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Guerrilla Games: Regarding Killzone Shadow Fall and 1080p

MidBoss

Member
I've heard of branch prediction but this is just crazy. Who thinks of these things? I would kill to learn from these guys.
 
:uglyclap:

so are all XBO games 1080p native because the scaler generates a full 1920x1080 pixel progressive image.

:facepalm:

there is a difference, but we're talking shades of grey at this point. this reminds me of Remedy's response to Alan Wake's resolution.

Shadow Fall MP is creating unique frames made up of 2073600 unique pixels (1920 x 1080). It has the appearance of true 1080p under a number of conditions (something that upscaling never achieves), holding up to pixel counting under those circumstances (check out Dark10x's shots to see some of those best case scenarios).

Where it's 'cheating' is that half of those pixels are based on the previous two frames, rather than rendered traditionally. They are still calculating 1 pixel to 1 pixel of the 1080p output for each frame, but they aren't doing it the way we expect when we hear 'native 1080p' and hopefully in the future we won't see this again without being told upfront.

GAF noticed when certain games were not native 1080p. Like what happened with Ghosts. The developers had said it was 1080p, and unpatched, it wasn't, and we called it out. Here, we noticed something was up, but not what. Which is fair enough because it was a brand new technique we didn't know how to identify.

Now we do, so hopefully developers will realize that they can't pull the wool over our eyes the same way.

It is different to scaling. It is native 1080p... but it gets there using reprojection, so it's not true 1080p in the sense we expect, even though under certain conditions it looks almost as good as true 1080p.
 

BigTnaples

Todd Howard's Secret GAF Account
I don't care about 1080p. The multiplayer was blurry and difficult to focus on moving objects when sitting close on a smaller monitor.

Give us a 720p option if this is the only way to do 1080p.


You realize 720p would make it much more blurry and hard to focus than this technique right?
 
A good explanation and a genuinely impressive solution for when games need a little extra to reach a desires fps without simply lowering the internal resolution and killing the image quality.

All console gamers should be excited by this tech if they can find their way past the dick swinging contests.
I wonder if this method could work on the X1; I see no reason why not. Might go a long way towards preserving good image quality in games without having to go with 720p, or maybe I'm oversimplifying things a bit.
 

zzz79

Banned
As long as it's internally rendered at 1080p including black bars (which I think The Order is), then yes, The Order is native 1080p.

But it's not ... the native res of the game is 1920×800. including both black bars they get 1920x1080. Means the game information is showed only in 1920x800 pixles the reaming are just black (no game info).

The output signal will be 1080p, so a FULL-HD TV can display it 1:1, but the games itself is rendered on 1920x800.
 
So lower res framebuffers to combine into a 1080p output.. not native.. end of discussion.

Not that it matters, there is a lot trickery going on in games to compose the final framebuffer. (image)

It is native 1080p. Just like he said many games render effects like alpha, transperencies, shadows, and textures at lower than 1080p, while outputting a 1080p image. The temporal solution they implemented isn't free either, it takes some amount of processing power to accomplish that also.

My guess is that being a launch game which was largely worked on before the console specs were final, this was the best way they found to accomplish 1080p at the time. Future ps4 games won't need to resort to these workarounds, as we've seen with numerous other ps4 games.
 

kinggroin

Banned
Well, it is true that rendering some elements to a lower resolution render target is a perfectly normal and well-recommended practice.

Elements? Like, the entire frickin frame in which ALL visual elements are encapsulated? By doing it the way they did, everything is affected and you end up with an image much softer than a front to back 1080p rendered image.

They're being disingenuous with regards to their comparison to rendering alphas and lighting at low res.
 

Jack_AG

Banned
I'm floored at the responses from people who obviously haven't read the whole thing. That being said, it isnt 1080p and he brings up a good point about various systems in a game engine that might render some alpha, shading, lighting, etc at a lower resolution. If we are to apply the "non(insert resolution) stamp to KZSF - it should be applied to every game that uses techniques like these or similar. So... Pretty much all of them. Not defending GG but dude has a point.
 
If Bluray movies have black bars,

are they not 1080p?

philosoraptor_templatxeog8.jpg

switching to the Blu-ray way of labelling would be a good idea. we all know what 1080p 2.39:1 means when we see it on the back of a Blu-Ray box. It tells us both that we're getting 1:1 pixel mapping on a 1080p set, AND an aspect ratio that will give us some black bars.
 

Man

Member
I don't care about 1080p. The multiplayer was blurry and difficult to focus on moving objects when sitting close on a smaller monitor.

