Same as Kludger, cockpit, elite, no assist, manual gears is the only way to go to enjoy Shift to its true potential...

Kludger, Man, How did set some of the times with loaner cars? did you fly them?

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 [url=

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferred_shading]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferred_shading[/url] .

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.

A couple of people have asked why this discussion

wasn't kicked off on the EA forums. The simple answer here is that

3rdparty developers need to go through EA to post on there, which is far

from ideal. It's quite difficult to engage with your audience if everything has

to be vetted.

So of course our dev-team have been following the feedback on the official

forums - our silence there isn't a reflection that we don't care - it's just a

product of that EA policy.

That's a good question and unfortunately we can't

answer this one yet as it's up to EA and not us. I can tell you that from a

development point of view the DLC was authored to the highest level like the

rest of the game so it runs on PC (now) very nicely.

I can only really say and give advice based on what

I would do if I were modding - the tools aren't mine to give.

There is a free-cam for the development team -

exposing this as a feature in replays wouldn't be without issues, for example

parts of the scene that aren't normally visible from the track that have been

constructed minimally say for optimizations purposes would then be visible.

There's also the issue of camera collision in free-cam like flying through walls

etc.

"-loose" in our developer terminology means "use

loose files", which translated means files are individually loaded. We dropped

loose file support to address one of the original complaints about Shift 1 -

load-times. Our pakfiles (BFFs - Base File Format) are now loaded in one

go, making the game data loading about 70% faster over single file loading -

a typical test track with 8 AI loads in about 12 seconds on my dev PC from

SSD for example.

It wouldn't be easy to resurrect individual file (loose) loading, because that

feature was dropped very early in the development of the new game engine

for SHIFT 2. That doesn't stop modding, it just means Tools to deal with

BFFs are needed.

At the start of Shift 2, DX11 was about 5% of our

target audience. If you look at the recent Steam survey, it's still in the low

teens percentage wise. There's not an infinite amount of development time

in a commercial world, unfortunately.

An issue with the dead-zone on 360 controllers has

been fixed for the patch. I don't see any problems with the latency of input

and 90% of the dev-team use them for testing...

It's actually 64 headlights (16 cars, 2 front and 2

rear lights) - when we embarked upon night lighting we looked at our worst

case - SPA with 15 AI on a start-grid (110 lights total afaik). Trying to

forward render this scene sucked big-time.
In a forward renderer you need to code shaders that would handle say 4 or

8 lights that are the closest to the geometry being rendered. The result is a

horror show of flickering lights, because the track lighting and cars lights

project very far and choosing the lights with a limited number per mesh just

doesn't work. We made the right choice and I'm very proud of the night

racing in SHIFT 2

The original Shift 1 used quite a lot of XML for it's

data formats. XML is slow and inefficient to read/load, so we optimized as

many formats as possible to a new format that we designed (HRDF -

Human Readable Data Format). We got a 25% improvement in load-time

and memory by doing this.

I can tell you that at least on Xbox 360 issues with

Fanatec wheels are being addressed. (if you start the game with it plugged

in, there is a bug in the driver that means FFB gets broken)

The patch is nearly finished on the dev side in the

next week. Then it'll go through EA QA. So, currently I would guess

sometime between the 24th and 30th on past experience as a guide.

Stuttering like this is caused by lack of video

memory e.g. the working set of render targets and textures with the

resolution selected is bigger than the amount of memory on your graphics

card - so the driver starts to 'swap' resources.

The game by default willl preload all resources into VRAM while loading, but if

it's too big to fit into video memory, then we are at the mercy of the driver

taking time to transfer textures etc that are in view, so as you turn a corner

with new stuff in view, the graphics driver will take time to 'load' this, and the

game logic will jump to the next view based on the 'missed' time.

Collision stuttering...

This is because of a DX9 locking issue. When a collision happens, the

physics system must deform the mesh that is in memory against the

collision point. This is quite time consuming and the data must be 'locked' so

that if that car is being rendered it is not changed halfway through. I only

really see the frame drops on the high-end (60fps+) - it can be fixed with

more memory and code. I'll see what I can do to raise the profile of this

issue.

Most of the options don't require a reboot - it's a

GUI issue with the prompt to restart for all changes of the video options.

The only options requiring a reboot to take effect are Resolution, Windowed

Mode and V-Sync

Regards
Griff

Yes it does,

In the graphic options - 'medium' for 'Car Detail' is the same as the PS3 and

Xbox 360 as a level of detail for opponent cars. At the 'high car detail' all

other AI cars get 2x detail/triangles compared to console. Textures were

authored 2x higher than the consoles and PC high detail uses this.

Environment maps and shadows are also twice the resolution in high detail.

Draw distance for track/car LOD scaling are higher, procedural grass distance

and particle numbers and texture anisotropy superior. High-end anti-aliasing

too. Was this a lazy port? If you think that, think again - we built this game

to scale

I'm pondering enabling crowds in the Rear View

Mirror and extending grass draw distance in the next patch for high detail.

Tree's won't be changing though - they are one of the more expensive

parts of the scene to render and the balance we have without affecting

frame rate is a good one.

Regards
Griff

Yes, it's very unlikely to be related to overclocking -

but I have on a few rare occasions in the past debugged issues related to

an OC. Best to rule that out when looking at problems 'in the wild'.

Thought you might be interested to see what I use day to day spec wise:

Dev 1 - 2 x Xeon 5570 @ 2.93Ghz(16 Threads), 12GB ECC DDR3, 3x256GB

Crucial M225 SSD, 2x128GB Crucial C300 SSD, ATI 4870 512MB, 9500GT

512MB, 2 x 30" Cinema Display, Win7 x64.
Dev 2 - Intel i7-2600k @ 4.0ghz, 4GB DDR3, 160GB X-25M SSD, 256GB

Crucial C300, NVidia GTX480 1536MB, 23" LG 3D, Win7 x86.
Dev 3 - Intel i7-2600k SB eval system, 4GB DDR3, 160GB X-25M SSD, ATI

5970 2GB, 23" Cinema Display, Win7 x64.
Dev 4 - Macbook Pro 17" i7 2.3Ghz, 256GB SSD, 8GB DDR3, ATI 6950

1GB, Win7 x64

We aware of this issue - un-sure whether a fix will

make it to the first patch, but addressing this is being discussed.

Set the Shadow Detail Level to Low - that option

willgive you the biggest boost in terms of night time performance.

Some more detailed shadow info since you asked.

Low Detail - 2 Spot Shadows, 256x256. ShadowMap is 512x512
Medium Detail - 4 Spot Shadows, 512x512. ShadowMap is 1024x1024

(PS3/360 level)
High Detail - 8 Spot Shadows, 1024x1024. ShadowMap is 2048x2048.

For night racing, there's a bunch of metrics used to choose the shadowing

lights - the key thing is that there is some persistence of these lights, so

they'll fade out and be replaced without any abrupt change when a better

shadowing light is found as you drive around or other cars/lights move in the

scene. Everything is rendered each frame - the only partial of rendering of

anything in the entire game is the cubic environment map where we render

3 faces one frame and 3 the next. There's no limiting - the limit is the detail

level that's been set by you.

For daytime racing, we use the industry standard cascaded shadow mapping

and some different optimizations depending on whether you are running ATI

or NVIDIA h/ware.