Stretch Goal: Mantle/graphics enhancement

Pledge/Kickstarter
#1

Hi,

I played the alpha for few hours. It is definately a pretty game. But I don’ t know how far the textures are final now. At far sight it looks kind of photographic and especially the flowers are beautiful. But I also saw few flickering Textures sometimes and so on, you already know it because of several reports(I’m using 2x290X, 1440p, Very High). Sadly Crossfire doesn’ t work yet but that’s normal.

  1. As textures look very washy when i am right in front of them i would really like to suggest to include some features to enhance them. There is much VRAM left(The tech demo only uses about 2GiB). You should calculate with the top models having about 8 GiB at release(as mine already do) and PS4 etc. have 8GiB shared VRAM. Higher res Textures will improve the quality of near objects extremely and don’t lead to less fps. Maybe Supersampling could also be a way to manage it.
    It is also a little annoying that the distance of sight is so short and objects load very closely but I think its just because of the alpha. So this could be one stretch goal.

  2. In the last months especially with AMD Crossfire I experienced many texture bugs and performance issues in DirectX mode(World of Warcraft, Watch Dogs, Battlefield 4, Dragon Age: Inquisition). After switching to Mantle on BF4 and DA:Inquisition, everything works flawlessly and smooth. So please try to work together with AMD as well as NVidia. I want to suggest Mantle as a stretch goal. Maybe the current amount is not enough for it. But as there is no stretch goal yet I don’t think anyone would be put off when you match the goal the demands. I think it could also be beneficial for the advancement of your developers.

If you are a forum user and like these suggestions please don’t hesitate to announce your support. Thank you.

#2

Yeah i have noticed the draw distance but i think the textures are fine but keep in mind this is very very early alpha.

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#3

I understand what you mean and I hope it didn’t sound like any reproach to the developer team.
The fact that it’s in early alpha state makes it possible to change few fundamental things. Of course it is very important to do things right now because in a few months some can not be changed anymore.
It is very distracting when drivers or dual GPU setups don’t work at release date. And that’s what happened to many AAA games in the last months, especially with AMD cards. It looks to me like they became a problematic company and it seems like implementing mantle might avoid many problems.

Although the game is designed very well so that the landscape looks extremely realistic with some distance some textures themselves remind me a bit of vanilla skyrim when you are just in front of them. As you know it was released 2011 and now it’s three years later and there are people with 4k monitors. And in the near future some will have 8k monitors. I don’t want to say when I personally expect this game to be released but I don’t expect the textures being state of the art when they stay like that. So then it would be up to modders which will cause additional bugs as we learned from Skyrim. I think if you design textures with about half the resolution of the screen when you stand right in front of them(about 2k resolution) it should look pretty nice.

It is very easy to make a game with fabulous creatures like goblins, dragons and whatever, with magical effects or futuristic weapons and special effects. This game does not have them. It has to be extremely immersive, funny, educational, must integrate in history and it is dependent on excellent graphics. It would be sad if you walk through the wonderful landscape, suddenly stop and think:"Damn man, has this square meter of path the same resolution like this beautiful tiny stone in top of it?"
So, it is just a suggestion I made and of course nice textures are very expensive. But when I think about games in the past one should expect about 50 “points” out of 100 given by critics just for impressive graphics.

#4

I agree!
The team should work with Nvidia and ATI at the same time.
I hate when a developer attaches to a single GPU manufacturer, and it makes poorly optimised games for the other one.
Some situations are shameless, for example Ubisoft.
I have Nvidia, so i shouldn’t worry, but i still hate to see how the games (which already run poorly on nvidia) run terribly slow/buggy on ATI.

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#5

that’s not a dev problem, that’s ati’s fault for not being as attractive as nvidia for developers

#6

It is actually a problem of the developers.
When Watch Dogs was kind of unplayable for months I was really angry on Ubisoft(and not only me!). They worked together with NVidia and it looked like they didn’t care for AMD users at all. In the end with a simple driver update everything changed dramatically. So it looked like AMD just hadn’t finished the drivers just in time. (I still wouldn’t blame AMD for the whole thing)
But no matter who’s fault it is - it is always the developers’ problem when people are angry because a game doesn’t work properly. And no matter how AMD works due to lack of resources I am sure if you take care of it early enough there will be no issues at all on release date. Of course it may also work with DirectX but I guess it is more likely when Mantle is an option.
I think it’s the best example to compare how horribly Watch Dogs worked and how properly Dragon Age: Inquisition works (but only with Mantle, Edit: and the latest beta driver) just one week after release.
As the Cryengine will support Mantle soon I am pretty sure that it should absolutely be something you might think about as developer.