Give us a 720p option if this is the only way to do 1080p.
Now that's just silly. An argument could maybe be made for 900p vs temporal-reprojection 1080p but this is genuinly delivering much more (precise)data than 720p.
 

sinnergy

Member
there is a difference, but we're talking shades of grey at this point. this reminds me of Remedy's response to Alan Wake's resolution.

Shadow Fall MP is creating unique frames made up of 2073600 unique pixels (1920 x 1080). It has the appearance of true 1080p under a number of conditions (something that upscaling never achieves), holding up to pixel counting under those circumstances (check out Dark10x's shots to see some of those best case scenarios).

Where it's 'cheating' is that half of those pixels are based on the previous two frames, rather than rendered traditionally. They are still calculating 1 pixel to 1 pixel of the 1080p output for each frame, but they aren't doing it the way we expect when we hear 'native 1080p' and hopefully in the future we won't see this again without being told upfront.

GAF noticed when certain games were not native 1080p. Like what happened with Ghosts. The developers had said it was 1080p, and unpatched, it wasn't, and we called it out. Here, we noticed something was up, but not what. Which is fair enough because it was a brand new technique we didn't know how to identify.

Now we do, so hopefully developers will realize that they can't pull the wool over our eyes the same way.

It is different to scaling. It is native 1080p... but it gets there using reprojection, so it's not true 1080p in the sense we expect, even though under certain conditions it looks almost as good as true 1080p.

It's still not native.. it can be because of any factors, no time, no budget, not enough power.. fact is that they temper with the composition of the final image.

And that they forgot to tell this to us..
 

terrier

Member
Good response, should have said before and not after though, considering this is the age of pixel counters and this was going to see the light sooner or later.

Now it would be nice that other developers told if their games are fully rendered at the resolution they say or only part of the pipeline is.
 

benny_a

extra source of jiggaflops
I wonder if this method could work on the X1; I see no reason why not. Might go a long way towards preserving good image quality in games without having to go with 720p, or maybe I'm oversimplifying things a bit.
I don't know the bandwidth requirements but based on the February '13 post-mortem on the KZSF demo they have a 800MB MRT. And that was the SP.

Maybe this technique is quite memory and bandwidth intensive? Maybe only an issue if you're hitting limts on the Xbone but if you're managing your stuff clever it can be done.

Anyone an idea?
 

jacobeid

Banned
Reading GG's post, I realize how little I know about anything. KZ multiplayer didn't bother me at all, but I'm also not one to get too picky about resolutions and things of that nature.
 
I aint mad. Better than that MS guy saying "you do know xbox one outputs at 1080p, right?" or something like that. pls post that tweet lol.
 
But it's not ... the native res of the game is 1920×800. including both black bars they get 1920x1080. Means the game information is showed only in 1920x800 pixles the reaming are just black (no game info).

The output signal will be 1080p, so a FULL-HD TV can display it 1:1, but the games itself is rendered on 1920x800.

So is a letterboxed 1.85:1 or 2.39:1 blue ray film not 1080p then? It also doesn't display full screen on a standard HDTV.
 

_hekk05

Banned
It's still not native.. it can be because of any factors, no time, no budget, not enough power.. fact is that they temper with the composition of the final image.

And that they forgot to tell this to us..

They told digital foundry though, who told us. Otherwise we would never have known
 
It's work in progress. It'll be refined. It sounds like they were implementing it last moment.

It being refined down the line is no good if it failed in its original implementation's goals.

'He's the sacrifice we made to hit 60FPS, yet that only happens in the cave section where you spawn'.
 
Good response, should have said before and not after though, considering this is the age of pixel counters and this was going to see the light sooner or later.

Now it would be nice that other developers told if their games are fully rendered at the resolution they say or only part of the pipeline is.

Nobody found this out , it seems GG told DF and then they post about months later .
Even if you pixel count the normal way like most people do it would show up as 1080p native.
 

velociraptor

Junior Member
It's hilarious how people go bonkers over this. What Guerrilla is doing is actually an ingenuous, really advanced method of achieving the same goal. I mean nobody actually noticed it wasn't "native" for months, did they?

The IQ wasn't as good as SP but I always assumed it was due to the lower quality AA.
 

TyrantII

Member
I think that's what you call 'baffling people with science'

Looks like they're going to baffle developers with science too at their talk.

Like it or not the image is 1080P. They use some tricks to calculate and interpolate some pixles due to it being cheaper in the render pipeline, but its still not anywhere close to simply being a upscaled framebuffer.

If anything MS's devs will be taking a close look here, since it might mean a end to their vasaline covered image troubles. Rendering a 90% accurate 1080P image 90% of the time with much less resources is a good thing, especially if they can refine the method (tiles?) And reduce some of the unwanted side effects (blur, artifacts).
 

velociraptor

Junior Member
I think the main problem with the tech is that it doesn't hit the FPS the trade-off was made for(and as a result looks worse?).

