MotoGP: what went right/wrong

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http://gamasutra.com/features/20060808/motogp_01.s...

Intresting article from gamemaker himself; they had some odd coding problems with ms tools.

The single biggest performance drain on MotoGP’06 wasn’t the number of vertices or textures but the number of draw calls.

In November 2005 our game was running at 12fps, with the render loop taking nearly 2 frames.

That month news came through from Microsoft that the changes to the Xbox360 SDK that would allow us to circumvent these draw commands wouldn’t be ready in time for our launch. We were in very serious trouble indeed.

Neil, one of our engineers, set about moving the render loop onto its own processor core. This was a major engineering challenge that took 6 weeks to complete, but even then the renderer was running over a frame.

Another engineer, Matt, eventually solved the problem by writing an offline automatic occlusion system. It would travel round the track and take snapshots of the scene every few yards – and query the GPU to see which draw calls resulted in pixels being written to the screen. At run time it would not execute draw calls that didn’t contribute to the scene, and this cut our draw call count in half. The system has to revert back to frustum culling if you stray too far from the track.

I think he is talking about inability of doing efficient z-depth logic on 360, which is odd as 360 (tiling renderer) has superior hidden surface removal.

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http://gamasutra.com/features/20060808/motogp_01.shtml

Intresting article from gamemaker himself; they had some odd coding problems with ms tools.

[quote]The single biggest performance drain on MotoGP’06 wasn’t the number of vertices or textures but the number of draw calls.

In November 2005 our game was running at 12fps, with the render loop taking nearly 2 frames.

That month news came through from Microsoft that the changes to the Xbox360 SDK that would allow us to circumvent these draw commands wouldn’t be ready in time for our launch. We were in very serious trouble indeed.

Neil, one of our engineers, set about moving the render loop onto its own processor core. This was a major engineering challenge that took 6 weeks to complete, but even then the renderer was running over a frame.

Another engineer, Matt, eventually solved the problem by writing an offline automatic occlusion system. It would travel round the track and take snapshots of the scene every few yards – and query the GPU to see which draw calls resulted in pixels being written to the screen.  At run time it would not execute draw calls that didn’t contribute to the scene, and this cut our draw call count in half. The system has to revert back to frustum culling if you stray too far from the track.[/quote]

I think he is talking about inability of doing efficient z-depth logic on 360, which is odd as 360 (tiling renderer) has superior hidden surface removal.

Acert93

Inscrit depuis 7565 Jours

I believe it is the GPU render calls. There is a significant overhead for this in DX9 due to the API and some older hardware. Vista resolves this to a degree and will be one way in which DX9 hardware is faster on Vista than XP. It sounds like the API update from MS to reduce the draw call latency was not out. Kind of confused why so many various parts of the 360 have taken so long to get running. We all heard about the tiling API issues and later additions to smooth things over; seems there is still a bit of work left to be done.

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Now that I retired I can play more MGS games.

Optimusv2

Inscrit depuis 7486 Jours

This is some interesting stuff.

Hey acert is the draw call latency no longer an issue now? I hope its fixed.

I read that entire thing awesome awesome awesome :)

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Blue Dragon Blue Dragon 青いドラゴン

Acert93

Inscrit depuis 7565 Jours

I don't know, a dev was talking about it a couple months back. MS is touting it as a significant reason to get Vista, even for older games, so you would think the 5-10% increase in performance would be something 360 devs would be all over.

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Now that I retired I can play more MGS games.

LEBATO

Inscrit depuis 7716 Jours

Another thing that went wrong: Funds, a developer admitted it was a game on a small budget.

The game was still really good and I don't regret buying it.

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Did you agree with me? Yes, No? Visit http://www.lebato.blogspot.com and see if we agree on something.

deftangel

Inscrit depuis 7462 Jours

The tiling performance improvements to the API only went out in May I think, so probably a bit too late to incorporate into MotoGP. They would have had to have knocked the game back by a couple of months if they wanted to rework that part.

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lukasblue

Inscrit depuis 7341 Jours

Posté par Acert93

Kind of confused why so many various parts of the 360 have taken so long to get running.

On this i agree completely. It appears to me, ati/ms just put together some progressive hardware without clear knowledge how to control it. They making software tools by the way (as it goes). Well, good time for MS to show how good coders they are.

I think this article is the first of its kind that 360 dev is actually talking to media in such manner.

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Denjinflash

Inscrit depuis 7568 Jours

Posté par lukasblue

I think this article is the first of its kind that 360 dev is actually talking to media in such manner.

yeah, it's nice. this game was great for me, too.

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MotoGP: what went right/wrong

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