BFBC2 Update-Beta news

Beta Players will secure their gamer alias (Soldier Name) for retail according to BFBC2's twitter. This should mean you can reserve your soldier name with the beta for the retail version when it is available.
 
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DICE



Join Date: Jan 2010
Posts: 2


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<hr style="color: transparent; background-color: transparent;" size="1"> <!-- / icon and title --> <!-- message --> Hi there forum people, I'm one of the audio programmers at DICE responsible for the audio tech in Frostbite. repii sent me here to hopefully clarify some things. So here we go.

1. All platforms we presently target use software mixing in favor of the older hardware mixing engines. For PC, with Windows Vista switching to software mixing to get around hardware limitations and provide more powerful APIs (DirectSound was designed around the old ISA bus) with added support for things like custom DSP effects in the mixing pipeline, we could finally have a unified path for all SKUs. While the hardware acceleration provided by current gaming cards does provide the ability to do limited mixing and some environmental (reverb) effects without much CPU cost, the APIs are restricting (AFAIK, no custom DSP chains in HW) and it would demand much work from our side to work around that, if it's even possible.

2. Looking at some usage metrics at Steam Hardware Survey we can see that only about 3.7% of Steam users have access to any type of hardware acceleration features, although it seems to be increasing slightly. Granted, this is not necessarily the most reliable source, but it's the best one we have access to and it's usually a great indicator of what our target audience uses. Had we relied on hardware accelerating sound cards for our audio engine we would have provided a degraded experience for almost 97% of consumers. We want all our consumers to have an awesome aural experience when playing our games, so obviously we will do what fits that goal best given the resources we have available. We simply can't afford to support more than one path.

3. Regarding availability of hardware to test on, given that we would've gone down that path, I'll simply say that we used to have a discount from that big sound card manufacturer, but several years ago that disappeared. It's not like with Intel and the graphics cards companies who send repii all their new toys
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We simply cannot afford to go our and buy lots of cards, which is another upside to software mixing, we don't have to since all our features work on all cards equally. This saves both money and time and allows us to deliver greater quality to all of you.

4. I know PC gamers are constantly looking for that edge over the console crowd, so I'll say this about performance, since this is that type of thread. If you have a faster CPU, our audio engine will be able to do more "stuff" in the same amount of time, and as such provide an even more awesome experience for you guys. This is however not something we would be able to do had we used hardware acceleration, since those resources are the same for everyone (kind of like on consoles, ironically enough). So just know that as you buy better computers, our engine will scale fairly well along with it. Even more so in future revisions of the engine.

5. If you truly want the best audio experience, in any game on PC, focus on finding a sound card with a good DAC and make sure you can turn as much post-processing as possible off and that you have some nice speakers. Any "enhancements" made to the signal after we send it to the sound hardware may introduce unwanted artifacts. Our sound designers take great care to mix the game and even master it thoughtfully depending on the settings available in our in-game options menu, so to get the true intended experience, stay away from additional EQs or other effects. This of course goes for home theatre receivers and TVs when playing on consoles as well. They even author specific content for the LFE, so make sure you turn that woofer up! But who am I to say what you can and can't do with your audio!


I hope this information sheds some light on how we're thinking, and the audio department here at DICE would like to thank everyone in forums and video comments for their kind words about the audio in our games!

Thanks for listening.
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I can't wait. I have a dumb question though. I pre-ordered the game at GameStop. Does that get me a BETA key or do I have to wait for some other place to give out public keys online like FilePlanet?
 
GameStop is a confirmed provider of beta keys with pre-orders, so yes, gamestop will email you a beta key when the time comes.
 
I'm still waiting on Fileplanet to provide beta keys, if they do. I would much rather try the beta then pre-order. I'm always hesitant to pre-order products.
 
That's for the PS3 I believe. Was already posted on the Battlefield blog.
 
Killa, after reading the agreements stuff at the CT site, should you be posting anything from there?
 
