Crytek: Xbox One eSram to provide phenomenal performance.

Crytek Shares Secrets of Using Xbox One eSRAM’s Full Potential, Resulted In ‘Big’ Bandwidth Saves

http://gamingbolt.com/crytek-shares-secrets-of-using-xbox-one-esrams-full-potential-resulted-in-big-bandwidth-saves#HuwVbJXm4Kg5S8QS.99

The increased power that the Xbox One and PS4 offer over the previous generation of consoles has been as hot a topic now as it was when both consoles launched. However, it’s been observed that the Xbox One falls ever so slightly (at best) behind the PS4 in many frame rate tests, not including the lack of 1080p titles compared to Sony’s console.

Many developers have attributed this to the console’s eSRAM. Crytek has more than its share of experience with the same having developed Ryse: Son of Rome, which is one of the best looking launch titles for either console till date. GamingBolt spoke to Crytek’s US Engine Business Development Manager Sean Tracy about the advantages of using CryEngine when used with tiled textures since eSRAM is more suited for the latter.

“CryEngine has a unique and novel solution for this and was shipped with Ryse. One of the problems when using Deferred Shading is that it’s very heavy on bandwidth usage/memory traffic. This gets exponentially worse as overlapping lights cause considerable amounts of redundant read and write operations. In Ryse our graphics engineers created a system called tiled shading to take advantage of the Xbox One,” Sean explained.

“This splits the screen into tiles and generates a list of all the lights effective each title using a compute shader. It then cull’s light by min/max extents of the tile. We then loop over the light list for each tile and apply shading.

Ultimately this resulted into bandwidth gains and they were able to use just a single compute shader for culling and lighting, which is simply phenomenal. “In practice this made for the biggest bandwidth save we could have hoped for, as just reading the Gbuffer once and writing shading results once at the end for each pixel. Only a single compute shader was used in Ryse for light culling and executing entire lighting and shading pipelines (with some small exceptions for complex surfaces like skin and hair).”

This is just a snippet of our interview with Crytek and we will have more in the coming days.

Cool.

@GravityX:

In current news the order 1886 and second son exclusives on the ps4 destroy graphically any game including ryse on the xflop

can it make Crytek's games not suck?

It's like Eddie Murphy is still doing stand up.

lol Shittek and their tech demos.

Can't wait for stuff that looks even better than this.

@GrenadeLauncher said:

lol Shittek and their tech demos.

Can't wait for stuff that looks even better than this.

Runescape?

Not really.

It's starts with a misleading title and continues with Crytek PR. That's good System Wars material. Go on, keep the jokes flowing out and let the laughter continue.

I knew Sean would have to revisit this topic about esram since his last interview a few days ago.

He already acknowledged the bottleneck of the esram but I am glad he is elaborating on the work around and utilization.

@ReadingRainbow4 said:

@GrenadeLauncher said:

lol Shittek and their tech demos.

Can't wait for stuff that looks even better than this.

Runescape?

And here are my 2 favorite haters gamer's.

Anyway, as you all like to say any one can find bad screens of any game.

But I think this is great news for Xbox One gamer's don't you?

@GrenadeLauncher said:

lol Shittek and their tech demos.

Can't wait for stuff that looks even better than this.

Another thread with PR, something I despise about all companies. Then the TC creates a misleading title that's not found in the article, spinning the PR even further. We are now deep in fanboy-land lol. The lulz keep coming. Show the results Crytek, stop talking about how you'll make your 900p/30fps game prettier next time. Of course you will, as will other devs.

Now, If only I enjoyed Crytek's eye-candy, shallow games. I gave up on them last gen, but after trying the low metascoring 60/100 Ryse on my Xbone, I thanked Lord Zeus almighty that I didn't actually buy it. I don't care about Crytek's PR and spin, I don't like their superficial games. Honestly, this game won't be remembered a few years from now as a bona fide classic other than it was "a looker".

