NinjaBoiX
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Digital Foundry just posted their Rage Face-Off.
The conclusion appears to be, that while both games are running at 720p60 for the most part, the PlayStation 3 version struggles with texture streaming more than Xbox 360, and the resolution throttling they use to maintain the refresh rate is more pronounced on the PlayStation 3 version. Obviously the PC is the superior version.
I just posted the whole article minus the introduction and bolded the relevant bits.
The conclusion appears to be, that while both games are running at 720p60 for the most part, the PlayStation 3 version struggles with texture streaming more than Xbox 360, and the resolution throttling they use to maintain the refresh rate is more pronounced on the PlayStation 3 version. Obviously the PC is the superior version.
I just posted the whole article minus the introduction and bolded the relevant bits.
Digital Foundry said:Rage on console runs with a dynamic framebuffer that adjusts resolution according to engine load, but looks to run the game at as close to the full 1280x720 wherever possible. As you might expect from a game that operates at 60Hz, GPU time is at an absolute premium so neither version of the game features any kind of anti-aliasing, which is a bit of a shame as some of the more high contrast areas do lend themselves to noticeable "jaggies".
However, despite the limited 16.67ms available to render each frame, dynamic lighting is really effective and there's a wealth of post-process effects employed to give an extra layer of depth and atmosphere to any given scene. id doesn't just rely on the core beauty of the Mega Texture technology, instead supplementing it with a range of effects that might not have the complexity or fidelity of its competition, but really look the part and run beautifully at 60Hz. Perhaps the biggest noticeable drawback of the adherence to 60Hz is that dynamic shadows are thin on the ground: vanquished foes that drop into shadow remain lit by light sources unknown, and most of the environmental shadows are obviously "baked in" at the map creation phase.
It's fair to say that performance is very much at the heart of Rage, contributing to both its strengths and its weaknesses, but the one thing to make plain is that id hasn't gone for a COD-style perceptual 60FPS wherein a great deal of frames are dropped at will, with the hope that the player won't actually notice. The developer's focus has been on making this experience as consistent and exciting as possible.
First up, let's address the most positive aspect of the 60Hz implementation: the feel of the game. Most console video games run at 30 frames per second, introducing an inherent level of latency which isn't ideal but to which we have become accustomed. A typical 30FPS game has lag of anything between 100ms at best (unless we're talking about Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit) up to anything like 150ms. Factor in frame-rate drops and latency can creep even higher. On top of that, you need to add the additional delay incurred by your flatpanel monitor.
We measured Rage's input lag at an extremely consistent 83ms on Xbox 360, making the game feel that much more responsive than much of the competition, with Killzone 3 at 116ms and Bulletstorm at 133ms, for example. Now, what is truly remarkable here is just how well Rage sustains that 60Hz update and thus that rock-solid controller response. First up, let's take a look at a selection of clips concentrating on its first-person shooter elements, where pad response is arguably at its most important.
That's as close to a solid 60FPS as you're going to see all year - we couldn't find any duplicate frames at all on the PlayStation 3, while the tiny handful of dropped frames on Xbox 360 couldn't be seen by the human eye. Now compare and contrast that with Call of Duty: Black Ops and you'll have some idea of how much of a technical achievement it is for id software to be able to sustain that frame-rate, pretty much without fail, with this level of graphical detail.
Rage also has a very large driving component too - from various race types staged on pre-defined circuits to a very large, expansive game world you can explore at will. These sections spectacularly demonstrate the potential of id tech 5 in creating huge, tremendously detailed environments while mostly retaining the all-important 60FPS update. Here is where we see some deviation from the locked frame-rate we saw in the shooting sections: id allows itself to render out some lovely, often screen-filling explosive effects, and it's clear that the additional load on GPU fill-rate caused by this liberal application of full res alpha can prove to be too much - we see a momentary drop in performance plus screen-tear.
The effects are short-lived however and don't tend to impact on your enjoyment of the game at all - the screen-tear is definitely more noticeable than the frame-rate drop, but you get the idea this was all factored in and assessed by id. There's a feeling that its load balancing tech isn't quite so deeply applied in the driving sections as it is in the shooting - and it's almost certain that rendering the Wasteland offers far more of a challenge to the engine than the enclosed corridor shooting of most of the FPS missions.
Load balancing is the key to Rage's enviable performance profile. The developers have put frame-rate first to the point where the game code physically downscales the visuals to make it run at 60Hz. We understand the principle behind it and we can see the way it works simply by looking at the captures we've taken, but there remains an element of mystery in what actually causes the scaler to kick in, which we'll come to in a moment. In terms of the basic mechanics, Rage operates an internal monitor that measures engine load and when the renderer is in danger of missing a 60Hz refresh, it downscales the next frame. A 720p vertical resolution is always maintained, but the horizontal can be adjusted dynamically - anything from 640x720 (cutting image definition in half, basically) up to full-fat 1280x720.
We've seen something similar to this load balancing technology in the past: WipEout HD's 1080p mode scales between 960x1080 and 1920x1080 accoring to load, while the 3D versions of the MotorStorm titles also adjust resolution according to load. The idea is that motion on-screen is so fast and the user so involved in the experience that a reduced resolution will not be noticed as much as dropped frames or intrusive screen-tear.
