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[monome]

One portion of asset creation is already ready for extremely high specifications. Models. Taking depth, normals, and specular from an insanely high poly model and applying that to a "low" poly model.

You guys don't seem to realize they'll likely do something similar anyway. Too many polygons opens up a huge range of issues we have yet to deal with.

But again, that's just one portion of asset creation. You don't think costs will skyrocket when someone is making a 12,000x12,000 pixel texture? Just so every rock in an environment looks individualistic?

There's a reason Pixar movies cost $100 million to make. And that's for 2-3 hours of content. Spread that over a 20 hour game.

So much this.

I don't want next-gen to provide cinema like empty shell games, nor do I need to shell 400€ for a new box to get slightly more optimized games.
Software more than ever has to scale to the grandeur of the projected hardware designs.
Or we're gonna get glorified quick-time events movie from major publishers.

 

[gundamkyoukai]

One portion of asset creation is already ready for extremely high specifications. Models. Taking depth, normals, and specular from an insanely high poly model and applying that to a "low" poly model.

You guys don't seem to realize they'll likely do something similar anyway. Too many polygons opens up a huge range of issues we have yet to deal with.

But again, that's just one portion of asset creation. You don't think costs will skyrocket when someone is making a 12,000x12,000 pixel texture? Just so every rock in an environment looks individualistic?

There's a reason Pixar movies cost $100 million to make. And that's for 2-3 hours of content. Spread that over a 20 hour game.

Yes i do think cost will rise but not like the gen .
Allot devs went bankrupt but going HD was not the only reason, bad management also play a huge part.
With more power we might get better middle ware tool to help asset creation and cut down on dev time.
I also see games becoming cheaper to make as pubs outsourced and set up shop other place but this is going off topic and should be save for another thread.

Point is i don't think having a high spec systems going to bankrupt anyone.

 

[Thunder Monkey]

Yes i do think cost will rise but not like the gen .
Allot devs went bankrupt but going HD was not the only reason, bad management also play a huge part.
With more power we might get better middle ware tool to help asset creation and cut down on dev time.
I also see games becoming cheaper to make as pubs outsourced and set up shop other place but this is going off topic and should be save for another thread.

Point is i don't think having a high spec systems going to bankrupt anyone.

A high spec system in an of itself won't kill anyone.

Well... maybe if it catches their house on fire.

But the strive to push those systems will. Pushing what is now considered "weak" systems nearly wiped out half of the studios that deved for them. Pushing something more powerful than a 2014 top end gaming PC will kill a lot more. Hell, even using what is considered a metric step up on middleware didn't help. A lot of games this gen cost more than $50 million to make. That's even with modest hardware.

 

[blu]

Yep this is something you see in every next gen thread .
Specs can't be to high cause the cost of asset creation would make Pubs go bankrupt .
When they are already made much higher than what you are seeing now.
Perfect eg for this is GT5 where cars are made so good they can be on PS4 hardware already .

Funny that you mention GT5, because I expect Polyphony to largely redo their assets come GT6, as tessellation will make their current-gen 'high-end' assets look largely sub-par for next gen.

 

[brotkasten]

Funny that you mention GT5, because I expect Polyphony to largely redo their assets come GT6, as tessellation will make their current-gen 'high-end' assets look largely sub-par for next gen.

They didn't even largely redo their assets for this gen. What makes you think they'll do it for the next one? :lol

 

[Sadist]

I have no idea about tech stuff, but compared too the speculated Wii U specs, how much of jump is it?

 

[Thunder Monkey]

They didn't even largely redo their assets for this gen. What makes you think they'll do it for the next one? :lol

It makes me wonder what the money Sony gave them went too when I read the complaints people had with 5.

I have no idea about tech stuff, but compared too the speculated Wii U specs, how much of jump is it?

We don't exactly have hard specs for either.

Based on speculation though... DC to Xbox?

