I am bored of waiting, lets discuss graphics

[Stelios]

Hello everyone!
Like many of you, i just cant wait for AC to be released. I also cant seem to drive any other sim knowing that AC is on the way. I hope it gets released soon.

Something that bugs me with the tech demo graphics is that for the most times of the day on the track, the lighting seems like its blurring the rest of the graphics. I mean that when the sun is strong, the car , track and all the other objects have this kind of blur on them. This is also visible in the latest 458 screenshots, especially the cockpit shot.

Am i missing something in the graphics settings? Is this engine using differed lighting? If yes, this blur is to be expected but honestly i cant say i like it that much. I tried playing around with the graphics settings in the menu but it is still there. Maybe there is a line of text i can edit in the game's .cfg?

What do you guys think?

p.s. Maybe "blur" is not the best word to describe it, maybe its "dirty" , "fuzzy"
p.s2 Maybe its BLOOM ? I think its the same "effect" in BF3 for example

 

[radome]

Let's save the GPU cycles and conjure the image of the mirage in our mind's eye.

On the other hand, where to render or "map-in" the blurriness could be pre-calculated for an entire course patch-by-patch based on the angle of incidence of the ray from the driver's eye position.

I imagine the effect was quite pronounced on Sebring's long north-south runway around 2 pm

 

[EIF]

To those who have the tech demo, does it favour ATI or Nvidea GPU's in terms of performance? I'm sure I had seen Nvidea logos on some tech demo material. Torn between a 7950 and 670.

 

[AC Lover]

To those who have the tech demo, does it favour ATI or Nvidea GPU's in terms of performance? I'm sure I had seen Nvidea logos on some tech demo material. Torn between a 7950 and 670.

Which version of 670 m8? In any case, I think it will be better choice than 7950

 

[AC Lover]

I will buy new rig at the end of the months, this 8 years old machine I have now can go to museum

Wanted to get some beast for gaming but in the end I can spend some 900 euros :

GeForce GTX660-Ti Asus OC 2GB
LGA1155 Z77 Asus P8Z77-V LX2
LGA1155 Intel® Core™ i5-3350P
DDR3 2x4GB 1600MHz Kingston HyperX

Hope this will be good enough for decent framerate

 

[EIF]

760 is out end of the month apparently and slightly faster than the 670, hopefully for a little less money too. So guys, does AC favour nvidea or ATI?

 

[Stelios]

I cant help but notice that the smoke puffs from the tires are sprites.

I really hate sprites. Can we please have smoke made of particles? I know its going to be really heavy on the gfx cards, but it will be nice to have as an option. Its 2013, i think its time for games to include smoke made of particles .

I am no graphics guru but i am pretty sure the particles can physically interact with the rest of the geometry in the game, such as the car itself and the road, so we wont be getting those ugly effects when the sprites go through objects / road, i hope you get what i mean

What do you guys think?

 

[nothke]

"Sprite" is a method of bilboarding a single poly to always face a camera,
"particle system" is a way to instantiate many objects under one controller.

Comparing them is like comparing apples to scissors, they are not comparable.

In both cases you mention, the "particle system" generates "sprites". The reason why the particles look better in the screenshot you posted is cause they are using a method called "soft particles", and the difference is that the intersection point of the sprites is smoothed instead of being a "hard" edge like in not-soft particles.

http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/04/Soft-Particles

Many games are using them for over 5 years. I have complained about this to Simone few weeks ago, and he told me he will put the proposal up on the next meeting. I hope he did.

 

[BanjoMaster]

Interesting article Nothke, thanks for posting I hope it's considered too, as seeing the intersection line right in your face really does break the immersion at times. If it can be dealt with economically (as in resources) then I hope they do so.

 

[Mapu]

what about performance loss when using "soft particles"?

 

[nothke]

what about performance loss when using "soft particles"?

I am not sure, but I think it's minimal.. It's just few lines of code

 

[Stereo]

what about performance loss when using "soft particles"?

If AC's already using a depth buffer for depth of field screen effects, it's not gonna make a big difference. Depending when particles currently get rendered, probably not much work to change it either.

Keeping a depth buffer does take a bit of graphics resources, not sure how much.

[edit] as always I defer to the people actually making the game, we posted at the same time.

 

[EIF]

I'm all for these type of effects as long as they're not too expensive on performance. For all rFactor and GTR2's lack of polish I do love them for running massive grids with no slowdown

I've just upgraded to a 7950, I hope AC will run well on it

 

[Mr Whippy]

I'll be running AC on a GTX275 and expect it to cope fine on 1920x1200 or whatever res I choose to run.

I'd imagine soft particles will make it in, but like any commercial project they start with what they need and then beautify it towards the end as time/GPU budget allows.

Yeah I might miss out on some super hard to spot visual feature that adds about 2% more quality for 10% less FPS but hey I don't mind.

The basic elements in AC look very good so I can't see me missing extra special carbon fibre anisotropic shaders or grass at 300m instead of 600m etc

Dave

 

[AC Lover]

I think I will give a little more money for :

LGA1150 Z87 Gigabyte GA-Z87M-HD3
GeForce GTX760 Gigabyte OC 2GB
LGA1150 Intel® Core™ i5-4430, 3.0GHz BOX 22nm

 

[Michael Hornbuckle]

Will the GTX275 even run DX11? Pretty old card but I guess if you are running the TP it's okay. Not sure that I would consider shadows and trackside objects "hard to spot visual features" but good luck to you....I just hope that my 2 6950's will give me plenty of eye candy and at least 60 FPS

 

[Dinca Andrei]

For 3 screen setup its obvious that we need a good PC spec t run the game at a framerate above 70 or more.
But those parts are so expensive that some of us just dream on.
My PC spec : AMD X4 640......8Gb DDR3....nViidia GTX 560Ti
With this system AC runs with around 100 FPS with 2 Monitors in clone mode( one monitor for desktop and one for playseat) so i am more than happy with this.

 

[AC Lover]

Its really great we don't need to consider some extremly good machines to run AC, that's giant + for Kunos.. and its still looks perfect

 

[Mr Whippy]

Will the GTX275 even run DX11? Pretty old card but I guess if you are running the TP it's okay. Not sure that I would consider shadows and trackside objects "hard to spot visual features" but good luck to you....I just hope that my 2 6950's will give me plenty of eye candy and at least 60 FPS

GTX275 is old but it certainly has enough shader model support and raw power for track-side objects and shadows.

Any shortcoming on features will be down to poor graphics engine development rather than hardware limitations.

Ie, I recently played a load of games with all the features turned on to full.

Only a few DX11 features may be missing but from what I can see these are limited to things AC probably isn't using any way, like tessellation... though I'm sure there is code to allow that to operate, albeit less efficiently, on older shader model cards.

Dave

 

[DennS]

Thank you guys (incase Kunos decided to tweak the colors because of this thread )

 

[Dinca Andrei]

Christmas will come early..i can feel it