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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.
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.
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.
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.