Microsoft: "Tiled Resources" Key To Xbox One Graphics

[Revolutionary]

Yeah we get it. it's trivial tech news, no need to be a smarmy git about it. Also anyone clicking on a trivial tech article probably does want to be "bored with the details", so you could have at least included a link to site that does have technical details. This is the escapist there are people here that get excited about tech-demo trailers.
eg...

 

[Amakusa]

nope, it's a nice concept but that isn't enough for me to reserve order a xbone.

 

[Whoracle]

Those two are much more subtle and very hard to notice when just playing, and since games don't exactly list their rendering techniques it's hard to provide examples unless you've got issues like texture popping in Rage or an explicit change list like for the ENB mod.

Well, that's interesting at least. Will have to check that out. I'd say it should be notable when REALLY looking for it, but you're right, definitely not while playing the game regularly. Thanks for the examples

 

[Clovus]

It sounds like this is only useful for FPS, and even there it would be annoying. Outside of the bits where I'm actually shooting down the sites, I don't keep my eyes glued to the center of the screen. I don't like settings that cause the edges of the picture to not be in focus or be a lower quality.

Your eyes can move really, really quickly. If there's something interesting to see, I'm usually looking at it on the edge of the screen as I'm moving the reticule towards it. I actually like to stop and look at things in games, and sometimes the best view means that I actually look at the whole screen instead of moving the reticule all over it. It's like requiring that you can only look at stuff focused in real life by turning your whole head instead of just using your eyeballs.

So, I'd prefer to just keep upgrading incrementally with more powerful hardware (ie, like on a PC), rather that using shortcuts like this.

 

[Prof.Beany]

Im sorry but is this actually new?
I mean I could be wrong but I swear this tech is as old as 3D gaming itself (hyperbole, obviously).
And whats more I dont see how this is really a hardware specific thing as it sounds more like its handled by the rendering code as opposed to any specific hardware features.
Seriously I know Ive turned around overly fast and seen textures and such pop in more than once in my time gaming so MS are really going to need something better to convince me.

 

[neppakyo]

So in layman's terms, they have to do shortcuts due to the underwhelming lack of power of their hardware.

Pretty much what I got from their statement. After the wrost console reveal in all time of console reveals, people shouldn't preorder it. Make MS wait, lose some money so they can actual make it better. Don't give MS a free pass. Yes, I'm talking to all you xboners.

Basically every piece of hardware uses shortcuts of some kind-- it's called optimization.

Id Software is well-known for pioneering or at least popularizing a lot of techniques that let you squeeze more performance out of computers-- look up adaptive tile refresh or raycasting for some of the earlier examples of this. (The later examples are more impressive, but also more difficult to understand.)

True enough. Still, I hope the xbone doesn't hold back games due to it being the worst performer. Devs usually develop for the weakest system, hopefully they can take full advantage of the superior hardware of the PS4. It's a lot faster, and has more available memory for games to use. The xbone itself takes 3GB for it's OS's on it, and whatever silly 'TV TV SPORTS SPORTS' and such features as well.

captcha: for the gipper - So, that means the PC/PS4 is the gipper?

 

[Ruley]

Doesn't Borderlands 2 and Battlefield 3 already do this resulting in texture pop in when you turn around? MASSIVELY immersion breaking... I don't know if i trust this to be in every single game given how it wasn't properly handled in those two. This feature may already exist in other games though and the fact that i didn't notice them is testament to the system working.

Yet, still a few bad eggs will slip though i imagine.

 

[Sol_HSA]

So I went and read the opengl extension. Which wasn't pretty clear. Googled around. More or less figured out what's this about.

It's a texture memory management scheme, where you can have a, for instance, 16384x16384 texture which isn't actually in memory (as that would take gigabyte), but can be used as if it was. The game can upload pieces (tiles, here) of the texture or delete them, based on what's needed.

This could be spun as real, cool news, but, again, microsoft manages just to confuse people. I don't get it.

 

[jack3000]

Just to clear some things up: tiled resources has nothing to do with tesselation, which is increasing polygons in closeups. This is about textures.

LOD through MIP has existing for a long time, so obviously this is not what MS is claiming they just thought up...
Tiling large textures such as in RAGE has already been implemented as well of course, which is the software-manual version of what tiled resources now offers through hardware.

What is is new here: a direct3d card hardware lookup table that performs tile lookups of large textures, making both shaders as well as software engines using it much easier AND faster.

 

[devotedsniper]

Wow what an awesome new feature! wait..it isn't oh...

and so much for the new consoles outpowering pc's.

 

[Hero in a half shell]

Just to clear some things up: tiled resources has nothing to do with tesselation, which is increasing polygons in closeups. This is about textures.

LOD through MIP has existing for a long time, so obviously this is not what MS is claiming they just thought up...
Tiling large textures such as in RAGE has already been implemented as well of course, which is the software-manual version of what tiled resources now offers through hardware.

What is is new here: a direct3d card hardware lookup table that performs tile lookups of large textures, making both shaders as well as software engines using it much easier AND faster.

It sounds like we've all misunderstood what exactly this thing is, but I don't fully understand what you mean, I think what you mean is that they've created a brand newmore efficient way for the textures to be stored and called from the RAM, which would be a really innovative feature. Is that right, or could you explain it in more simple terms? Thanks.

 

[Nadia Castle]

What a lovely piece of marketing fluff. I wonder if it will be as intense as Blast Processing or the PS2's mighty emotion engine that will make our games look as good as Toy Story?