Loakum @Driftwood Awesome! I’m loving it! It does show a much crisper picture and the frame rate looks good! I was playing Stella Blade and Dragonball Soarkling Blast! :) (4 Days ago)
Driftwood @Loakum: enjoy, the one Sony sent us will be there on launch day. Coverage will follow asap. (6 Days ago)
Loakum *takes a large sip of victorious grape juice* ok….my PS5 pro arrived early! So much winning! :) (6 Days ago)
Driftwood @reneyvane: non ils l'ont publié le 1er octobre et je crois que tu l'avais déjà linkée. ;) (4 Weeks ago)
CraCra Y a un souci sur les forums ? (7 Weeks ago)
nostradamus very few with religious beliefs are naive or zealots, but for sure don't find amusing their beliefs being thrown in for clout. maybe STFU with that discourse? (10 Weeks ago)
Driftwood Download is now functional again on Gamersyde. Sorry for the past 53 days or so when it wasn't. (> 3 Months ago)
Driftwood Another (French) livestream today at 2:30 CEST but you're welcome to drop by and speak English. I will gladly answer in English when I get a chance to catch a breath. :) (> 3 Months ago)
Driftwood GSY is getting some nice content at 3 pm CEST with our July podcast and some videos of the Deus Ex Mankind Divided preview build. :) (> 3 Months ago)
Driftwood For once we'll be live at 4:30 pm CEST. Blim should not even be tired! (> 3 Months ago)
Driftwood More Quantum Break coverage coming in a few hours, 9:00 a.m CEST. (> 3 Months ago)
Driftwood We'll have a full review up for Firewatch at 7 pm CET. Videos will only be tomorrow though. (> 3 Months ago)
Driftwood Tonight's livestream will be at 9:15 GMT+1, not GMT+2 as first stated. (> 3 Months ago)
There will always be games that fit on DVD9 but it hurts to think that developers of new generation Sandbox type games will have to cut content to fit DVD9 eg GTA4 having a much smaller playing area then GTA San Andreas.
Sure you can make huge maps like Oblivion by repeating textures and other procedural tricks but to get a the fedility of PGR3 cities on that scale, it's just not going to happen on DVD9
Its very easy to find ways to max everything out. Its just as easy to run out of space on BR disk as it is to run out of space on DVD9.
Instead of CGI, use real time.
Intead of duping textures, use a better lighting model.
What matters more is the capabilities of the hardware. These systems can handle HDR lighting and can approximate global illumination. There really isn't an excuse to make the concessions they are making in PGR4 and DVD9's capacity is not an excuse.
They could just as well use neutral textures and leave it up to the lighting to do the job.
Floating around somewhere on the net is a video of PGR3 with the developer making real time adjustments to the lighting model. They just need to stick with that.
Oblivion is another perfect example. The sun is simulated in that game, and textures don't swap out of thin air. You can stand outside the whole time in Oblivion and watch the sun go up and down and you'll see a dramatic affect on the environment due to the changes in lighting.
Crackdown does the same thing.
Saintsrow does the same thing.
In fact, even the GTA games do it.
Allen Wake also does it.
Even Morrowind on the Xbox does it.
Overlord does it too.
Tons of game do it, and there's no real excuse not to have it. Duping textures seems like such a lazy excuse. While I'm sure PGR4 will still be great, and I'm going to play it - I just don't think this is a case against DVD9 so much as it is an confession by BC that they've chosen an older method of lighting and that as a result they are wasting space on DVD9 when they should be using that space to include more levels or to add more textures or higher rez textures - instead they are wasting space by duping them.
I wasn't even thinking about what they have or could have done, I was just looking at the current situation, and DVD9 is a limitation.
I owned a 360 from day 1 and just recently a PS3 which I love as a Media device, and just thinking about the possibly of Cell and RSX working together like one super GPU makes my forehead sweat(Exaggeration) ,
Its very easy to find ways to max everything out. Its just as easy to run out of space on BR disk as it is to run out of space on DVD9.
Instead of CGI, use real time.
Intead of duping textures, use a better lighting model.
What matters more is the capabilities of the hardware. These systems can handle HDR lighting and can approximate global illumination. There really isn't an excuse to make the concessions they are making in PGR4 and DVD9's capacity is not an excuse.
They could just as well use neutral textures and leave it up to the lighting to do the job.
Floating around somewhere on the net is a video of PGR3 with the developer making real time adjustments to the lighting model. They just need to stick with that.
