GT6 "80% finished", GT7 expected in "a year or two" + other info

[Johnnypenso]

I'm interested as anyone about the tweaks that have been applied to the physics. I wonder what they found and why they made changes. Did they change because users thought there is too much rollable cornering and dive while braking? Are they adding flat-spotting, over heating brakes? I know it's only a few days til our questions are answered. I can't wait to feel how cars like the '88 Supra, '89 300ZX, 787B drive. Will cars with higher sidewalls ride better over curbs? The video of the Alpine going through a corner is awesome.

Some of my friends, including me, noticed a difference in the demo, especially without ABS, but the differences were subtle and many reported not noticing any difference at all. That fact that the car was even drivable with a stock 5/5 BB without ABS was a revelation in itself, and not something I would even attempt with GT5's unforgiving, noABS physics. I'd like to see some of the features you mentioned as well, along with a more gradual accumulation of overheating in the tires, the addition of racing brakes, wider tires etc.

 

[Castrol96]

It seems the PS3 cannot render reflections and effects of cars like PS4, also Kaz commented on the effects on the PS2 were better in a way. I just want PD to improve on the reflections because Forza are going almost real.

Forza 5

GT6

The car models are OK, but for PS4 we need to see 1080p reflections.

 

[Tenacious D]

Forza 5 is running on hardware that is better than most gaming PCs, so... yeah, neat...

Having GT7 as GT6 in proper 1080p with a good anti-aliasing solution and presumably a rock solid 60fps in all situations would be a fairly major graphical upgrade to what we've seen so far.

I really don't get this "anti-aliasing at native resolution" thing. It's a completely unnecessary performance it, and all it does is fuzz up the image a bit. There are tons of discussions on this topic, and one quote sums up my feelings on this matter. Well, two quotes for context.

I game at 1920x1200. And I don't see the difference with AA on except framerate drops.

99.99% of the time, me neither. I'd recommend going for native resolution, then Anisotropic Filtering, then a more recent pixel shader version (1 = DX8, 2 = DX9, 3 = DX 9.0c [much better than 2 if you can run it], 4 = DX 10, 4.1 = DX 10.1), then going for VSync, and if you've still got FPS to spare, maybe turning on some antialiasing.

Exact ordering varies, but that's generally about the order I increase things in. Maybe pixel shader before resolution if the game is really demanding.

Obviously these are PC gamers, which run games as stupid high resolution as possible, but that's the "anti-pixel" world we've become. 1920x1080 is plenty good for a photo-real image, unless your HDTV is one of those 10' Sharps. If GT7 does use AA, I hope I can turn it off because it's wasted processing for no real benefit.

 

[stiggygonzalez]

That forza 5 model looks great,but I don't think I've ever seen a car (in real life) look so shiny.
Maybe turtle wax is included so you can give your car 10 coats of wax through kinect.
Wax on wax of.

 

[Johnnypenso]

That forza 5 model looks great,but I don't think I've ever seen a car (in real life) look so shiny.
Maybe turtle wax is included so you can give your car 10 coats of wax through kinect.
Wax on wax of.

I was going to mention the same thing. The Forza model looks uncharacteristically shiny. Like a static scale model or something like that as opposed to a real car.

 

[stiggygonzalez]

I was going to mention the same thing. The Forza model looks uncharacteristically shiny. Like a static scale model or something like that as opposed to a real car.

Yes real cars just don't look like that,even brand new showroom ones.
T10 have gone OTT,I think.

 

[Imari]

I really don't get this "anti-aliasing at native resolution" thing. It's a completely unnecessary performance it, and all it does is fuzz up the image a bit. There are tons of discussions on this topic, and one quote sums up my feelings on this matter. Well, two quotes for context.

Each to their own. I find it to be a bit like the tearing thing. Some people can't see it at all, some people find it unbearable.

A lot of how much effect you'll see depends on the scene. In games with broad swathes of similar colours and limited lines, it's really not that much of an improvement. In games with lots of harsh contrasts and hard lines, it's almost a necessity so that you're not seeing a flickery mess.

 

[Conquerer]

Yes real cars just don't look like that,even brand new showroom ones.
T10 have gone OTT,I think.

Oh, really.

