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Phil Harrison responds to eSRAM sze, "Clearly not the case, look at Forza 5"

Damigos

Member
Going by the numbers above, would the Xbone be able to pull off a game at 900p 60fps?

I know nothing about the numbers. But PS3 can 1080p60 Gran Turismo 6, so i guess that of course it is possible for XB1. Antialiasing, subscatter, dynamic lighting etc are the hard part that pushes RAM and Graphics card to the limit
 

Metfanant

Member
Annnd... we're back to comparing PS4 vs X1 lol.


That bottleneck could be anywhere from the lower spec'd GPU with just 12 CU vs 18 CU, or the 16 RoPs vs the 32 RoPs or the DDR3 vs GDDR5. I just don't necessarily agree that the 32MB of ESRAM is the sole problem. Maybe in the context that they're expecting ESRAM to save the day, and the developer simply answers, "It's not enough" lol

read my last post...AND the one right above yours here that im quoting...nobody is saying that the ESRAM is the ONLY problem with the Xbone hardware...but the ESRAM is supposed to make up for the bandwidth deficiencies of the DDR3...but when youre trying to squeeze everything into the ESRAM (to use its bandwidth) the numbers just dont add up...
 

DieH@rd

Banned
Someone needs to tell Phil Harrison that it would be a pure fucking miracle if F5 in this state would not hit 1080p60 on Xbone. Turn10 compromised a lot of things to acheve that rendering speed.



Disastrous anisotropic filtering [lack of texture bandwith to the GPU]
http://abload.de/img/ao067c8i.png

Insane track asset quality reduction
http://i.imgur.com/semvdyJ.jpg

Mortal Kombat crowd
http://abload.de/img/dat_3d_crowd_1akezo.jpg

Total reliance on ineffective shader-based AA techniques [aggressively semi-hidden by blur and dof]
http://abload.de/img/1920x-1g4enh.jpg
 

Finalizer

Member
I've got a brilliant idea for the folks at Redmond. Hire a mute for the next Xbox PR guy. Guaranteed to immediately improve consumer perception of the brand in rapid time.
 
What was the logic for going for esram instead of split pools of ddr3 and gddr5 like a pc?

I mean, by removing the esram, you free up the space in the soc for a better gpu right?

Why didn't they go for 4gigs of ddr3 and 4gigs of gddr5?
 
Wouldn't that include the AA solution though as well?

They use post aa. So, no.

Then they used more than 24bit buffer. Maybe they said 24 byte?

Maybe. All I know is that the math is right. Units are wrong?

EDIT: Oh shit. I know what I did wrong.

8 bits for the color. 24 for the deferred rendering.

So after that you divide all that by 8 to turn it into bytes. Numbers come out the same, missed two steps.
 

Drainer

Banned
Someone needs to tell Phil Harrison that it would be a pure fucking miracle if F5 in this state would not hit 1080p60 on Xbone. Turn10 compromised a lot of things to acheve that rendering speed.



Disastrous anisotropic filtering [lack of texture bandwith to the GPU]
http://abload.de/img/ao067c8i.png

Insane track asset quality reduction
http://i.imgur.com/semvdyJ.jpg

Mortal Kombat crowd
http://abload.de/img/dat_3d_crowd_1akezo.jpg

Total reliance on ineffective shader-based AA techniques [aggressively semi-hidden by blur and dof]
http://abload.de/img/1920x-1g4enh.jpg

You seem to be on a crusade of some sort. Haven't you made this exact post in another xbox thread?
 

Madness

Member
That's not really fair. The crowd is the way it is because you drive by it so fast it doesn't need to be really detailed. It's not really because of the XBO's limitations. Overall F5 looks great. It's 60fps and 1080p... AND it is a launch title. The man has a point.

It's perfectly fair. They couldn't achieve 1080p and 60 FPS with fully rendered crowds, so they changed the crowd into almost cardboard cutouts.