 

[blu]

They didn't even largely redo their assets for this gen. What makes you think they'll do it for the next one? :lol

Well, they tried. And I expect a similar situation come GT6 - 'premium' (AKA tessellation-redone models) and 'standard' (AKA GT5 premium) models ; )

As to the reasons why? Because if the competition uses tessellation-based models for their next-gen iterations, Polyphony will be at a huge disadvantage either fidelity- or performance -wise. At GT5's poly budgets, competition's models will blow GT5 out of the water, or at GT5's asset fidelity, competition will run at a fraction of GT5's polycounts. It's a win-win situation for the competition / lose-lose situation for Polyphony ; )

Basically, unless a developer has a flawless pipeline for converting their current-gen (irregular-triangle-mesh) top-quality assets into displacement-mapped, tessellation-based assets, such a developer will be at a natural disadvantage for re-using their assets come next-gen. And Polyphony are at a wost-case scenario there, as they have a massive assets base - the chances that they'll be able to 'automagically' convert that to next-gen asset standards are slim. Polyphony's best bet is to have modeled all their top-end assets in a tessellation-friendly format - patches, or somesuch.

 

[fabricated backlash]

Well, they tried. And I expect a similar situation come GT6 - 'premium' (AKA tessellation-redone models) and 'standard' (aka GT5 premium) models ; )

So you think they're just going to add stuff again, without quality control? No thanks.

 

[AniHawk]

They didn't even largely redo their assets for this gen. What makes you think they'll do it for the next one? :lol

well what else are they going to be doing in the next seven years until gt6's release?

 

[fabricated backlash]

well what else are they going to be doing in the next seven years until gt6's release?

Animating another Nascar Driver to create more Nightmares?

 

[Thunder Monkey]

well what else are they going to be doing in the next seven years until gt6's release?

Coke and hooker parties.

Duh.

 

[squidyj]

One portion of asset creation is already ready for extremely high specifications. Models. Taking depth, normals, and specular from an insanely high poly model and applying that to a "low" poly model.

You guys don't seem to realize they'll likely do something similar anyway. Too many polygons opens up a huge range of issues we have yet to deal with.

What is this? I don't even.

You're saying that devs are going to keep doing to models in next gen what they're doing in this gen and that this is somehow going to cause next gen costs to be... worse? The logic just isn't there.

What issues are "too many" polygons going to cause? subpixel polys for the whole screen are not really a problem. unless you're suggesting we're going to wind up with all sorts of shadowing problems from sampling really gnarly z buffers for shadow maps?

The big thing with all of this is everything right now has to be optimized to the max for highly limited RAM. You have to be able to store everything in such a small space right now that it's more work for devs to optimize those assets to the limitations of the hardware than it is to create those assets in the first place.

New technology is coming into place to make that a thing of the past though. Concepts such as ID's Megatextures, Sparse Voxel Octrees and tessellating LOD have the potential to take hand-crafted LOD's and models and turning them into efficiently managed dynamic LODs.

Likewise, enhanced gpu and cpu power allows for improved animations in real-time with less involvement. With real-time implementations of GI level designers can move objects around without having to recompile a lightmap.

 

[blu]

So you think they're just going to add stuff again, without quality control? No thanks.

I'm applying the exact same logic as this gen. Polyphony have the choice to do what is technically feasibly to preserve their car park or face the wrath of the fanbase. People love their last-gen garages, you know ; ) Of course, there's always the possibility of Polyphony saying basta and axing any last-gen assets. I guess it's all up to Kaz' patience.

 

[test_account]

It makes me wonder what the money Sony gave them went too when I read the complaints people had with 5.

Kaz bought all 1000+ cars for his own car collection. The reason he gave? He needed to study the cars Just kidding hehe.

But seriously though, GT5 was made from scratch, that is why it took so long. And the things people complained about was pretty minor stuff when it comes to the costs of things i think. If the developers had good salaries, then that can add up to quite some money over 5-6 years.

 

[brotkasten]

It makes me wonder what the money Sony gave them went too when I read the complaints people had with 5.

Last thing I read was $60M for GT5. But that was pre-launch, iirc.

 

[Donnie]

I have no idea about tech stuff, but compared too the speculated Wii U specs, how much of jump is it?