The issue with Rage is that res can drop even when there's not a great deal of action on-screen, resulting in an exaggeration of aliasing in more brightly lit areas. In all of the like-for-like shots we were able to find with dynamic resolution in effect on both systems, the detail deficit was more pronounced on the PlayStation 3, sometimes alarmingly so. It's all the more puzzling because often we see resolution drops kick in when it's difficult to imagine the engine being under much load at all.
The top shot is just a cut-scene showing your new buggy inside the Hagar settlement garage. It seems to be running at 640x720 on PS3 while Xbox 360 is in the region of 896x720. In the bottom shot, we're again seeing 640x720 on the PlayStation 3, while 360 renders the same scene at 1152x720. In all cases we're seeing a locked 60 frames per second, but we're really scratching our heads on what could be causing the kind of engine stress that requires a downscaled framebuffer in these shots - and they're just two examples from a range we could draw from our captures. In other situations, Rage is capable of producing absolutely phenomenal, richly detailed vistas that stretch out into the distance as far as the eye can see - all at native 720p, on both platforms.
The success of dynamic resolution is all about visual perception and everyone will have their own tolerance level, but based on our experience, Rage on Xbox 360 manages to maintain the illusion of a full high definition presentation even when it is switching between various resolutions: there's just the odd shimmering visible in the aliasing every now and again but overall integrity of the effect is sound. The effect on PlayStation 3 seems to be much more frequent and the resolution drops are significantly more noticeable.
Another element of image quality where there are plain differences between the two consoles is in terms of the texture streaming. To fully understand this, we need to have a bit of a refresher course on how id's virtual texturing works: in short, there are four levels here in the journey from storage to display: the optical drive, the hard drive cache, the memory cache and the on-screen texture. In a worst case scenario, the Xbox 360 will go through all four stages on every piece of art in the game. Installing the game to hard drive cuts out the optical disc completely and thus removes the slowest part of the procedure.
PlayStation 3 only gets a partial install - a weighty 7.1GB that takes around 20 minutes to complete - so some of the texture data is still being drawn from the Blu-ray (which in terms of all-important seek times is slower than the Xbox 360's DVD drive), and this does result in significant differences in the time it takes for the image to fully resolve. Running Rage on an Xbox 360 without the install, but with a hard drive attached for caching purposes, isn't quite as fast as the PS3 - but it's not a million miles away from the overall performance profile.
Out of interest, we ran some tests where we would continuously change direction 180 degrees in the exact same spot on the Xbox 360 with and without an install and then compared that with performance in the exact same spot on the PlayStation 3. Curiously, after repeating the process a couple of times, no matter how we ran Rage - even with no hard drive at all - the 360 would resolve prominent textures faster. In his mammoth Quakecon 2011 keynote, John Carmack talks about the fact that they max out onboard memory and that the split system/video RAM of PlayStation 3 in concert with the bulk of the OS caused some issues for them.
In terms of our experiment, the conclusion we have is that the 360 transcodes texture data faster, or it is able to cache more assets in RAM - either way, it's clear that there's more to individual performance characteristics than we know right now but id seems to be more at home with the Microsoft architecture. In terms of how this perhaps could influence gameplay, we're reminded of a couple of Wasteland missions where the player snipes at base guards from afar, ducking into and out of cover. On PS3, we witnessed some screen-filling texture pop-in, which resolved much more quickly on 360.
In the Quakecon 2011 keynote, Carmack talks about the Wasteland as being the real challenge for texture streaming. How this translates into image quality on console was fairly straightforward from our point of view - the player tends to be travelling at speed here in his vehicle, and with a great deal of foreground art on PS3 there is simply not time for the full detail assets to be resolved, while things looks fairly solid on the Xbox 360. As the Wasteland area is one of the visual highlights of the game this is a bit of a shame as prominent areas of detail on 360 are very blurry indeed on the PS3.
Another word of warning we should note concerns the way that the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 file formats differ. Format a USB drive on your 360, plug it into your PC and make hidden files visible and you can see exactly how Microsoft's system works - it generates a big bunch of large files and stores data within that allocated space. When you download a demo or piece of DLC from Xbox LIVE, it is also stored as a series of large files on the disk - this helps tremendously in terms of keeping fragmentation of the drive low.
The PlayStation 3 doesn't do this: when a game or demo installs to your HDD, there can be thousands of smaller files (in the case of GT5, up to 44,000 files) which does mean that over time your drive can fragment and drive performance will degrade a lot faster. In a recent discussion with a game developer who developed a data-heavy open world game, their extreme stress tests on the PS3 HDD actually reduced performance to lower than that of streaming in the same assets from Blu-ray. In order to show Rage running at its best, we formatted our HDD and gave the game a best case scenario from which to run - a completely empty drive - but it was still found wanting compared to the 360 full install, and wasn't orders of magnitude better than the 360 running from disc with HDD cache.