I am probably only going to buy an Xbox One myself, but you do them no service trying to spin the truth to fit your narrative. Yes they chose crowds as one thing to cut because you drive by so fast you don't really notice but to say it's not because of limitations is wrong, it's precisely because of that reason.
 

Damigos

Member
I've got a brilliant idea for the folks at Redmond. Hire a mute for the next Xbox PR guy. Guaranteed to immediately improve consumer perception of the brand in rapid time.

Or leave the position empty. No PR guy needed. MS will save about 1 million each year (maybe more) and consumer perception will skyrocket
 
Someone needs to tell Phil Harrison that it would be a pure fucking miracle if F5 in this state would not hit 1080p60 on Xbone. Turn10 compromised a lot of things to acheve that rendering speed.



Disastrous anisotropic filtering [lack of texture bandwith to the GPU]
http://abload.de/img/ao067c8i.png

Insane track asset quality reduction
http://i.imgur.com/semvdyJ.jpg

Mortal Kombat crowd
http://abload.de/img/dat_3d_crowd_1akezo.jpg

Total reliance on ineffective shader-based AA techniques [aggressively semi-hidden by blur and dof]
http://abload.de/img/1920x-1g4enh.jpg

Would it be fair to revisit these points once Forza Horizon or Forza 6 are out? you know... to ensure that the strawman hasn't overlooked other factors like it being a launch title, time constraints and the amount of work it takes to create individual characters in a crowd, etc.?

I remember a developer interview where he said, it's not that the hardware is not capable of rendering each button or stitches, the issue is, do you really want to pay an artist to sit there and waste time painstakingly drawing each stitch?
 

Metfanant

Member
8 bit = 1 Byte so you need to divide all these buffer sizes by 8. So in all these cases eSRAM should be enough to hold the framebuffer.

Hmm that can't be right. GG has said shadow falls buffer is 47mbs. Certainly isn't ~8mb

Then they used more than 24bit buffer. Maybe they said 24 byte?

im not savvy about the calculations...but from the original post mortem of the old demo...



G-buffer with 5 MRTs + 32bit depth
‣ 1080p, RGBA16f, no MSAA at the moment
‣ 2x 8bit backbuffers
 

Fox_Mulder

Rockefellers. Skull and Bones. Microsoft. Al Qaeda. A Cabal of Bankers. The melting point of steel. What do these things have in common? Wake up sheeple, the landfill wasn't even REAL!
Great work agent Phil
 

dark10x

Digital Foundry pixel pusher
Would it be fair to revisit these points once Forza Horizon or Forza 6 are out? you know... to ensure that the strawman hasn't overlooked other factors like it being a launch title, time constraints and the amount of work it takes to create individual characters in a crowd, etc.?

I remember a developer interview where he said, it's not that the hardware is not capable of rendering each button or stitches, the issue is, do you really want to pay an artist to sit there and waste time painstakingly drawing each stitch?
Did you know that pgr3 and 4 both feature full 3d crowds?
 
im not savvy about the calculations...but from the original post mortem of the old demo...
I fixed my calculations. Forgot to include the 8 bits for color data lol.
If they did use 32bit then that's even bigger. Regardless, Xbox One eSRAM is a limit. And I'm putting this laptop away. I have work in 3 hours. Fuck me, lol.
 

shandy706

Member
Hmm, haven't noticed that. That is not a current gen racing game..
Maybe it belongs in the PS360 era

Racing sims tend to sacrifice graphics for physics/framerate.

Comments like the above quote are so far off base. You people would throw-up if you saw some recently released PC sims I've played.

PCars may raise the bar when it hits, but it's still in development and we don't know what the console versions will look like. It has some pretty tracks. It also still has some really ugly ones too...shrug.

Forza 5 is the best looking, released, console sim on the market. I'm talking @1080p/60fps on an HDTV during actual gameplay. Nothing compares in motion playing it on big screen, despite changes from its reveal.

Don't feed me any perfectly placed bullshots, gifs, or compressed YouTube videos either.
 
