Shadows are not that bad, really

[brambos]

Oh okay, i just would of thought the ps3 could of handled it, but i guess not.

Not trying to be a Grammar-Nazi here, but please notice the difference between "of" and "have". "Of" makes no sense in the two instances you've used it in.

 

[-=DV=-]

The opposite is actually true here...because the PS3 is so different than the 360, it suffers when games are made for the 360 and ported, because to actually USE to power of the PS3 games have to be coded very differently...

multiplatform games translate better when they are lead developed on the PS3, and ported to the 360 because less optimization is needed. Games that are absolutely identical on both systems are usually led on the PS3...

Its generally thought amongst developers that because the ps3 has so much raw processing power (and it does) that it can handle the inefficiencys of a port. So they develop for the easier system (x360...ie DX) then port over to the ps3. In 99% of cases ending up with a slightly buggy, worse looking, worse performing game on the ps3. I cannot think of one single multiplat that was developed on the ps3 then ported to the 360...The ps3 is harder and more time consuming to dev for. Its more expensive to dev for, And you would have to scale everything down to take over to the x360. Much quicker and easier (read cheaper) to dev on the system that is far easier, then port over with almost no modification needed.

The PS3 does have the ability to perform much better than the x360. GT5 has shown this, compared with forza where GT5 has 16 cars on track, FM3 has 8. GT5 has a more precise phyisics engine (read more intensive calculations) GT5 model polygon numbers completely dwarf FM3's, A much more intense and beautiful lighting engine. and remember back to the T10 guys saying about FM3 that they had drastically reduce smoke and other particle effects compared to FM2 because they were sitting on the absolute limit of what was possible with the x360's hardware.

So why do 99% of multiplats look AND perform better on the 360? Because thats what they are developed on, Then ported to the more powerful ps3 with the mindset that its quicker to dev for the 360 and then port to the ps3 with minimal if no optimization and just let the ps3's raw power make up for the inefficiencies.

 

[GTShadowKing]

At least this Shadow is a good one...

 

[HKS racer]

I cannot believe people are defending the Commodore 64 shadows in GT5. No way.

 

[charliec]

I cannot believe people are defending the Commodore 64 shadows in GT5. No way.

I can't believe people think that the real time 60FPS rendering of shadows is like the Commodore 64.

Can you tell which platform this is on?

 

[Spagetti69]

Pitstop, great game.

 

[Minty]

Gt5p and UC2 have better shadows because time (and position of the sun) stay the same. This way a lot of the shadow calculations can be done on beforehand, stored in memory and used when necessary.

In gt5 the sun moves, shadows change a little bit every frame, and have to be recaclulated every time on the fly... To be able to do this they needed to downsize shadow quality.

So in short we pay some shadow quality, but we get the magic of dusk at Nurby. Taking this in mind I can live with those shadows easily.

PS: I am not a PD programmer, everything above are assumptions, but bigger and wronger assumptions have already been made in this thread

Strangely, the shadows actually seem sharper to me on the tracks with day/night cycle.
But your idea means the shadows would only be bad on the tracks with day/night which just isn't the case.

 

[ESCUDO 1800hp]

Shadows are not that bad, really

Yes the shadows are really bad, really.

 

[SKOT_FREE]

Yes the shadows are really bad, really.

As a GT fanboy, I agree the Shadows are Horrible. Let's add the Jaggies on the Standard Cars to that especially with Smoke while Drifting....It even shows up in the Pics that are taken.

 

[ESCUDO 1800hp]

Honestly, blob shadows or NO SHADOWS would look better than the current shadows.

Not only are they pixely, in many places they don't update often enough, such as on the custom rally tracks. In some cases they update about 2 times a second. (By comparison, a typical value in a PC game is 12 times a second for shadows.)

 

[Negrumir]

Games that are absolutely identical on both systems are usually led on the PS3...

Could you name some? Seriously, every developer I've seen builds for the 360 and PS3 owners often get shafted. Why they don't take the opportunity to show how good they are with a multiplatform game I don't know. PC gets the absolute best graphics of all, no problems there. Then it gets ported to 360 and PS3. 360 gets a simple downscale and it works fine. PS3 gets the same thing except it doesn't work that way, I don't know all the mechanics but it ends up with poor framerates and worse anti-aliasing. Borderlands and The Orange Box are two that I have that are so much worse on PS3 than 360. Shoot, UT3 is the same engine as Borderlands and it runs flawlessly on PS3.

I still don't see why people are complaining about the shadows so much... I've never noticed any glaring issues with them. The smoke pixelation and low-res textures on standards and tracks really gets to me but the shadows aren't such a big deal. I recently got Forza 3 and started playing that. There are almost no shadows at all on the interiors and I noticed that right away. All the cars look really plastic-y and there's only the tiniest hint of smoke even if you burn the tires through 4th gear. (not ripping on the game, it's quite fun)

It's like getting really pissed at having an immaculate super car. Everything looks amazing on it and it's nearly perfect but..! The leather for the seats is old, cracked and ripped, the wood on the interior is rotted, and carpeting is stained. If you just sit there and stare at it, yes, it's gonna look like crap. But if you get your ass in the seat and just drive you'll probably never notice at all.