Dreamcast to GameCube maybe, or slightly less. I mean we don't know the specifics of the GPU or CPU outside of cores (which tells us very little). But the rumoured amount of RAM (2GB vs 1GB) doesn't indicate a very large gap in hardware).

 

[pottuvoi]

What issues are "too many" polygons going to cause? subpixel polys for the whole screen are not really a problem.

With current hardware you end up doing ~6x the shading work with subpixel sized polygons.
There has been some interesting research to fix this problem, but none of the current GPUs do it like this.

Another problem is antialiasing a high frequency sub-pixel sized features is not easy.
In case of textures this was solved with pre-filtering, but polygons are not that easy to pre-filter..

 

[Thunder Monkey]

What is this? I don't even.

You're saying that devs are going to keep doing to models in next gen what they're doing in this gen and that this is somehow going to cause next gen costs to be... worse? The logic just isn't there.

Ummm... are you high?

I explicitly said that the creation of models won't impact the cost of next gen dev anymore than it has because they are likely to do the exact same thing next gen that they did this gen. Applying the normal, depth, and specular maps from a very high source to a "low" poly model.

But that is only one aspect of asset creation. You've still got a fuckton of texture work to do, and that will see continuing cost increases the higher the resolution of said textures.

 

[blu]

What issues are "too many" polygons going to cause? subpixel polys for the whole screen are not really a problem.

Huh? Sub-fragment triangles are a *major* problem for the efficiency of today's GPU pipeline. Even before considering that triangle setup is not free, modern GPUs are designed for optimal pixel-shading efficiency at a dozen-or-so fragments per polygon, and definitely not less than a quad fragment per polygon. You go below that and your fillrate goes down the drain.

@pottuvoi, good find! Turns out gaf can be occasionally of use these days ; )

 

[McHuj]

But that is only one aspect of asset creation. You've still got a fuckton of texture work to do, and that will see continuing cost increases the higher the resolution of said textures.

I'm thinking that perhaps next-gen is when we will finally see more art asset middleware companies form.

Epic, and previous id, did it with their engines, but there's no reason why one couldn't form a company that supplied art assets such as high quality textures to developers.

 

[Margalis]

I'm thinking that perhaps next-gen is when we will finally see more art asset middleware companies form.

Epic, and previous id, did it with their engines, but there's no reason why one couldn't form a company that supplied art assets such as high quality textures to developers.

An engine is a platform, art assets are not. If you use off-the-shelf textures the style of your game is now dictated by those textures. Which are most likely going to be photo-referenced and suitable for the most generic games possible.

Could you find a texture suitable for a rock in Skyrim? Sure. Could you find a texture suitable for a rock in Skyward Sword? Probably not.

 

[Thunder Monkey]

I'm thinking that perhaps next-gen is when we will finally see more art asset middleware companies form.

Epic, and previous id, did it with their engines, but there's no reason why one couldn't form a company that supplied art assets such as high quality textures to developers.

But then comes the problem of styling.

Most devs already have access to what I like to call "stock" textures. They still end up altering them to a huge degree or starting fresh to maintain a level of visual cohesiveness among assets.

The big change will come in the form of mix and match randomly generated textures. But I suck at teh maths.

And I apologize for the are you high comment squidyj. But I tend to be confrontational in turn when someone is with me. Reflex from having a brother.

 

[SkylineRKR]

Dreamcast to GameCube maybe, or slightly less. I mean we don't know the specifics of the GPU or CPU outside of cores (which tells us very little). But the rumoured amount of RAM (2GB vs 1GB) doesn't indicate a very large gap in hardware).

I think its more than that. Going by the rumors that is. It would be a single Radeon 4x vs a crossfire Radeon 6x, and Quad Core vs high end i7. The 2gb vs 1gb RAM may be just twice the difference, but its still a bigger difference than say the Xbox and 360 in terms of raw numbers.

