Widescreen Gaming Forum

Who ever wrote that has some connection or involvement with SMS, there is no way someone can be that clueless and be a game reviewer at the same time, He's saying there are things that are working perfectly, that even SMS admits are not working right.. ??

Any credibility this person might have would have been pissed away with this article, I dislike dullards who write lies simply to trick people into buying crap and in the process padding their pockets of the designers, this also precipitates down to a key fact; the more people buy the crap.. the more the companies will continue to make it.. PC's are not consoles, Even your modest computer specs are 8x or more the processing power of a 360, of course it will run 'well'.

http://www.simbin.se/ download GTR demo, this is a game thats from the end of 08' I think, then do a search for GTR game mods.. then kick yourself in the nuts when you realize how dumb your statement about Shift 2 is...

Guy's, I have to disagree.. if you are playing Shift 2U... you need to read this review, a Fair and Honest Review. Sure S2U needs some tweaks, which game doesn't, but its a great game, though not Full Sim, A Blast and runs well on my older E8650 w/paliti 1GB and with AA off I average 38-42FPS

See Link: http://www.virtualr.net/need-for-speed-shift-2-unleased-review/#more-12354

Well, at least it looks like we might get some fixes to this broken pile soon.

"Hi,

My name is Martin Griffiths and I'm PC Lead on SHIFT 2 Unleashed. I'm going to use this post to give you some background on our engine and what's coming up in the first patch.

SHIFT 2 has a completely new engine which is a deferred, light pre-pass renderer. A basic overview of this rendering method can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferred_shading .

Our deferred renderer is far from basic though - the rendering team at SMS has about 100 man years of render coding between us, and we used some of the most advanced techniques that are known at this time. We did our best - so it's sometimes disappointing after so many late nights to see flippant remarks, over constructive criticism.

So, this new engine allowed us to do cool things such as the night racing that would have been very difficult with an old style forward renderer. With deferred rendering the lighting stage is separate from the geometry stage(s) and hardware anti-aliasing like MSAA in a basic form won't produce correct results. Solutions to allow us to anti-alias had to be found - we came up with two methods to balance AA processing cost/quality over a wide range of PCs. A very large amount of time was spent on this and while some other developers just choose to do a post-pass edge detection filter we weren't satisfied with that, the 'HIGH" method for example was 3 months of R&D.
There are lots of 'tips' about overriding the AA mode - doing this will produce problems with lighting at edges and will also break other lighting components like Bloom, giving a visual look that we didn't intend. If you prefer the look with a driver over-ride then we've no problem with that - but the graphics team wanted a consistent look and feel, to do the many artists who created the tracks and cars justice.

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. If you have any specific questions, please feel free to ask in this thread and I'll do my best to reply.

Regards,
Griff

--
Martin Griffiths, PC Lead, SHIFT 2 Unleashed, Slightly Mad Studios."

This long winded excuse could have been simply bypassed and solved if they had chosen to use Open CL and Phys-X to do the coding..

Differed shading is NOT new, it's a G/Z buffer multipass compositing technique I've used for over 15 years with just about every quality 3D imaging and compositing system on the market. ( same system is used in different ways to create DOF, and atmosphere in allot of games. ( Although not called ' differed shading' the same type of system can be seen in COD MW2 Afghanistan the Z buffer usage for depth tied to an atmosphere modifier to reduce visibility over a distance and G buffer to provide geometry shading on the downed C130 as an example.. )

So, this new engine allowed us to do cool things such as the night racing that would have been very difficult with an old style forward renderer.

Pretty Sure SIMBIN has been doing very well with dynamic night racing for ~ 5 years now..

There has been some confusion that our anti-aliasing uses the CPU - it does not... To better balance very high-end CPUs the patch will include a 3rd anti-aliasing method which is CPU based -

So it wasn't but now it is.. And i suspect that anyone with a high end CPU would have a fairly good GPU.. even so the min GPU for the game is still well above the 360 spec. Which is where this port came from, so it's just poor coding on their part ( relates back to first sentence). As the owner of a 'high end graphics card I'm annoyed that these companies continue to offload graphics work on the CPU.. lazy programming. I love how the AMD CPU is an afterthought

This will also help AMD based quad-core too

the work was done with Intel which I'm sure is not going to lend SMS any help on making the AMD CPU's look good.

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.

SMS: " can you help us AMD to make Xfire work "
AMD: " yes.. it's called Open CL "
SMS; " no we don't want to use the right product for the job, we wan't something else that will end up as a hack job"
AMD: " good luck with that.. click"

( same conversation with nvidia but switch X-fire for SLI and Open CL for Phys-X)

(non SLI) graphics performance should be 5-10% faster with the patch.

So with the zero support/optimisation for ATi/AMD based cards, you'll get a 5-10% increase in crap..

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.

That has to be the most politic way of saying " our PC input is crap".. Good thing is, it would be really hard to screw it up even more..

Most of these issues were solvable with the very first sentence's solution, but obviously that would be way too logical. I really don't have a problem flaming these guys, all this time spent on the game to make it worse then the first one. They HAD the core starting point, it's not like a whole new engine was developed, they had already hit the limit of 360's performance so what we get o the PC is SMS's attempt to manipulate the 360 to give it more performance and in the process they make it useless for the PC.

whatever, NFS is a dead franchise to me, it's nothing but a re hashed money grab.

Oh and previously i stated SMS worked with SIMBIN.. I think it was Codemasters who might have worked with them on GRIP. I've forgotten.

To be fair to the guy madtech, they are using a superset of deferred shading, often called deferred lighting or light pre pass.

It is quite a new technique only surfacing in 2008.
Here's the original writeup on it:
http://diaryofagraphicsprogrammer.blogspot.com/2008/03/light-pre-pass-renderer.html

A shader deferred is a shader denied.

I can't agree with this at all. I feel like he's lying right to my face. I'm sure he's not, but I can't understand how someone likes this game.

Ok guy's forget the article from Vituralr... though I do agree with it. The game does not Suck and it is very good and challenging. Please D/L this mod called MiniMod from Juls... follow instructions and you will see that the game is well done and that setting up your wheel or gamepad will be much easier.

Direct Link to MiniMod:
http://www.mediafire.com/?jx0gzox6i1f2bi1

Here is a link with a description... This Works Guys, Try it! :
http://www.virtualr.net/need-for-speed-shift-2-handling-minimod-released/