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Killzone: Shadow Fall technical presentation slides [Up: Tech Videos]

Lord Error

Insane For Sony
But we dont need 20TFlops for that :) We can use lower precision and hacks a get around with 4TFlops :p Still 4TFlops for one effect wont happen for at least 7 years.
You can do volumetric smoke with far less than 4TF. Here's a demo made in 2009 that runs on 8800GTS (400 GFlops). It's only rendering smoke, but still, it's fully dynamic and interactive:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezltebzdgjI
At first it's rendered so it looks more like particles, but later on the blur is applied to give it more of a smoke appearance. Here he explains how it's done and what it can do, and says that even at the time it could have been done with 4-16x as many particles on some more high end GPU in 2009: http://directtovideo.wordpress.com/2009/10/06/a-thoroughly-modern-particle-system/

The guy who made this is pretty much a genius for this sort of thing though. He's also just recently made a phenomenal looking realtime raytraced demo, with full scene multi bounce reflection/refractions: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8hSZGTXTx8
He works for SCEE btw.

- City landscape is so low poly that is actually doable on current gen consoles, as i said quite a few times in past
The polycount is 500k for whole visible geometry, with lighting [so shadows] its 670k, only 100k more than God of War: Ascention for example.
I'm guessing you've seen the numbers in the presentation slides somewhere for this, but where did you see the equivalent number for GoW:A? I'd also say that I doubt PS3 could do that many poly scene where everything is reflective and/or transparent, which was the biggest selling point for that scene. *edit* Ah, I also noticed on that video that you were probably looking at, that GPU was using just 46% of its frametime to render that polycount.

- Bokeh DoF has currently almost same quality as in Crysis 2 on consoles. In C2 it was half-res of 720p and in KZ:SF its 1/4 of 1080p
I thought they were saying the same thing here, that the DOF resolution is halved both ways, resulting in 1/4 pixels. I noticed that some people tend to say it one way and others the other way, while thinking the same thing. What I mean is, if DOF buffer on console C2 was 576x360, here the buffer is probably 960x540. If it was really quarter both ways (480x270), I think it would be way noticeable. They also wrote something about porting some point sprite based solution for this to be in full res.
 

bobbytkc

ADD New Gen Gamer
memx3jnb.jpg


Hm, 4.5GB of memory... I thought Guerrilla only learned about the 4GB -> 8GB upgrade at the event like everyone else? :p

Devkits have more memory than the final release of the system. Even when the PS4 only had 4 gigs, the devkits had 8 gigs of memory
 

Lord Error

Insane For Sony
Another interesting thing that I noticed from the slides - their CPU profiler has six bars. Could that mean that 6 cores are available for development with two being locked out for OS or whatever else?

Also, it just downed on me how it's kind of crazy that the game is already using so much memory. Just for sound it's using more than total amount of PS3s memory, and 4.5GB is probably more than any PC game I've seen. I think BF3 on Ultra is something like 3GB when you add up main+vram.
 

Perkel

Banned
What's with that 20TF volumetric smoke ?

Stalker Clear Sky had smoke that is way cheaper and look almost the same in 2008

You people make it sound like it is some feature from future where in fact good volumetric smoke is available.

Now big clouds, very high quaality smoke that is demanding but you really don't need that to make it look good. Just look at above stalker tech demo vid. It reacts to wind circulation and it react to objects that is all you need with vl smoke effects.

gameplay test
 
Another interesting thing that I noticed from the slides - their CPU profiler has six bars. Could that mean that 6 cores are available for development with two being locked out for OS or whatever else?

I saw that too (mentioned it on previous page). It does look like Sony will have 6 cores for games, and 2 for the OS. Not sure if it's new thread worthy?

Still a great amount of power for games. And tbh, I think this actually puts Sony in a better position to innovate with the OS over the course of the 8-10 years. I don't own a PS3, but from what I can tell, Sony has barely changed the XMB over the years. They've added features, but the OS still essentially looks like the day it launched. I'm hoping with the PS4 Sony will continue to innovate in the OS, and not be afraid to radically change it down the road if they think it could be better.
 

Perkel

Banned
Another interesting thing that I noticed from the slides - their CPU profiler has six bars. Could that mean that 6 cores are available for development with two being locked out for OS or whatever else?

