There is no freaking way Xbox One will have 4K without a hardware upgrade, and that’s not gonna happen.

Sony does not mandate 1080p.

Infamous: 2nd son can have a dozen+ enemies and civilians on screen. You’re comparing an in game screenshot to a bullshot.

Every console or gaming device has a power budget that can be put towards resolution, framerate, or visual effects. PS4 has a higher total budget than Xbox, and good PCs have an even higher budget.

That means PS4 would run Sunset Overdrive better, and Xbox would run Infamous 2nd Son worse.

Yes, PRT or what some may say Virtual Texturing, is built into Id Tech’s game engine. John Carmack implemented this tech into the Id Tech’s engine years ago when they released Rage for last gen. However it is only software based. GraphineSoft has said that hardware based TR/PRT are faster streaming, as the hardware will automatically do more jobs for the programmer. They even said DX12 will make better use than DX11, which will be faster. For me, the Esram in X1 will use this tech and it will allow for bigger, better looking worlds, with stable frame rates. Actually Crytek used a custom tiling solution on the Esram for lighting in Ryse. They “chopped” up the light, which saved them alot of bandwidth to stream the other assets. This is a form of TR, because assets are chopped up and streamed where needed, instead of just loading textures “dumb”. This is what I gather from GraphineSoft and Microsoft. Look, check out Rage that used software based PRT/Virtual Texturing. This was 2011, and it still has tons of detail. Carmack was able to do this with only 512MB of memory! It is because “tiling” the textures, saved him huge amounts of memory, and so he added massive more textures.

This is what Microsoft refers to as huge amounts of GigaTexels in my post above (or below). Tiling the textures, shadows, lights etc, will save them massive memory, thus more “unique texture data or sharper renders, or no loading screens” per GraphineSoft. If u search GamingBolt for GraphineSoft’s interview about this, and how it will be even better with DX12, you’ll see for yourself.

So there were no 1080p games on ps4 last year? SMH.
Fact is 900p games can look stellar, surpassing games who only have 1080p to boast about. What about shading, shadowing, lighting, animation etc.? What about overall presentation? Countless NPCs, all moving around while all those other FX are turned on? What’s the point of pushing 1080p if your environment is sterile? Wouldn’t you prefer a more immersive game or a game that can offer more in social gaming interaction via modes etc. As a dev, why shed your games from what matters, just for the sake of 1080p? The only answer I can think about is your company mandates it.

For example the screenshots below. Two great looking games but one looks a whole lot more immersive than the other. can you count the number of NPCs in SSOD compared to ISS?

Hey mark, I think there is a difference between the two tech, PRT & TR. PRT just do textures and TR are not limited to textures. Its almost misleading to say the PS4 will have TR. As is PRT is available to both because of their GPUs are GCN based. TR however will be only available to XB1. It is an advancement over PRT for the fact that it is not limited to textures among other things.

POV: But if you would ask me if Linux programmers can help improve upon PRT to equal what TR can do, I cant see why not. Mind you now, I’m not as tech savvy as you guys. The Linux PRT improvement thing is just my guess. Maybe you can help make sense of what I’m trying to convey.

EDIT: Also I was under the impression that PRT is already in use on both platforms. Wolfenstein The New Order and, and Trials Fusion.

Wether I’m right, or u are, we’ll have to wait n see next year. I’ll be watching GraphineSoft’s blog for updates on games that use their middleware. I can judge for myself from there. The Glider Demo from Build 2013 used 16MB of memory to render a 3GB texture, so as of now I’m leaning toward excitement.

From Microsoft concerning GigaTexels

“Jun 28, 2013Microsoft have announced DirectX 11.2, which will be released for windows 8.1 only. This update to DirectX 11.2 brings a new feature, which will work on the Xbox One too. It’s called Tiled Resources.

If you ever wanted the flexibility of gigatexel resources but couldn’t enjoy them because of their massive memory cost, or GPU bandwidth limitations cripples your GPU performance, this new technology called Tiled Resources -for Direct3D- allows your GPU to handle massive textures -large atlas textures too- using a minimal memory footprint, increasing bandwidth efficiency.

In this talk, which took place in San Francisco from June 26th to June 28th, some engineers have a deep dive into the API and its intended usage, and show how the technology works using excellent demos that take full advantage of it!

As you can see in the video, this update allows textures to swap into the graphics cards -and your Microsoft Xbox One- memory much easier, and places far less strain on their memory, allowing the GPU to much better render textures”.

From GraphineSoft;

Mark Dupree
7 months ago · Shared publicly

Another question. What would say, on average, that the average Xbox One or PS4 game shows on screen (40 inch 1080p tv) at a time, or every second. 2 gigabytes, or 3 gigs per second? My question is, can a developer show tons of more data/detail on screen at a second because of this software? Can u throw me a number in terms of gigs per second hypothetically, compared to what I’m seeing now in a game like Call of Duty? Or am I missing something? Lol. Thank u. 

GraphineSoft
7 months ago

Hi Mark, thanks for your question.
The exact numbers are very application specific but we estimate that – using the Granite SDK – game developers can use about 4 times the amount of unique texture data per scene compared to a coarse streaming approach.
Game developers can choose to use these extra resources to upscale all the textures which results in ‘sharper’ final renders. Or they can add more different textures that add more unique details to the world.

Wolfenstein doesn’t maintain 1080p on either next gen console (PS4 dips down to 1720×1080 and Xbox dips down to 960×1080 to maintain 60 fps), and some of the textures are rather last-gen looking.

Hardware texture streaming is a nice trick but won’t result in mind blowing performance gains like you’re suggesting.

Actual next gen developers on beyond3d:

Sparse textures/tiled resources just provides some native hardware support for certain parts of a virtual texturing pipeline. In particular it lets you avoid a manual indirection in your shader, which makes it easier and cheaper to sample and filter your virtual textures. It’s not going to allow for a dramatic leap in texture quality or anything like that. Most likely it’s just going to give you better performance, and possibly allow for higher-quality anisotropic filtering than what the software path will provide.

Hardware support for partially resident textures (called Tiled Resources in DirectX API, or more generally “sparse textures”), do not bring any new possibilities over software virtual texturing implementation (custom shader code). It mostly shaves off a few ALU instructions (and one cache friendly memory load), makes anisotropic filtering easier to implement properly and doesn’t need tile borders for filtering (that saves less than one percent of storage space, but makes addressing easier because tile borders make power of two alignment hard).

Hardware PRT also provides a minor memory saving (~10 megabytes total), as you don’t need your own indirection lookup texture. However if you use a hash instead of a texture with full mip chain (one pixel represents one page, for example 128×128 pixels of texture data), your memory consumption is equal to hardware PRT version. But this requires one extra memory lookup (if cuckoo hash is used) and some extra ALU.