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GamingBolt - Halo Infinite Graphics Analysis – Slipspace Engine Shows off its Technical Prowess

CyberPanda

Banned
Halo Infinite is setting up a benchmark for ninth-gen graphics.



Halo is finally making a comeback. There was a period of time that the Halo franchise was the premiere console shooting experience. The first game was dubbed the “killer app” for the original Xbox, and Halo 3 remains one of the Xbox 360’s all-time bestsellers. With the advent of a whole generation of twitch shooters, the franchise lost its Xbox mascot status, at least in the public’s eye. And long-standing disputes between Bungie—the original developers—and Microsoft, saw the two part ways after the development of Halo: Reach. Halo 4, developed by 343 Industries was a surprising technical achievement on the Xbox 360, a last hurrah for the 7 year-old console in 2012.

But between the Master Chief Collection remasters, and the somewhat mediocre Halo 5: Guardians, it can feel like the franchise is a Microsoft flagship out of obligation at times. But Redmond, with the considerable amount of resources at their disposable, just won’t let it go. Next year’s Halo Infinite, scheduled to make an appearance on Xbox Scarlett, is bigger, better looking, and deeper in scale than anything we’ve seen from Halo so far. And it’s built on the all-new Slipspace engine. The new internals allow 343 Industries to deploy a whole range of next-gen tech and effects. We saw a tantalizing tech demo at E3 2018. This year’s E3 brought yet another glimpse of Halo: Infinite and Slipspace. The game’s a year from release but let’s take a deep dive and have a look at what’s going on under the hood with the new trailers.

Engine Overview:

https://youtu.be/Si-rMZwGsfk


Slipspace has been described by 343 Industries as the “biggest investment” the studio’s ever made. They were right on the mark with this statement. Every preceding Halo title was built on the creaking framework of Halo 2’s engine, with iterative improvements made to each outing. Slipspace is a big deal, not just because it’s a new engine. It’s a new engine built with Xbox Scarlett in mind. Next year’s Microsoft platforms boast better GPU performance than the Xbox One X.

But the real story’s Scarlett’s massively improved CPU prowess. It’s early days, but certain aspects of the Slipspace tech we’ve seen—such as the rhino horde—point to a deeper degree of simulation made possible by a faster CPU. Apart from this, Slipspace appears to push draw distances and LODs way out. Halo’s know for relatively linear sequences—the Infinite in the new game’s name could well hint at more open-ended level design. And we’d be amiss to ignore the massive overhaul to lighting tech.

Lighting



Earlier Halo titles used a hybrid deferred + forward renderer. This allowed for a reasonable number of dynamic lights—especially in the environment. But the majority of lighting remained baked and particle effects didn’t emit or receive light—making things like explosions and gunfire static. In the 2019 trailer, we see a radical overhaul to the lighting approach. Halo Infinite appears to be using a fully deferred solution, handling a large number of lights on-scene at a time. It’s particularly impressive how lighting from the alarm casts colored light on surfaces, with radiosity passing the reflected color on elsewhere. This is a huge improvement over Halo 5: Guardians. To hit a consistent 60 FPS, the latter game made a lot of visual compromises—dynamic lighting was one of these.

Materials and Textures

Physically based rendering is in full effect here. While the effect was introduced in Halo 5, 343’s artists evidently didn’t have the time to deploy a full-fledged implementation. Material rendering was of inconsistent quality, with PBR being deployed in certain areas, but not elsewhere. With Halo Infinite, we see fantastic material rendering quality across the board. 343 studios has had an entire generation to get their material rendering pipeline up to speed and the effort shows.

Everything from metals to clothing looks correct and physically accurate. Together with the very high texture resolution—4K texture assets are deployed to scale well on high-res displays—surfaces just look a whole lot more convincing than in previous games.

Model Quality

The per-scene polygon budget has gone up significantly. As a result, character models and environmental objects receive a steep increase to poly count. This is easily noticeable when observing the bearded marine—his face is organic, without blockiness.

And fine details, like the folds of leather on Master Chief’s gloves, are rendered as geometry and not a flat texture. Character rendering in particular benefits from the use of subsurface scattering, for more convincing, less “waxy” character skin. Model quality isn’t a massive leap ahead of what we’ve already seen this gen, but it’s of an impressive fidelity for a game that appears to be running at 60 FPS all the time.

Frame Rate



The trailer’s frame rate deserves special mention and consideration. Even though we were shown a cinematic sequence, it appears to be running at a full, v-synced 60 frames per second, without frame drops. If the shipping game has a similar performance profile, it’d be very significant. Halo 5 managed to hit 60 FPS most of the time. But this was because it was built from the ground up to hit 60 FPS. The short 8.33 ms rendering budget per frame meant making some profound compromises, from dynamic resolution, to static lighting, to relatively low-quality materials. The need to hit 60 FPS at all times meant that Halo 5 ended up looking not much better than the 7th-gen Halo 4.