I don't know; the input lag was virtually eliminated and the gameplay was much more responsive as a result. Image quality remained pretty good.
 

Klocker

Member
GG: We recognize the community’s degree of investment on this matter

sad that they even needed to explain themselves. Interesting to techies but for average gamers, completely blown out of proportion.


resolutiongate is stupid
 

No_Style

Member
This reminds me of Halo: Reach and its use of Temporal AA resulting in artifacting and other ghosting problems when in motion. People notice issues with these temporal techniques. They're clever but less than ideal, I hope GG doesn't utilize in their next title.
 
I feel there needs to be a video to better visually understand this. Get 2PP on the case!

Oh there will be a GDC Talk. Ok, that's now on my radar.
 

Mr.Jim

Member
So do you think with this technique every time you change direction the pixel predictionshistory would be wrong and result in a bad frame?

I loved the description though thanks GG!
 

REV 09

Member
The up scaling technique may be better, but they still were dishonest and misled everyone....even if they're trying to skirt around it. They knew what people expect "native" to mean. Unfortunately this may happen a lot this gen.
 

TyrantII

Member
So, this make two times in a row that digitalfoundry make mistakes about PS4 games?

They've made a lot more mistakes than that, on both systems. Even missed a rather apparent drop to 900P on XB1 TR:DE.

Something's up over there, be it politics or carelessness.
 
So it's "native" 1080p because the engine itself outputs a 1080p image, though not all pixels have been drawn the same way through the renderer of the game.

Nice explanation and nice of GG to speak clearly about this.
 

benny_a

extra source of jiggaflops
So do you think with this technique every time you change direction the pixel predictionshistory would be wrong and result in a bad frame?
I remember seeing (bad, compressed) footage of the gun sway when running. Based on the description above that the point in the animation where the gun reaches its peak and sways downwards you should expect artifacts.
 

Stallion Free

Cock Encumbered
This reminds me of Halo: Reach and its use of Temporal AA resulting in artifacting and other ghosting problems when in motion. People notice issues with these temporal techniques. They're clever but less than ideal, I hope GG doesn't utilize in their next title.

Halo: Reach destroyed so many cutscenes with that crap. It looked hilarious every time someone crossed in front of the camera.
 

HORRORSHØW

Member
The up scaling technique may be better, but they still were dishonest and misled everyone....even if they're trying to skirt around it. They knew what people expect "native" to mean. Unfortunately this may happen a lot this gen.
i agree. this explanation, while interesting and innovative, shouldn't have been reactionary. they should have detailed the process during development.
 

zzz79

Banned
If Bluray movies have black bars,

are they not 1080p?

philosoraptor_templatxeog8.jpg

The image signal which is send to the TV is 1080p, meas it counts 1920x1080 progressive pixels.

But the film information is held/stored only on 1920x800 pixels, means 280 black pixels are there, to fill up the full resolution to 1920x1080, but these pixles do not hold any information about the movie.

In your mindset a movie in 1920x280 with solid black bars a 400 pixels each would be also 1080p, just because the output signal of the BD player is 1920x1080 progressive.
 

Toppot

Member
Excellent explanation, transparency and educating people is the best way forward in these increasingly tech-aware times.
 

Novak

Member
So KZ is rendering 960x1080 frame and interpolating it with last two frames to get native 1080p.

Ryse is rendering 1600x900 frame and interpolate it (from current frame) to get native 1080p. (They dont use hw scaler)

But somehow one is considered native and other is not...why is that? What is the difference?

PS ryse is just an example. Same thing was with Battlefield 4 or any other sub 1080 game
 

Sweep14

Member
But it's not ... the native res of the game is 1920×800. including both black bars they get 1920x1080. Means the game information is showed only in 1920x800 pixles the reaming are just black (no game info).

The output signal will be 1080p, so a FULL-HD TV can display it 1:1, but the games itself is rendered on 1920x800.

Misread, sorry
 
Halo: Reach destroyed so many cutscenes with that crap. It looked hilarious every time someone crossed in front of the camera.

Quite, although the quality of TAA in Reach was directly linked to FPS meaning the 30FPS cap limited how good that implementation was. I'm wondering if the same is true for SF.
 

sinnergy

Member
So it's "native" 1080p because the engine itself outputs a 1080p image, though not all pixels have been drawn the same way through the renderer of the game.

Nice explanation and nice of GG to speak clearly about this.

Yeah then Ryse is also native 1080p, because Crytek, let's the engine scale and render the final image.. (it's their own software scaling algorithm. )

So Yerli was right ;)
 
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