NFS-Planet



Shift 2 Unleashed: Patch is in the works Thursday, 14.04.2011
Shift 2 UnleashedMartin Griffiths, PC Lead at the Slightly Mad Studios revealed the first details about an upcoming patch for Shift 2 Unleashed. In a detailed posting he explains some specifics of the graphics engine and clarifies some misunderstandings with the anti-aliasing problems:



There has been some confusion that our anti-aliasing uses the CPU - it does not. In the graphics options the 'Normal' mode uses MSAA with a special sampling trick to produce correct results at triangle edges - the 'HIGH' method extends this with a depth based search which requires a GPU with high bandwidth because the shaders are sampling many depth pixels for each pixel in the scene. Any performance issue on particular hardware is down to the characteristics of that GPU - there isn't anything we can do about this without a driver update.

To better balance very high-end CPUs the patch will include a 3rd anti-aliasing method which is CPU based - MLAA. We are working with Intel R&D to add this. On quad-core (and above) systems this will allow AA without any GPU cost and little impact to the frame rate to what you see when running with AA turned off currently. This will also help AMD based quad-core too.

Some people have noted that the game doesn't scale well with SLI/Crossfire - SLI performance scaling doesn't just automagically happen, it requires quite close collaboration with the GPU makers. We've been in regularly contact with NVidia and ATI throughout the development of the game, with their performance teams feeding back on any areas where we could improve, pooling our expertise with theirs. About 6 weeks of programmer time was spent pre-shipping on SLI/Crossfire scaling - we needed another 4 weeks since we went gold because of the complexity of implementing this in such a large engine. Both GPU makers have devoted a lot of time to some complex issues.

So yes, the upcoming patch includes SLI/Crossfire scaling. To give you an example a GTX 295 will go from 48fps to nearly 70fps in 1080p. Also the rendering team found some further optimizations so that normal (non SLI) graphics performance should be 5-10% faster with the patch.

Input lag - we've solved the latency issues reported using some wheels. There was a dead-zone issue and a threading problem introduced very late in development that have been fixed.

Garage screen crashes/CTDs - a fast button press issue that wasn't seen during development is also fixed in the patch.

A black screen issue on starting a race requiring a pause/unpause to fix is also addressed. This was caused by a timing difference with the protection system.

NVision - some reverse/double stereo issues with the mirrors and environment maps have been addressed in the patch. NVidia very kindly provided us with more hardware for the render team to address this - Kudos to them for that.

There are also some more minor fixes in the patch - the above represent the vast majority.



The patch for Shift 2 Unleashed is almost finished and has to run through EA's QA (Quality Assurance), but maybe we can expect the release of the patch at the end of this month.

» Posting von Martin Griffiths
» VirtualR (Source)
 Shocker  -  Digg Twitter Facebook
Comments (1)


Pages:
»1«
 
#1: von FedskaTheOne (17.04.2011 15:32) View profile Add to your Friends-List Send Message Website
Doesn't look like the patch will fix major optimization problems.

-----------
[url=http://steamcard.com/]


You have to be logged in to post comments.

Please login by using the form in the right menue. If you are not registered yet you can create here a new free account.






Highlights
Community
Partner
NFS-Planet & all Content is © 2000-2024 by NFS-Planet
Do not copy content or images without our permission.

This site is not endorsed by or affiliated with Electronic Arts, or its licensors.
Trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Game content and
materials copyright Electronic Arts Inc. and its licensors. All Rights Reserved.

This page has been created in 0.15 seconds.