@psymon100 said:
That's pretty cool. I'm planning on getting an R9 290, and maybe Titanfall on PC. But no plans for a 4K monitor.
Downsample like the rest of us cool kids.
@The_Stand_In said:
It's a Source game for God's sake. Why are people so surprised a Titan can run it at 4k?
"As I've written code and created maps for Source, I'd like to clarify exactly why this is.
Most of the level geometry in Source is made out of brushes, which are for the most part are cuboids, but can generally form any shape (although it's not recommended). At the bare minimum, the level must be an enclosed box made of 6 brushes.When maps are compiled, the game level is divided into boxes of playable space called "leafs" (this is because they are leafs of a binary space partition tree) in such a way that information about the visiblity of other leafs (i.e. where in the game world can I see from my current position) can be pre-computed for every leaf in the level. This means that when the camera is inside one area in the level, it already knows which geometry is occluded and does not have to perform potentially expensive calculations every frame.
All the static lighting in the level is also pre-computed, using a radiosity based method (indeed, there is very little dynamic lighting in Source as a result). This is why Source scales really well to machines with lower specs because much of the computational burden is shifted to the map compiler. Furthermore, all of the game code in Source is written in C++ and it does not use scripting (although Squirrel is utilised to a small degree in games since Left 4 Dead), which means the game code is generally more performant than those that do. I don't know if other engines compile their scripts into binaries or not though, so this may be a moot point.
There are certainly disadvantages to this approach however - prominently, increased memory usage, highly static map geometry/lighting and long compile times for complex maps. Another disadvantage is that it does not work well in open levels. This is because the number of visible leafs is massively increased in open spaces, hurting frame rate. So I suspect Respawn might have had to make some major changes here (and this might impinge on the "can run on a toaster" quality of Source that people like to espouse).
Valve notably shifted away from this approach in Dota 2 and Alien Swarm, but I suspect that's more because the cameras in this game are incompatible with the visibility calculations. They also started using dynamic global illumination in Dota 2, which might be a feature to expect in future versions of Source...
I'd also like to quash the notion that Source is somehow an inferior engine in terms of graphical quality. The graphical quality of a game in this age is determined by the artistry and complexity of the world, not by the engine it's running on. It may be less dynamic than other engines, but static lighting generally looks much nicer than dynamic lighting."
Log in to comment