Oblivion is another perfect example. The sun is simulated in that game, and textures don't swap out of thin air. You can stand outside the whole time in Oblivion and watch the sun go up and down and you'll see a dramatic affect on the environment due to the changes in lighting.
Crackdown does the same thing.
Saintsrow does the same thing.
In fact, even the GTA games do it.
Allen Wake also does it.
Even Morrowind on the Xbox does it.
Overlord does it too.
Tons of game do it, and there's no real excuse not to have it. Duping textures seems like such a lazy excuse. While I'm sure PGR4 will still be great, and I'm going to play it - I just don't think this is a case against DVD9 so much as it is an confession by BC that they've chosen an older method of lighting and that as a result they are wasting space on DVD9 when they should be using that space to include more levels or to add more textures or higher rez textures - instead they are wasting space by duping them.
As far as I know, textures would not be a resource that would affect lighting very much unless they were using a lot of normal mapping or some kind of pixel shading that needs to be reprocessed with changes in the POV of the camera or changes in light intensity.
PGR may have that "photo realistic" style going for it, but the textures in the game are mostly just flat.
Other than the reflections on the cars and road surface, I don't see a ton of advanced textures. Certainly no parallax mapping.
It's something Sony work hard on but an area they will always be playing catch up in. MS make operating systems for computer hardware for a living!
So the whole point of saving GPU resource to avoid that all that with detailed textures that match your realtime lighting
As far as I know, textures would not be a resource that would affect lighting very much unless they were using a lot of normal mapping or some kind of pixel shading that needs to be reprocessed with changes in the POV of the camera or changes in light intensity.
PGR may have that "photo realistic" style going for it, but the textures in the game are mostly just flat.
Other than the reflections on the cars and road surface, I don't see a ton of advanced textures. Certainly no parallax mapping.
It's something Sony work hard on but an area they will always be playing catch up in. MS make operating systems for computer hardware for a living!
Or do you mean something else?
If you are curious of which games I have enjoyed over the years, click my name.
Point: Consoles are about compromise in design (i.e. where the power is). This isn't Xbox 360 versus PS3, but, "All consoles make compromises and argueing that because 1 game hits a limit that a limitation was the incorrect decision is hasty if not considered in the context of all design decisions, limitations, and market factors".
Method: Take your example, word for word, and demonstrate in a different scenario (different game, different performance vector) that your criticism can be completely flip flopped.
The other point was your point was very tunnel vision oriented to the issues and a lot of your statements are inaccurate.
Now we are creeping in the territory of 80MB difference. So 15% isn't too bad, right? Considering you may have a couple hundred MBs in functional code and sound the percentage rises. So 80MB for OS, 30MB for the framebuffer, 100MBs for audio, 50MB for game related code, that leaves you about 260MB for graphic assets (various geometry and texture formats). On the Xbox 360 you are looking at 340MB -- that is a 30% difference in resources allocated for graphical assets.
Hence more than one multiplatform developer has bitched about the memory situation on the PS3. That and the split memory pools, that take more management, have performance gotchas and limitations, and more bandwidth restrictions to mitigate and balance.
And use your SPEs for graphic tasks instead of running game code?
Sounds like a lose-lose situation. You are leaving performant silicon on RSX idle and using the CPU for core graphic tasks when they are needed to do the stuff that makes games fun, engaging, and deep.
Oh, and you just sucked up the majority of your system memory bandwidth (and footprint) from CELL.
So, lets return to my point:
"All consoles make compromises and argueing that because 1 game hits a limit that a limitation was the incorrect decision is hasty if not considered in the context of all design decisions, limitations, and market factors".
By your reasoning, that no HD optical media was a poor design and market decision because a game has hit a store limition, the same logical conclusion can be drawn that the PS3 has been limited in many, many games in regards to system memory.
If no HD optical was a mistake in the Xbox 360, then memory limitations in the PS3 was a mistake by Sony.
The issue isn't so clear now, is it?
...
but it hurts to think that developers of new generation Sandbox type games will have to cut content to fit DVD9 eg GTA4 having a much smaller playing area then GTA San Andreas.
Further, GTA:SA was under 1.5GB. Sandbox games do not tend to be huge, contrary to popular opinion.
So you have put forth a conslusion, DVD9 limitations holding back the scale of GTAIV, and haven't done anything at all to substantiate this position. The current crop of sandbox games with realtime day cycles indicate this hasn't been an issue.
