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[GribbleGrunger]

10 - 100 times seems a large margin. Can anyone explain why?

 

[ElTorro]

Easer fetching of textures. Instead of requesting full texture, engine can requrest only parts that it needs [that are visible].

No. You are probably referring to tiled resources, but that is not what is meant here. That has nothing to do with the CPU. The author's article got it wrong.

Surface tiling most probably refers here to the subdivision of geometric objects into smaller geometric objects.

"Tiling" is generally a term that easily leads to confusion since it refers to very different things in different contexts. Another common confusion is the equivocation of tiled-based rendering with tiled resources.

 

[Shin-Ra]

I don't want to drag this off-topic, but MS should really set up something like the ICE Team. So far as I know they don't have anything like it, and this generation they need it more than ever.

People DO understand that Microsoft has some of the smartest graphics programmers IN THE WORLD. They CREATED DirectX, the standard API’s that everyone programs against. So while people laude Sony for their HW skills, do you really think they don’t know how to build a system optimized for maximizing graphics for programmers? Seriously?

 

[twobear]

At this point it's just a semantics argument of existence of resources vs organization. I've acknowledged they're not co-located. Don't know what else I can say.

I don't think it is semantics, though, because resources and organisation are co-dependent. Even if every studio had a handful of 'ICE Team'-like guys who work on software tools, it wouldn't be the same, because the trans-studio nature of ICE Team is part of what makes them so effective.

 

[thunder_snail]

I don't know, but ICE Team work only on Sony's PlayStation hardware, and as you said, the D3D team are building a high-level API, not low-level, hardware-specific tools.

I highly doubt ICE team teaches studios how to implement some stuff in ASM. Most likely, they work on the libraries that can be used by other studios.

Also the D3D team is writing low-level stuff. They wrap it up nicely in to high-level API so other devs can use the work they've done.

 

[anexanhume]

Whatever the D3D team do, obviously the result isn't as pronounced, there's Halo 4, standing head and shoulders above anything else MS put out graphically, where as Sony had GG, SSM and ND constantly nipping at each others toes.

QD am cry.

The person responsible for Halo 4 looking good technically also left MS for Sony too.

 

[Neuromancer]

Sure the Sony ICE team sounds great... But where do they stack up against MS's cadre of technical fellows?

 

[Muppet of a Man]

Sure the Sony ICE team sounds great... But where do they stack up against MS's cadre of technical fellows?

I know you are trolling. But if ICE can make the Cell sing, they must have some miracle workers on board.

 

[majik13]

Weird. AF is such a bizarre thing to skimp on, especially when the Xbox One versions of some of those games had it.

with all these acronyms flying around,what does AF stand for Anisotropic Filtering? Auto Fetch? Air Force? Abercrombie & Fitch?

 

[cyen]

with all these acroynmys flying around, does AF stand for Anisotropic Filtering? Auto Fetch? Air Force? Abercrombie & Fitch?

Abercrombie & Fitch for sure. (Anisotropic Filtering)

 

[twobear]

I highly doubt ICE team teaches studios how to implement some stuff in ASM. Most likely, they work on the libraries that can be used by other studios.

Also the D3D team is writing low-level stuff. They wrap it up nicely in to high-level API so other devs can use the work they've done.

Well whatever it is that they do, they're not doing it as well as ICE Team, so they're either less talented or their organisation structure within MS is detrimental.

 

[StuBurns]

QD am cry.

The person responsible for Halo 4 looking good technically also left MS for Sony too.

I think Beyond is the best looking PS3 game, but it also came out later, and Heavy Rain wasn't so hot, so I don't see them as being part of the constant one upmanship.

 

[KyleOnTheRun]

So this is basically hardware-level occlusion culling? Which Naughty Dog sort of pioneered with Crash Bandicoot in 1996? Cool.

I mean it. Legitimately cool. Just surprised it took this long for Sony engineers to realize it's a fantastic performance-boosting technique and nail it down system-wide.

 

[Jetlagger]

They lost arguably the best person to head such a team to ICE (Corrine). They do have their D3D team of course, though. They also have a team responsible for the SDK on the XB1. So I'd say they have equivalent resources, just not in a unified team.

I get really excited every time I'm reminded that Corrinne Yu is now a Naughty God.

In terms of DBZ, that's like... Goku teaming up with, like, a clone of himself. That's two Gokus.

 

[dragonelite]

10 - 100 times seems a large margin. Can anyone explain why?

Bad/average first implementation?
Then a fine tuned ASM implementation with SIMD there is your gain.

 

[curb]

I don't know, but ICE Team work only on Sony's PlayStation hardware, and as you said, the D3D team are building a high-level API, not low-level, hardware-specific tools.