This is borne out by the fact that Halo 4 in the Master Chief Collection on Xbox One, with a boost to rendering resolution, stands on its own when set against its successor. With Scarlett, we have over twice the GPU power and several times the CPU power on tap for developers to leverage. One tantalizing possibility is the return of 60 FPS as a norm in games—Scarlett might have the resources to do 60 FPS at high resolutions, without having to make too many visual compromises. This is interesting because 60 FPS actually used to be the norm right up until the 6th-gen. Many titles on PS2 and older platforms ran at 60. For that matter, even Super Mario World on the SNES was a 60 FPS title.

From the 7th gen onwards, developers increasingly traded off framerate for rendering budgets. And no matter the quality of your motion blur, 30-FPS shooters are inherently compromised experiences. It speaks a lot to Scarlett’s hardware prowess if its able to hit 60 FPS, even in Halo Infinite’s cutscenes. It might make sense to avoid reading too much into the trailer’s framerate, though. 343’s been clear that they’re showing a target render and not actual game footage. While they’re evidently working towards making 60 FPS doable across the board, it’s quite possible that we might see compromises to either the visuals, the framerate, or both in the shipping product.

Post-process pipeline

The post-process pipeline has always been an area of strength for the Halo franchise. Halo 3 infamously rendered at a sub-native resolution in order to feature more accurate 128x HDR. Looking at the latest footage, we see that Slipspace continues this tradition and deploys a wide range of high-quality post effects. Temporal anti-aliasing is being used here. There is a softness to the footage’s IQ, but this is a reasonable tradeoff for the excellent AA coverage, minimizing shimmering.

We see extensive use of Halo’s signature overwrought bloom lighting with the emergency alarm. This time, though, an enhanced lighting pipeline allows for light bouncing—this means that the overall effect isn’t as predicated on bloom itself as in earlier titles. We see a high quality bokeh depth of field effect in the closeups of the marine’s face. Dynamic DoF can be expensive to implement and it’s great to see this in place and running at 60 FPS. Halo 5 featured this effect, but it was limited to 30 FPS cutscenes. We’d be interested to see if dynamic DoF is implemented in actual gameplay conditions, too.

And lastly, the footage showcases excellent per-object motion blur, with a high sample count. Motion blur was often used in the 8th gen as a band-aid to mask the jankiness of a 30 FPS update. But here, we see a high quality implementation that’s running just fine at 60 FPS and delivering a remarkably smooth presentation. This calls into mind Marvel’s Avengers, another upcoming title where 60 FPS gameplay is combined with excellent motion blur to deliver exceptionally smooth action.

Conclusion



Slipspace was built from the ground up for Xbox Scarlett and this shows, from what we’ve seen so far. A massive improvement to lighting and material quality are our key takeaways from the Halo Infinite footage shown so far. But just as important is the fact that everything appears to be running at a locked 60 FPS. If this is a benchmark for 9th-gen visuals, we’ve got good times ahead of us.

 

Tesseract

Banned
giphy.gif
 
I don't care how many polygons they push in that scene or whether it's 60 FPS that game totally looks current gen, devil may cry runs at 60 fps and looks just the same as halo infinite looks,

at this point in starting to think maybe next gen consoles don't have enough vram to show that leap or perhaps it's the same story again that Microsoft have rubbish talent compared to sony, cause if Scarlett is 24-32gb of ram as rumoured and all it can offer is that look then Microsoft are really dumb!
 
Great read! Hopefully 343 will learn their mistakes from Halo 5 and make a great game with plenty of memorable moments like in the previous games and a fun multiplayer. Just need to decide if I want to play it on the X or pick up a Scarlett for this.
 

demigod

Member
whether you work on NASA or Pixar, halo infinite still looks like a current gen game! Even if u avoid watching the video analysis!

Gotta love it whenever he pulls out the "I'm a developer card". I don't even know what game he develops, probably some indie game. He's blind as fuck.

 
Gotta love it whenever he pulls out the "I'm a developer card". I don't even know what game he develops, probably some indie game. He's blind as fuck.

I have absolutely no idea what looks next gen on halo infinite, comparing it to last of us 2 death stranding ghost of tsushima or any other game it simply looks similar it's not a next gen leap, resident evil 4 and DMC run at 60 fps and look similar so does gears 5, I literally don't know y people think halo infinite looks next gen,

Same people who said death stranding was a ps5 title, they even say ghost of tsushima is a ps5 title, I hate to disappoint but halo infinite is a cross gen title and from what I've seen it's Xbox one X material not Scarlett!
 
I'm not even going to waste my time. I was writing out a load of old shit and to be fair, you're just not worth it. Continue jacking it to your console of choice.
You don't have to be a developer to see it looks current gen, anybody can tell it looks current gen and Ur "i work with graphics stuff card" is silly most of us have worked with graphics we can tell every bit of that scene and it's still current gen material, hate it or love it!
 
easy benchmark to surpass
i mean, that really depends, we’ve only seen a sliver of the game and from a technical standpoint, what we’ve seen is impressive. if this game allows you to seamlessly move from space to the ring in an open world fashion, it’s going to be damn impressive. but only time will tell.

