Whoracle said:
Hagi said:
[...]
On the contrary, most everyone probably is already doing it. A lot of techniques like this already exist and are used a lot.
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TBH, as I understand it, not many games do that. It's not "Don't compute stuff that's outside of the FOV", but "Render stuff that's on the fringe of the FOV in lower quality. I checked 3 games for that since I read that post (Uncharted 3 [PS4], The Secret World [PC], and Kingdom Hearts II [PS2]), and none of those do that.
It's easy to test: Stand still, and compare the center of your screen to the borders. Any difference in fidelity?
Care to hook me up with a few games that implement this? I want to see if it's noticable.
Well I'm unsure on the exact implementation as Microsoft simply doesn't seem to mention this. There's a lot of factors when it comes to texture quality.
There's the size of the texture itself, a 2048 texture is going to cost less performance than a 4096 texture, swapping them out when you focus on them might be smart but it's got the obvious issue seen in Rage where you get texture popping. On top of that in order to swap them out you're going to have to hold them both in memory, which takes up a lot of space. From what I can read it might be this, in which case Rage would be a good example to look at, but on the other hand this isn't the best way to use techniques like this because of the texture popping thing.
I may be overestimating Microsoft here but what I'm hoping it is instead for example AA techniques like seen in the ENB mod series ( www.enbdev.com ) which you can see in games like Skyrim and GTA IV ( when using the mod, do note that it also changes many other things in how objects are rendered ). What this does is that it using high quality AA near the center of the screen and gradually decreases the quality towards the edges. So the center will be rendered as if you're using the best possible AA setting, but since the very edges are much lower in quality the actual performance cost is only that of a medium AA setting.
On top of that what's also possible is to decrease the quality of many supporting textures like normal maps, when they're not near the center of the screen. This would be a lot less noticeable when switching so shouldn't produce the texture popping issue mentioned above whilst still causing an increase in performance.
Those two are much more subtle and very hard to notice when just playing, and since games don't exactly list their rendering techniques it's hard to provide examples unless you've got issues like texture popping in Rage or an explicit change list like for the ENB mod.
What's simpler to say though is that the concept of using less intensive rendering techniques and resources near the edges of the screen has been around for well over a decade. Chances that DirectX, which has pretty much always been running after OpenGL, is featuring something that hasn't been done before is practically zero.
