Source: Digital Foundry
Link here
and a few snippets
Link here
and a few snippets
The Coalition has been hard at work on Gears of War 4 for years now, but 2016 is the year when fans will finally get their hands on the game. Microsoft showed off an impressive demo of Gears 4 at its E3 media briefing this year and we were impressed to learn that it was shown running on Xbox One when a PC version is also in development. The Gears franchise has always pushed the boundaries of console hardware, but the transition to a new hardware platform using a new engine with a new team is no trivial matter.
As striking as the E3 stage demo was, it's the 25-minute demonstration shown off later that impressed us the most. The game's co-op mode was demonstrated using both the Xbox One and PC versions of the game thanks to the Xbox Play Anywhere initiative. The PC was connected to a massive 98-inch 4K LCD display with the game operating at this extremely high resolution and it looked great. Next to this, however, was an Xbox One S connected to a 65" HDR-capable LG OLED display. Despite the higher resolution on PC, the strength of HDR combined with the remarkable performance of the OLED display resulted in a breathtaking presentation. We had our doubts about HDR displays but, after the demo, we immediately started price-checking HDR-capable OLED TVs. It was that impressive.
Beyond that, the game was shown running at a consistent 30 frames per second on the Xbox One S. The quality of the animation, post-processing, materials, and effects really pushes Gears 4 to the forefront of real-time rendering on the platform and we simply had to know more. The result is this interview.
What is it like working with Unreal Engine 4 on Xbox One? What impact does HDR have on workflow? What features are going to be included in the PC version? Mike Rayner, Technical Director for The Coalition, answers all of these questions and many more.
Digital Foundry: Many developers have struggled with Unreal Engine 4 on consoles yet it's clear that Gears of War 4 is shaping up to be one of the most impressive-looking titles on Xbox One. Could you elaborate on your experience with the engine and how things have evolved since development first started?
Mike Rayner: All past Gears titles used Unreal Engine 3. Gears of War 4 will be the first Gears game on Unreal Engine 4 and is the technical foundation for a new generation of Gears games. UE4 is optimised for modern triple-A content workflows, with a completely new rendering engine, and major improvements in almost every part of the engine.
The Coalition was one of the first studios outside of Epic Games to get early access to Unreal Engine 4 in early 2012. We have a great working relationship with the Unreal Engine team. As a member of the Unreal Engine Technical Advisory Board we have continuously encouraged improvements to the engine for triple-A development. Microsoft has contributed to UE4 platform features such as DirectX 12 as well as numerous optimisations and bug fixes. Epic Games constantly improves and evolves the engine and we have kept pace by upgrading to the latest versions throughout development. Gears of War 4 will ship on UE 4.11 along with many of our own custom extensions and improvements.
Through our team's experience with Unreal Engine Development and Microsoft's deep platform experience, we have been able to push the engine to new heights and deliver what we hope is not only the best Gears game for fans, but also a defining visual showcase on Xbox One.
Digital Foundry: With Gears of War: Ultimate Edition, there was a decision to stick with a forward rendering path. Has that changed with the move to Unreal Engine 4 while developing Gears 4?
Mike Rayner: Gears of War: Ultimate Edition was running on a heavily upgraded Unreal 3 engine and was still using a forward rendered path. With Gears 4 we have entirely switched over to Unreal Engine 4's fully deferred rendering engine. Deferred rendering allows for a richer visual quality feature set and more advanced post-processing with attractive performance characteristics enabling increased lighting complexity through decoupling scene geometry from lighting.
Digital Foundry: How has the rendering system changed since Gears Ultimate?
Mike Rayner: We started with a clean slate on Gears 4. There were a few key optimisation tricks, using the hardware optimally, that we picked up during the development of Gears of War: Ultimate Edition that we have moved over. Then we've scrutinised, analysed and optimised every part of the Unreal 4 rendering pipeline. Epic Games has some of the brightest graphics engineers on the planet and they've really outdone themselves this time with Unreal 4 and provided a great starting point for developers.
We have worked closely with Epic Games and exchanged ideas for improvements and optimisations along the way. Parallel rendering was a new feature that was developed by Epic Games and was made available to us during development of Gears 4. This really transformed the rendering pipeline and was a massive power boost in terms of throughput. The Coalition then, working closely with Microsoft's internal D3D12 dev team, transitioned the engine fully to D3D12 on Xbox One - and this again boosted performance greatly for us, and there is still potential to push the engine even further under D3D12.
Digital Foundry: What sort of differences are there when going between the SP and MP renderers?
Mike Rayner: Multiplayer responsiveness at a smooth 60fps is a key focus for which we needed to take a different approach than the 30fps in campaign. For SP we have everything on that UE4 offers and more - allowing the campaign to deliver the highest visual showcase possible. For MP, we disable some secondary systems such as refraction, lens flares, screen space reflections (for some levels), and motion blur. We also did some heavy modifications to UE4's bloom, tone mapper, and decal system to make them as optimal as possible. We wrote our own flavor of the 'significance' system that Paragon uses, enabling player characters to have the highest rendering quality with intelligent dynamic level of detail management for non-player characters.
Digital Foundry: Is the game built as a DX12-only title (with certain low-level Xbox additions console-side)?
Mike Rayner: Gears of War 4 is a DirectX 12 title on both Xbox One and Windows 10. Working with Microsoft's Silicon, Graphics and Media team and Epic, we have transitioned Unreal Engine fully to DX12. DirectX 12 has allowed us to increase performance by giving us more direct control over the hardware, simplifying the driver layer, and allowing us to make fully informed and optimal decisions on how to manage graphics resources.
Digital Foundry: What are your thoughts on the changing console landscape we're seeing with Project Scorpio and the PlayStation Neo? How much of an impact do you feel this might have on development?
Mike Rayner: For Gears development, we are in a really good position to leverage Project Scorpio to its fullest while continuing a no-compromise approach for all platforms we currently ship the game on. We have invested in scalable features in our engine to support a broad range of GPUs and performance profiles for PC and Console. We have authored our content at 4K, which allows us to show higher resolutions with increased source content detail on the highest end GPUs.
As a developer I find it very attractive having a universal platform to target and optimise our game across multiple Windows Devices: Xbox One, Xbox One S, Project Scorpio, and Windows 10. With the universal platform, we can do this in a manner that allows everyone to play together over Xbox Live without compromising our ability to push each device to its full potential while leaving none of our fans behind, no matter what device they play on.