13 replies to this topic

[starstutter]

So I've been thinking latley about what people think of the different sacrifices engines have to make to keep good framerates. Source packs most of its power (or as much as it can as of 2007) into vertex shaders and thus suffers from restricting polycounts and clostrophobic scenes (the environments in ep2 were still fairly closed off). Of course since it is mainly in the vertex shaders the resolution can be cranked up to rediculous levels and be just fine in framerate. Unreal uses deferred rendering and pushes everything it can into screen-space pixel shaders. This allows for highly complex lighting, large polycounts, and enourmous scenes. The downside is however it scales awful with resolution.

Now I personally highly favor the second approach. When playing I game I'll happily turn the resolution down to 800x600 (even without AA) and max out every other setting. A whole lot of other gamers I've seen on the other hand would rather stick their face in acid than play a game at 1024x768. They turn down all the settings to low (as is practical) and max out the resolution. These are the same people that acted like they would take hunger strike protests to Unreal Tech for not including AA in dx9 games.

Anyway enough ranting on that. Which do you prefer and which do you think is the most prevailant opinion?

[Jare]

Online FPS nuts will go for high res and high framerate at the expense of visual quality. I personally don't mind low resolutions (for games that don't show much text) if I can apply FSAA, high quality and good framerates (30+). However, LCD screens suffer with anything but native resolution.

[starstutter]

Jare said:

I personally don't mind low resolutions (for games that don't show much text)

That I can understand. I think there's a method though that allows for AA only on text to clear up that problem.

Since most games use texture render targets now-days, I wish they would give you the option of linear filtering on the final framebuffer. I know it makes things blurrier, but at the low resolutions the "pixel popping" can get real hard on the eyes. Especially for much grittier graphics like in GoW. And plus, with as blurry as graphics are today anyway, I doubt it would make too much difference ;)

[Jare]

starstutter said:

I think there's a method though that allows for AA only on text to clear up that problem.

Since most games use texture render targets now-days, I wish they would give you the option of linear filtering on the final framebuffer. I know it makes things blurrier, but at the low resolutions the "pixel popping" can get real hard on the eyes. Especially for much grittier graphics like in GoW. And plus, with as blurry as graphics are today anyway, I doubt it would make too much difference ;)

I like AA but I don't like blurry things. If you just don't have enough pixels to render a readable character then there's not much that AA can do.

I'm not sure I follow your comment on the framebuffer... you mean having a low res framebuffer that is then stretched to a higher res screen with filtering? You can let the LCD do that for you. :) (as long as the game lets you set the screen aspect ratio independently of the resolution, which should be mandatory these days)

[Certa]

You can force AA with your graphic card even the most basic gamer understands that. I play in 1280x1024 / max graphics and 1600x1200. But there are a few games where I will turn down effect details particles and shades down but I still play with the Hi-res because you can see more of the game at once which is highly important with something like Unreal.

[starstutter]

Certa said:

You can force AA with your graphic card even the most basic gamer understands that.

Problem is that with deferred shading, that can cause a lot of visual errors.

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I play in 1280x1024 / max graphics and 1600x1200.

yeah well not a whole lot of people have the luxery of doing that. Most can either have only one or the other.

[rouncer]

i think hi resolution gives away the mistakes too quick. i like low res and even when the screen is choppy it seems to make it work, like low quality mpegs hide so much of "syntheticness" of the game you cant even judge a games graphics by looking at it, because it could look like anything.

but hiresolution and good framerate would be good for online sport, u reckon.

i even think putting the screen through a 0 stretch magblend on a triangle puts a little effect there that can hide possible inconsistencies, cause all the pixels offset by half a pixel when you put it through the triangle. its a bit like fake AA.

[starstutter]

rouncer said:

but hiresolution and good framerate would be good for online sport, u reckon.

Hmmm, that's a good point. Like in some multiplayer games, turing on depth of field effects hinders your skill.

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i even think putting the screen through a 0 stretch magblend on a triangle puts a little effect there that can hide possible inconsistencies, cause all the pixels offset by half a pixel when you put it through the triangle. its a bit like fake AA.

Yeah, that's more or less what I was talking about. I do believe there is a strong inverse relationship between clarity and visual belivability.

[rouncer]

sick.

[Reedbeta]

starstutter said:

I do believe there is a strong inverse relationship between clarity and visual belivability.

That's why a lot of games nowadays deliberately include a film-grain postprocessing effect, or even use dithering to some extent, to add a little noise and hide the "smoothness" of CGI. :yes:

[TheNut]

Some games you have to play low resolution unless you have a massive monitor/TV to display the tiny tiny bit of important text you need to read to advance in the level. Kind of annoying that those games don't rescale the font to accommodate the resolution (typically RTS games).

Regardless, I prefer to play at a medium resolution. Something that I usually judge what the game was designed to be played in. Usually it's 1024x768 with 4xAA. I find the mid-resolution combined with anti-aliasing gives the most pleasing picture quality.

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That's why a lot of games nowadays deliberately include a film-grain postprocessing effect

In the game Fuels of War, they did a beautiful job with that effect. The city scenes are so vivid and live-like with film grain that it brings a whole different level of experience.

[starstutter]

Reedbeta said:

That's why a lot of games nowadays deliberately include a film-grain postprocessing effect, or even use dithering to some extent, to add a little noise and hide the "smoothness" of CGI. :yes:

hmmm, I'm remembering they did than in penumbra and valve is using it for left4dead. What precisley is dithering again?

[Reedbeta]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dither (skip the stuff about audio and go down to the graphics section).

There are tons of ways to apply dither. The classic case is making it appear as though the image color depth is higher than it really is (e.g. simulating an 8-bit per channel image using only 2 or 3 actual bits per channel). But its general effect is to turn aliasing into noise, and so you can apply it in any situation where you have a limited number of samples and want to make it seem like there are more. It's almost a form of Monte Carlo, only instead of random numbers you use a repeating pattern of well-distributed noisy numbers.

[starstutter]

Reedbeta said:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dither (skip the stuff about audio and go down to the graphics section).

oh wow that's freaky :lol:
I may want to consider that as a nice post-process option