Yeah it does look like it.

So 6 cores for games and 2 for OS.
 

Lord Error

Insane For Sony
What's with that 20TF volumetric smoke ?

Stalker Clear Sky had smoke that is way cheaper and look almost the same in 2008

You people make it sound like it is some feature from future where in fact good volumetric smoke is available.

Now big clouds, very high quaality smoke that is demanding but you really don't need that to make it look good. Just look at above stalker tech demo vid. It reacts to wind circulation and it react to objects that is all you need with vl smoke effects.

gameplay test
Good find, that already looks pretty much good enough for most of game related purposes, even though it's clearly using far less particles than the demo I posted above.
 
I saw that too (mentioned it on previous page). It does look like Sony will have 6 cores for games, and 2 for the OS. Not sure if it's new thread worthy?

Still a great amount of power for games. And tbh, I think this actually puts Sony in a better position to innovate with the OS over the course of the 8-10 years. I don't own a PS3, but from what I can tell, Sony has barely changed the XMB over the years. They've added features, but the OS still essentially looks like the day it launched. I'm hoping with the PS4 Sony will continue to innovate in the OS, and not be afraid to radically change it down the road if they think it could be better.

BUT there's also the arm CPU for OS tasks, like streaming, downloading and installing. So I would not count on the 2 cpu's of the 8 being locked out.
 
Another interesting thing that I noticed from the slides - their CPU profiler has six bars. Could that mean that 6 cores are available for development with two being locked out for OS or whatever else?

yeah, it's confirmed on b3d, also that they run at 1.6 ghz.

Check some of the items where they show time in cycles and microseconds.
The simplest math is when they highlight a single item on one core, like the sAllocatorMutex::Lock slide.
It's 68,233 cycles /(1/1,000,000*42 second) = ~ 1.6 billion cycles/second.

edit:
It works the same for the soldier update slide, which has multiple packets that are handily summed up for us.

i guess it's good to know they are using very real ps4 hardware then.

but the fact it's only 6 cores isn't surprising either, even though some argued vehemently that even 1 cpu would be reserved.

that would put it the same as durango by rumor, maybe less in practice if durango audio chip is as whiz bang as said.

i also remember a rumor one core on ps4 was disabled for yield. possible thing to consider.
 

Man

Member
I`m sorry but that Deep Down tech demo is pure bullshit.

Sure, it might be realtime but it`s a carefully made cutscene in that case in where the flame isn`t actually the work of realtime physics. I haven`t seen Crysis, Guerrilla Games, Dice or any of the top dogs create flames or dynamic fluids that realistic.

And then you compare those guys work with the laughable work from Capcoms best with Resident Evil 6 etc.

I believe it`s possible with PS4 specs but I`m expecting a considerable downgrade with the actual Deep Down.
 

JCreasy

Member
I can't repeat this enough: I'm incredibly excited to see GG's new IP.

They've been making Killzones forever. Imagine the creative blue balls the artists must have to try something new.

It's gonna be like Bungie evolving from Halo to Destiny, watch!
 

Man

Member
Destiny looks like crap in gameplay though so far.
To be fair though it is a 2014 title and we haven`t seen much combat gameplay yet...
 

Codeblew

Member
Another interesting thing that I noticed from the slides - their CPU profiler has six bars. Could that mean that 6 cores are available for development with two being locked out for OS or whatever else?

Also, it just downed on me how it's kind of crazy that the game is already using so much memory. Just for sound it's using more than total amount of PS3s memory, and 4.5GB is probably more than any PC game I've seen. I think BF3 on Ultra is something like 3GB when you add up main+vram.

Maybe in debug/profiling mode, they take up a core or two.
 
The guy who made this is pretty much a genius for this sort of thing though. He's also just recently made a phenomenal looking realtime raytraced demo, with full scene multi bounce reflection/refractions: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8hSZGTXTx8
He works for SCEE btw.

that's Matt Swoboda aka Smash. Kinda funny to see his Fairlight demos and then hear him talk about research at Sony dev events and other conferences :p Always a good indicator what's cooking at Sony's European R&D.
 

bak4fun

Unconfirmed Member
Another interesting thing that I noticed from the slides - their CPU profiler has six bars. Could that mean that 6 cores are available for development with two being locked out for OS or whatever else?