Would it be fair to revisit these points once Forza Horizon or Forza 6 are out? you know... to ensure that the strawman hasn't overlooked other factors like it being a launch title, time constraints and the amount of work it takes to create individual characters in a crowd, etc.?

I remember a developer interview where he said, it's not that the hardware is not capable of rendering each button or stitches, the issue is, do you really want to pay an artist to sit there and waste time painstakingly drawing each stitch?

There's various ways to generate random 3D crowds. Non which are particularly high maintenance. The horsepower simply isn't there.
 

Marvel

could never
This Forza 5?

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-11-23-digital-foundry-vs-forza-motorsport-5

Or this Forza 5?

NzQy9ml.jpg

Whoa.
 

foxbeldin

Member
Would it be fair to revisit these points once Forza Horizon or Forza 6 are out? you know... to ensure that the strawman hasn't overlooked other factors like it being a launch title, time constraints and the amount of work it takes to create individual characters in a crowd, etc.?

I remember a developer interview where he said, it's not that the hardware is not capable of rendering each button or stitches, the issue is, do you really want to pay an artist to sit there and waste time painstakingly drawing each stitch?

Well, actually, in game development, you spend more time removing details than you spent adding them.
3D crowd models are really fast assets to create, you don't need much to begin with, then you just randomize skin tone, hats, clothes colors etc... They had enough material for the reveal, yet they removed them for performance.
 

Yaoibot

Member
Fact is the best looking game ran at 900p and 30fps.

Not that it should matter.

That is not a fact, its an opinion. Please learn to distinguish between the two. If we're comparing technical merits - texture resolution, poly count, lighting, resolution and framerate, actual measurable qualities - pretty sure KZ: SF trumped everything.

Now when it comes to personal preference about how appealing the game looks overall, then we again enter the realm of personal opinion. And in case you're still struggling to pay attention, this thread is about Forza and its performance and merits in the 1080p department, so bringing up other games that don't even hit that benchmarch is and exercise in deflection.

Edit: The reason why Forza hit 1080p in the first place is because racers are corridor games, with small, fast moving environments where many details can be lost (in the motion blur, usually). As others have pointed out a number of compromises were made to hit that resolution. But you know that, if you've read any post other than your own here, and you are just being willfully obtuse.
 
It's perfectly fair. They couldn't achieve 1080p and 60 FPS with fully rendered crowds, so they changed the crowd into almost cardboard cutouts.

I think the crowd is more a victim of dynamic lighting being dropped from the game. Without a light there would be nothing to shade the polys except the lightmap they would be standing over. They could have baked vertex colors in per frame like in sports games but if their pipe didn't do that and they had no time to implement it the fall back to cutouts would have made sense.

I have a pretty good feeling that the actual hardware spec vs the PC equivalent they were developing against was just different enough and the tools were not getting to them fast enough that they had to start being pragmatic to hit launch.
 

hodgy100

Member
forza is 1080p due to using a froward renderer, so its framebuffer fits into the edram, so technically phil is correct. BUT any game that uses deffered rendering will have to do some messing around to get higher performance as all the required buffers wont fit on the 32mb of esram.
 

Freshmaker

I am Korean.
Remember when the Cell was a pain in the ass to program? Just give team some time and the right SDKs and everything's going to be alright. Xbox One users are getting games like Ryse on release. Time will only give better looking games, and Ryse looks freaking fantastic as a launch title.

Cell actually had somewhere to go.
 

nelchaar

Member
Someone needs to tell Phil Harrison that it would be a pure fucking miracle if F5 in this state would not hit 1080p60 on Xbone. Turn10 compromised a lot of things to acheve that rendering speed.