 

[eso76]

Funny that you mention GT5, because I expect Polyphony to largely redo their assets come GT6, as tessellation will make their current-gen 'high-end' assets look largely sub-par for next gen.

photo travel car models won't look sub par for another 10 years.
i doubt you'll ever really need to get higher than that ingame actually.
same can be said for fm4 lod0 models which are about the same quality.

both gt5 and fm3/4 assets have long long legs.

now, some tracks on the other hand could use some remodeling.

An engine is a platform, art assets are not. If you use off-the-shelf textures the style of your game is now dictated by those textures. Which are most likely going to be photo-referenced and suitable for the most generic games possible.

Could you find a texture suitable for a rock in Skyrim? Sure. Could you find a texture suitable for a rock in Skyward Sword? Probably not.

still, for games aiming to visual realism, this is going to work.
when you approach a certain level of detail, trees will probably look alike in most games, as will a lot of urban environment pieces.
Sure every dev will need to tweak them to their needs, but it's still a lot cheaper than modeling and texturing them from the ground up and i'm sure this is what we'll see in the near future; huge libraries of shared assets.

Skyward sword and the likes might not benefit from them, but then again, games not aiming for photorealism are not the most expensive ones to make.

 

[blu]

photo travel car models won't look sub par for another 10 years.
i doubt you'll ever really need to get higher than that ingame actually.
same can be said for fm4 lod0 models which are about the same quality.

both gt5 and fm3/4 assets have long long legs.

now, some tracks on the other hand could use some remodeling.

I admit I should've worded that post better. That's why I expanded on that in my next post on this page.

 

[Majanew]

I think its more than that. Going by the rumors that is. It would be a single Radeon 4x vs a crossfire Radeon 6x, and Quad Core vs high end i7. The 2gb vs 1gb RAM may be just twice the difference, but its still a bigger difference than say the Xbox and 360 in terms of raw numbers.

Yeah, from the rumored specs, it's much larger. Heck, if the next Xbox has 2GB GDDR5 at 256GB/s, it'll smoke the Wii U just on that alone.

 

[blu]

Yeah, from the rumored specs, it's much larger. Heck, if the next Xbox has 2GB GDDR5 at 256GB/s, it'll smoke the Wii U just on that alone.

Erm, that last 'leak' was a prank.

 

[Thunder Monkey]

Yeah, from the rumored specs, it's much larger. Heck, if the next Xbox has 2GB GDDR5 at 256GB/s, it'll smoke the Wii U just on that alone.

Our own little personal GAF WiiU insider puts the WiiU RAM count at 2 gigs.

Erm, that last 'leak' was a prank.

Shhh!

I want to see if his brain explodes.

 

[BurntPork]

I have no idea about tech stuff, but compared too the speculated Wii U specs, how much of jump is it?

~50-75% of the Wii to 360 jump. Enough for some ports, but not all.

 

[Majanew]

Erm, that last 'leak' was a prank.

I figured it might've been from some of the crazy specs, but I had my fingers crossed.

 

[specialguy]

Our own little personal GAF WiiU insider puts the WiiU RAM count at 2 gigs.
.

no, he doesn't. said the lower bound was 1 gb and the final amount isn't decided.

 

[blu]

Shhh!

I want to see if his brain explodes.

You cruel, cruel monkey.

 

[Thunder Monkey]

no, he doesn't. said the lower bound was 1 gb and the final amount isn't decided.

"So as I said before that memory can't be less than 1 gb, the kits have at least 2 gb (is higher of course because this is the lower value of the range)."

So yes and no. The kits have at least 2 gigs, so the actual console could have anywhere from 1.5-2 gigs.

You cruel, cruel monkey.

Blame the aliens. They made me.

 

[Majanew]

"So as I said before that memory can't be less than 1 gb, the kits have at least 2 gb (is higher of course because this is the lower value of the range)."

So yes and no. The kits have at least 2 gigs, so the actual console could have anywhere from 1.5-2 gigs.

Xbox 360 devkits have 1GB RAM while the retail has 512MB. I say Wii U is probably between 1-1.5GB.

 

[Thunder Monkey]

Xbox 360 devkits have 1GB RAM while the retail has 512MB. I say Wii U is probably between 1-1.5GB.

I'll split the difference.