 

[PepeMickey]

Yes real cars just don't look like that,even brand new showroom ones.
T10 have gone OTT,I think.

Yes they do, it depends on the amount of coats you use of lacquer, custom paintjobs tend to be more reflective than factory ones but it's not completely impossible for a car to look like that.

 

[sailworksman]

What's with that Fisker video. Driving line on, all the noob assists on and driving backwards? The person can't drive worth S#@T! Not a very good promo for GT6. Another failed video. I think were all getting our hopes up.

 

[Zoom!Zoom!]

Yeah, if you have the video settings flat out wrong you won't get a picture. But if you set your PS3 to 720p every single 1080p game and movie will still play in 720p.
You might as well say you don't get a picture on your screen if you plug the playstation into a grapefruit. You're just doing it wrong.

That's because the game itself will runs at 720p. (I don't know any PC or console will only run at 1080p) Every time I set a game down to 720p my HDTV will show it's a 720p signal. PS3 will downscale and upscale movies.

 

[05XR8]

What's with that Fisker video. Driving line on, all the noob assists on and driving backwards? The person can't drive worth S#@T! Not a very good promo for GT6. Another failed video. I think were all getting our hopes up.

That person was giving us a look of the course in reverse. Granted he should have been cautious and looking at the track map.

 

[Tenacious D]

Didn't know about that. Praise to Sony and PD for this kind of commitment

Don't know about you guys, but i'm hoping for a GT7 ASAP on PS4.

My religion doesn't allow me to play a arcade racing game, so, sorry DriveClub.

I'm with you on this, because Drive Club seems more like GRID or PGR, which are okay with those who like them, but that's just not my bag.

In games with lots of harsh contrasts and hard lines, it's almost a necessity so that you're not seeing a flickery mess.

I really think we're addressing some other processing need here, not anti-aliasing. I could be wrong, you could be one of those 50% give or take that slather AA on crazy resolution monitors, even at native resolution. But when you bring up "flickery mess," that's usually a matter of framerate interpolation beyond 60hz, and most likely anisotropic filtering, a method of improving texture resolution for things like surface textures as they recede into the horizon, a few examples here. It's a form of anti-aliasing, but is more specific in application. AA itself is a "whole frame" treatment, blending the edges of all pixels in a frame. And this is where the blurry effect comes in that I find unnecessary at native resolution.

There is a whole big debate over what resolution is even perceptible at normal TV viewing distances, and a good deal of study indicates that the lowly 720p resolution is fine enough that many people can't tell the difference between it and 1080p. I'm a little dubious on that myself. With movies, I'd agree the differences are pretty much imperceptible, but that's a different matter from those high contrast unnaturally sharp edges in video games you mentioned.

What's more, there are strong indications that the Ultra-high Definition standards being worked on matter a lot with our perceptions. For instance, a properly tuned OLED screen can cause motion sickness, as it looks almost as if the viewer is looking into an alternate universe with a radically different perspective and motion to theirs. I'm hoping this spells the demise of that idiotic "shaky cam" effect, which I deplore with a passion.

Frankly, this is more of a druther matter anyhow, as both next gen systems on paper should be able to handle a lot of image processing at such a "slow" 60fps screen rate. By the way...

I've had a beer now and I'm feeling much better.

I wish I could spot you one when I reply to one of your posts. I'm sure the humor would be more fun.

One more thing: I was going to toss up something like Conquerer's examples, because glassy finishes on real world cars are a lot like the Forza 5 image.

 

[wowbaggerBR]

That forza 5 model looks great,but I don't think I've ever seen a car (in real life) look so shiny.
Maybe turtle wax is included so you can give your car 10 coats of wax through kinect.
Wax on wax of.

I think the same way when i see one of those Autovista shots. Nothing shines like that.

But, and how about that?

To me, looks astonishing. One of my favourite LMP's in all of his rendered glory

(It's a shame that never gets dark on Forza's La Sarthe)

 

[05XR8]

I like the dirt on the car. I saw marbles in the FM5 video as well. Wonder if they'll have pick up on the tyres and see the rubber come off the inner fenders.

 

[sems4arsenal]

As next gen goes I would very much like to see dirt and scratches building up on cars and Tracks getting tyre marbles etc small stuff like that really adds to the whole experience.

Car Models don't really need much improvments.

