LucasArts' 60FPS Force Unleashed II Tech Demo

A frame-rate upscaler that really works? Digital Foundry investigates.

[milohighclub]

so could this be applied to 3d games, that take a drop in framerate???

[Omega Zues]

That would be interesting to see.

[nveenio]

It could, but apparently not on 360. Unless MS opens their development, it looks like innovative hardware solutions like this can't be done.

[raztad]

Yeah that would be awesome. I easily see games like KZ3 profiting from this technique.

KZ3 is, in practice, doing 60fps to render 3D. However GG cant make KZ3 in 2D 60fps and 30fps (in 3D). That would kill 3D users chances to enjoy the multiplayer.

[Takoulya]

You can barely tell the difference between 60 FPS and 30 FPS.

[El_Colombiano]

You can't tell the difference between 30fps and 60fps??? It's like night and day! Download the videos Digital Foundry provided and it looks SO much better.

[bjornbear]

however, its not game breaking if the game is in 30fps (unless you are playing multiplayer on 30fps against someone playing on 60fps) as some "gamers" (tech junkies) like to argue.

people make a big deal over it, but tbh im more concerned about gameplay than frames per second, so as long as the fps doesn't go under 30.

however, if a game is running at 60fps im not going to complain =3

[raztad]

@Takoulya

INPUT LAG. 60 fps games react much faster to controller input. This ALONE is more than enough not to put 30fps and 60fps dudes playing competitive.

[Takoulya]

I'm sorry, let me clarify that. I meant that 60fps won't have you at an advantage over someone who plays at 30fps in an online game. Well, that was before I heard about the decreased input lag. I guess I was just being ignorant... anyway, at least I learned something today.

[zootang]

Move Support please! Dual wielding light sabers with the move! Move controller glows to whatever color the light saber is, imagine it.

[nickjkl]

imagine me being tired and there youre answer

also and so it begins the developers are starting to use the ps3 correctly

also this game only uses 5 spus against the 6 usable spus hmm

i loled at

"it took our rendering team of three engineers more than a year to focus on performance and PlayStation3 SPU work."

crytek better deliver on crysis 2 after this comment

"the overall result is better than Sony's extremely impressive MLAA solution which is now available for all developers to insert into their games as part of the PS3 SDK"

[Gilliand]

What about the awesome black light saber. In the end it probably be the only color I use, again.

[hesido]

It uses 5 spus for this specific task, and only a small portion of their frame time (takes about a milisecond). Reading is good!

[showtimefolks]

is good i could care less whether its 60 or 30 fps

[koehler83]

I usually prefer a consistent 30 frames over 60, except in a First Person Perspective (which I usually dislike anyway).

As long as the camera doesn't need to move insanely quickly, as it does in an FPS for example, I find 30 frames to appear more like film and thus more cinematic and pleasing to the eye.

[kevnb]

from fighters, to beat em ups, to even rpgs. 30 fps is ok for a minimum framerate, but for an average framerate where it dips lower than 30 fps it hurts my eyes.

[hesido]

Look at and enjoy the fluidity of 60 fps vs 30 fps.. The extra frames come almost free, more power to them!

[chazjamie]

wow, so the xbox will be holding the ps3 back,inevitably. just read it. i cant believe this shit. i really cant

changed my tenses.

[Shaman]

How did you get that from this article?Its just says that in order to make 360 version work you have to bypass the APIs which is not legal thus MS needs to approve it.Anyway...amazing idea and tech,it still is needs work though.

[kevnb]

I love these articles, someone who has no idea what hes talking about will pick up info here and there.

[Projekt7tuning]

@ Shaman
Thank you. Bubble to you.
I myself am still trying to figure out how he came to that conclusion. Just bad comprehension?
That called reading or hearing what you want too.

[Raider69]

Thats indeed true my friend!MS has apply security measures regarding the use of APIs and directX features on the 360 and thats one of the reasons some dev's are stating that they cant take more juice out of the 360 hardware!Security measures and checks are an issue at this point and probably will not be solve this generation,because im not seeing MS revising the 360 hardware and codes from scratch on future 360 models!For some people that dont know the 360 has some directX features enabled on it!But In this case the directX features are disable because MS lock them!

[Trroy]

Those TRCs are in place to ensure backwards compatibility with previous 360 models -- they cannot be removed. There is no hidden magic inside the 360 that will ever make it able to handle this as well as the PS3.