What of all the other design and performance issues that crop more often?
Where is the priority? Why? How does this affect cost and reasonable market penetration?
It is statements like this that resulted in my tongue and cheek response. Truly the reverse is true, "There will always be a few games that cannot fit on DVD9..." in which case you can either span disks, cache to the HDD, or in a few cases the user will get reduced asset quality (sound, textures, mech complexity) or the developer will need to impliment unique solutions that are system specific like procedural generation.
Making a big deal out of a rare occurance -- when far more weightier issues affects many [most!] games -- and looks at the issue very narrowly (i.e. HD optical not available, limited production in 2006, HUGE expense) seems like special pleading.
The fans have spoken. Concerning the graphics of the Halo 3 Beta: "There's so many little effects and things going on that make this game pretty much 2nd only to Gears at the moment."
There you go.. :P
http://www.cyberwarriors.nl
http://home.xmsnet.nl/bigbear/fiat124.jpg
There you go.. :P
Interestingly, there are always all kinds of tradeoffs based on design. There are cases where the PS3 memory architecture could be an advantage. But then again there are cases where DVD9 can be an advantage.
Getting bent out of shape because a developer had to mitigate a limitation isn't really a big deal unless it becomes a significant bottleneck to design and is a recurring issue without remedy.
Consoles are a lot about exploiting what you have and making the most of it and leveraging the closed design and absolute consistant performance threshholds to your advantage.
The fans have spoken. Concerning the graphics of the Halo 3 Beta: "There's so many little effects and things going on that make this game pretty much 2nd only to Gears at the moment."
You can't blame Microsoft for that, though. Sony put BRD in their machine in order to make it future proof (and to help BRD against HD_DVD), but it made their machine very expensive, which is one of reasons why it is selling so poorly, and ultimately it won't have that long lifespan due to limited userbase (if it continues to sell so badly and 3rd parties will start to leaving PS3 after this Holiday season, Sony might be in huge trouble).
As much as someone can bitch about DVD limiting 360 games, it's weird that Microsofts games offer so much more in terms of content and gameplay length (most of Sony's games are single player campaigns only...)
"That just happened 'cause that was awesome" - Randy Pitchford, Gearbox
If what you say is true and there is no ingenius way to get around the memory limitation then hopefully the PS3 can make up for lower res Tex with better effects, animations, and higher poly models.
I will let Uncharted, Killzone2, Burnout Paradise, Rachet and Clank speak for what the PS3 can do when they are release, until then I will cross my fingers that some genius is finding away to overcome the memory limitation you speak of.
Also on a side note, the reason I seem so adament of the PS3 is that after having my 360 replaced because RedRingOfDeath, you really start to appreciate the PS3 more for its quiet stabability. Also in Canada it's only a 150$ more to buy a PS3 and you get a freaking Bluray player, Wireless connection 40GB more space and it Upscales all my PS2 games better then my shitty TV's scaler chip. I have to say after owning the PS3 it's become my (Car of choice)
You just want it to be successful.
"That just happened 'cause that was awesome" - Randy Pitchford, Gearbox
LOL, gamersyde is not turning into that big of a war, yet.
LOL, gamersyde is not turning into that big of a war, yet.
It seems playsyde and xboxyde has merged rather nicely like one big happy family :)
Hironobu Sakaguchi is coming back to reclaim the throne :)
October 20th 2007 (A good day)
Don't ask any questions just shut up and buy Halo : Ghosts of the Onyx one of the greatest books ever.
pssh! more like electronic gay-ming monthly! amirite
So the whole point of saving GPU resource to avoid that all that with detailed textures that match your realtime lighting
There are a lot of ways you can do procedural textures--everything from the artist design stages for generating base content to later be altered and packaged down to runtime on demand.
Displacement mapping is the technique of using textures to generate geometry (of which a tesselation unit is very helpful in doing single pass displacement).
Parallax mapping, or as Epic calls it virtual displacement mapping, is pixel shading intensive, not vertex. It is essentially a progression of bump mapping; in Parallax Mapping the effect is create "parallax" ie the sense of depth through the forground and background shifting independantly based upon the point of view and angle of the observer. There is no geometry created -- hence POM fails when you get flush with the real geometry (e.g. a brick wall using POM for the grouting looks real until you get flush, in whichc ase all the depth is lost and you see a flat wall). POM doesn't require a tesselation unit either; see RSX's use of parallax mapping in games like Motorstorm.