Also, it just downed on me how it's kind of crazy that the game is already using so much memory. Just for sound it's using more than total amount of PS3s memory, and 4.5GB is probably more than any PC game I've seen. I think BF3 on Ultra is something like 3GB when you add up main+vram.

It's plainly written in the comments that they are using 6 cores:
"Our approach on PS4 is similar to what we did to PS3.
We’re using our own job scheduler to distribute the load over 6 CPU’s."

Apparently the system memory is not optimized yet:

"Our memory is quite naturally split more towards the GPU.
We actually expect the GPU portion to grow in the future as we optimize the CPU map.

This is all we have in the system memory.

Sound is a mix of compressed and uncompressed in-memory samples,
there is much more sound streaming from disk.

Physics meshes used to be a size issue on previous platforms.
Now they’ve become smaller and the memory is so much bigger they’re insignificant.

We still have to find out what goes into ‘various’, we haven’t really optimized for memory yet"



And for the DoF, they have a high resolution version running on compute that they didn't port to ps4 yet, and they say in the comments also that they might increase the DoF quality thanks to the optimizations done.
 

RoboPlato

I'd be in the dick
yeah, it's confirmed on b3d, also that they run at 1.6 ghz.



i guess it's good to know they are using very real ps4 hardware then.

but the fact it's only 6 cores isn't surprising either, even though some argued vehemently that even 1 cpu would be reserved.

that would put it the same as durango by rumor, maybe less in practice if durango audio chip is as whiz bang as said.

i also remember a rumor one core on ps4 was disabled for yield. possible thing to consider.

I'm surprised about two cores reserved. Maybe 1 core is the eventual target but wasn't hit in time for the demo build. They may have also had to dedicate a core to video recording since they really wanted to use that for the demo and the dedicated chip may not have been ready on time.

It's also the first official word we've gotten on the 1.6GHz. The only other legit source we've had was the system diagram that just said ">1.8GHz?" which is clearly not sure of things. Either the CPU has gotten upgraded since the demo, those diagrams were from April IIRC, or more likely, the CPU has been done for a while.
 

scently

Member
yeah, it's confirmed on b3d, also that they run at 1.6 ghz.



i guess it's good to know they are using very real ps4 hardware then.

but the fact it's only 6 cores isn't surprising either, even though some argued vehemently that even 1 cpu would be reserved.

that would put it the same as durango by rumor, maybe less in practice if durango audio chip is as whiz bang as said.

i also remember a rumor one core on ps4 was disabled for yield. possible thing to consider.

Link to post on b3d please.
 

gofreak

GAF's Bob Woodward
It really does seem like they're just figuring out what they can and can't do, and the memory situation in particular is something they won't really be able to explore or exploit in this first game.

That's pretty impressive given their results so far. Changes going into their next game will be interesting to see. I wonder if the new IP is too far along to make significantly more mature use of the hardware than SF.
 

pottuvoi

Banned
They already use 800MB for buffers, I really doubt they would add multisample AA for the mix.
I'm betting the T means temporal and M something like morphological. ;)
Btw did that aircraft in the slides have self reflections? I thought that was a long way off?
That's something that would be super cool in racing games, finally seeing the mirrors reflected in the car body
Basically everything in the scene has self reflections. (ground, characters, trees.. everything.)
There's basics of their reflection tech on the tech paper.
 

boinx

Member
If the fps never dipped below 30 in an alpha version i'm sure they could get it higher but every Killzone game has always been 30fps and they will probably remain that way. Mercenaries is targeting 30fps too.
 

KKRT00

Member
You can do volumetric smoke with far less than 4TF. Here's a demo made in 2009 that runs on 8800GTS (400 GFlops). It's only rendering smoke, but still, it's fully dynamic and interactive:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezltebzdgjI
At first it's rendered so it looks more like particles, but later on the blur is applied to give it more of a smoke appearance. Here he explains how it's done and what it can do, and says that even at the time it could have been done with 4-16x as many particles on some more high end GPU in 2009: http://directtovideo.wordpress.com/2009/10/06/a-thoroughly-modern-particle-system/
This demo runs on GTX 560 in 30fps in 720p win 100% GPU utilization, so on around 1.3TFflops GPU. For 60fps You need at least 2.6Tflops and probably more than 3TFlops for 1080p + some other physics, bluring, shadowing occluding etc. just for smoke.
So i were close with 4TFlops guess. It wont happen this gen.

