Quality vs Tech

achillesian

I've been playing dragon age non stop over the last 2 days on my ps3, and its kickass. But the way in which it was ported has raised a few questions in my mind, mainly: is having so many textures applied to one object hurting the appearance of the object on lower end systems or consoles because of the needed downsizing in resolution?


This is a comparison image from gamespot showing off the same scene in dragon age across the pc and ps3 platform.

Lets assume the pc high quality texture for the female torso here is 1 2k diffuse 1 2k normal and 1 2k specular

this is probably downsized to 1 512 1 512 and 1 512 from what i can see, it seems about 1/4 the quality and detail.

Personally i believe, in this instance (and several throughout the game [specifically areas that have alphas as well that have hideously low resolution]) it would be best to go with 1 good looking diffuse and skip the rest.

That may not be the best course of action in all areas of this game, or games of other genres but:

1. most of the shadows in this game are baked in
2. there are like 2 persistent dynamic lights (if your weapon has fire enchantment[and i couldn't even really see it effecting the environmental normals] and torches, which just do a flickery slightly moving light-source which does somewhat interact with normals)

Tell me what you think, what i left out, reasons why things are the way they are.

*things to know, the above character is the human characters mom and joins and fights with you a little bit, so i think that puts her down as a main character on texture budgets etc.

gamedev

It all really depends. They probably arent using a full res spec map for both platforms. Probably half the resolution of the color map.

As for the port, inherently, the PC will have more texture memory to work with with will mean less mip mapping / streaming issues and higher res textures. Consoles are much more limited when it comes to texture memory.

is having so many textures applied to one object hurting the appearance of the object on lower end systems or consoles because of the needed downsizing in resolution?

I don't think the number of maps applied really has much to do with it. I would agree however that I would prefer to down res my spec and then my normal before my color map.

achillesian

gamedev wrote: »

I would agree however that I would prefer to down res my spec and then my normal before my color map.

yeah, it seems like they scale all 3 together, can any devs confirm or deny this with there porting experience, or do they put the diffuse as priority or, another map as priority?

pior

I quite strongly disagree about that game potentially looking good if stripped down to just a diffuse-only texture style.

Not saying that diffuse-only games look bad in general ; but here its a clear case of a successful scalable game production. The look is persistent across different platforms, only at the cost of occasional framerate drops and texture resolution. The final look and feel are still the same, hence this is successful in terms of both looks and production values.

I mean you certainly don't want the artists to repaint a new, diffuse only version of all assets just for the console ports... It would be the way to go for a Wii version, but for a 360+PS3+PC triple release scalability is the way to go - if not the production would just be a nightmare....

cryrid

yeah, it seems like they scale all 3 together, can any devs confirm or deny this with there porting experience, or do they put the diffuse as priority or, another map as priority?

There's a Devil May Cry 4 article that says "However, the textures were not blindly scaled down to a uniform size; rather, appropriate adjustments were made depending on the map type. For example, diffuse maps were scaled down to a 1/4 size, normal maps to ½ so they would not lose too much detail".

I'm not sure if this was the difference between ports or just between the full-quality models they used in cut-scenes / advertisements and the in-game ones, but it sounds like they put more priority on the normal map and less on the diffuse.

eld

and consider that there really isn't much of "main character" textures or content in this game, since every character mostly share the same system of clothing and facial construction.

This just shows that you have quite some more playroom with texturesizes on modern pc-hardware, while on the console you have quite some less.

and:

I played this on pc, so I could enjoy it on 1920x1200, which is quite far ahead of the 1280x720 that the console versions run at, the texturesizes the pc-version run with would be quite some wasteful as you wouldn't exactly match up pixels on the standard half-HD.


but as said, resizing textures will still retain the overall look of the game, and is an easy way to do it.