Considering many of your posts I'm guessing that none of you took the time to read the article I posted yesterday.
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By The Secret Developers
Published Sunday, 27 October 2013
Have you ever wondered what developers really think about the latest gaming news and controversies? In this new series of Digital Foundry articles, it's game creators themselves who take centre-stage, offering a fresh, unique perspective on the issues of the day, free to write what they want about the subjects that they are passionate about, with a rock-solid assurance from us that their anonymity will be protected. In short, freshly served, informed opinion direct from the people creating the software we care about, with zero involvement from marketing or PR.
In this first piece, a seasoned multi-platform developer offers up his view on hardware balance - not just in terms of the current Xbox One/PlayStation 4 bunfight, but more importantly on how the technological make-up of both consoles will define the games we play over the next few years. If you're a game-maker that would like to contribute to the Secret Developers series, please feel free to contact us through
digitalfoundry@eurogamer.net and be assured that any discussions will be dealt with in the strictest confidence.
With just weeks to go before the arrival of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, there seems to be a particular type of mania surrounding the technical capabilities of these two very similar machines.
The raw specs reveal numbers seemingly light years apart, which clearly favour one console platform over the other, but it seems to me that at a more global level, people can't quite see the wood for the trees. Spec differences are relevant of course, but of far larger importance is the core design - the balance of the hardware - and how that defines, and limits, the "next-gen" games we will be playing over the next eight to ten years.
At this point I should probably introduce myself. I'm a games developer who has worked over the years across a variety of game genres and consoles, shipping over 35 million units in total on a range of games, including some major triple-A titles I'm sure you've played. I've worked on PlayStation 2, Xbox, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PC, PS Vita, Nintendo DS, iPhone, Wii U, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. I'm currently working on a major next-gen title.
Over my time in the industry I've seen a wide variety of game engines, development approaches, console reveals and behind-the-scenes briefings from the console providers - all of which gives me a particular perspective on the current state of next-gen and how game development has adapted to suit the consoles that are delivered to us by the platform holders.
I was spurred into writing this article after reading a couple of recent quotes that caught my attention:
"For designing a good, well-balanced console you really need to be considering all the aspects of software and hardware. It's really about combining the two to achieve a good balance in terms of performance... The goal of a 'balanced' system is by definition not to be consistently bottlenecked on any one area. In general with a balanced system there should rarely be a single bottleneck over the course of any given frame." - Microsoft technical fellow Andrew Goossen
Dismissed by many as a PR explanation for technical deficiencies when compared to PlayStation 4, the reality is that balance is of crucial importance - indeed, when you are developing a game, getting to a solid frame-rate is the ultimate goal. It doesn't matter how pretty your game looks, or how many players you have on screen, if the frame-rate continually drops, it knocks the player out of the experience and back to the real world, ultimately driving them away from your game if it persists.
Maintaining this solid frame-rate drives a lot of the design and technical decisions made during the early phases of a game project. Sometimes features are cut not because they cannot be done, but because they cannot be done within the desired frame-rate.
"If the frame-rate continually drops, it knocks the player out of the experience and back to the real world, ultimately driving them away from your game if it persists."
Achieving an absolutely rock-solid frame-rate in a triple-A game across multiple platforms isn't easy. Dead Space 2 and its sequel, shown here, realised the dream.
In most games the major contributors to the frame-rate are:
-Can you simulate all of the action that's happening on the screen - physics, animation, HUD, AI, gameplay etc?
-Can you render all of the action that's happening on the screen - objects, people, environment, visual effects, post effects etc?
The first point relates to all of the things that are usually handled by the CPU and the second point relates to things that are traditionally processed by the GPU. Over the successive platform generations the underlying technology has changed, with each generation throwing up its own unique blend of issues:
-Gen1: The original PlayStation had an underpowered CPU and could draw a small number of simple shaded objects.
-Gen2: PlayStation 2 had a relatively underpowered CPU but could fill the standard-definition screen with tens of thousands of transparent triangles.
-Gen3: Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 had the move to high definition to contend with, but while the CPUs (especially the SPUs) were fast, the GPUs were underpowered in terms of supporting HD resolutions with the kind of effects we wanted to produce.
In all of these generations it was difficult to maintain a steady frame-rate as the amount happening on-screen would cause either the CPU or GPU to be a bottleneck and the game would drop frames. The way that most developers addressed these issues was to alter the way that games appeared, or played, to compensate for the lack of power in one area or another and maintain the all-important frame-rate.
This shift started towards the end of Gen2 when developers realised that they could not simulate the world to the level of fidelity that their designers wanted, as the CPUs were not fast enough - but they could spend more time rendering it. This shift in focus can clearly be seen around 2005/2006 when games such as God of War, Fight Night Round 2 and Shadow of the Colossus arrived. These games were graphically great, but the gameplay was limited in scope and usually used tightly cropped camera positions to restrict the amount of simulation required.
Then, as we progressed into Gen3 the situation started to reverse. The move to HD took its toll on the GPU as there were now more than four times the number of pixels to render on the screen. So unless the new graphics chips were over four times faster than the previous generation, we weren't going to see any great visual improvements on the screen, other than sharper-looking objects, which influenced the overall design. They started to understand how to get the most out of the architecture of the machines and added more layers of simulation to make the games more complicated and simulation-heavy using the CPU power, but this meant that they were very limited as to what they could draw, especially at 60fps. If you wanted high visual fidelity in your game, you had to make a drastic fundamental change to the game architecture and switch to 30fps.
Dropping a game to 30fps was seen as an admission of failure by a lot of the developers and the general gaming public at the time. If your game couldn't maintain 60fps, it reflected badly on your development team, or maybe your engine technology just wasn't up to the job. Nobody outside the industry at that time really understood the significance of the change, and what it would mean for games; they could only see that it was a sign of defeat. But was it?
Switching to 30fps doesn't necessarily mean that the game becomes much more sluggish or that there is less going on. It actually means that while the game simulation might well still be running at 60fps to maintain responsiveness, the lower frame-rate allows for extra rendering time and raises the visual quality significantly. This switch frees up a lot of titles to push the visual quality and not worry about hitting the 60fps mark. Without this change we wouldn't have hit the visual bar that we have on the final batch of Gen3 games - a level of attainment that is still remarkable if you think that the GPU powering these games was released over seven years ago. Now if you tell the gaming press, or indeed hardcore gamers, that your game runs at 30fps, nobody bats an eyelid; they all understand the trade-off and what this means for a game.