Disastrous anisotropic filtering [lack of texture bandwith to the GPU]
http://abload.de/img/ao067c8i.png

Insane track asset quality reduction
http://i.imgur.com/semvdyJ.jpg

Mortal Kombat crowd
http://abload.de/img/dat_3d_crowd_1akezo.jpg

Total reliance on ineffective shader-based AA techniques [aggressively semi-hidden by blur and dof]
http://abload.de/img/1920x-1g4enh.jpg

You seem to be on a crusade of some sort. Haven't you made this exact post in another xbox thread?

You could say he's a DIE HARD critic..

I'll show myself out.
 

NBtoaster

Member
So what about NFS? 1080p and Frostbite 3. You can most likely still tile with eSRAM to get +32MB buffers to work.

Games are more likely going with low resolutions to reduce required bandwidth. 16 ROPs and DDR3 are probably bigger issues than eSRAM size.
 
This Forza 5?

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-11-23-digital-foundry-vs-forza-motorsport-5

Or this Forza 5?

NzQy9ml.jpg


Nothing good can come of statements like this. They just need to shut the hell up about stuff like this and not even respond to these things. It only makes them look bad. Just ignore it, put out your games. If you have compelling games people might still buy your system, but don't get into a fight you can't win.


So many little details were changed from that reveal. You can pretend you were impressed by 1080p / 60 FPS but it was the lighting, reflections and little touches @1080p that were most impressive, and were all reduced for release.

Even the rear window reflections are some kind of fake jpg. They fade in and fade out as the car's moving? I don't know what the technique is but it's not "real time reflections" Grenawalt talked about!
 

RulkezX

Member
Forza 5 is probably not the best game to use as an example...


Haven't read the whole thread , but that was what passed through my mind after reading the thread title.

On first play it looked really good , but the more time I spent with it the more the cut corners became apparent. It's also sterile and soulless , with unacceptable load times , but that's probably OT.
 
Would it be fair to revisit these points once Forza Horizon or Forza 6 are out? you know... to ensure that the strawman hasn't overlooked other factors like it being a launch title, time constraints and the amount of work it takes to create individual characters in a crowd, etc.?

No, because we already saw pre release footage where good looking crowds were already complete. They clearly had to be removed along with a whole host of other things to hit the required performance.
 

TheD

The Detective
So what about NFS? 1080p and Frostbite 3. You can most likely still tile with eSRAM to get +32MB buffers to work.

Games are more likely going with low resolutions to reduce required bandwidth. 16 ROPs and DDR3 are probably bigger issues than eSRAM size.

The DDR3 speed is an issue because of the eSRAM not being large enough to hold everything that needs high bandwidth and thus, it is the eSRAM's size that is causing the problem.
 

Valnen

Member
I fundamentally disagree that Tomb Raider is a show case for next-gen visuals.

A game that was created with a baseline of 480MB of memory for systems that are 8 and 9 years old getting a facelift does not a next-gen game make.

But others are free to disagree, which is why we have so many people saying PC ports are next-gen which I don't agree with. But to be fair, the TR Definitive Edition is more than just a PC port. It has lots of improved stuff that you normally don't get in a PC port. It's still a based around a 360/PS3 game however.
I honestly think Tomb Raider DE looks better than any of the launch games with all its upgrades, even Killzone.
 

hodgy100

Member
So what about NFS? 1080p and Frostbite 3. You can most likely still tile with eSRAM to get +32MB buffers to work.

Games are more likely going with low resolutions to reduce required bandwidth. 16 ROPs and DDR3 are probably bigger issues than eSRAM size.

Yeah you are right the presence of the ESRAMis to make up for the slower DDR3 anyway. ifthey used faster memory the need for esram would be redundant.

Need for speed was also 30fps, its likely they could swap around the framebuffers from esram to ddr3 and the like and the bandwidth limitation wasn't a problem due to the lower framerate.
 
I dig forza 5 but this a shot I took the day I got it. Look at that crowd, the grass behind them and those freaking trees!
GetPhoto.ashx

I completed the game (1000/1000G) and I can't say that I'm bothered with the trees and the crowd. It all looks fine when I'm driving.

