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Titanfall Dev Claims Xbox One Doesn't Need DX12 To Improve Performance
MojoKid writes: "One of the hot topics in the wake of Titanfall's launch has been whether or not DirectX 12 would make a difference to the game's sometimes jerky framerate and lower-than-expected 792p resolution. According to Titanfall developer Jon Shirling, the new Microsoft API isn't needed to improve the game's performance, and updates coming down the pipe should improve Xbox One play in the near future. This confirms what many expected since DX12 was announced — the API may offer performance improvements in certain scenarios, but DX12 isn't a panacea for the Xbox One's lackluster performance compared to the PS4. It's an API that appears to mostly address scenarios where the CPU isn't able to keep the GPU fed due to draw call bottlenecks."
If the framerate is jerky then they didn't plan the game properly.
There's no excuse on a console where you know the exact resources available, right down to individual clock cycles.
No sig today...
Ok, fair enough, the XBox One is a vast improvement over the XBox 360 in many ways...
But it isn't SO much of an improvement that it is drop dead obvious.
The PS1 to PS2? Clear as day, just compare FF7 to FFX.
The PS2 to PS3? Likewise, clear as day, compare FFX to FF13.
How about before the PS1? SNES? Really, do I have to compare FF2 to FF7? :)
The XBox (original) to XBox 360, night and day...
The XBox One? Meh... it is nice, but it can't even play 1080p games, 10 years after 1080p really started to come out in any numbers.
The PS4 is better, being 50% faster (thanks to 50% more GPU resources), but it isn't THAT much better. Neither console is really "next-gen", that would have been 4K resolution.
Both are "fine", but fine just isn't going to cut it.
Only they're also known targets, and should be able to be easily programmed for, as a result. Performance for 1920x1080 shouldn't be an issue for any title on the hardware available. It boggles the mind at how poor these developers must be if they can't even target known hardware, console-style, and get good performance out of the thing. Average PC game devs don't seem to have any problem doing so on the PC, and that's a moving target. Why would any competent devs have a problem with a fixed target? They've got decent CPUs. They've got decent GPUs. They've got a decent amount of RAM. Yet they found a way to get horrible performance out of it. Send in the firing squad.
I have to agree with you. Did they not playtest it in anything resembling a "real" situation?
Good grief.
MS pulled a fast one at E3, wehre they used high end PC's to demo the XBox One.
IIRC MS later claimed that these were "representative" and also used for development. However, if these were the machines the devs were using to develop their game, it's no wonder they exceeded the available resources on the console.
http://www.techpowerup.com/185...
So they are a bit different, hardware wise. A big difference is unified memory. There is only one pool of memory which both the CPU and GPU access. That's makes sense since the CPU and GPU are also on the same silicon, but it is a difference in the way you program. Also in the case of the Xbone they decided to use DDR3 RAM, instead of GDDR5, which is a little slow for graphics operations, but the APU (what AMD calls the CPU/GPU combo chips) has 32MB of high speed embedded RAM on it to try and buffer for that.
Ok so there are some differences. However that aside, why the problem with the target? Visual quality. Basically, a video card can only do so much in a given time period. It only can push so many pixels/texels, only run so many shaders, etc. So any time you add more visual flair, it takes up available power. There's no hard limit, no amount where it stops working, rather you have to choose what kind of performance you want.
For example if I can render a scene with X polygons in 16ms then I can output that at 60fps. However it also means that I can render a scene of 2X polygons in about 33ms, or 30fps.
So FPS is one tradeoff you can make. You don't have to render at 60fps, you can go lower and indeed console games often do 30fps. That means each frame can have more in it, because the hardware has longer to generate it.
Another tradeoff is resolution. Particularly when you are talking texture related things, lowering the output resolution lowers the demand on the hardware and thus allows you to do more.
So it is a tradeoff in what you think looks best. Ya, you can design a game that runs at 1080p60 solid. However it may not look as good overall as a game that runs at 720p30 because that game, despite being lower FPS and rez, has more detail in the scenes. It is a choice you have to make with limited hardware.
On the PC, we often solve it by throwing more hardware at the problem, but you can't do that on a console.
They have really anemic CPUs. The PS4 and Xbox One are each using something pretty similar to the Athlon 5150 (except with 4 modules/8 cores instead of 2 modules/4 cores).
Those machines were representative of what dev teams - even internal MS dev teams - were told the console would be capable of at launch.
