1080p discussion

Quote from Marcem

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but isn't OpenGL 4.5 designed to fix the issues of it being a state machine? From a non-dev's perspective, wouldn't that make multi-plat development way easier, especially when DX12 seems to be doing the same stuff to bring it into line with XBOne DX 11/12? Last generation the PS3, 360, and PC couldn't be any more different. Now all three are x86-64, two use essentially the same rendering API if the Windows PC domination continues, and the PS4 API seems to be familiar territory from what I can glean. Seems to me that we won't be seeing so much quality difference between ports and exclusives.

Well, if there was hardware parity between the consoles you'd be right.

Quote from Marcem

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but isn't OpenGL 4.5 designed to fix the issues of it being a state machine? From a non-dev's perspective, wouldn't that make multi-plat development way easier, especially when DX12 seems to be doing the same stuff to bring it into line with XBOne DX 11/12? Last generation the PS3, 360, and PC couldn't be any more different. Now all three are x86-64, two use essentially the same rendering API if the Windows PC domination continues, and the PS4 API seems to be familiar territory from what I can glean. Seems to me that we won't be seeing so much quality difference between ports and exclusives.

In regards to openGL 4.5. I'll have to get back to you after I've actually written some openGL4.5 stuff. In theory it does seem to solve a lot of those issues though and looks like a step in the right direction.

Even better, Khronos is writing a NEW graphics api that won't have to deal with any backwards compatibility issues.

It's true the architectures these days are more similar but the consoles still do put emphasis on taking advantage of parallel programming moreso than a computer. This is due to the low per-core clock speed. In most cases with a computer you have these really fast cores so they can push through more easily.

I actually spent a good deal of my sunday discussing this with other graphics engineers. One point that was made was while being able to prep all your rendering data in a multithreaded environment is nice, submission is essentially a possible bottleneck. Which leads to doing more work on the GPU but sometimes that's not feasible..... Essentially I've now given myself a TON of research test cases I have to try now.

mmm... This reminds me of an interview with Tim Sweeney in 2007 when he talked about the future of graphics and parallelization of code. summarizing some ideas of him: he did forsee lower level graphics API, so that you wouldn't be restrained by the API itself. And in an ideal world, CPUs could parallelize code with no programmer's intervention, releaving you from the burden of dealing with all the specifics of parallelizing code yourself. AMD's APUs and Intel HD graphics seem to be going towards tighter integration of GPU and CPU, which should eliminate some of the bottlenecks we have today.

They should certainly help if they eliminate having to transfer graphics data from system memory to GPU memory. If we can just give the GPU a pointer and say something like "start here" then that eliminates that bottleneck. Memory speed will continue to be a bottleneck (which is one of the reasons why a lot of developers were happy about the faster ram in the PS4).

The big advantage to doing that is doing stuff on the CPU should be a lot less of a penalty and you have a lot more freedom on the CPU.

Quote from AlexM

Naughty Dog would be an extreme case of this because of the PS3's architecture. I'm pretty confident if it was a mutliplat game it wouldn't look as good.

Does Uncharted look that good? In video that doesn't look much more than Tomb Raider. (I don't have a PS3 or the games to compare side by side).

Quote from blackdog

Does Uncharted look that good? In video that doesn't look much more than Tomb Raider. (I don't have a PS3 or the games to compare side by side).

Opsie. I ended up discussing about GPU + CPU integration when the main point was about GPU's programmability.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8363/khro…engl-initiative

The key idea there seems to be: as GPUs are becoming more and more fully programmable, why there isn't a standard instruction set for GPUs? There is x86 for CPUs, will there be an equivalent for GPUs? Intel did though about that when they started their GPU with x86 cores initiative, which failed to result in a consumer video card but succeded in becoming a co-processor to compete with Nvidia Tesla. Nvidia has its CUDA, but no game is fully utilising it because it's Nvidia only.

Uncharted 3 looks good. Except that due to PS3 bottlenecks they had to bake lots of things and lower the resolution of many shaders and textures. With PS4 and that Uncharted 4 teaser they seem to be freed from having to lower the detail in this char to go higher in the other char and some other trade offs.

Graphics vs fluidity? I'd say fluidity if the game is naturally fast, such as F1. But for horror, terror, adventure, image sharpness first.

DAFUQ?? They pulled the "Adventure of young Indiana Jones" already in the third chapter? Damn...

looks great yes, but this section doesn't look ver representative of the best quality they can pull? I mean I would have chosen some scenario with large vista... but still, considering that Tomb Raider* is multi-platform, doesn't look much less to me.

Aside: the kid animations are quite terrible as well, they look so fake and keyframed.

*compare those titles just because they are similar, I mean: "corridor" type maps with large vistas in the background.

Quote from 0kelvin

Opsie. I ended up discussing about GPU + CPU integration when the main point was about GPU's programmability.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8363/khro…engl-initiative

The key idea there seems to be: as GPUs are becoming more and more fully programmable, why there isn't a standard instruction set for GPUs? There is x86 for CPUs, will there be an equivalent for GPUs? Intel did though about that when they started their GPU with x86 cores initiative, which failed to result in a consumer video card but succeded in becoming a co-processor to compete with Nvidia Tesla. Nvidia has its CUDA, but no game is fully utilising it because it's Nvidia only.

Uncharted 3 looks good. Except that due to PS3 bottlenecks they had to bake lots of things and lower the resolution of many shaders and textures. With PS4 and that Uncharted 4 teaser they seem to be freed from having to lower the detail in this char to go higher in the other char and some other trade offs.

Graphics vs fluidity? I'd say fluidity if the game is naturally fast, such as F1. But for horror, terror, adventure, image sharpness first.

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They are certainly becoming more programmable but nowhere near the freedom of the CPU. A couple reasons for this, one is while it's fast to get stuff onto the GPU memory it's prohibitively slow to go the other way. The other is because GPU's are massively parallel doing things like if statements are huge performance drops. Really high performance shaders avoid branching so a warp (a group of processors) can all execute together.

Is that an art style thing though? I really need to play GTA5 but I'm holding out for a next gen release.

Quote from AlexM

Is that an art style thing though? I really need to play GTA5 but I'm holding out for a next gen release.

I would say art style, I played both games on a PC monitor, and can easily say Uncharted 3 looks way better. GTAV looks nice, but when you look closer, it's a bit of a mess. Ambient occlusion doesn't look so nice up close, and the cascaded shadow map falloff is ridiculous. Also GTAV tends to be a "one size fits all" in terms of shaders/effects, while Uncharted has a bunch of one-off type stuff. Can't wait to see how GTAV looks like when it isn't stuck to the requirements of a PS3 though.