I have absolutely no idea what looks next gen on halo infinite, comparing it to last of us 2 death stranding ghost of tsushima or any other game it simply looks similar it's not a next gen leap, resident evil 4 and DMC run at 60 fps and look similar so does gears 5, I literally don't know y people think halo infinite looks next gen,

Same people who said death stranding was a ps5 title, they even say ghost of tsushima is a ps5 title, I hate to disappoint but halo infinite is a cross gen title and from what I've seen it's Xbox one X material not Scarlett!

it’s not done yet.
 
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i mean, that really depends, we’ve only seen a sliver of the game and from a technical standpoint, what we’ve seen is impressive. if this game allows you to seamlessly move from space to the ring in an open world fashion, it’s going to be damn impressive. but only time will tell.



it’s not done yet.
Were not talking about the final product were all discussing about what we've seen and judging on what we've seen, well it ain't a next gen leap if this is what they call next gen then ps5 and Scarlett are simply pro versions of PS4 and one x
 

Vasto

Member
Here's a

Here's a good analysis. ...




So according to NX Gamer the demo actually was running on Xbox One X. If that is the case I can only imagine what it will look like on Scarlet. This looks amazing and it is crazy to see what Microsoft is now doing at 60FPS with visuals. Halo Infinite will be the benchmark.
 
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The video is pretty interesting, it has clips of the normal infinite trailer but with a different pilot (or the pilot without a beard). Wonder where they got that from, never seen it before

edit: nvm I’m an idiot, I forgot he started off without one
 
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Gavin Stevens

Formerly 'o'dium'
Gavin Stevens Gavin Stevens , what do you do with graphics tech? Just curious.

Design lead on a quake 2 engine project that’s totally ripped the engine apart piece by piece and now has near zero quake 2 code. First engine to add per pixel lighting (before tenebrae for quake 1) and now has a fully robust dynamic shadowing system coupled with per pixel lighting, among other things. Essentially it’s now got more features than a lot of modern engines, as well as full modularity and scripting.

 
Halo is my favorite series.

Y'all better not have your expectations set so high. History repeats itself. 343 is historically disappointing.

If it's good then great, but it's probably gonna be a big disappointment.
 

Gavin Stevens

Formerly 'o'dium'
h

he has a gtx 1080ti in PC and switch all day between graphics options in games like:
RDR2, COD MW etc.🙄

Worked with various game engines over 20 years, including id tech, unreal engine and unity, created over 50,000 individual art pieces and textures as well as sculpts, models of various lods and different types of visual styles, scripted over 500,000 lines of parm code, as well as co-designed a robust set of tools and editors, plus worked on several full releases as well as contributed to the Quake 2 RTX project.

Also, its a 2080ti I own.

Why, you offering me a job? Please, continue talking to me about development pipelines and how things work on vidya gaems. x
 

VFXVeteran

Banned
The graphics engine highlights are very welcome, however, going full deferred rendering isn't a good idea. I guess they want to save on performance for the next-gen console. The big problem with full deferred rendering is all those lights won't cast shadows and 2) they will have problems with transparency on objects. I would have loved for an engine to just do straight forward rendering (with many lights) but we just aren't there yet.

In any case, I look forward to seeing this game. Thanks CyberPanda CyberPanda
 

VFXVeteran

Banned
at this point in starting to think maybe next gen consoles don't have enough vram to show that leap or perhaps it's the same story again that Halo devs have less-than-stellar talent compared to other developers, cause if Scarlett is 24-32gb of ram as rumoured and all it can offer is that look then Microsoft are really dumb!

I'm going to lean towards agreeing with this. After looking at Alex's analysis, I will say that the tech is there but the assets are too simple compared to other games. I've seen this kind of shortcoming with Gears 5 too especially the metal shaders. It's really hard to make metal look good without throwing in a lot of detail layers and a really good PBR-based specular material. It's not a MS vs. Sony thing though. Sony and MS can be left out of the argument and we should just compare the assets of other companies that also make games for both platforms.
 
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Codes 208

Member
That's a fallacy. You can still develop a title with next-gen technology and scale down to a base console. It's been done throughout this entire generation.
Especially considering next gen is already going to be using the same type of architecture. Comparing this gen to next gen will likely be ver similar to comparing PC low to high-ultra settings
 
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D

Deleted member 471617

Unconfirmed Member
Can't wait for E3 2020!!! I'm already super hyped and excited!!!
 

Romulus

Member
At this point, I just hope it's a good game. 343i have proved they can pull some off decent visuals, but I haven't enjoyed a single halo game since they took over.
 

LordOfChaos

Member
The engine looks great, I hope the game is to go with it.

I love Halo lore and I was one of the ones defending 4's campaign as their first entry into the series, it was setting the stage for some of the good stuff, like the second judgment of the Precursors. 5 just...Seemed to go way off the rails and into fanfic territory.

I imagine Infinite will just have to deal with where they are in the story now, and then hopefully the end sets off what the Forerunner trilogy seemed to.
 
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