Tech Evolution: How Devs Pushed Consoles To Their Limits

October 3rd, 2012, 23:47 Posted By: wraggster

Digital Foundry on major tech advances this generation, and how it will transition into the next
The story of each and every console generation is one of evolution - increasingly more complex, visually exciting games coming to market year-on-year. The benefit of fixed hardware architecture is that game-makers get to know the machines they are working with and are able to squeeze out more performance with each successive project. The current seventh generation of consoles has been longer than most - and the technological advances we've seen over the last seven years have been truly remarkable.
"From a tech perspective at least, it's hard to find any actual 'bad games' in AAA development at this time - an endorsement of quality standards in the industry and proof that the current generation is now mature."

A quick tour of the major titles on site at the Eurogamer Expo last week was testament to this: in terms of the technological nuts and bolts at least, it was virtually impossible to find any kind of "bad game" on the show floor whatsoever.
Flashback to late 2004/2005 and the twilight of the PS2/Xbox heyday and there was never the kind of consistency in technical excellence as that seen in today's AAA market. Of course, the games, the budgets - and the industry itself - are bigger than they were back then, and equally of note is the increased importance of events such as GDC and SIGGRAPH, where we see developers sharing technologies, workflows and philosophies.
But it's interesting to see the emergence of a number of technologies, initially defined by the limitations of the current-gen machines, that will continue to evolve as we move into the era of the next Xbox and PlayStation 4.
One of the most impactful changes we see in the wave of current and upcoming games is the shift to what's referred to as deferred rendering. The actual technology isn't actually that new - a vintage 2001 Xbox 1 Shrek game from a North American division of DICE is thought to be the first console title to implement it and variations in the technique were seen in Xbox 360 launch title Perfect Dark Zero along with a more impressive roll-out for the tech in GTA 4 before it really hit its stride in Guerrilla Games' Killzone 2. However, the technology is becoming increasingly more popular for the way in which a vast range of light sources can be added to any given scene, without anything like the performance penalty associated with traditional "forward" rendering - where light sources are calculated in turn with rendering load increasing accordingly, rather than considered as a whole.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...o-their-limits

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