Are games on all the systems (Wii U/Xbone/PS4) going to get better looking overtime? Hell yeah, they will. There will be optimizations for all of these machines. Some developers will spin in interviews like Crytek desperate to keep their company in the public eye. Other devs will optimize and keep their techniques/coding on the on the Down Low. This happens every gaming generation. Some devs talk it up in press, others just release beautiful games and make you wonder how they did it.

However, I want to read in interviews about Crytek's attempt to actually improve their depthless, hollow, boring gameplay instead of the tricks they are using to make their eyecandy games look even better next go-round. In the hack and slash heavy Ryse, he only hacks I see are Crytek.

The future isn't bright with Crytek, it's boring.

The Order is 800p and doesn't even use deferred rendering. I wouldn't say it "destroys" Ryse, lol.

Ultimately this resulted into bandwidth gains and they were able to use just a single compute shader for culling and lighting, which is simply phenomenal.

The future is going to be amazing.

And remember, esram is only a bottleneck if your coding like it's 2012.

That's a brilliant solution to using Esram effectively. I don't thing it will spread however all developers don't have the same talent at coding to writing a light tiling engine or process. If anything I believe this will help lead to some creature e solutions

Great news

Possibly, however with any new techniques it could make its way into future SDK updates.

The future is bright.

It makes you wonder what other elements could use this technique. This post was about game technology not gameplay or content

They don't destroy Rise but surely look better,in Infamous case the games isn't even comparable Infamous is open world Ryse is a restrictive smoke and mirrors game,where your movement is severely limited to confined paths ways..

CryEngine has a unique and novel solution for this and was shipped with Ryse. One of the problems when using Deferred Shading is that it’s very heavy on bandwidth usage/memory traffic. This gets exponentially worse as overlapping lights cause considerable amounts of redundant read and write operations.

This problem the PS4 doesn't have it because of its true HSA nature,there is no constant redundant copy and paste,and is ESRAM the culprit for it,since the CPU has no access what so ever to it and the data need to be flush for it.

. GamingBolt spoke to Crytek’s US Engine Business Development Manager Sean Tracy about the advantages of using CryEngine when used with tiled textures since eSRAM is more suited for the latter.

Again like i have been saying all alone Tile Resources had been on xbox one since the beginning,nothing will change the outcome of what has happen up until now..

And more facts about esram:

Andrew Goossen: I just wanted to jump in from a software perspective. This controversy is rather surprising to me, especially when you view ESRAM as the evolution of eDRAM from the Xbox 360. No-one questions on the Xbox 360 whether we can get the eDRAM bandwidth concurrent with the bandwidth coming out of system memory. In fact, the system design required it. We had to pull over all of our vertex buffers and all of our textures out of system memory concurrent with going on with render targets, colour, depth, stencil buffers that were in eDRAM.

Of course with Xbox One we're going with a design where ESRAM has the same natural extension that we had with eDRAM on Xbox 360, to have both going concurrently. It's a nice evolution of the Xbox 360 in that we could clean up a lot of the limitations that we had with the eDRAM. The Xbox 360 was the easiest console platform to develop for, it wasn't that hard for our developers to adapt to eDRAM, but there were a number of places where we said, "Gosh, it would sure be nice if an entire render target didn't have to live in eDRAM," and so we fixed that on Xbox One where we have the ability to overflow from ESRAM into DDR3 so the ESRAM is fully integrated into our page tables and so you can kind of mix and match the ESRAM and the DDR memory as you go.

Sometimes you want to get the GPU texture out of memory and on Xbox 360 that required what's called a "resolve pass" where you had to do a copy into DDR to get the texture out - that was another limitation we removed in ESRAM, as you can now texture out of ESRAM if you want to. From my perspective it's very much an evolution and improvement - a big improvement - over the design we had with the Xbox 360. I'm kind of surprised by all this, quite frankly.

Digital Foundry: Obviously though, you are limited to just 32MB of ESRAM. Potentially you could be looking at say, four 1080p render targets, 32 bits per pixel, 32 bits of depth - that's 48MB straight away. So are you saying that you can effectively separate render targets so that some live in DDR3 and the crucial high-bandwidth ones reside in ESRAM?