The same thing goes for MLAA (which SPUs handle brilliantly), and for 3D warping, as opposed to having to render a complete 2nd 3D scene (again the SPUs handle it great), and deferred rendering (which can only be done via slow tiled rendering with the 360 eDRAM)

Its true that the 360 architecture is "holding back" console games in this regard. Not really a surprise from tech that is a year older, and cost $100 less -- actually $300 less to make -- out of the gate to boot.

In any case, pretty much all of the features I mentioned (60 fps interpolation, MLAA, 3D warp rendering, deferred rendering) are "extras" and not prereqs for a good looking game. Good art direction trumps pretty much all of them (except the 3D one, I suppose, if you play in 3D, since it has a huge effect on the framerate).

Its also tough to gauge the effect of "ease of development" on the look of a game -- you could claim that the PS3 is holding 360 games back, because they need to leverage more developer resources to use the PS3's muscle to the point where it can match or exceed the 360 -- you just wouldn't have any numbers, or algorithms, to back you up. Wouldn't stop you from being right, however. Time is just as much a factor in making a game as hardware capacity... arguably more, pound-for-pound. Of course, as game engines evolve, that argument also loses weight, since the work only needs to be done once, for all of the games which share an engine.

If you want to split hairs, though, chazjamie is correct, from the technical perspective.

[commodore64]

@ Trroy.
Good post

And a good article.
We need more of both on n4g, that's for sure

[raztad]

The SPUs are beast. Good thing more devels are starting to use them properly.

[seann]

no dude, its more about experimentation than anything els: "tech-demo".

[Garrus_Vakarian]

What the hell are you talking about.

[kevnb]

true 40-60 fps should be what they are aiming for, the standards for console games are so low these days.

[raztad]

What means TRUE? true is just perception. Heck many people doesnt perceive the difference between 30 and 60fps. So if the technique fools your eyes and doesnt introduce artifacts why not to use it?

Your comment about TRUE 40-60fps, reminded me MLAA, and some guys arguing it is not TRUE AA, but hell still GoW3 looks pretty damn smooth.

[kevnb]

its better than motion blur by the looks of things. But why even put yourself in this situation? It doesn't look the same as what 60 fps would look like. infinity ward wouldnt settle for 30 fps like everyone else, and look how that turned out. Im already noticing weirdness with it, I can just imagine what it would look like with heavy action on screen lol.

[cyborg6971]

Kev infinity ward didn't settle on making a true sequel to mw either. Whatever credibility you had died with that statement.

[hesido]

Not at all..

They can cram in much more detail with this technique, and still achive 60fps, just look at the demonstration. It is impeccable, especially when in motion. The fidelity of interpolated frames are amazing.

[kevnb]

just like 1080i isnt 1080p. and @ cyborg6971, that was a waste of a comment.

[Malebaria]

Impressive stuff,worth a read if you´re into Tech.

[coldfoot]

Force Unleashed 2 won't be 60 fps as this was just a tech test, but here's what it will have and here's why the PS3 version will be better, at least in terms of motion blur effect:

The shipping version of The Force Unleashed II uses 5-11 sample motion blur on Xbox 360 (pictured), while the PS3 game uses five SPUs working in parallel to deliver a consistent 16 sample implementation.
According to his figures, The Force Unleashed II's motion blur eats up 2.2ms of resources on Xbox 360 (give or take 0.4ms), while the five-SPU-powered PS3 version is much faster at 1.4ms (give or take 0.5ms).

So the PS3 can produce a better quality motion blur effect in less time, thanks to the SPU's.

[pork_chop_express]

no the only meat of it is, MLAA of 16xAA equivalent is available in the sony SDK :)

[Klepto]

You have obviously never seen 16xAA, there are no jaggies no matter how hard you look and makes the image quality amazing. GOW3 had aliasing even though it wasn't much, MLAA also causes odd artifacting and other graphical glitches. So please stop heralding it as this amazing tech.

[pork_chop_express]

I use 16xaa on my sli rig thanks mate.

BUT DA GLITCHES, lol u sound butt hurt.

[Klepto]

lol no. I have a PS3 and love it but when people say that stuff about MLAA it makes me cringe cause its just not true.

[Kalowest]

So MS's stupid security is holding the 360 back.

[fireplace]

The only reason for this limitation must be backward compatibilty in next Xbox. If they will stay with it, they will be able to make 100% comaptibilty.
But developers can only use what is in Direct X(box) API's and this sucks for those who like to think out of the box.

[hesido]

Please watch the demo video! The demo video is awesome for people who claim they cannot tell the difference between 30 and 60fps, you will see you are able to tell the difference!

