Allerlei Technikdiskussionen

Trayal schrieb:

...aber gut, meine offensichtliche Vermutung: Battlefield 4 ist primär ein PC Spiel und es war zu wenig Zeit für eine ordentliche Portierung. 60 FPS waren das MUST HAVE und es wurden alle Kompromisse eingegangen, um dieses Ziel mit Sicherheit zu erreichen, ehe anschließend die noch verbleibende Zeit in Schadensbekämpfung gesteckt wurde.

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Trayal schrieb:

Dita666 schrieb:

Wieso beide? Ich dachte die Ps4 Versionen sind 1080p?

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Den Gerüchten nach bisher...

CoD: PS4 1080p und X1 720p
BF4: PS4 900p und X1 720p

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el_barto schrieb:

Wobei mir bei BF4 900p und dafür die volle visuelle Pracht wichtiger wäre als 1080p und nur magere Effekte, unschärfere Texturen etc.

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el_barto schrieb:

So siehts aus. Ich denke auch nicht, dass der limitierende Faktor hier DICE war, sondern EA, die als Publisher einfach so schnell und so ökonomisch wie möglich Portierungen auf die neuen Konsolen haben wollten.

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Trayal schrieb:

el_barto schrieb:

Wobei mir bei BF4 900p und dafür die volle visuelle Pracht wichtiger wäre als 1080p und nur magere Effekte, unschärfere Texturen etc.

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Alles unter 1080p bzw. alles was erst dazu hochskaliert werden muss (je weiter umso schlimmer), ist mMn allgemein inakzeptabel. Ganz egal was und wo.

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Zhadow schrieb:

Mir wäre aber der BF SP in 1080p mit allen Effekten und scharfen Texturen dafür aber nur in 30fps am Liebsten.

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Glod schrieb:

This. Es ist wie bei den bisherigen Launches auch. Da wird gerade bei Multiplattformspielen nur das Nötigste gemacht, weil auch einfach kein großer Profit zu erwarten ist.

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Trayal schrieb:

BF4: PS4 900p und X1 720p

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Phenomenon schrieb:

Wenn zwischen PS4 und X1 technisch wirklich Welten liegen, dann wäre das nicht gerade optimal, denn alle Multiplatformspiele werden dann aufgrund der schwächeren Hardware für die X1 optimiert (und dann nahezu 1:1 auf die PS4 portiert, da man ja nichts wegstreichen muss, das Hinzufügen von Effekten z.B. ist ja deutlich aufwendiger). Multiplattformspiele auf der PS4 werden dann wohl nur selten bis nie die Hardware ausreizen.

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Phenomenon schrieb:

Wenn zwischen PS4 und X1 technisch wirklich Welten liegen, dann wäre das nicht gerade optimal, denn alle Multiplatformspiele werden dann aufgrund der schwächeren Hardware für die X1 optimiert (und dann nahezu 1:1 auf die PS4 portiert, da man ja nichts wegstreichen muss, das Hinzufügen von Effekten z.B. ist ja deutlich aufwendiger). Multiplattformspiele auf der PS4 werden dann wohl nur selten bis nie die Hardware ausreizen.

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As a developer, you cannot be driven by the most powerful console, but rather the high middle ground that allows your game to shine and perform across multiple machines.

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Most studios, especially third-party studios, will not be pushing the consoles that hard in their release titles. This will be due to a mix of reasons relating to time, hardware access (it typically takes over two years to make a game and we got next-gen hardware back in February) and maintaining parity between different console versions of the game.

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With the new consoles coming out in November, the balance has shifted again. It looks like we will have much better GPUs, as they have improved significantly in the last seven years, while the target HD resolution has shifted upwards from 720p and 1080p - a far smaller increase. Although these GPUs are not as fast on paper as the top PC cards, we do get some benefit from being able to talk directly to the GPUs with ultra-quick interconnects. But in this console generation it appears that the CPUs haven't kept pace. While they are faster than the previous generation, they are not an order of magnitude faster, which means that we might have to make compromises again in the game design to maintain frame-rate.

