Bethesda Softworks has made an impression with Fallout 4 but no one can deny that the initial impression was how it didn’t quite look as good as, say, Batman: Arkham Knight or The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. VP of marketing and PR Pete Hines offered his own reasoning for Fallout 4’s visuals, stating that no game offered the kind of interactivity that it did. Speaking to AusGamers after QuakeCon, Hines was asked whether id Tech was ever under consideration for adding that extra level of beauty.

As it turns out, it wasn’t. “No, because of moveable objects [in Fallout 4]. Doom has interactive stuff, but it doesn’t account for hundreds and thousands of little items that you can pick up and move and they’re all individual. It’s not suited for a game where you want to have thousands [of items] and clutter the world with all this stuff that’s all interactive and has physics. It’s just not what it’s for.”

That being said, id Software does contribute in other ways. “It doesn’t mean there’s not things that the id guys are doing that aren’t applicable. Like, ‘How did you solve this? In this scene, what are you doing here?’ There’s a million things on the much more granular level, like, ‘Maybe we want to add this thing to our engine or borrow this thing that you do in Doom or The Evil Within,’ or whatever, ‘And we’ll write our own version of that that works on our engine or solves our problem’.”

The huge amount of interactivity and the sheer breadth of the open world also opens up a potential can of worms…or bugs, as the case would be. However, it’s also that breadth and the level of things to interact with that “makes the game awesome, because it is real and those [objects] are real things that you can pick up and move, and you can take your bobble heads and arrange them neatly and roll wheels of cheese down a hill by the thousands. That’s part of what makes the game fun, is all of the stuff that you’re allowed to do in these virtual worlds.”

Fallout 4 will be out on November 10th for PS4, Xbox One and PC. What are your thoughts on what Bethesda is promising? Let us know in the comments.

But id Tech 5, the engine powering The New Order, has been around since Rage’s release 2011. The engine was marketed on the basis of its texture streaming technology, namely Virtual Texturing, which allowed developers to stream texture into memory automatically. It also employed shadow maps to lend soft edges to shadows (the specific phenomenon known as “penumbra”), screen space reflections, soft particles and a number of graphical effects and post processing. With Wolfenstein: The New Order, id Tech 5 would often see resolution drops on PS4 and Xbox One in order to accommodate a constant 60 FPS frame rate.

Wolfenstein: The Old Blood has released only on the PS4, Xbox One and PC though, skipping the previous gen entirely. How does it fare with its performance and has MachineGames managed to tap into the extra power of current gen hardware to bolster the resolution along with the constant frame rate?

On analyzing the PS4 and Xbox One versions, we noted a dynamic buffer being used for the horizontal resolution. This is the chief reason why the game enjoys a nearly stable 60 FPS frame rate, and results in dynamic resolution scaling for both consoles. Thankfully, the Xbox One version dynamically scales slightly more than the PS4, the latter sticking to its native 1080p resolution at most times. There’s still a fair amount of dynamic scaling in both versions and it’s not necessarily a new concept, especially for the Xbox One. Many games like Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare and most recently, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt used dynamic resolution scaling to ensure a sold frame rate. This practice typically relies on the number of free resources the console has at a time. The key difference here is that even though The Witcher 3 was running at 30 FPS, it managed to stick to 1080p resolution on the Xbox One in cut scenes. Wolfenstein: The Old Blood sees dynamic scaling in its resolution for both gameplay and cut scenes.

It’s interesting to note the noisy grain filter used in The Old Blood. Like The New Order, it lent a historical feel to the game and brought the grittiness of the action all the more. However, it also served to mask some of the anti-aliasing issues and resolution shifts in The New Order. The Old Blood may have improved the resolution scaling somewhat but the anti-aliasing on consoles is still pretty limited. You’ll of course see more jaggies on the Xbox One but both versions suffer from the same. Shadow dithering also occurs at times but there’s less roughness to edges in the PS4 version.

The vaunted 60 frames per second performance holds up in the console versions at least. The PS4 version succeeds in maintaining its 60 FPS frame rate but the Xbox One version isn’t too different. As it stands, the differences in frames per second for gameplay are fairly insignificant across both versions. It’s also worth noting that alpha effects, volumetric effects, physics, particles and such are similar across both console versions.

As stated before though, id Tech 5’s main calling card is Virtual Texture which can support Mega Textures with resolutions up to 128,000 x 128,000. So even though all versions of Wolfenstein: The Old Blood suffer from Mega Texture streaming issues, there’s at least some means to remedy it i.e. to have a bigger HDD. That being said, we observed more problematic texture streaming on the Xbox One version compared to the PS4 with some textures loading slightly later and resulting in a dithered visual experience.

