Resolutions & Games

[RyanT]

Hey everyone, first post here and most certainly not the last! I heard about Tech Artists.org at GDC (from AnnieCat and a shirt at a tech art round table) and figured this would be the best place to ask my question.

Today we’re seeing players demand our best from gameplay to graphics. And with this demand I’m personally starting to see requests for games that support higher resolutions. Currently 720p seems to be the console standard slowly moving to 1080p.

As a tech artist how does this effect us and should we be developing assets differently to support these higher resolutions? And why is it that 720p has been the standard for so long especially now that 1080p seems to be more of the norm in TV’s?

I guess in short, I’m confused as to how game resolutions effect us and if we should be weary of increasing resolution sizes.

Thanks!

[Wolfsong]

720p vs 1080p has nothing to do with how common TV’s are, it’s always been the aim for games on the current consoles to run at 1080p as it’s still lower resolution then high-end PCs and content is usually shared.

The reason most console games don’t support 1080p is because of the hardware in the consoles vs how optimized the game engines are for it. Rendering 1080p takes a lot of power, so it’s a balance between render resolution, engine code optimization for the specific platform, amount of post effect, shader complexity, shadow quality, total tri count on screen, total drawcall count on scene and so on.

Games that run in 1080p generally has less details in their environment and simpler shaders and so on. Many games that says they run at 720p actually runs on lower resolution and up-scales as well, due to the hardware limitations and wanting to have advanced lighting and shaders.

But the longer the current console generation lives the better the graphics engines gets optimized for them and so more games go for running at higher resolutions… unless they want to use that extra power on even cooler lighting, shaders and effects.

PC will always be in the front line when it comes to resolution and the need for higher resolution meshes and textures. Just look at the content created today for DX11 games, which has content resolution that in theory is scalable in eternity.

[j83]

Hardware hasn’t changed for several years, and fewer and fewer games ship even at 720p. One reason for this is that more and more games are multiplatform, so you cannot cater everything in your game to one specific platform, as often you have to make certain concessions in order to get the game to run at acceptable framerates on both platforms.

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=46241

The good news is, during this cycle of hardware, a ton of techniques have been developed for fast and efficient anti-aliasing, image sampling, engine structure, so why the resolution of games hasn’t gone up for the most part per se, pixel for pixel, you’re getting a better quality image with fewer examples of aliasing, moiré patterns, etc. due not only to rendering but also to more logical art creation techniques. :):

As for how game resolution effects us, the higher the resolution, the stricter we have to be in shader creation, art creation, etc.

For example, modern GPUs operate on the concept of pixel quads. In effect, pixels are grouped into quads, and then processed. However, triangle size on screen influences how many pixel quads have to be processed in the GPU, as if triangles on screen are smaller than a quad, for each small triangle, you have to render an additional pixel quad. In a worst-case scenario, you could literally render 4x the actual resolution if you do not manage your art content well enough.

Also, as tech artists we have to know how our engines manage batches/drawcalls, how we use the hierarchical Z pass to minimize overdraw, how to find out when and why the GPU is stalling on texture fetches, how to know when you can afford more ALU operations in certain scenarios, etc.

That’s a little bit of the stuff we need to know for content, image resolution, etc.

[RyanT]

Perfect answers guys, I’m most appreciative I’ll be working with consoles for the first time in depth soon and its something I’ve worried about for awhile. That link helps clarify a lot!