On PC, we find ourselves with a mountain of technological advantages over the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Our Core i7 920 at 2.66GHz offers a much more powerful CPU than the consoles, while just the RAM alone in our GTX580 offers a 200 per cent boost over the entire memory available in both machines. We have an older, but still stupidly fast Samsung F1 1TB HDD in the unit too, which significantly outperforms the 2.5-inch laptop drives used by Sony and Microsoft in their consoles.
In the past, John Carmack has talked about how id can use 8k paging files for textures over the 4k files used on console due to memory constraints. This is potentially exciting stuff: it means that Rage can look a whole lot better on PC. Unfortunately, out of the box even on max settings, this is difficult to see. Here we're re-running our initial comparison video, comparing the PlayStation 3 version to the PC version, where we've enabled 8x anti-aliasing. An alternative version, pitting the 360 game against the computer version is also available.
There are some clear advantages here. Even without the custom configs now being presented on the internet by enthusiasts not happy with performance out of the box, we're still seeing a very significant improvement in the texture loading times, giving a much greater sense of solidity to the game world. The addition of 8x anti-aliasing also makes a big difference in terms of the quality of the image, eliminating "jaggies" almost completely and helping to resolve sub-pixel detail in the distance. In gameplay, id also enables a few post-processing effects that we don't see on console too, though these are rather minor.
However, texture quality in general remains much the same in terms of the variation between high and low quality artwork on-screen at any given point. There are clearly some improvements to the artwork resolved, but we are not seeing any kind of revelatory increase in detail we would hope to see bearing in mind the quality of the artwork we know to exist, and that id itself says is available to access.
So what's going on? Similar to the console versions, Rage on PC has a singular focus on resolving a 60Hz update and to do that, the vast majority of the graphical functions enthusiasts love to tweak have been completely removed from the front-end. Indeed, all users have to fiddle with are resolution settings, anti-aliasing levels, and a curious option called "GPU Transcode". All other options are handled by an inbuilt piece of code that analyses performance and adjusts quality to help ensure a 60FPS update.
This is all absolutely fine, but the problem is that high-end systems don't seem to see the benefit and as you can see from our "out of the box" comparison videos and screenshots (8x AA, GPU transcode enabled) at a like-for-like 720p resolution, the differences are somewhat minimal. It's been down to graphics card vendors like NVIDIA and motivated enthusiasts to dig deep into the renderer's variables and attempt to come up with a better solution.
In the final analysis, id tech 5 is an engine that can scale according to the amount of horsepower you have available - so the obvious choice would be to recommend the PC version of Rage as the best choice: modern GPUs just have so much more power than the consoles, while a standard desktop hard drive effortlessly outperforms the console equivalents. However, as we've seen from launch, out of the box, Rage has issues - particularly with AMD graphics cards - and these are still being worked on, and there's a sense that we've yet to see the game running at its best.
We didn't have any particular issues with our i7/GTX580 combo, but we still didn't see the kinds of increase in visual quality that we were promised pre-launch: in the here and now we seem to be reliant on enthusiasts in order to unlock the full beauty of Rage - quite why the full range of options were not made easily available is a bit of a mystery and thus far, info from Bethesda and id has been limited on how the command line and console options should actually be used. This is frustrating, to say the least. We'd also hope that in future Carmack makes good on his talk to release an uncompressed texture pack for Rage, even if those raw assets would account for almost 100GB of data. If the art exists, why not utilise it and let those invested in their hardware make the most of the phenomenal effort id put into its core assets?
In terms of the consoles, the purchase recommendation is very straightforward: Rage is an easy win for the Xbox 360 - if you have the hard drive attached. The dynamic resolution scaling technology works more effectively on the Microsoft platform, and there are very few instances where you feel or even recognise that you're playing a sub-HD experience - unfortunately the same cannot be said for the PlayStation 3 where the visual sleight of hand is not quite so effective.
Another major issue we have with Rage is with the checkpointing system, which is fundamentally broken and can set you back well over half an hour of gameplay time if you haven't been religiously saving your progress manually. This in itself is time-consuming and annoying, more so on PS3 where both saving and loading takes longer than the preferred full 360 install.
Texture streaming is the other main bugbear people will have with Rage: it's noticeable on all platforms (even PC), but a full 360 install up against a partial PS3 install is no contest - the 360 wins hands-down and provides the better experience. At its worst, the combination of low resolution textures and sub-HD resolution combines to make Rage look rather bland, a touch blurry/blocky and detail-lite on the PS3 at times, something that just doesn't seem to be the case with the 360 game running exactly as id outlines. The controversy right now seems to extend beyond the platform comparisons though. Is Rage enough to convince the enthusiast gaming audience that id software can still compete with the heavyweight developers in the genre that it created?
In many ways, the company itself has sought to avoid these comparisons and strike out with its own unique product - and perhaps that's for the best. Mega Texture technology provides the basis for Rage's unique look and the ability to run so much detail at 60Hz - something no other developer has managed to produce on console, but it's clear that elements such as animation, AI and physics are very old-skool when stacked up against Rage's competitors. It doesn't matter though - in terms of the overall package, the scale of the single-player offering and the fun it represents, id's latest is a hugely entertaining game - and at times, its technological focus really will take your breath away.
That's annoying.