[pork_chop_express]

game doesn't ship with it lol, but MLAA is now in the sony sdk woot

[jden28]

@Trroy

Sorry but what you say is not completly true...
Early on developers praised M$ for having the better more consistant and easier to develop for platform...The main part of that platform was directx thats why developers were able to get games up and running on the x360 faster than the ps3...thier familarity with directx allowed them to make game faster and at a highr quality early on...But what these guys are saying is because M$ forces developers to adhere to the directx and direct3D API's that more creative developers are not getting all they could out of the hardware...THE Developer himself says that the hardware is capable of doing what he want but he has to code directly to the hardware and must bypass the directx API...I'm inclined to believe the developer that was doinng it and not you...

Also...early on Sony was critisized for not having better API's and forcing developers to code to the hardware directly which is what was taking so long and costing so much...In the end no matter how good your API's are coding to the hardware will most often give better results once its understood...

The bottom line is that if M$ allows developers to code directly to the hardware then we will see better and better visuals from its machine as the more creative developers continue to learn to use it in new ways just like the ps3 programmers did with the ps3...but if M$ continues to create an artificial barrier to its hardware we may not see the vast improvements in visuals like we did on the ps3 from its 1st, 2nd, then its current generation of software...

Also Trroy MLAA was Sony's solution to not having true AA embedded in the hardware like the x360 does...its brilliant tech but its a software solution vs. the x360 hardware solution of FSAA so the x360 could do it easily but has no need to as its FSAA solution is better.... Also the edram on the x360 is NOT slow it is the fastest memory and has the highest bandwidth of anything on both machines...Deffered rendering can be either a software of a hardware solution the defferered rendering done in KZ2/3 is software and can be done on both machines but did you know the gpu in the x360 is a hybrid and does some of this already...3D warping on the ps3 is a hybrid software and hardware solution which is why a firmware update was necasary to enable it...its true the x360 will have to do most of in software but its already being accomplished....

Early on major techies like john carmack said that the x360 and the ps3 hardware were pretty close as to overall system strength and I believe him...This developers numbers proved it...
"Compare this with the frame-rate upscaler, which runs at 1.5ms on 360, and 1.4ms on PS3 (again parallelised over five SPUs). " Those numbers seem pretty close to me....

[raztad]

"Also Trroy MLAA was Sony's solution to not having true AA embedded in the hardware like the x360 does...its brilliant tech but its a software solution vs. the x360 hardware solution of FSAA so the x360 could do it easily but has no need to as its FSAA solution is better...."

Disagree in many ways. RSX in fact is MSAA capable (I guess that is what you call "true" AA), but the overhead is too high, while MLAA (=8xMSAA which is actually no possible on xbox360 due to its weak CPU) run very fast on SPUs. Other thing, xbox360 10M EDRAM has proven in certain circunstances to be a limitation: for example it is not possible to fit a 720p 4xMSAA image, that is why many xbox games are sub HD.

I disagree with most what you posted, especially the whole xbox GPU = hybrid? and speculations about 3D warping.

Of course are the games the ones that should do the speaking. Carmack can say whatever he wants but RAGE pales technically in front of Crysis 2 and not to mention KZ3. Read Crytek presentation in SISGRAPH, they mention RAGE as ann example of a game using fully PRE-BAKED lightning, shadowing.

[jden28]

@Raztad

Sorry raztad but as you said the RSX is MSAA "capable" is NOT the same thing as being a Hardware function...the x360 uses its daughter die the edram and its logic processors to give the x360 FSAA 4X free at 480p and free at FSAA 2x 720p it get tiled to do FSAA 4x 720p or any larger image at "virtually" no cost to the gpu

You can disagree all you want about the xean gpu being a type of hybrid gpu that does some deffered rendering natively but it a fact that you can look up... from the origanally released gpu specs from ATI...

Once again....I will take the side of a developer that has scean both machines and knows thier inner most workings over you...And proffesional developers and jounalist seem to think that RAGE tech is amazing even with crysis and KZ2/3 to look at so what can I say there...You mention the x360 having a "weak" cpu its NOT weak but I'll be the first to admit that it does NOT have the raw processing power of the cell...the cell has roughly 40-50% more processing power than the xenon cpu found in x360, but alot of it is used to make up for the "weaknesses" found in the RSX gpu...which is why every developer that talks about the ps3 talks about the cell and its spu's as its power block vs. all the x360 deveelopers talking about memory and shaders for lighting as its advantages...

[Trroy]

@jden28,

Sorry bud, I think if you knew what a TRC was you might have just enough extra knowledge to realize that I'm not disagreeing with the dev at all. I didn't disagree with the developer, with regards to a to-the-metal solution being faster than the DX solution he had available -- I merely stated that he will never, ever be able to use his alternate method on the 360 -- ever. Those TRCs (Technical Requirement Checklist, that all 360 games must pass to be published. Sony and Nintendo also have extensive TRCs -- its certainly not exclusive to MS) are not ever going to change. As far as every 360 in consumer hands is concerned, what he wants to do just plain isn't possible, and *never* will be.