 

[Corpsey]

I'm a 3D animator so I noticed it right away you know it's probably because the game is in 3D though.. for each camera it has to render the shadow.. and so using a low res depthmap shadow gets away with that. So those lucky ones with a 3D tv are probably on ecstasy with how good the game is looking for them right now. Hmm an option to turn it up, no matter how much strain it puts on my PS3, would be nice though. Because anyone who abuses it = instant recycled materials for PS4 and I wouldn't abuse it so I'd reap all the benfits :x

 

[snicker3s]

Strangely, the shadows actually seem sharper to me on the tracks with day/night cycle.
But your idea means the shadows would only be bad on the tracks with day/night which just isn't the case.

That is a very valid point,...

But I suspect they just use the dynamic shadow system throughout the game (even on tracks that dont change time).

Probably for programming simplicity sake (using different systems makes you have make everything work with both systems). Programmers want to keep things as general as possible.

Again, just assumptions from my part...

 

[Cosbuster]

Shadows look bad and jagged in pretty much every console game I can think of but GT5 is the only one where they're bad enough to be distracting.

 

[HKS racer]

I can't believe people think that the real time 60FPS rendering of shadows is like the Commodore 64.

Can you tell which platform this is on?

Go at Daytona Road watch the replay when the car not being close to the screen, it's simply to awful to tell.

 

[charliec]

Go at Daytona Road watch the replay when the car not being close to the screen, it's simply to awful to tell.

I didn't understand any of that.

Anyways, of all the things they could allot memory and processor capacity to, shadows are some of the least important to me. I'm happy playing at 1080p at (or near) 60FPS. If I take time to check out the shadows, yes, I notice they typically are crap. But, that's why I spend most of my time playing versus focusing on flaws. I also don't enjoy staring at the crowds or foliage for extended periods.

I'm sure a native 720p at 30FPS could have allowed better shadow rendering and alpha blending but...I don't care personally. They're shadows.

 

[deftonesmx17]

- 60fps: This is one that is very important for the game so im glad they stuck to it, but cutting the framerate in half would have GREATLY increased resources available for other areas...

I have never experienced a solid 60fps in GT5. It goes anywhere between 20-60 (generalization). If it was a constant 60fps, screen tearing would not exist (even without v-sync enabled).

- GT5's intensive lighting model: there is a reason the lighting in GT5 is so good...it takes up a lot of resources

GT5's lighting model looks like early PC "HDR" more akin to bloom. It is overly bright instead of being sublte like you see in other modern game engines. Subtle is more realistic as I have never been driving down a tunnel and had my entire vision turn white for a couple seconds like what happens in GT5 (or early HDR in PC games).

Could you name some?
......
......
I still don't see why people are complaining about the shadows so much... I've never noticed any glaring issues with them. The smoke pixelation and low-res textures on standards and tracks really gets to me but the shadows aren't such a big deal. I recently got Forza 3 and started playing that. There are almost no shadows at all on the interiors and I noticed that right away.

Burnout Paradise - The devs talked about it multiple times. It also proved that leading dev on the PS3 proved to make a better end product as there is virtually no difference between the PS3 and 360 version.

Come on now, really? You can see the shadows just fine in Forza 3.

If I take time to check out the shadows, yes, I notice they typically are crap.

Just out of curiosity, are you normally using the in-car view? The shadows are easy to ignore when not, but are near impossible to ignore for me when the blocky things keep rolling over my dashboard and interior which is likely taking up 50% of the screen.



Back to the original post. This may be an issue between soft-shadow vs hard-shadow rendering. The far right image is like what you see in GT5, center is like what you see in most other games like UC2, and finally the left image is what you'd see in a modern PC game with shadow quality on max.

 

[Metfanant]

I have never experienced a solid 60fps in GT5. It goes anywhere between 20-60 (generalization). If it was a constant 60fps, screen tearing would not exist (even without v-sync enabled).

no arguing here...my point still stands though...if PD cut the framerate in half and locked it at 30fps it would free up a TON of resources...the problems with that however is that you have input lag issues..

GT5's lighting model looks like early PC "HDR" more akin to bloom. It is overly bright instead of being sublte like you see in other modern game engines. Subtle is more realistic as I have never been driving down a tunnel and had my entire vision turn white for a couple seconds like what happens in GT5 (or early HDR in PC games).

i disagree that GT5's lighting is like early PC HDR...GT5's lighting is quite serious, and uses a lot of resources...its a very dynamic HDR solution...