XB1 Platform team MASSIVELY screwed the pooch on those promises and what the teams got was a gaming console that was startlingly bad at drawing verts and triangles. Some titles had to smash practically all non-hero asset shaders down to early DX9 era diff / spec / norm, and cut scene vert budgets to levels on par with Far Cry (the first one, with no plot and bad voice acting) and RtCW.
So, yeah. Don't blame the game dev and art teams on this one. Blame the platform team and upper management that promised hemorrhaging-edge next-gen capability and handed the game teams a TiVo with a graphics card soldered to it.
AMD defines a module as a set of 1 FPU and 2 integer cores. The Athlon 5150 has two modules/four integer cores. The consoles have two of these two module/four integer core things for four modules/eight cores.
You are incorrect. The consoles use Jaguar modules, as opposed to the Bulldozer family, which is what you describe. The Athlon 5150 is also Jaguar BTW.
Mada mada dane.
"XB1 Platform team MASSIVELY screwed the pooch"
No the XB1 executives that neutered the platform to increase profit margins are at fault. There is NO EXCUSE for the platform to not be 1080p and enough horsepower to easily handle everything at that resolution. The platform team had their hands tied by a bunch of idiots in suits telling them they need to make it cheaper so they can make more profits off of the device.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
If the framerate is jerky then they didn't plan the game properly.
I was going to say "or test it properly", but with the number of glaring bugs I see in games these days I'm starting to think that publishers are taking the sell-it-anyway approach.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
Titanfall was developed by Respawn and published by EA. Respawn are an independent developer, not owned by either EA or Microsoft. Microsoft have absolutely no control over those developers apart from having an exclusivity deal with Respawn/EA.
They over estimated the cost of GDDR5. You can only lose so much money on your console, and Microsoft has lost massive amounts for 2 generations.
They thought the price of GDDR5 was going to be so high they console would sell for more than people could pay. Remember the $799 3DO? No. There's your answer.
They tried to make up for it by putting 64 megs of high speed on die cache, but again screwed up. The cache was expensive and took up space on the CPU die that Sony used for more Cuda cores.
So yeah, it was a money decision, but it wasn't about profit, it was about making a console people could afford. Both companies guessed, and Microsoft guessed wrong.
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I've played both and I'm actually partial to the XOne version. The game "feels" better designed for a game pad vs mouse/keyboard, and it has the pacing that's better suited to relaxing on the couch. WIth the titans, the fast twitch you get with the mouse isn't as big a deal, and the wall running stuff lend's itself better to a controller situation. I think a lot of FPS stuff fails to translate to console, but some of them can be quite good if the dev's think about it beyond "right stick == mouse look".
If you look at the Mantle benchmarks for various games it's pretty clear that it doesn't get you much on half decent systems, and on high end systems you're looking a negligible effect. I would think the same is true of DX12, which does the same basic thing.
For all the complaining about the Xb3 it's not terrible hardware, it's some odd choices compared to the PS4 and it's slow compared to a high end PC. But it's not in an absolute sense bad hardware.
It boggles the mind at how poor these developers must be if they can't even target known hardware, console-style, and get good performance out of the thing.
It boggles the mind why Microsoft put shitty laptop CPU ram in a gaming device.
The devs are trying to find a balance point between visual quality (memory taken) and performance (memory bandwidth) but the 68GB/s memory bandwidth on the XB3 is way too low. IMO the 175 ish on the PS4 is too low too. For 30 FPS remember that only means you can have 2GB of stuff on screen at a time, for 60... well, 1 GB of stuff. (That's not counting AI and Audio).
Yes, sure, the dev's need to make a game for it, but that's really hard to do when basically it's going to be like running the game on very low on the XB2, low on the XB3 and very high on even a mid range PC with a dedicated GPU that isn't terrible.
What is a "finished product" in software development? There are always further optimisations to be made, bugs to be fixed, content to be added.
You're right, total brainfart on my part. I knew they were Jaguars (hence anemic), but I was thinking jags were put together the same way as the Bulldozers. Still--my point was that it's an Athlon 5150 with more cores (same speed, architecture), which really isn't enough to feed modern games at 1080p.
As someone noted in another comment, developers were shown hardware that was much faster than the actual Xbox One. Creating a rather awkward situation where they were creating games that couldn't be run on the actual machine w/o some cuts and/or issues. Interesting enough, the N64 apparently also had similar issues.
From what I have heard it was not a money decision. It was that of availability. They didn't think enough of it would exist to furnish production of one console let alone two. So they stuck with a more mature technology. So yeah they both guessed, but they were both also playing chicken, and MS flinched. Even today, if BOTH companies used DDR5, are you certain that it would not delay console production?