidth and TMUs by trying to only stream the required highest resolution textures for a certain assests of a scene so that it can conserve alot of texture fillrates ad bandwidth so that the level of detail gets scaled back when objects are far away while also being scaled up too where the objects near the camera will have the highest level of detail. 

Of course eDRAM is not going to completely feed the GPU completely, but it should take a big load off main RAM bandwidth.

It will take a fair amount of stress off of the main memory but the WII U is likely assumed to have very litle functional units in the GPU so I guess bandwidth won't mean much in the end without the low amount of available processing power. Afterall a higher bandwidth is only required when a more powerful GPU is in presence. 

In due time you'll know what I mean by the mantra "it can achieve more with less".



Scoobes on 23 November 2013

Good luck to them. It'll be interesting to see how they pull off 4-8K textures. Like fatslob, I thought they might try something like the megatextures that ID used in Rage, although at the speed of the game I'm not sure how well that could work.




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curl-6 on 23 November 2013
fatslob-:O said:
curl-6 said:

Of course eDRAM is not going to completely feed the GPU completely, but it should take a big load off main RAM bandwidth.

It will take a fair amount of stress off of the main memory but the WII U is likely assumed to have very litle functional units in the GPU so I guess bandwidth won't mean much in the end without the low amount of available processing power. Afterall a higher bandwidth is only required when a more powerful GPU is in presence. 

In due time you'll know what I mean by the mantra "it can achieve more with less".

In due time? You found a dev willing to break NDA? :p



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fatslob-:O on 23 November 2013
Scoobes said:
Good luck to them. It'll be interesting to see how they pull off 4-8K textures. Like fatslob, I thought they might try something like the megatextures that ID used in Rage, although at the speed of the game I'm not sure how well that could work.

It'll work, trust me.

The graphical display is not continuous per se but it is discrete in framerates. Megatextures work based off of distance calculations from the camera to the tile of the texture. The tiles with the least distance between the camera will have the highest resolution streamed to the memory whereas everything further away from the camera will have lower texture resolutions being streamed to the memory. 



fatslob-:O on 23 November 2013
curl-6 said:
fatslob-:O said:
curl-6 said:

Of course eDRAM is not going to completely feed the GPU completely, but it should take a big load off main RAM bandwidth.

It will take a fair amount of stress off of the main memory but the WII U is likely assumed to have very litle functional units in the GPU so I guess bandwidth won't mean much in the end without the low amount of available processing power. Afterall a higher bandwidth is only required when a more powerful GPU is in presence. 

In due time you'll know what I mean by the mantra "it can achieve more with less".

In due time? You found a dev willing to break NDA? :p

Not exactly what I meant.  



megafenix on 23 November 2013

No formula of how the guy calculated the edram bandwidth yet?

very interersting that he fails to provide more bandwidth with 32 megabytes of newer edram compared to how much one can get with 4 megabytes of embedded memory of the old gamecube, are you sure this guy is a tech expert?



F0X on 23 November 2013
fatslob-:O said:
curl-6 said:
fatslob-:O said:

Who gives a damn about shin'en ?!

Quite a few people actually, as they're one of  the only devs who seem to have a proper grasp of the Wii U hardware and who care about making their Wii U games look good.

Of course, it doesn't hurt that they also make fun games. :)

They should atleast try to get a blockbuster hit so that nintendo can justify buying them.  


I agree with this, although it's not like Shin'en is incapable of making awesome games. Case in point: Art of Balance.



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fatslob-:O on 23 November 2013
megafenix said:

No formula of how the guy calculated the edram bandwidth yet?

very interersting that he fails to provide more bandwidth with 32 megabytes of newer edram compared to how much one can get with 4 megabytes of embedded memory of the old gamecube, are you sure this guy is a tech expert?

Are you sure your not some Alt account of eyeofcore ? BTW If you want to know so badly you DON'T add bandwidths of different memory subsystems.