The fans have spoken. Concerning the graphics of the Halo 3 Beta: "There's so many little effects and things going on that make this game pretty much 2nd only to Gears at the moment."
Displacement mapping is the technique of using textures to generate geometry (of which a tesselation unit is very helpful in doing single pass displacement).
Parallax mapping, or as Epic calls it virtual displacement mapping, is pixel shading intensive, not vertex. It is essentially a progression of bump mapping; in Parallax Mapping the effect is create "parallax" ie the sense of depth through the forground and background shifting independantly based upon the point of view and angle of the observer. There is no geometry created -- hence POM fails when you get flush with the real geometry (e.g. a brick wall using POM for the grouting looks real until you get flush, in whichc ase all the depth is lost and you see a flat wall). POM doesn't require a tesselation unit either; see RSX's use of parallax mapping in games like Motorstorm.
Seems like it would just be the fastest way to do it.
About parallax mapping - I don't know where you are getting your info but as far as I know, even bump mapping requires vertex shading.
These effects are often just called pixel shading by pixel shaders but in reality its a pixel shading doing some vertex shading + pixel shading.
The entire effect relies on the calculation of vectors on pixels in order to create the effect. That's vertex shading, not pixel shading. The pixel shading comes in after the pixel shader has done the vertex math.
Depending on how you want to look at it, you could call that pixel shading or vertex shading. The distinction is a fine line, which is why we have unified shaders now because the real practical differences between a pixel and vertex shader is relatively small.
I prefer to call it vertex shading, as the core math is vector math. But there is nothing wrong with calling it pixel shading, as the most intensive part if pixel shading.
In the new world of unified shaders, it's best to just call it shading - I guess.
All forms of bump mapping, including parallax require vertex shading, which is basically heavier as you move towards parallax mapping.
And I see that the old play on words of confusion is at it again.
To clear things up:
Parallax Mapping = Displacement mapping
Virtual Displacement mapping = somebody just made that up - it's a dirty fast way of doing Parallax mapping, which is the same as Displacement mapping.
You could also call Virtual Displacement mapping = Virtual Parallax mapping
Now people have taken to calling parallax mapping the dirty fast way of doing displacement mapping, which you appear to be doing - but forgive me for saying, that is just wrong.
As far as I can remember:
Parallax Mapping = Displacement mapping
Parallax Mapping != Virtual Displacement mapping
Virtual Parallax Mapping = Virtual Displacement mapping
Make sense?
Parallax Mapping is not pixel shader light / vertex shader heavy, and it doesn't require a tesselation unit.
Unified shaders is a hardware implimentation that has not obscured the distinction between vertex and pixel processing (or ROP processing either) in the way you are suggesting.
Virtex shading deals with vertices (geometry) and pixel shading deals with pixels. Vertex shaders can use textures (vertex shading, R2VB) to augment real geometry; pixel shaders can use textures (various bump maps like normals and parallax maps) to augment pixels to appear to represent geometry -- hence drawing flush to geometry with a parallax map will clearly show the geometry hasn't been altered.
Edit: Wiki is your friend (as it seems you don't believe me).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displacement_mapping
Parallax mapping is implemented by displacing the texture coordinates at a point on the rendered polygon by a function of the view angle in tangent space (the angle relative to the surface normal) and the value of the height map at that point. At steeper view angles the texture coordinates are displaced more, and so give the illusion of depth due to parallax effects as the view changes.
Parallax mapping described by Kaneko is a single step process that does not account for occlusion. Subsequent enhancements have been made to the algorithm incorporating iterative approaches to allow for occlusion and accurate silhouette rendering[2].
The fans have spoken. Concerning the graphics of the Halo 3 Beta: "There's so many little effects and things going on that make this game pretty much 2nd only to Gears at the moment."
http://www.bizarrecreations.com/article.php?articl...
And see this amazing "image" showing pretty much all weather effects on may of the cities to show the difference. It looks amazing.
http://www.bizarrecreations.com/images/news_conten...
EDIT: Someone put all the images above in the right order, here are the results.
http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y148/tyger_cheex/...
http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y148/tyger_cheex/...
http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y148/tyger_cheex/...
http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y148/tyger_cheex/...
http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y148/tyger_cheex/...
http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y148/tyger_cheex/...
http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y148/tyger_cheex/...
http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y148/tyger_cheex/...
http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y148/tyger_cheex/...
http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y148/tyger_cheex/...
http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y148/tyger_cheex/...
AMAZING!