On top of that, what raztad said about the RSX having onboard MSAA is true -- it does. And Quincunx AA as well. The Xenos GPU does MSAA faster than the RSX, as long as the framebuffer fits in the 10MB of eDRAM... but guess what? A 720p buffer won't, which, like raztad stated, is why you see so many sub-HD 360 exclusives, yet all PS3 exclusives are 720p or better. The PS3's ability to offload an AA technique to the SPUs, that is somewhere between 8x and 16x MSAA in quality, at no cost to the RSX, is a HUGE boon for the PS3's rendering performance.

Also, the PS3's ability to use 3D warping with the SPUs is basically something the 360 just plain cannot handle, and deferred rendering requires so much framebuffer memory, that the 10MB eDRAM of the Xenos actually becomes a performance bottleneck while using it, because it has to swap framebuffer tiles out constantly along the 360's slower unified memory bus, making the whole technique unusuably slow, unless your framebuffers are tiny.

As far as the Cell being only "50%" faster than the Xenon... consider that the 3.2 GHz SPUs never suffer from a cache miss (which basically puts them EACH about 30% faster than any single Xenon core, for tasks that fit reasonably on them), and that developers can use 6 of them, as opposed to the 2 extra cores the Xenon has, one of which is half-devoted to the OS, and all of which share a 1MB, 8-way set associative L2 cache with each other. They will actually interfere with each other, if they attempt to handle similar problems in parallel, due to similar memory access patterns. When it comes to the business of solving parallel problems, the Cell is probably 3x as fast as the Xenon, at least, and on top of that, the SPUs have WAY more bandwidth to the GPU and VRAM than the Xenon does to its unified memory.

[jalen247]

Great article and tech

[cyclindk]

So would this mean that a developer could potentially make a 15 (fifteen) fps game, with all the bells and whistles that a lower framerate would provide and then with this technique bump it up to a solid 30 frames per second?

[hesido]

But the controller lag would greatly increase. Also, since there's much less motion information available, there will be more artefacts (see the demo video), however, their power-point presentation talks about rendering portions of the scene elements at 15fps or 20fps (background for example) giving more time for rendering stuff..

A very good innovation!

[roguewarrior]

need more articles like this on N4G

[jden28]

@ Trroy

thankyou for proving my point your entire rebutal is talks about the power of the cell which I never disagreed with. My point was that it is the developers ability to code to the metal that would allow you to get similar results on both the ps3 and the x360..as this is what the developers are saying....My point about the cell is that it IS a more powerful cpu than the Xenos in the x360 but that the Xeon gpu easily outclasses the RSX...which is one the the ps3's bottlenecks that and its segmented memory become bottle necks for the ps3 and seeing as the ps3 is more than just the cell you have to acknowledge that no matter how much you agrue with me it's the developers that have said that both the ps3 and the x360 "SYSTEMS" offer similar real world performance...some things that can be done on the x360 are handeled with ease and are more difficult to handle on the ps3 "ALA" SHADERS.... Bye the way the tiling method used for getting FSAA 4X on 720p or higher is done on the daughter die with its own set of logic processors and is "Virtually free" to use for the gpu...And bye your own admition the ps3 must use its spu's to accoplish a similar effect... so I take mulpitple spu's to pull off MSAA...While it's free to the xenon cpu and the xeon gpu...these are the things I'm talkin about...You prove my points...In addition to that My only real point left is that its evident that the developers have the will and the ways to push the x360 hardware much further than many of us thought were possible but it's up to M$ to embrace them and provide improved and more versitle SDK's and TRC's to foster a better develpment enviorment....

YOU SAID
" I merely stated that he will never, ever be able to use his alternate method on the 360 -- ever."

I say never say never....as both M$ and Sony both just released in the past 12 months new SDK's that improved their development enviorment..we never know when the next one or whats included in them SDK is coming...

And running in SUB-HD is not exclusive to the x360 it has acctually happend more on the ps3... Especially early on when develops trying to use the spu's complained about them having a very small memory cache... and that the segmented ram in the ps3 often made developers have to copy images from the vram to the main ram and back to construct a full sized image that simply Fit in the x360 unified ran arcitecture...You see even if half you ram is faster if the image won't fit and you have to make copies and multiple passes to build the image its a waste of the develors time and provides no advatage to larger worlds...