Maninthemirror
Banned
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-crytek-the-next-generation
You can tell its a Leadbetter article he tries to degrade PS4's CPU repeatedly in the article
There's some interesting and dare we say it controversial stuff here. Image quality purists won't be too happy to see another developer signalling the death of multi-sampling anti-aliasing in favour of temporal and post-process alternatives, while a great many core gamers won't be ecstatic with the reasoning on the firm's line on 30fps as the preferred standard for console gameplay. And yes, we have an Xbox One developer telling us that multi-platform releases won't be that much different between the two next-gen consoles - a line of argument that doesn't go down very well with some at the best of times.
Regardless though, across the range of questions, there's some fascinating new information here - how the move from PowerPC architecture to x86 radically changes the way that developers code and optimise their games, a frank assessment of the raw CPU power of the new consoles, Xbox One's ESRAM and audio hardware, and Crytek's aim to bring CG-quality visuals to real-time rendering.
Digital Foundry: Crytek is at the bleeding edge of rendering tech and your demands from hardware are very high, so how satisfied are you with the final designs of the Xbox One and PlayStation 4?
Cevat Yerli: Both consoles have a DX 11.1+ capable GPU with full compute shader support which allows us to come up with new creative rendering techniques that were not possible before. The GPUs are very efficient in performing math operations and the CPUs, in contrast to the previous PowerPC-based architectures, have standard PC features like out-of-order execution and branch prediction. All this reduces the need for micro-optimisation and allows us to focus more on the high-level algorithms which is usually the more rewarding part of development. We are also looking forward to seeing what the PlayStation 4 will offer in regards to online compute capacities, and the strategy rolled out for Xbox One cloud support is certainly going to be very interesting in terms of compute power for next-gen games. I also think Microsoft's decision to include Kinect as standard is a positive one, as it avoids fragmenting the market and allows developers to treat its functionality as a given.
Digital Foundry: On the face of it the bigger GPU and wider bandwidth of the PlayStation 4 makes it far more powerful than the Xbox One. Yet developers like John Carmack - and even PC benchmarks on equivalent hardware - suggest that the two platforms may be closer than the specs suggest. What's your assessment?
Cevat Yerli: Both next-gen platforms have excellent specs and provide wins against each other in a variety of areas. But, in essence, both of them are going to run next-generation games in more or less the same quality due to the diminishing returns of optimising for these little differences. That being said, platform-exclusive titles might be able to take advantage of these slight variations on both Xbox One and PlayStation 4.
Digital Foundry: What's your take on Sony's emphasis on PS4 GPU compute? In multi-platform projects is it likely to be explored?
Cevat Yerli: GPU compute is definitely the future. The CPU performance is better than last-gen but not by a huge margin, the GPU on the other hand is a really sizeable improvement. If the task is suited to it, moving to the GPU can be an incredible performance win. However, this is taking away performance from the traditional graphics pipeline so there is a limit to what you can move to the GPU. As for the broader multi-platform question, supporting GPU compute isn't really much more difficult than supporting multi-platform rendering, so it's certainly something we'll be using more and more on all platforms.
Digital Foundry: There were hopes that next-gen console would target 60fps - something John Carmack mentioned in his QuakeCon keynote this year. Can you talk us through the thinking behind Ryse as a 30fps game?
Cevat Yerli: Developers always have to choose whether they go for 60 or 30fps, depending on the type of game and complexity of the project. With Ryse, we wanted to go for a very emotional experience with complex and dramatic lighting, high fidelity environments, and rich characters and character animations. So 30fps was our choice, and we believe that most developers will go for richer worlds at 30 frames per second rather than 60fps - which would call for compromises, as 60fps demands twice the amount of compute rendering speed. 30fps is a standard that is above, for example, what most cinemas use for showing films. Early demos with higher frame-rate experiences have shown that gamers and viewers have a mixed opinion about its perceived quality - for example, how 48fps cinema experiences were received. So it's both a production design choice as well as user research.
Digital Foundry: What is your experience with the ESRAM on Xbox One? How do you utilise it in Ryse? Is 32MB really enough for the high-bandwidth rendering elements you'd want to utilise? How important is allocating graphics between DDR3 and ESRAM for Xbox One development?
Cevat Yerli: We put our most accessed render targets like the G-Buffer targets into ESRAM. Writing to ESRAM yields a considerable speed-up. While 32MB may not be enough to use something like MSAA to the fullest, with a smart memory management strategy it is possible to deal with that.
Digital Foundry: The Xbox One has dedicated audio processing hardware that is not present in PS4 or PC. How do you utilise it in Ryse?
Cevat Yerli: Essentially the hardware is performing calculations on audio data, handling the decode of audio that is encoded in XMA, Microsoft's proprietary, designed-for-game-audio, encode/decode compression algorithm. It takes weight off the main processing cores by using this optimised processor, which is approximately twice as powerful as the 360's, which means we can have higher voice counts, that is more sounds playing simultaneously. Also it supports the 7.1 surround sound architecture, which vastly improves the 3D localisation of sounds and the immersive audio environments we have created for Ryse.
Digital Foundry: Xbox One has its data move engines, dedicated audio hardware etc that should free up CPU resources. Are we seeing a situation almost like the reverse of 360/PS3 - this time with Sony having less CPU resource but more GPU power?
Cevat Yerli: Xbox One's move engine has proven to be quite useful to us by accelerating streaming of texture data, etc. How well that fares overall and compares to the prowess of PS4's compute engines remains to be seen and likely depends on the specific type of game you want to build.
You can tell its a Leadbetter article he tries to degrade PS4's CPU repeatedly in the article