Moving on to the PC version, it’s capable of running at a constant 60 FPS with a 1080p resolution. Along with better anti-aliasing than the console versions (and much improved over The New Order), it also delivers better effects and transparency. MachineGames may not have messed around too much with its assets and visual design but it’s certainly offered a lot more graphical options for the PC version of Wolfenstein: The Old Blood.

The graphical options are indicated below:

• Graphics quality: Low; Medium; High; Ultra; Custom
• Anti-aliasing: Disabled; 2x; 4x; 8x; 16x; 32x
• Virtualtexture cache size: Low; Medium; High; Ultra
• Virtualtexture compression: Disabled; enabled
• Virtualtexture CUDA acceleration: Off; On; Smart
• Virtualtexture max PPF: 16; 32; 64
• Virtualtexture filtering: Bilinear; Trilinear
• Virtualtexture anisotropic: Low; Medium; High
• Virtualtexture LOD bias: Slider with distinct values
• Virtualtexture page fade: Disabled; Enabled
• Shadow resolution: 2048; 4096; 8192
• Character shadows: Disabled; Enabled
• Dynamic object shadow quality: Off; Low; Medium; High
• Character shadow quality: Low; Medium; High
• Depth of field: Medium; High
• Radial blur quality: Off; Low; High
• Screen-space reflections: Disabled; Medium; High
• Subsurface scattering: Disabled; Enabled
• Haze flare: Disabled; Enabled
• Ambient occlusion: Disabled; Enabled

We tested the PC version on a number of different GPUs with an Intel Core i7-5960X and 16 GB RAM with all settings maxed out. Frame rate performance is as follows:

• Nvidia Titan X: 60 frames per second
• Geforce GTX 980: 47 frames per second
• Radeon R9 290X: 49 frames per second
• Radeon R9 290: 45 frames per second
• Geforce GTX 960: 59 frames per second
• Geforce GTX 770: 36 frames per second

The PC version is clearly the victor here. Not only does it benefit from a wider range of graphical options and better performance but it also boasts better anti-aliasing, particle and alpha effects and a 1080p resolution that isn’t subject to dynamic scaling. The PS4 version does come in close at second place though since it manages better texture streaming, a more stable native 1080p resolution and near constant 60 FPS performance compared to the Xbox One version.

Performance analysis was carried by Bill Smith.

During the Q&A session at QuakeCon 2013, John Carmack was asked whether he plans to use mega-textures in future games developed by id Software, to which he gave a pretty long explanation, detailing the benefits of using mega textures.

“So the performance issues on the PC, we had the disastrous driver problem and we still have driver problems that crop up. Some of that is also the fault of doing something that nobody else was doing. There is value to doing exactly what everyone else does, that is a well tested path, nobody will accidentally break something that everyone is doing. We were clearly doing something off the beaten road with the mega-texture, the continuous texture uploading and all that entire pipeline of things. It hit the goals that we were looking for on the consoles. On the PCs it should have been superior to that but we had the disastrous driver problem which colored a lot of people’s views on it and we still now occasionally have problems where Rage starts running crappy on somebody’s system.”

“As it stands right now, yes we are still using mega-textures, higher densities, having more in the back which we can call as needed even if we can’t ship them necessarily. The step that I would like to take data wise and we just can’t afford to ship it on optical media (current generation) is if we can ship a defused map along with a pre-baked light, then we have the best of both worlds. We have no downsides to dynamic lights, where right now we have to approximate them but you can also have the full glory of the completely baked world view. We are still far from tapping out all we can get it out from there. We have technologies that let people map paint directly on the mega-textures. We should be able to fix every crossing edge in the world which is something that is not at all plausible to do in any other way. Every time you have two things meeting, don’t have that edge seeing there that nothing get rid of but actually cross fade a little support texture around it. ”

He also explained that  the use of mega-textures have resulted in fantastic results with no performance issues.

“The ability where we have used it with stamping has allowed fantastic advances something that has no stability or performance issues. There were big wins to be had there that we didn’t make the most of and we are still trying to make more out of them. In the end when you say long term, data always wins. So something like mega-texture will win in the end, whether it is dominant in the coming generation or its takes the transition towards cloud gaming.”

“When you take the case of cloud gaming, where you are running on a data set of servers, its completely credible considering having a petabyte of data for this entire glorious world that is build with cloud resource, over and over and in almost all cases, cleverness and compression technologies eventually falls to just put the damn data there. It’s possible that we were pushing a little bit too early on the mega texture because it  barely worked on current generation, but I think inevitably that’ where things will be,” he added.

There is no doubt that Rage was a technical mess on the PC but now that everything is done and dusted, Carmack should be appluaded for trying out something different. Personally, I think mega-texture is going one of the biggest deals in the next generation consoles, given how powerful they are. Let’s hope they fix the driver problems and compatibility issues across the board.

Source: QuakeCon 2013 Keynote