1.5-1.75 gigs (Nintendo does like odd numbers).

 

[CouchMaster]

Well, they tried. And I expect a similar situation come GT6 - 'premium' (AKA tessellation-redone models) and 'standard' (AKA GT5 premium) models ; )

GT5 premiums have 2 different car models, one that you see in races and another one in photo mode. I suppose those photo modes are the ones you'll see in races in next gen GT title.

 

[blu]

GT5 premiums have 2 different car models, one that you see in races and another one in photo mode. I suppose those photo modes are the ones you'll see in races in next gen GT title.

They have more than two models as they have multiple LODs in-game. But even if they ran with their photo-mode LOD across the board, they would still be at a disadvantage, as the competition can get as-good-or-better-looking models at a fraction of the polycount.

 

[dragonelite]

One portion of asset creation is already ready for extremely high specifications. Models. Taking depth, normals, and specular from an insanely high poly model and applying that to a "low" poly model.

You guys don't seem to realize they'll likely do something similar anyway. Too many polygons opens up a huge range of issues we have yet to deal with.

But again, that's just one portion of asset creation. You don't think costs will skyrocket when someone is making a 12,000x12,000 pixel texture? Just so every rock in an environment looks individualistic?

There's a reason Pixar movies cost $100 million to make. And that's for 2-3 hours of content. Spread that over a 20 hour game.

Render farms that need power and cooling taking probably several mins to hours to render a individual frame.

It shouldn't really make it more expensive using higher res textures if one thing it should make assets making more easier less limitation and artist have more space to work in(Both for models and textures)

Dont forget gpu have limits too i know DirectX only supports 8kx8k textures.
But no one will really use it. For models or Textures it just takes to much space atleast not next gen.

 

[Donnie]

I think its more than that. Going by the rumors that is. It would be a single Radeon 4x vs a crossfire Radeon 6x, and Quad Core vs high end i7. The 2gb vs 1gb RAM may be just twice the difference, but its still a bigger difference than say the Xbox and 360 in terms of raw numbers.

There's no chance of those kind of specs for XBox 3. It won't even have a single high end Radeon 6xxx never mind two and neither will it have a 6 core i7. These kind of specs just aren't possible for a console in 2012.

Also regarding RAM, raw numbers aren't important, comparative numbers are. 512MB vs 64MB is a far bigger difference than 2GB vs 1GB.

Yeah, from the rumored specs, it's much larger. Heck, if the next Xbox has 2GB GDDR5 at 256GB/s, it'll smoke the Wii U just on that alone.

Yeah and IF the WiiU has GDDR5 it won't, and IF the XBox 3 has DDR3 (which is the actual rumour) it won't. A lot of IF's there considering we don't know what kind of RAM either system has. The believable rumours out their suggest both use DDR3 for main memory.

 

[Marco1]

If the 2GB Ram rumour is true then doesn't that give us an indication of the specs of the system?
They are not going to match a monster GPU and CPU to 2GB if 2GB will be the bottleneck.

 

[tycoonheart]

A 6 core processor
A powerful GPU
Built in Kinect
Probably an HDD
Probably a new type of optical disk drive that holds way more than DVDs

This thing is going to be expensive, if this rumor is true.

 

[itsgreen]

A 6 core processor
A powerful GPU
Built in Kinect
Probably an HDD
Probably a new type of optical disk drive that holds way more than DVDs

This thing is going to be expensive, if this rumor is true.

What is built in Kinect?

Also 6 cores doesn't make a processor automatically expensive and a powerful GPU is build on a contract so the effective part costs are only the silicon...

You'll pay a premium for the harddrive, but the part costs won't exceed 40$ and are probably costs that the consumer will have to pay for the 'premium' package

And a blu-ray drive is 60$ without bulk discount and if they drop the blu-ray movie support they save some additional costs...

 

[metareferential]

A 6 core processor
A powerful GPU
Built in Kinect
Probably an HDD
Probably a new type of optical disk drive that holds way more than DVDs

This thing is going to be expensive, if this rumor is true.

I don't care if it is going to be expensive. It'd better be powerful.

