Japanese devs talk HD on consoles (and its issues, including not really rendering HD)

[HardOCP News]

I'm back where I was 3 years ago: playing a jaggy, blurry mess. It's frustrating when you know the potential, and look forward to something so much, but it just doesn't deliver.

Here's to hoping developers can come up with something.

which game is a "jaggy, blurry mess"?

 

[steviep]

Well... it was a pain to do AA on the PS2 due to the hardware hit required, and most devs didn't bother. Here's hoping the same thing doesn't happen here, despite full screen 4xAA not being possible without the afformentioned performance hit. Devs will find a way.

 

[amdgamer]

I agree the 360 version was silky smooth, but no way near better in terms of graphics, i had the same setup as you and the 7800gtx on your rig would blow the 360 version away,
1280x720 with 4xaa and 16xaf looked a lot beete and played silky smoothwith those settings on the gtx, theres a thread on av forums which discusses this anyway

An amazing release for a launch game though

Yeah, COD2 was truly a gem of a launch day game. They really hit things right and optimized the game perfectly. It's sad that we are 7 months in the X360's life cycle, and some developers are still pushing out half-assed stuff that isn't oprimized right for the X360. COD2 is a really good looking intense game with lots of action, and high detailed textures all running in high definition at 720p at 60fps for 95% of the game. Those guys who were involved with the X360 version of that game has earned my respect as they really worked to deliver a solid product. Some people complained that online play was laggy, but I never noticed it. I only noticed the lag getting unplayable when someone with a crappy connection joined the game.

 

[amdgamer]

which game is a "jaggy, blurry mess"?

The only game i've seen that is a jaggy blurry mess, is MLB 2K6. Of course, this game was clearly rushed and half assed with some really serious bugs, and a lot of minor ones. If it wasn't for the drastically improved and impressive gameplay, I might not have been very forgiving. The biggest saving graces for this game is the impressive gameplay, and the fact that it's awesome seeing some of your most favorite players nearly photo realistic in high definition.

 

[Jason711]

I don't know if you'd call it a bottleneck, per say. More like a limit to how much bandwidth you can throw through the system. And devs have certainly come close to "taking advantage" of the processor, in that they are maxing them out in some of the most recent games. With that said, they still have room to learn how to use it more effeciently.

i guess what i was refering it to was taking full advantage of its tri-core hyperthreading capabilities..

 

[steviep]

i guess what i was refering it to was taking full advantage of its tri-core hyperthreading capabilities..

Well... that doesn't work exactly the same way as the P4's hyperthreading works. The fact that all 3 cores share 1mb of L2 cache makes it extremely hard to take full advantage of those 3 cores at once, especially with 6 threads. For more, see ArsTechnica's article here.

Even if the PPE's branch prediction is significantly better than I think it is, the relatively meager 1MB L2 cache that the game control, AI, and physics code will have to share with procedural synthesis and other graphics code will ensure that programmers have a hard time getting good performance out of non-graphics parts of the game.

Furthermore, the Xenon may be capable of running six threads at once, but the three types of branch-intensive code listed above are not as amenable to high levels of thread-level parallelization as graphics code. On the other hand, these types of code do benefit greatly from out-of-order execution, which Xenon lacks completely, a decent amount of execution core width, which Xenon also lacks; branch prediction hardware, which Xenon is probably short on; and large caches, which Xenon is definitely short on. The end result is a recipe for a console that provides developers with a wealth of graphics resources but that asks them to do more with less on the non-graphical side of gaming.

With all that said, there is still a lot to learn with the tools that have been given to devs, so it's not like what you see on the system now is anywhere near the end of the line for it.