Forza 5 is the best looking sim on a console right now. It doesn't feel as sterile as the older games of the series and that's the most important thing for me.

I started playing GT6 again yesterday and I think the Polyphony game still has better graphics in certain areas (like lighting) but it also looks as sterile and dead as the past games.

What I'm trying to say is: I can live with paper trees and crowds but I'd like to see more details on the tracks. Like flying helicopters, birds, fog effects (like on the Prague track in Forza 5) and so on.

These details add to the atmosphere and immersion when driving and racing. GT6 looks lifeless compared to Forza 5.

I'm sure Polyphony will work on that with GT7.
 

Metfanant

Member
I completed the game (1000/1000G) and I can't say that I'm bothered with the trees and the crowd. It all looks fine when I'm driving.

Forza 5 is the best looking sim on a console right now. It doesn't feel as sterile as the older games of the series and that's the most important thing for me.

I started playing GT6 again yesterday and I think the Polyphony game still has better graphics in certain areas (like lighting) but it also looks as sterile and dead as the past games.

What I'm trying to say is: I can live with paper trees and crowds but I'd like to see more details on the tracks. Like flying helicopters, birds, fog effects (like on the Prague track in Forza 5) and so on.

These details add to the atmosphere and immersion when driving and racing. GT6 looks lifeless compared to Forza 5.

I'm sure Polyphony will work on that with GT7.

i would make the argument that being Xbone vs PS3...that Forza 5 should be visually superior in EVERY way to GT6...
 

slapnuts

Junior Member
To tell you the truth, I feel that way about most next/current gen games whose visuals people on this forum seem to obsess over, they're really puzzling to me. Thankfully, I'm not a guy who cares much about pretty graphics.

I do agree with that as well...most launch games were not jaw dropping next gen material...I do know that these types of "true" next gen games will be coming soon on both systems though, once developers get a handle on these new systems...exciting times for both systems in the near future and of course PC will benefit from this as well.
 

LCGeek

formerly sane
Yes, can developers work around Esram and achieve desired results? Yes.

Can they isn't a problem it's will they and how often. The last few 3d generations are not short of examples of bad ports. Almost every generation is filled with them and devs have all sorts of excuses as to why they may not invest time or talent on doing so.

MS bungled this area. Coming up with that riff raff for it doesn't change the situation or the likely outcome gamers are to see as a result of them badly engineering the console.
 

Melchiah

Member
That's not really fair. The crowd is the way it is because you drive by it so fast it doesn't need to be really detailed. It's not really because of the XBO's limitations. Overall F5 looks great. It's 60fps and 1080p... AND it is a launch title. The man has a point.

And from what I've seen it in person before the launch, it's got pretty bad aliasing.
 

driver116

Member
It's really starting to get cringe-worthy all this damage control from Microsoft. It's time they just accept the Xbox one for what it is and fucking move on.
 

mrklaw

MrArseFace
Someone has already mentioned tiling, but I think unless MS has tools that let you use tiling transparently, it won't be used much. I think that was supposed to be a big thing on 360 but wasn't really used. If it requires too much effort from devs it'll just be ignored and a simpler route wll be taken (like lower res or lower framerate)
 

Madness

Member
It's really starting to get cringe-worthy all this damage control from Microsoft. It's time they just accept the Xbox one for what it is and fucking move on.

Yeah, like enough smoke and mirrors, most people know it's weaker than the PS4. The way they presented this console before launch, the way they've launched it and then the way they try to spin all this is ridiculous.

They just need to shut up about this, and just release games. If the gamers want it, they'll buy it, if not, better luck next time, if there is one.

I'm waiting for that white Xbox One and to see whether or not Halo 2 Anniversary or Halo 5 release this year.
 

zhao3gold

Banned
I am a Xbox fan, and I wish all these stupid Microsoft guys shut their mouths, but to work harder to provide the good games. Otherwise, no chance to compete with PS4.

And for agent Phil, please go home.
 
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