So are consoles holding back this game?

[Greven]

My PS4 run this better than many of my PC user friends. Most people who doesn't use chat is cause they don't want to, easy as that cause PS4 can easily read every keyboard.

To the topic, PS4 doesn't have DirectX11 so they didn't implement it or similar graphic effects through other means.

Consoles holding back is a lie and an easy excuse.

[Kelg]

My PS4 run this better than many of my PC user friends. Most people who doesn't use chat is cause they don't want to, easy as that cause PS4 can easily read every keyboard.

To the topic, PS4 doesn't have DirectX11 so they didn't implement it or similar graphic effects through other means.

Consoles holding back is a lie and an easy excuse.

Ps4 is fine. It's Ps3 that is at it's limit. I played a little bit on ps3 and the game looked like it was running at 15 fps in unpopulated areas. Just horrible.

[Kosmos992k]

To the topic, PS4 doesn't have DirectX11 so they didn't implement it or similar graphic effects through other means.

That's incorrect.

DirectX 11 is a graphics library that supports a certain feature set that hardware makers implemented in their GPUs. The GPU core in the PS4 is almost identical to what is in many PCs, though it has fewer compute units within the GPU than high end PCs do. However, it has all the DX11 hardware units required, and the OpenGL libraries that Sony uses provide the same functionality as the DX11 libraries.

DirectX is nothing more than libraries that developers can use to access certain GPU features. If you honestly believe that there is anything in DX11 that cannot be implemented in an alternate library such as Open GL, you need to re-educate yourself.

It's 'correct' to say PS4 doesn't support DirectX 11, because that is a proprietary library owned by Microsoft. However it's also incorrect, because all the functionality accessed through DirectX11 is present in the PS4's GPU and can be used by developers using OpenGL library calls that provide the same functionality as the Microsoft DX11 library.

So, you would be better off saying that PS4 supports DX11 functionality, but does not directly support the Microsoft DirectX 11(TM) library

[Bishop81]

Short answer: No.

Long answer: Seriously, some of the textures have no mip-mapping to them, resulting in aliasing (i.e. "flickering"), e.g. That boss in Alex with the tanks. Look at the ground. The flickering only stops when you zoom in very close; at that point the texture resolution is half or less the sampling frequency so aliasing goes away. Mip-mapping isn't rocket science, it's just downsampling before-hand high res textures. The only cost is memory. I find it hard to believe that they are having memory problems in a tiny boss arena.

and the OpenGL libraries that Sony uses provide the same functionality as the DX11 libraries.

Actually the PS4 has it's own graphic API, lower level than the likes of DX and OpenGL.

[Kosmos992k]

Short answer: No.

Long answer: Seriously, some of the textures have no mip-mapping to them, resulting in aliasing (i.e. "flickering"), e.g. That boss in Alex with the tanks. Look at the ground. The flickering only stops when you zoom in very close; at that point the texture resolution is half or less the sampling frequency so aliasing goes away. Mip-mapping isn't rocket science, it's just downsampling before-hand high res textures. The only cost is memory. I find it hard to believe that they are having memory problems in a tiny boss arena.



Actually the PS4 has it's own graphic API, lower level than the likes of DX and OpenGL.

OK, What's that element of their toolkit called? I was quoting the OpenGL one since it's generally the most recognized alternative to DirectX, and has been used by Sony with both PS3 and PS4.

The underlying point I was making was that the hardware in the PS4 is just as DX11 capable as the majority of AMD GPus build in the last 3-4 uears and although it doesn't use MS DirectX11 specifically, the functionality is there and supported by the APIs/libraries supplied by Sony.

But, I'd be interested to know what they call the lower level interface you're describing, is it a PS4 variant of Mantle?

[Bishop81]

OK, What's that element of their toolkit called? I was quoting the OpenGL one since it's generally the most recognized alternative to DirectX, and has been used by Sony with both PS3 and PS4.

The underlying point I was making was that the hardware in the PS4 is just as DX11 capable as the majority of AMD GPus build in the last 3-4 uears and although it doesn't use MS DirectX11 specifically, the functionality is there and supported by the APIs/libraries supplied by Sony.

But, I'd be interested to know what they call the lower level interface you're describing, is it a PS4 variant of Mantle?

Did a little more digging. Turns out there are 2 APIs - your choice depending on how lazy you are. :P

GNM and GNMX according to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlaySt...ystem_software).

More details from,

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/di...-playstation-4

Low-level access and the "wrapper" graphics API

In terms of rendering, there was some interesting news. Norden pointed out one of the principal weaknesses of DirectX 11 and OpenGL - they need to service a vast array of different hardware. The advantage of PlayStation 4 is that it's a fixed hardware platform, meaning that the specifics of the tech can be addressed directly. (It's worth pointing out at this point that the next-gen Xbox has hardware-specific extensions on top of the standard DX11 API.)

"We can significantly enhance performance by bypassing a lot of the artificial DirectX limitations and bottlenecks that are imposed so DirectX can work across a wide range of hardware," he revealed.

The development environment is designed to be flexible enough to get code up and running quickly, but offering the option for the more adventurous developers to get more out of the platform. To that end, PlayStation 4 has two rendering APIs.

"One of them is the absolute low-level API, you're talking directly to the hardware. It's used to draw the static RAM buffers and feed them directly to the GPU," Norden shared. "It's much, much lower level than you're used to with DirectX or OpenGL but it's not quite at the driver level. It's very similar if you've programmed PS3 or PS Vita, very similar to those graphics libraries."

But on top of that Sony is also providing what it terms a "wrapper API" that more closely resembles the standard PC rendering APIs.

The cool thing about the wrapper API is that while its task is to simplify development, Sony actually provides the source code for it so if there's anything that developers don't get on with, they can adapt it themselves to better suit their project.

[Kosmos992k]

Did a little more digging. Turns out there are 2 APIs - your choice depending on how lazy you are. :P

GNM and GNMX according to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlaySt...ystem_software).

More details from,

Thanks. It sounds like the lower level APIs are doing similar things to what projects like Mantle attempt to achieve, except since PS4 is a fixed platform, it's much more closely tailored to the hardware in PS4

[Bishop81]

Thanks. It sounds like the lower level APIs are doing similar things to what projects like Mantle attempt to achieve, except since PS4 is a fixed platform, it's much more closely tailored to the hardware in PS4

More like Mantle is trying to do what console APIs have done for ages.

Even so I believe the likes of Mantle and DX12 will only be a halfway point between pre-12 DX/OpenGL and console APIs.

PS: Consoles frequently let you go to a very low level. N64 and PS2 let you rewrite the microcode even.