Andrew Goossen: Oh, absolutely. And you can even make it so that portions of your render target that have very little overdraw... For example, if you're doing a racing game and your sky has very little overdraw, you could stick those subsets of your resources into DDR to improve ESRAM utilisation. On the GPU we added some compressed render target formats like our 6e4 [six bit mantissa and four bits exponent per component] and 7e3 HDR float formats [where the 6e4 formats] that were very, very popular on Xbox 360, which instead of doing a 16-bit float per component 64pp render target, you can do the equivalent with us using 32 bits - so we did a lot of focus on really maximizing efficiency and utilisation of that ESRAM.

im surprised microsoft gave crytek a second chance with Rise 2.. For EA the crysis series has been a loss leader.. Now ryse is costing microsoft millions.. And for what? sales they couldn't possibility hope to make back.. I like the cryengine, but save the cryengine for use from different game devs. Crytek themselves cant make a good game at all. Recently i've been replaying crysis 3 the second time around all im doing is sighing. The game is terribleeeeeeeeee..awful gunplay , lifeless aliens.. Its just a tech demo.

If devs figure out how to use the ESram properly, then at best they caught up a little to the ps4. The ps4 still has a faster gpu for which the bone is not going to overcome. The ROPS are also terrible in the bone. So congrats i guess for microsoft? give your devs plenty work to get the same or less performance than a ps4

I guess if I was all in on the graphics/tech fight I would care. The games I have are fun, and look better than on my PS3/360. Mission accomplished for me. LOL at championing consoles you don't own.

I'm still in awe of Ryse, destroys every PS4 game to date, maybe Infamous is close.

sure... we all know sony has a history downgrading big time before release. can't wait to see what order looks like lol

So the topic is about graphics and performance, and Cryteks opinion on it (an area they excel in)

Yet all cows can do is deflect and comment on gameplay (something un-related to the topic at hand)

LOL that DC.

i really dont care if it has nothing to do with the topic.. I see ryse mentioned in the OP and i guess i wanted to rant about how terrible crytek is. And its true.. Crytek sucksssss ass.

and 2) Im not a fanboy of the ps4.. I dont have a ps4 or a Bone. I only game on PC. Consoles are for peasants..

Less talk more action, No one should give a crap what microsoft or crytek has to say about the ESRAM and better performance. SHOW IT.. Till then its a 720p machine. The Magic Clouds,The DX 12, and now this magic esram? When's it gonna end? microsoft just gotta come out and say, Hey look we know our machine isnt as good as the ps4 or even close to a pc.. But look at these games.............. They certainly won't be killing the competition with games from crytek.

I keep hearing you can't compare infamous to ryse because its open world to linear lol stop it infamous is a open space but you can't do anything in that space its just as linear as ryse there's more going on in the first two levels of ryse than infamous whole game, shadows, people, textures, animations, shading and physics all superior on ryse and before anyone says its 900p .......it was 1080p before http://i.imgur.com/4AkyB9t.jpg which one looks better?

lol

Yeah, I'm looking at that game of yours, Ryse, and the fact you're Crytek who fucked themselves up big time after chasing consoles.

Hahahaha. Go home.

if it was 1080p before, thats because of the pc it was running on at E3..

You know, just like this game.. Downgrade to lower details after it stopped running on pc. You either lower the resolution or lessen the details. Crytek went with lowering the res.. Forza went with lowering the details

So amazing that their game ran 30fps at 900p.

Don't believe the hype.

@lunar1122: what driving game on the ps4 doing this at 60fps? None and when dc come out and it has no crash physics, lacking car physics and real car sounds and still running at 30fps then what? Oh but it has gl that's the only thing that it has going for it.

Silly man.

It was a launch game, that was 360 game. Don't you dare insult the developers that worked so hard to make this great game. It looks amazing and your pretense and illusion of the numbers game is disgusting and frankly has no place if you are gamer.