And of course if there were kind of no borders for Supersampling samples and other enhancing techniques it would be nice for everyone no matter whether he’s got an NVidia or AMD card.

#7

why should they care about amd users? they make up a small sample of their target audience, amd does not offer anything that helps devs make their games look and run better(in actual, not just gimmicks like mantle), and they have lackluster support.

i’m surprised people still buy amd videocards. you’d think the company ati couldn’t hack it and had to be bought out by amd would be a warning flag…

except the game works fine. it just lacks features for certain hardware, as all games invariably do. you cannot make a game run or look the same on every type of hardware. ultimately it’s up to the consumer to make well researched, informed purchases, and up to the hardware manufacturers to make their products valuable to the consumer, whether they be developers or end users.

100% of those amd problems exist because they have zero driver support because they don’t care about their customers.

#8

I don’t know about your personal problems and why you have to publish them but there are one third of the users who have AMD cards and two third with NVidia cards. One third might be less than two third but it’s still a big bunch of people. And that’s the only fact the developers should care about. Although I easily could, I don’t want to join any discussion of that kind on this low level here. You are totally off topic and your reply is not constructive.

#9

Ubisoft doesn’t give a shit about pc in general i have a nividia card but if i enable all the fancy features that nivida people get it crashes every 15 minutes. Even without them enabled it crashes every 15 minutes. Assassins creed 2, 3, black flag and unity were complete disasters on pc regardless of what card you had.

#10

The game will be released some time after DX12 will be introduced. I rather vote for a full DX12 treatment (that will also benefit the Xbox One version probably) than spending resources on Mantle which would only benefit a small portion of customers anyway.

#11

Of course Mantle alone would be a weak stretch goal, that’s why I would bundle it with the overall enhancement of the graphics cause I see some potential there (although many of the current textures(like wooden elements) may be just placeholders) but I guess Mantle will be easily achievable as soon as the Cryengine supports it natively so I would see it as some kind of bonus on top of it.
I am not quite sure what you mean with the DX12 treatment. As far as I know DX12 inherits some features that are in Mantle but also provides useful features for the engine (which would mainly depend on Crytek). I never really cared about what DX Version a game was using as long as my graphics card could run it. I think it might not be useful to force to implement every new feature just for having implemented it as well as I think that a lower DirectX- Versions don’t automatically mean that a game looks worse.
I am pretty sure that Warhorse will implement every feature that contributes the game in a positive way no matter what number stands behind it. But it has to be accessible of course so in my opinion that means that the engine has to support it at first.

#12

DirectX is an API just like Mantle. The game doesn’t look better by using it, at least not if it uses some new shaders and stuff only available with the new version.

Much like Mantle DX12 should reduce the Windows and hardware overhead and increase the performance of games by better usage of the hardware.

I’m pretty much sure that DX12 will make Mantle obsolete in the long run. And yes, of course it depends on whether Crytek will offer DX12 for the CryEngine. I really hope that they wil do so soon and that games like Kingdom Come and Star Citizen will already benefit from that.

#13

Any news about a possible DX12 implementation for Kingdom Come (and for CryEngine)?

According to Microsoft first DX12 games should appear for the Christmas season 2015. Would be perfect for Kingcom Come imo. On top of that DX12 should make multiplatform developement easier and deliver a better performance on both PC and X1.

#14

not feasible, it’s coming out around the middle-ending of this game’s development, and you expect them to incorporate untested, new tech after almost finishing developing the game.

also dx12 has been made exclusive to windows 8 so they can sell another operating system. which is a huge fail as windows 7 is fine as is and dx12 really hasn’t proven itself in any significant way.

#15

Win8 is just as fine as Win7 and DX12 will run on Win10 as well (of course).

If you want to offer the best experience you have to use the newest tech. You needed to buy a CD ROM drive back in the days just to be able to play Doom…

But I agree that it depends on CryEngine and when they’ll offer full DX12 support for developers.

#16

Mantle would be great.

I thought Cryengine was going to support this already which is why I thought Star Citizen was stating that they’d support it, not that they’d have to do the work in-house.

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