The guy who made this is pretty much a genius for this sort of thing though. He's also just recently made a phenomenal looking realtime raytraced demo, with full scene multi bounce reflection/refractions: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8hSZGTXTx8
He works for SCEE btw.
And this demo runs in less than 20fps on 680 :)

I'm guessing you've seen the numbers in the presentation slides somewhere for this, but where did you see the equivalent number for GoW:A? I'd also say that I doubt PS3 could do that many poly scene where everything is reflective and/or transparent, which was the biggest selling point for that scene. *edit* Ah, I also noticed on that video that you were probably looking at, that GPU was using just 46% of its frametime to render that polycount. /QUOTE]
Of course this scene would look worse on current gen consoles, but its doable in terms of geometry.
Here screens from GoW:A
http://images.eurogamer.net/2013/articles//a/1/5/7/7/3/1/7/GoWA_CPU_1.bmp.jpg/EG11/resize/1280x-1
http://images.eurogamer.net/2013/articles//a/1/5/7/7/3/1/7/GoWA_CPU_8.bmp.jpg/EG11/resize/1280x-1
Here is shot from KZ 3, 270k tris on geometry and 740k tris! on shadows [so lighting]
http://images.eurogamer.net/articles//a/1/3/3/4/7/0/5/performance_Frozen_Shores.png
CE 3 for consoles also recommends around 700k, up 1m triangles
http://freesdk.crydev.net/display/S...es#LevelOptimizationForConsoles-TriangleCount


I thought they were saying the same thing here, that the DOF resolution is halved both ways, resulting in 1/4 pixels. I noticed that some people tend to say it one way and others the other way, while thinking the same thing. What I mean is, if DOF buffer on console C2 was 576x360, here the buffer is probably 960x540. If it was really quarter both ways (480x270), I think it would be way noticeable. They also wrote something about porting some point sprite based solution for this to be in full res.
I'm pretty sure its running in half-res so 576x720 or 1280x360 in C2 (a little lower, because framebuffer is subHD on consoles anyway :p]. It actually looks quite good, where the DOF shot in KZ3 presentation looked very low res, You couldnt really tell the structures of "DoFed" geometry.
http://images.eurogamer.net/articles//a/1/3/4/2/6/0/5/360_000.jpg.jpg/EG11/resize/1280x-1

========
What's with that 20TF volumetric smoke ?

Stalker Clear Sky had smoke that is way cheaper and look almost the same in 2008

You people make it sound like it is some feature from future where in fact good volumetric smoke is available.

Now big clouds, very high quaality smoke that is demanding but you really don't need that to make it look good. Just look at above stalker tech demo vid. It reacts to wind circulation and it react to objects that is all you need with vl smoke effects.

gameplay test

This looks very nice, but smoke seems to simulated in around 15fps, also its very low quality, so made from small amount of particles. It reminds me physx smoke, but a little more refined. Still looks quite good, i would want, in future games, to have at least in some static sections [like shown in Stalker] such a smoke to play with :)
 

Log4Girlz

Member
I can't understand why people are happy about this. Nothing special, run on 30 fps per second.

The lighting is special. The ray tracing is quite nice. Compared to generations past, a lot of first gen games didn't hold a candle to later generation games. This looks quite nice already and 4 years from now the PS4 will shit all over it.
 

gofreak

GAF's Bob Woodward
They already use 800MB for buffers, I really doubt they would add multisample AA for the mix.

One of the slides mentions 'no multisampling for now' which suggests they're thinking about it.

The memory consumption of the render buffers is large, but they have memory to burn at the moment - and presumably MSAA would only be applied to some of the buffers. Bandwidth might be the bigger thing here.
 
Because it's a most likely to be a £400 console managing it with the ease of just putting in discs and not having a £700-800 gaming PC with installations and configurations to be dealing with.

you forgot blue screen, drivers conflict, wasd lolmao and I can go on. You pay (maybe) 400£ but games and accessories cost more :)

The lighting is special. The ray tracing is quite nice. Compared to generations past, a lot of first gen games didn't hold a candle to later generation games. This looks quite nice already and 4 years from now the PS4 will shit all over it.

you can see partial ray tracing even on Crysis 2, date 2011. Nothing new here.