I don't know what happened in my brain but I read this as:

I don't know, but Ice-T work only on Sony's PlayStation hardware, and as you said, the D3D team are building a high-level API, not low-level, hardware-specific tools.

 

[benny_a]

QD am cry.

The person responsible for Halo 4 looking good technically also left MS for Sony too.

She wasn't responsible for Halo 4 looking good technically. She was a tools person.

 

[Orayn]

with all these acronyms flying around,what does AF stand for Anisotropic Filtering? Auto Fetch? Air Force? Abercrombie & Fitch?

Anisotropic filtering. It improves the appearance of textures on extended surfaces, especially when they're viewed from a sharp angle.

 

[viveks86]

No. You are probably referring to tiled resources, but that is not what is meant here. That has nothing to do with the CPU. The author's article got it wrong.

Surface tiling most probably refers here to the subdivision of geometric objects into smaller geometric objects.

"Tiling" is generally a term that easily leads to confusion since it refers to very different things in different contexts. Another common confusion is the equivocation of tiled-based rendering with tiled resources.

Oh! Well. Thanks for clearing that up. So when is surface tiling used in-game?

 

[cchum]

Bad/average first implementation?
Then a fine tuned ASM implementation with SIMD there is your gain.

Probably a generic implementation for all x86 architectures.

 

[StuBurns]

She wasn't responsible for Halo 4 looking good technically. She was a tools person.

She was. Outside of being the engine architect, which means she played a key role in determining engine performance, and in turn, viable poly-counts, texture resolutions, light map detail, etc, she also did extensive work on the lighting and animation tool sets.

 

[anexanhume]

She wasn't responsible for Halo 4 looking good technically. She was a tools person.

She was the principle engine programmer and developed a new dynamic radiosity algorithm (the patented one) while working on the Halo team.

I think Beyond is the best looking PS3 game, but it also came out later, and Heavy Rain wasn't so hot, so I don't see them as being part of the constant one upmanship.

Not sure I follow. TLoU was ND's best looking game and only preceded Beyond by a few months. That's not competitive time-wise?

 

[benny_a]

She was. Outside of being the engine architect, which means she played a key role in determining engine performance, and in turn, viable poly-counts, texture resolutions, light map detail, etc, she also did extensive work on the lighting and animation tool sets.

She was not the engine architect. Dave Berger was.
She worked with the tools and engine team but was more a tools person.

 

[twobear]

Apparently although her title was principal engine architect she actually only worked on tools. Frankie cleared it up a while back.

 

[ElTorro]

Oh! Well. Thanks for clearing that up. So when is surface tiling used in-game?

Dynamic tessellation of 3D meshes into triangles, for instance.

 

[RoboPlato]

This will benefit tessellation, right?

Apparently although her title was principal engine architect she actually only worked on tools. Frankie cleared it up a while back.

Tools is still a huge deal and makes her an even bigger catch for the ICE team since that supplies tools to all devs. She won't just improve first party games, her work will improve PS4 development as a whole.

 

[quickwhips]

PS4 is a beast.

Every thread....

I have no clue what this means or if it will do anything. What is Tiling used for exactly?

 

[anexanhume]

Apparently although her title was principal engine architect she actually only worked on tools. Frankie cleared it up a while back.

Odd. I always seem to miss his posts too so I'm not surprised I didn't catch that.

Still, it seems a little suspicious she'd do lighting work that was patentable while only working on tools.

 

[benny_a]

Every thread....

I have no clue what this means or if it will do anything. What is Tiling used for exactly?

Tightening up the graphics in level three.

 

[twobear]

Tools is still a huge deal and makes her an even bigger catch for the ICE team since that supplies tools to all devs. She won't just improve first party games, her work will improve PS4 development as a whole.

Well, yeah. I didn't mean to imply that it was less significant

 

[dragonelite]

Dynamic tessellation of 3D meshes into triangles, for instance.

Something the new Everquest can use?
Converting the voxel data to triangles before rendering?

I was under the impression it was about textures tiling and detilling.

 

[StuBurns]

Apparently although her title was principal engine architect she actually only worked on tools. Frankie cleared it up a while back.

Was this after she left?

 

[XiaNaphryz]

Tiling refers to how texels in a mip plane are not organized linearly but instead in blocks; linear layout of memory would have incredibly poor coherence when sampling if that were the case. Some tiling modes are considered more efficient for rendering vs sampling, which impacts decisions for layouts for eg shadow map targets which are used in both manner.