Both the consoles have Jaguar-based CPUs with some being reserved for the OS and others available for the game developers to use. These cores, on paper, are slower than previous console generations but they have some major advantages. The biggest is that they now support Out of Order Execution (OOE), which means that the compiler can reschedule work to happen while the CPU is waiting on an operation, like a fetch from memory.

Removing these "bubbles" in the CPU pipeline combined with removing some nasty previous-gen issues like load-hit stores means that the CPUs Instruction Per Cycle (IPC) count will be much higher. A higher IPC number means that the CPU is effectively doing more work for a given clock cycle, so it doesn't need to run as fast to do the same amount of work as a previous generation CPU. But let's not kid ourselves here - both of the new consoles are effectively matching low-power CPUs with desktop-class graphics cores.

So how will all of this impact the first games for the new consoles? Well, I think that the first round of games will likely be trying to be graphically impressive (it is "next-gen" after all) but in some cases, this might be at the expense of game complexity. The initial difficulty is going to be using the CPU power effectively to prevent simulation frame drops and until studios actually work out how best to use these new machines, the games won't excel. They will need to start finding that sweet spot where they have a balanced game engine that can support the required game complexity across all target consoles. This applies equally to both Xbox One and PlayStation 4, though the balance points will be different, just as they are with 360 and PS3.

One area of growth we will probably see is in the use of GPGPU (effectively offloading CPU tasks onto the graphics core), especially in studios that haven't developed on PC before and haven't had exposure to the approach. All of the current-gen consoles have quite underpowered GPUs compared to PCs, so a lot of time and effort was spent trying to move tasks off the GPU and onto CPU (or SPUs in the case of PS3). This would then free up valuable time on the GPU to render the world. And I should point out that for all of Xbox 360's GPU advantage over PS3's RSX, at the end of the day, the balance of the hardware was still much the same at the global level. Occlusion culling, backface culling, shader patching, post-process effects - you've heard all about the process of moving graphics work from GPU to CPU on PlayStation 3, but the reality is that - yes - we did it on Xbox 360 too, despite its famously stronger graphics core.

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So, with limited time, limited resources and limited access to development hardware before the retail consoles arrive, studios have to make a decision. Do they want their game to look good, play well and maintain a solid frame-rate? If so, compromises have to be made and screen resolution is an easy change to make that has a dramatic effect on the frame-rate (900p, for example, is only 70 per cent of the number of pixels in a 1080p screen).

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Yes, we will probably see a lot of sub-1080p games (with hardware upscale) on one or both of the next-gen platforms, but this is probably because there is not enough time to learn the GPU when the development environment, and sometimes clock speeds, are changing underneath you. If a studio releases a sub-1080p game, is it because they can't make it run at 1080p? Is it because they don't possess the skills or experience in-house? Or is it a design choice to make their game run at a stable frame-rate for launch?

This choice mirrors the situation we previously had with the 60fps vs. 30fps discussion. It might not be what the company wants for the back of the box, but it is the right decision for getting the game to run at the required frame-rate. Again, it is very easy to point out this fact and extrapolate from there on the perceived 'power' of the consoles, but this doesn't take all the design decisions and the release schedule into account.

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So why are studios rushing out games when they know that they could do better given more time?

When it comes to console choice, most gamers will purchase based on factors such as previous ownership, the opinions of the gaming press (to some extent), which consoles their friends buy to play multiplayer games, and in some cases, which exclusives are being released (Halo, Uncharted etc). This means that studios are under a lot of pressure to release games with new consoles, as they help drive hardware sales. Also, if a studio releases a game at launch, they are likely to sell more copies, as console purchasers require games in order to show off their shiny new consoles to their friends.

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Trayal schrieb:

Hier übrigens eine neue Serie (The Secret Developers) von Digital Foundry und dieses mal wohl kein PR Geblubber von Sony oder MS mehr. Entwickler die Anonym über Digital Foundry schreiben dürfen...

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