 

[Griffith500]

These effects are buffer-based (a classic "shortcut" method to save processing time, usually). Buffers are just "allocated" sections of memory. For higher detail, you need a higher resolution covering the same area (discrete sampling), which means larger buffers and more memory.

Comparing effects realised with 8Gib of memory with those squeezed out of 512 Mib is probably not sensible (theoretically, and all else being equal, for 2D effects such as environment mapping, we're looking at 4 times the effective detail on the new consoles - or more than twice for volumetric effects, whatever they might be). Granted, the games might not get all of that 8Gib; the reflections could still look nearly 3 times as good with only half the PS4's available memory used for games, assuming the same "split" as in the current games (which is probably not necessary).

Detail is data; data needs somewhere to live: memory.
Programatically "generated" data uses temporary buffers that it refills very often. I.e. either you stick it all in memory "permanently", or you keep swapping things around and overwriting stuff really quickly, bit-by-bit (this is how the high-res formats work in photomode). You're effectively juggling memory usage, processor throughput and all the bandwidths (how much you can move, how often) between all the different components to get the final product. This is why unified memory is kinda exciting; you don't have to move stuff as often for graphical effects (or anything computed on the "GPU"), and that may open up some bandwidth for other things.

 

[Imari]

I really think we're addressing some other processing need here, not anti-aliasing. I could be wrong, you could be one of those 50% give or take that slather AA on crazy resolution monitors, even at native resolution.

You are wrong. I have a normal resolution monitor (1920x1080) and my graphics card isn't powerful enough to go overboard on AA. I'm aware that there's such a thing as using too much AA, or the wrong type of AA for the situation, but that's not what I'm talking about.

I'd even agree to some extent that other factors are more important than AA, for example frame rate. But I don't agree that AA is completely unnecessary. It has value, even if that value comes at a high cost.

And you misunderstand about the flickering. Say you have the worst case scenario, a white brick wall with black mortar. At some distances it won't be too bad, but at most distances you'll get some sort of moire pattern.

In an image, you'd just have that pattern. But in a game you're in motion, so the pattern is constantly changing. Move fast enough (and it usually isn't that fast at all) and you get a flickering as the pattern shifts.

This applies even to a single line like a power line. Without AA, as the line gets thin enough that a single pixel is an appreciable proportion of it's thickness, you will see the width varying as the distance changes. If the contrast is low it appears as a wobble, if the contrast is high or the line is only one pixel wide at best it appears as a flicker.

Good AA makes an image clearer. You're right in a sense that resolution on modern monitors is often high enough that it's not really required for edge smoothing, but that's not all it's for. When a pixel is required to represent several objects at once, for example at long distances, that's where AA really makes an impression.

see example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatia..._an_image_with_extreme_pseudo-random_aliasing

 

[Griffith500]

That's what makes "temporal" anti-aliasing so interesting, as it attempts to isolate the frame-to-frame aliasing resulting from shifts in relative position of objects vs. the observer. Too much emphasis is placed on filtering still-images (blurry!), when it's the actual geometry of the aliasing effect that should be of interest.

 

[sk8er913]

I don't know some of you are wanting native 1080p with a system that has 256Mbs of RAM and a 3.2(x1) GHz Processor. Do you want to lag? Your cell phone can run 1080p better than your PS3. LOL

iPhone 4: 512 MB of RAM, 1(x2) GHz
iPhone 5: 1024 MB of RAM, 1.2(x2) GHz
Nexus 4: 4048 MB of RAM, 1.5(x4) GHz processing power.
300$ AMD WIN PC: 4048 MB of RAM, 3.0(x2) GHz processing power
3200$ I7 PC: 37144 MB of RAM, 3.4(x16) GHz processing power(cooking. lol)

I dont know why they didn't put 512 MB or 1024MB in the PS3 in 2006, as its very cheap, and would improve its specs quite dramatically and the 360(a Year older) had 512 MB and my 2005 Win PC came with 1024MB(now has 3070MB). Sony why you 2003 in 2006? :|

 

[CorvetteConquer]

Hopefully the final 20% is a working livery editor.

 

[TheDabbinDave]

All of this technical crap is so incredibly boring and will not affect sales whatsoever.

So, that's that.