I dont' want to see another major competitor offering an overpriced old machine like Nintendo did.

 

[specialguy]

I'll split the difference.

1.5-1.75 gigs (Nintendo does like odd numbers).

He's saying the dev kits have at least 2GB as the lower range, this is a minimum 2X retail, so the lower end of retail Wii U =1GB.

So a more reasoned guess is 1-1.5 GB, not 1.5-1.75. My guess is the Wii U dev kits have 2.5-3GB RAM, leaving a range of 1-1.5GB for the final retail. But this doesn't even tell us what kind of RAM...if it's slow DDR3 as rumored it may not be directly comparable to PS360 RAM numbers.

Because if it really has even 1 GB of RAM in the final I dont know why devs are acting like it can only do PS360 ports, unless something is hampering that RAM...

 

[DopeyFish]

I'd assume Microsoft will be using a variant of the AMD 7000 mobile line for the gpu

Low power requirement but still pretty damn powerful...

(I use the 6990M, and it's an absolute monster)

 

[Durante]

Regarding the talk about car models, would anyone seriously go ahead and create the source assets for a current-gen racing game using pure polygonal modeling? I'd assume they are already at least subsurf modelled or even with some kind of parametric surfaces. If so, converting them to a next-gen pipeline should be a largely automatic process. If not, the developer deserves the headache for their lack of foresight.

 

[specialguy]

There's no chance of those kind of specs for XBox 3. It won't even have a single high end Radeon 6xxx never mind two and neither will it have a 6 core i7. These kind of specs just aren't possible for a console in 2012.

Also regarding RAM, raw numbers aren't important, comparative numbers are. 512MB vs 64MB is a far bigger difference than 2GB vs 1GB.



Yeah and IF the WiiU has GDDR5 it won't, and IF the XBox 3 has DDR3 (which is the actual rumour) it won't. A lot of IF's there considering we don't know what kind of RAM either system has. The believable rumours out their suggest both use DDR3 for main memory.

Actually you forget another GPU generation is in store in early 2012. The mid range of that generation should be equivalent to todays high end such as 6970. So even if you pretend Xbox next is launching in 2012, which I say there's no chance, but even then, you'll be looking at a whole different ball game. Xbox next can have tomorrows mid range GPU (something lets say called, 7870) and it will be just as powerful as todays high range while not being extreme on heat-power.

And as far as the DDR3, the "actual rumor" specifies some amount of Vram. For this rumor to make any sense it would likely be something like 2GB+2GB, but it seems all the uneducated or those who want to paint the next Xbox as weak continue erroneously acting as if it will have 2Gb of DDR3 and thats it, which as I've pointed out about 50 times in this thread isn't even technically possible as DDR3 is just too slow to feed a GPU.

 

[P90]

when you approach a certain level of detail, trees will probably look alike in most games, as will a lot of urban environment pieces.
Sure every dev will need to tweak them to their needs, but it's still a lot cheaper than modeling and texturing them from the ground up and i'm sure this is what we'll see in the near future; huge libraries of shared assets.

So, not only will we have re-hashed environments in-game,like Dragon Age II, we will have them across the board? I fear the future.

 

[tycoonheart]

What is built in Kinect?

Also 6 cores doesn't make a processor automatically expensive and a powerful GPU is build on a contract so the effective part costs are only the silicon...

You'll pay a premium for the harddrive, but the part costs won't exceed 40$ and are probably costs that the consumer will have to pay for the 'premium' package

And a blu-ray drive is 60$ without bulk discount and if they drop the blu-ray movie support they save some additional costs...

I meant bundled in Kinect. No chance they make the kinect an accessory given the way MS has been pushing it recently.

I mean, looking at the technology listed in this rumor, what it suggests the next xbox might have seems to be a step over the tech that existed when the xbox 360 was released.

Add all that up and I guess I see this thing being expensive.

Which is why I think this rumor is false. I think both Sony and MS will use different strategy this time around. I think they will both go witch cheaper hardware and push creative gameplay using Move and Kinect respectively. Just my opinion.