It's fairly rare/unusal to be updating textures at run-time on the CPU outside of small volume textures for low-resolution lighting or post-process color look-up tables. Thus this isn't a terribly interesting advancement per se. That said Cort is an awesome guy.

Thanks.

 

[dragonbane]

I think Beyond is the best looking PS3 game, but it also came out later, and Heavy Rain wasn't so hot, so I don't see them as being part of the constant one upmanship.

I'm confident that this could change with their next game. They hired some rather talented people for their PS4 project from all over the world. Kara and Dark Sorcerer also looked pretty dope. So 3/5 I guess (Casting and HR only decent looking at the time and now rather mediocre). Since 2012 they have been constantly one upping themselves and others I think. Should be a good gen. Unfortunately SSM will join in much later this time, since they just lost one game.

 

[Graphics Horse]

Dynamic tessellation of 3D meshes into triangles, for instance.

Why would they use CPU for that?

And in what sense would 'detiling' make sense?

I'm going with the swizzle/unswizzle as suggested earlier, but not sure why he wouldn't just call it that.

 

[Steroyd]

So Goku finally stepped out of his 10x gravity training room.

 

[Gestault]

Does anyone know if anyone from ICE puts up spreadsheets of their workflow and notes like Carmack has in the past? Even things like this that may not have a dramatic effect in terms of the end product are fascinating on the dev-side.

 

[anexanhume]

Why would they use CPU for that?

And in what sense would 'detiling' make sense?

I'm going with the swizzle/unswizzle as suggested earlier, but not sure why he wouldn't just call it that.

Here's some tangential discussion I had with him regarding CPU use in the PS4: https://twitter.com/postgoodism/status/440917400075378688

So Goku finally stepped out of his 10x gravity training room.

He put it to 100x at the end.

 

[Shin-Ra]

Unfortunately SSM will join in much later this time

Like.. God of War II to III?

Spoiler

we all do!

I see a face in the cookie stack.

 

[ElTorro]

I was under the impression it was about textures tiling and detilling.

I'm going with the swizzle/unswizzle as suggested earlier, but not sure why he wouldn't just call it that.

I could very well be wrong, swizzle/unswizzle could also fit. It's only a tweet, but tessellation was my first association with that term.

 

[dragonbane]

Tools is still a huge deal and makes her an even bigger catch for the ICE team since that supplies tools to all devs. She won't just improve first party games, her work will improve PS4 development as a whole.

Do we even know if she works at ICE? I thought it was for ND directly for their own games.

 

[StuBurns]

I'm confident that this could change with their next game. They hired some rather talented people for their PS4 project from all over the world. Kara and Dark Sorcerer also looked pretty dope. So 3/5 I guess (Casting and HR only decent looking at the time and now rather mediocre). Since 2012 they have been constantly one upping themselves and others I think. Should be a good gen. Unfortunately SSM will join in much later this time, since they just lost one game.

No doubt, we already have RaD throwing their hat in the ring. It's going to be a generation of wild escalation I imagine.

 

[Neuromancer]

Every thread....

I have no clue what this means or if it will do anything. What is Tiling used for exactly?

Are you familiar with 'blast processing'? It's a lot like that but with several key differences.

 

[RoboPlato]

Do we even know if she works at ICE? I thought it was for ND directly for their own games.

ICE is housed at ND and does all the tool work. She may jump between that and some of the internal engine functions there but I'd be shocked if she wasn't working with them quite a bit.

 

[anexanhume]

Do we even know if she works at ICE? I thought it was for ND directly for their own games.

They're co-located at the very least. Look at the last few tweets in her timeline. Her profile specifically says Naughty Dog, though.

 

[dragonbane]

Like.. God of War II to III?

Haha. Well, much later than they could have this time around is probably the correct way of saying it

 

[dragonbane]

ICE is housed at ND and does all the tool work. She may jump between that and some of the internal engine functions there but I'd be shocked if she wasn't working with them quite a bit.

Yeah, likely. At least according to LinkedIn it looks like most of them are quite clearly either in ICE at ND or just ND. I think Corinne is just ND. We will see with Uncharted, because ICE most of the time has their own credits section completely separate from ND.

 

[majik13]

Anisotropic filtering. It improves the appearance of textures on extended surfaces, especially when they're viewed from a sharp angle.

yeah I know what it is, just wasnt sure if that was indeed what was being talked about. I wasnt aware of it being an issue on the hardware. But it is always good to see an example again.

 

[viveks86]

Dynamic tessellation of 3D meshes into triangles, for instance.

Nice! So tessellation is CPU bound? What portions are done by the CPU vs GPU?

 

[PolarGamer]

but I thought the PS4 was not going to improve but stay stagnant while the competitors improved


the game media told me so

Link?