Now we have a game that will be out at the end of this year and run and look worse than Crysis 3.
 

Perkel

Banned
========

This looks very nice, but smoke seems to simulated in around 15fps, also its very low quality, so made from small amount of particles. It reminds me physx smoke, but a little more refined. Still looks quite good, i would want, in future games, to have at least in some static sections [like shown in Stalker] such a smoke to play with :)

What 15 FPS ? You would see "choppy flow" if that would be the case.

Also this is 2008 compute wasn't really hot back then and smoke calculations should be way better using compute.
 
I hereby demand a game a that looks exactly like this.

I demand it.

If im not mistaken haven't used OpenGL yet but this could be done within like 20 lines of code. Redraw geometry but instead of shading just render a small rectangle at each vertices.

you forgot blue screen, drivers conflict, wasd lolmao and I can go on. You pay (maybe) 400£ but games and accessories cost more :)

you can see partial ray tracing even on Crysis 2, date 2011. Nothing new here.

Now we have a game that will be out at the end of this year and run and look worse than Crysis 3.

This makes me kinda hyped for Ryse tech being a exclusive game and such with microsofts moneyhats for Crytek.
 
you forgot blue screen, drivers conflict, wasd lolmao and I can go on. You pay (maybe) 400£ but games and accessories cost more :)



you can see partial ray tracing even on Crysis 2, date 2011. Nothing new here.

Now we have a game that will be out at the end of this year and run and look worse than Crysis 3.

I think it looks better than Crysis 3 personally. Not in textures maybe, but it certainly uses the tech to render a more impressive scene. Didnt Crysis 2 implement an incredibly inefficient use of ray tracing? Certainly seemed to kill performance vis-a-vis the visual difference it made...
 

Alienous

Member
OUR PRAYERS HAVE BEEN ANSWERED!!

https://twitter.com/killzone/status/334570113867059201

"Sev and Rico's story has been wrapped up, so you're not likely to see them again."

HALLELUJAH! They're answering a lot of questions right now over at Twitter lately.

It sort of supports the theory that in Killzone: Mercenaries
your final contract would be from the Helghast, for the execution of Rico
, especially if they have no further plans for him.

I really appreciate how GG give us an insight into the core of their games. It gives a glimpse at the technical prowess needed to produce graphics far above most games.
 

pottuvoi

Banned
One of the slides mentions 'no multisampling for now' which suggests they're thinking about it.

The memory consumption of the render buffers is large, but they have memory to burn at the moment - and presumably MSAA would only be applied to some of the buffers. Bandwidth might be the bigger thing here.
Most likely, yes.
I'm quite sure that they will use some sort of temporal reprojection based AA with edge detection, similar to what Epic uses.
you can see partial ray tracing even on Crysis 2, date 2011. Nothing new here.
Crysis 3 used 9 raymarched samples for screen space reflections, KZ4 does something well beyond that.
 
Crysis 3 used 9 raymarched samples for screen space reflections, KZ4 does something well beyond that.

The reflection-mapping across the city's many skyscrapers may be mesmerising on first sight, but on closer analysis it's clear these surfaces aren't mirroring nearby geometry at all. Instead, Shadow Fall uses a substituted background layer of unrelated buildings to fake the effect, with no passing aircraft factoring in.


from digital foundry, you mean this? ^_^
 

Portugeezer

Member
GG are pretty great with graphics but yeah I have high hopes generally too. Even for launch still!

GG said themselves they had to make the engine a certain way to get the game out in time, so with more time they could probably do a lot more graphically. We'll see in the coming years with Naughty God too.
 

Perkel

Banned

The reflection-mapping across the city's many skyscrapers may be mesmerising on first sight, but on closer analysis it's clear these surfaces aren't mirroring nearby geometry at all. Instead, Shadow Fall uses a substituted background layer of unrelated buildings to fake the effect, with no passing aircraft factoring in.


from digital foundry, you mean this? ^_^

No he meant screen space effect shown here:

without it (only cubemaps):


with it

 
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