Rendering The Future (layman's version... by a layman...) (Destiny)

by Ragashingo , Official DBO Cryptarch, Sunday, March 16, 2014, 00:04 (3704 days ago)

I'm not a graphics guy, and really not a 3D game engine graphics guy, but I love reading through the Halo and Destiny tech slides. Here what I, again the non-graphics guy, got from this set:

1. They did a lot of work to make sure Destiny's new graphic features worked on the 360. If I read it right it looks like they managed to give every scene dynamic lighting (with full interactive shadows and light flickers and stuff) while still fitting within the current generation of hardware. This is awesome for me since I'll be playing on the 360 for a while.

2. A lot of the work they talked about was getting the graphics system to do fewer passes on a scene and do more with those passes. By doing fewer passes it means that your console's CPU and GPU doesn't need to go back over a frame as many times to finish it up, leaving them free to beef up the fidelity and effects of a given frame or get started on the next frame sooner.

One big step forward from Reach seems to have been improving the materials system and rendering system to reduce the number of costly or hard to work with special cases. In Destiny they place a light and the entire scene from basic level geometry to characters, to transparent objects all get lit and shadowed correctly. In Reach they had several different light types, and terrain types and so on that all reacted differently (or not at all meaning some combinations didn't work with each other, period) depending on what they were doing. By improving things on one end it lets the artist more easily create what they want without worrying if the objects is going to reflect or shadow or interact with fog or sparks properly, etc.

3. Particles were a big improvement that Reach showed over Halo 3. Through various techniques Bungie got a huge increase in the number of particles they could use at once. This showed up as more sparks, and explody bits, and my favorite, as the raindrops that could be frozen in midair in theater mode since each nearby drop actually existed. The Destiny engine seems to take another similar sized step forward and uses some fancy tricks (like determining if a small particle is too far away to really be seen and taking it out of the equation early on so the game can use available processing power on things you actually will see) to further increase the number of particles they can have on screen at any given time. Particles are used for things like sparks and smoke, so look for a nice increase in those areas for Destiny!

Overall it sounds like by improving the engine in fundamental, low level ways, Destiny will get away with looking a lot better even with no increases in processing power. And perhaps even a lot super better when running on the next gen consoles.

My one, hopefully not too layman-ish, question would be this: A lot of the new lighting system was made to fit in the 360's small EDRAM but it sorta sounded like maybe the systems were still confined to that small amount of space even on the next-gen consoles. Is this true, or can the graphics systems spread their wings on the next-gen consles? You know... generally speaking... :p

Now excuse me while I duck in terror of the actual graphics guys coming and telling me how I've misinterpreted everything. :)