Now, you can argue whether the very intense approach is "realistic" or not, that is fine, but i didn't say it was the realism that was causing resource problems, but instead that it was "intensive."

as for the vision turning white, it is a simulation of the way the human retina reacts to going from darkness to bright lights...its actually something that can only be achieved with an HDR solution, and would be impossible with simple "bloom" effects

Burnout Paradise - The devs talked about it multiple times. It also proved that leading dev on the PS3 proved to make a better end product as there is virtually no difference between the PS3 and 360 version.

Yup, Burnout is a great example of a game led on the PS3 that turned out as close to identical as possible

EA in particular has shifted A LOT of their games to lead development on the PS3, and it has paid off for them as their titles are becoming more and more known for console parity...

 

[IceMan PJN]

Oh okay, i just would of thought the ps3 could of handled it, but i guess not.

I was going to pounce on this, but at least one other post beat me to it. I guess I'll just second that previous response by also pointing out that it's "could've", which is a contraction of "could have". It sounds like "could of", but it isn't. "Could of" makes absolutely no grammatical sense.

1. Think of each Premium car as part of a level in Uncharted 2. about 2 or 3 of those cars probably has the same amount of detail and polygons. And there are over 200 of them. Then you add on top of that 800 standard cars and tracks.

2. Making a action adventure game and making a racing game are two completely things.

3. Doesn't the 1080p resolution only consume power if you have a 1080p TV? I don't I have a standard def TV.

4. They could only use the Cell processor for AA if it's not being used up. I mean, they've got lighting, car physics, tire physics, premium level detail, standard level detail....you also have to keep in mind that GT5 has over 1000 colors which would also consume power room. It would definitely chew up the graphics card power.dividing all that up isn't an easy task. And to be perfectly honest, if I were making GT5, thinking about everything that went into it, shadows would probably be pretty low on the list. And with 5 years and around $80million already sunk into it, another year and more money to fix some shadows would also seem like a waste of time and energy when the rest of the game is finished.

I was going to do a point-by-point response to this, but.... This is a whole mess of ignorance. From one end to the other, it's just a series of statements that make absolutely no sense.

How on Earth does it matter how many cars are on the game disc or hard drive, when the system isn't rendering almost any of those at once? That's like worrying about how many calories your friend is consuming and pointing out that all of the contents of his refrigerator add up to over 150,000 calories. It doesn't matter if your friend isn't eating everything in his entire refrigerator all at once.

 

[MoLiEG]

Gotta be kidding, right???

Shadows in GT5 are an insult to the franchise... period... they better fix it... I don't care about other games since I mostly play racing videogames... better fix them... I realy hope they fix them...

 

[nsnsmj]

Honestly, a lot of resorces would've been freed up if the game was natively rendered in 720p. PD had to make sacrifices because of this, and from my understanding, rendering a game at higher resolutions is one of the most taxing things on consoles. Especially games like GT5 with robust physics engines, dynamic lighting systems, great visuals, AI (hehe....I kiid, I kid), and more.

It's a wonder PD were even able to get this to run natively in 1280x1080 with AA and a good framerate. These current consoles are not powerful enough to render a 60fps, 1080p, big budget, AAA, visually intensive game. Smaller downloadable games? Sure (i.e. Wipeout HD).

 

[charliec]

Just out of curiosity, are you normally using the in-car view? The shadows are easy to ignore when not, but are near impossible to ignore for me when the blocky things keep rolling over my dashboard and interior which is likely taking up 50% of the screen.

Ah, I typically use the bumper cam. Totally understand the shadow issue when using interior view though, I've definitely noticed it when I use the cockpit cam.

 

[PAWEL17]

Not trying to be a Grammar-Nazi here, but please notice the difference between "of" and "have". "Of" makes no sense in the two instances you've used it in.

Not, "not trying", are.

 

[TyphonInc]

- i would seriously consider starting with a 720p native resolution and dumping the 1280x1080 mode...if they want to use 1080p for the menus and replays, then fine...but for gameplay stick with 1280x720 and be done with it

Is there a way to have the game display in 720 instead of 1080? If we could have the option to lower the res, I think that would help.

 

[charliec]

Is there a way to have the game display in 720 instead of 1080? If we could have the option to lower the res, I think that would help.

You can set your PS3 to output at 720P, but I believe the game is still rendered at 1080P natively and then output at a lower resolution, so there's no benefit.

EDIT - I was wrong: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-gran-turismo-5-tech-analysis?page=6

 

[TyphonInc]

Ah, I typically use the bumper cam. Totally understand the shadow issue when using interior view though, I've definitely noticed it when I use the cockpit cam.

I've stopped using interior view because of the distracting block shadows.

For PC games they let you set the level of graphic definition. When outside the cockpit the 1080 looks awesome.
I would go back to cockpit view if I had the option to lower resolution and increase shadow definition. Just saying.