Looks nice, but it seemed to take a noticeable performance hit in the 3rd phase, and that's just moving around an empty map.

Gangrel wrote:

Tenzhi wrote:
Looks nice, but it seemed to take a noticeable performance hit in the 3rd phase, and that's just moving around an empty map.

Glad to see that I was not the only one who noticed that. I would have preferred a higher resolution video (720p as well), because at 480 quality on youtube, it looked like I was watching it through a very thin layer of vaseline on my screen (ie slightly blurred... and no it wasnt motion blur, which I did notice elsewhere i the video).

Sadly the file size limit for what I can transfer to VDG here forced the lower resolution. As for the slower performance, do remember that I use a dual core AMD laptop with integrated graphics for these videos. I have a better machine but I want people to get a real sense of how things look on the baseline machine. In this case I did not use the graphics scaling at all, so the performance did drag some.

Foradain wrote:

I had been looking for what had been said about what machine these videos were made on, and I come back and there it is ^_^.
Thanks, Doc!

Yes, we have two machines we use as the baseline to prove performance. One is an AMD-based Laptop, the other is a base MacMini.

I can't wait to see the some of these tech demo updates get combined to show the composite result! Like, running the 4-pass map environment with the power-effects inside/atop say, the city hall model.

This is looking great, but I am just really skeptical about my current machine being able to keep up with that level of detail AND eight people running auras and firing off powers all at once.... Closer to launch I will probably get a new rig, just to be safe.

Its ok, by then I will need a new machine anyways.

If your system can't handle it, blame the playa, not the game!

I couldn't resist. Technology changes, we just have to keep up. I, for one am glad this game will push the boundaries. I'm just ready to play!

Radiac wrote:

Two things I want to say:
1. The first map looked like a huge bathroom to me. With the tile etc. Just funny is all.
2. I personally am already tired of all the "Sure it looks good, but it's going get bogged down and crash on any regular computer." comments I've read here. I mean, what would you prefer, a game that has, at best, grainy graphics and looks like crap on all platforms because they listened to the gripes here about computer performance and made the game look WORSE as a way to satisfy your concerns about it, or a game that can potentially look really good on some platforms but needs to be ratcheted down on others? CoH had graphics settings, I would assume CoT will too. I'm not a programmer but I gotta believe they're at least looking at that.

Quite. Though UE4 also has a whole bunch of pieces built in to help make it somewhat less necessary for users to tweak and fiddle with every single effect, trying to figure out which ones have a good pretty-for-power-cost tradeoff. Doesn't mean it'll just be a single slider, but the video shown was with nothing but the very basic built-in optimizations, on an older machine, and by the third and fourth passes the engine was doing a number of things *at once* that are each individually pretty expensive.

So, to give an example that is at least plausible: someone with an older rig may need to opt between having "live" lighting from the open flames *or* seeing a lightning aura illuminating the walls, if their card only supports a limited number of dynamic light sources. Most likely we can arrange for the engine to make a reasonable "best guess" for most folks that run into that, and folks with a higher-end rig wouldn't have the tradeoff in the first place -- but even with the tradeoff, whichever one wasn't fully dynamic would still be showing up, it just might not have quite the level of detail that would show varying brightness as a 'light' moved around near it, or not have the shadows in quite the same level of detail.

As an interesting exercise for anyone interested in such thing, try grabbing a console game for the previous generation of consoles, sometime, and take a good, close look at little details like that. It might be surprising just how "realistic" they got things to look while using every trick and cheat in the toolbox to keep the cost down (and in fact, often inventing new tools). Even that generation of graphics -- on a par with the worst cards generally seen *now*, much less what will still be running at launch -- is starting to reach the point where there are stylistic tradeoffs being made, such as opting for motion blur (and the visual effects it gives) or opting for crispness but sacrificing the stylistic alternative in favor of visual fidelity. Current cards are *well* into that territory, which means that many choices are becoming less about "can the hardware do it?" and more about "what can a human player actually see and process meaningfully in real time?" (which could be rephrased as "what does a human playing the game actually care about most?")