 

[Imari]

That's what makes "temporal" anti-aliasing so interesting, as it attempts to isolate the frame-to-frame aliasing resulting from shifts in relative position of objects vs. the observer. Too much emphasis is placed on filtering still-images (blurry!), when it's the actual geometry of the aliasing effect that should be of interest.

Now that's a very interesting concept that really does seem like it would be more like the way real cameras (and presumably eyes) work. That would be the perfect thing for a racing game where it's all about the motion of things.

For photomode and the like there's nothing against them using super-sampling techniques and the like which are ideal for those still image, no motion situations.

 

[thekillzonegame]

PD please FIX that crappy sounds !!!!!

 

[Imari]

All of this technical crap is so incredibly boring and will not affect sales whatsoever.

So, that's that.

You're right. There is no technical basis behind Gran Turismo whatsoever. It's made out of moonbeams and puppy hugs.

Any computer game is technical, and Gran Turismo doubly so because it's a computer game about an intensely technical sport.

Most people don't think about it on the same level that a PD engineer would and they shouldn't need to, but the average consumer will certainly appreciate that someone has put some thought into providing a great graphical experience. If the game looks like a jaggy, flickery mess then that will certainly affect sales.

And it's OK for people to talk about that.

 

[TheDabbinDave]

You're right. There is no technical basis behind Gran Turismo whatsoever. It's made out of moonbeams and puppy hugs.

Any computer game is technical, and Gran Turismo doubly so because it's a computer game about an intensely technical sport.

Most people don't think about it on the same level that a PD engineer would and they shouldn't need to, but the average consumer will certainly appreciate that someone has put some thought into providing a great graphical experience. If the game looks like a jaggy, flickery mess then that will certainly affect sales.

And it's OK for people to talk about that.

You're absolutely right, I don't know what I was thinking! Lets keep bickering for pages and pages of what full HD is in a game played on a display that none of us have any control over its technical capabilities or incapabilities.

If crappy graphics is such a horrible thing, why the heck is Minecraft so freaking popular! (Rhetorical question)

 

[Griffith500]

You're absolutely right, I don't know what I was thinking! Lets keep bickering for pages and pages of what full HD is in a game played on a display that none of us have any control over its technical capabilities or incapabilities.

If crappy graphics is such a horrible thing, why the heck is Minecraft so freaking popular! (Rhetorical question)

You know ignorance is pretty destructive. It causes people to demand the wrong things, to choose the wrong things and to be too easily swayed by emotional arguments instead of the facts (that they don't know). This discussion will have been educational for someone, guaranteed. The "bickering" aspect is unfortunate (possibly even imagined), but people aren't perfect.

What's especially destructive in discussions of game performance is the lack of awareness of the resource juggling required to make the game run, and how, if you want to do one thing one way, you have to carry disadvantages in other areas. There is plenty of easy-to-digest information about how games are made, and if you're interested in discussing the technical side of things (which things like shadows, sound synthesis, aliasing, stat balancing etc. absolutely are), then it would be beneficial for everyone if people educate themselves on the phenomena first, then engage opinion mode.

Minecraft is successful because of what it offers despite the "crappy graphics". Besides, I think the limitations of the engine Notch used were leveraged well, and it has a certain funky charm that means, in actuality, the "graphics" (aesthetics) aren't "crappy" at all. Always compromises, always "working with what you got".

 

[Fgame]

How about an official Lego Gran Turismo?
It would look blocky how we expect Lego to be. But it could have more realistic physics than a normal GT game due to freed up processing.
I's give it a go, but i'm sure there would be a few stumbling blocks...

 

[wowbaggerBR]

You know ignorance is pretty destructive. It causes people to demand the wrong things, to choose the wrong things and to be too easily swayed by emotional arguments instead of the facts (that they don't know). This discussion will have been educational for someone, guaranteed. The "bickering" aspect is unfortunate (possibly even imagined), but people aren't perfect.

Lots of technical stuff going on here. And i'm learning with them. 👍

 

[ildd]

How about an official Lego Gran Turismo?
It would look blocky how we expect Lego to be. But it could have more realistic physics than a normal GT game due to freed up processing.
I's give it a go, but i'm sure there would be a few stumbling blocks...

It would be easy to implement damage, too.

There would be none because legos are indestructible