You sir are the problem with this generation.

@Wasdie: http://i.imgur.com/4AkyB9t.jpg they had it in 1080p but I think the 900p shot looks better

That's huge part of it. But Its obvious the One is made to have more poly's on screen than pixels. Sony has been controlling the narrative. However once gaming journalist start questioning the emptiness and lifelessness of the Sony offerings, as opposed to the more rich and lively worlds of Xbox One games, will we have a more accurate picture of what's happening.

A launch game. Where they had to write most of their own tools.

Ryse is a jaw dropping game. Only a bias fanboy would claim otherwise.

"Crysis can't run on consoles"

-> ports crysis to consoles

"Ryse is using an advanced new engine"

-> doesn't look better than Crysis 3

"Free to play is the future"

Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm having some trouble to believe these guys.

Any thing positive said about Xbox One or it's games by devs is always questioned. Why?

Time will tell and we'll see who is telling the truth all along.

How is the secodn paragraph a silly fan boy thing.?

The PS4 has a stronger GPU and double the ROP as well,is a well know fact not an opinion.

Oh brother..lol

You mean like MS downgraded forza 5.?

All games are linear in all you need to do something to advance even that you have some games which let you achieve your goal in different ways.

Now what we are talking here is how open the game is,rendering something you can't interact with or destroy is not the same as something you can destroy and interact with,can you fly over the air in Ryse.?

Can you climb into buildings.? Can you even fu**ing move more than 6 feed from side to side on most of Ryse.?

Yeah that is the problem with Ryse,you can't do sh** you can't interact with anything or explore anything alone side you,claiming you can't do anything in that space is joke and prove how much of a blind lemming you are..

You can do tons of things in Infamous that you can't do on Ryse period,and rendering an entire city which you can explore isn't the same or close to rendering a 6 feet wide pathway game like Ryse were you see a beautiful city from a far which you can't interact with,and the reasons are extremely obvious the game focus its resources on a close area much like Fighting games use to do,tekken 5 is basically one of the best looking games on PS2 actually rival games on xbox,but all the resources are target over a small area Ryse is the same and is the reason why it look like that.

Even so at 900p it can't even run at 30FPs it does so mostly at 26 FPS and has drops into the teens..

Hell that screen you linked show some interesting trade off made yeah trade off.

Look at the armor in the guy to the left on top it is really polished and real metal looking on the new build is dark with the gloss was kill,also look at Ryse main character armor look on the arm how the chains around the arm which join with the armor cast a shadow,and on the new build they don't..

Also the old build look sharper while the new build look more wash out,that is because the game on E3 was running at 1080p and then was downgrade to 900p.

Not even that they could accomplish it has drops into the teens and runs mostly at 26 to 28 FPS..

Xbox One has nothing to do with my comment.

I just listed some stuff where they didn't tell the truth.

At the very least take their words with a grain of salt.

Awesome news. The typical Sony Fan in the thread spreading their ignorance.

Wow Torm, you seriously need to get the consoles man. You sound like you have no idea what you are talking about.

6ft ? Render a whole city? A bunch of big boxes that you can't enter and handful of enemies in SS.

Come on man.

DR3 has a ton more poly's its pushing. Sure at a lower res, but is got way more going on and you enter the buildings too. Plus the game loads once at the beginning.

1080P vs more fleshed out worlds.

Give more going on than a pretty lifeless world.

Second son? Seriously? Not even close...have you even played either of the games?

If Xbone camp still want to talk about power, then PS4 camp will gladly keep reminding them for every PS4 1080P vs Xbone 720P game in the future.........gladly. At this point only stupid dogs still believe that Xbone has the slightest chance of matching PS4 in term of power

Yeah and the PS3 is still more powerful than the PS4. What did Sony say the tflops were for the PS3? 2 tflops, lol yeah you keep believing that.

@Wasdie: Funny how it still looked great huh MR moderator cow?

Seriously , you don't always have to come running to the cows rescue even though you're a huge cow yourself. Try being a little impartial sometimes.