I hear ya killa. I was just wondering since I saw a thread "named and shamed" where they removed users and all those they had invited or vice versa for posting stuff on public forums that was CT content.
 
Thanks guys, good looking out, honestly I am with CT for 3 years now, and never read anyting on that site...until now...LOL Thanks Six, Thanks Soulzz!
 
Good News about DX11 and BFBC2 from AMD


http://blogs.amd.com/how-to/2009/11/16/11-days-of-directx%C2%AE-11-day-six-dice/



2009
11.16
11 Days of DirectX® 11, Day Six: DICE

Posted by: Mr. Black / Tag: 11 Days, DICE, DirectX 11, Electronic Arts (EA), Frostbite / Add Comment
<!-- end postmeta -->
<!-- end title --> We wanted to get a game developer’s thoughts on DirectX 11, the impact it will have on gaming, and the problems it can solve for game developers. We asked Kevin Strange, AMD Developer Relations Account Manager in the UK to interview Johan Andersson, Senior Software Architect in the Frostbite Engine team at DICE. Here are excerpts from that interview. For the full interview please download it here.
(1) Can you start please with some background on how you are using DirectX 11 in the Frostbite 2 engine? What made you decide to jump onboard with DirectX 11?
We’ve been part of the DirectX 11 development from a _very_ early stage, a few years before there was an internal prototype available even. This helped us make sure that many of the features & improvements that are important for us got in — so that we have what we need to make the best possible PC games in the future.
There are 2 different areas where we are using DirectX 11 in Frostbite 2. The first is to streamline and optimize the CPU performance; how our engine & games communicate with D3D to take advantage of multiple CPU cores. This has become a bigger and bigger problem with previous D3D versions as GPU performance has been scaling and the CPUs have gotten more cores, but without us being able to utilize them for rendering with D3D.
Now in DirectX 11, with the new support for multi-threading in the API, we can render objects and submit it to the GPU in parallel on all available CPU cores (we’ve tested up to 16 virtual cores). This will be a big performance improvement and allow us to have much more variation and detail on our levels while costing less than before.
The multi-threading support also enables us to get faster loading times by loading shaders and other resources in parallel and to efficiently stream in textures & meshes without stalls, which would otherwise result in unwanted jerky performance in the game.
The second area of DirectX 11 that we are using includes some of the new hardware features such as compute shaders. We use compute shaders for deferred shading, which enables us to have many more all-dynamic light sources than we’ve been able to have before. We also see a big potential for using compute shaders for other future effects and optimization techniques.
(2) Can you share any details of how you plan to use DirectCompute 11 to implement deferred shading? What does that mean in terms of how your games would look or perform? Can you think of other way you might use DirectCompute 11?
Our plan is to improve performance and at the same time be able to have many more dynamic light sources than we’ve been able to have previously — and by a wide margin even. This is possible as the culling & processing of large light sources can be done much more efficiently and directly in a compute shader compared to traditional deferred rendering techniques....


The article continues on if you care to follow the link for the rest of the content.



At Siggraph we also showed a demo of a scene in Frostbite 2 with 1000 large overlapping dynamic light sources flying around which ran on an ATI Radeon HD 5850 card with very good performance.
There are many other interesting uses for compute shaders, for example many post-processing effects are a very good fit such as fast screen-space ambient occlusion, doing large blur kernels and accurate depth of field.
Frostbite_1000_lights1280-1.jpg
​
(3) The other big new hardware feature of DirectX 11 is the tessellator. Can you tell us about your plans for that and is it really a big deal?
Tessellation is a new big piece of technology in DirectX 11 and something that we are excited about. Tessellation combined with displacement mapping is a very powerful tool that can dramatically increase the detail of our objects and still render them very efficiently by varying the level of detail dynamically.
The primary areas that we are looking into using tessellation in the future are:

  • Smooth / round objects (for example vehicles and their wheels)
  • Very bumpy objects such as cobblestones and rocky terrain
  • Characters
One difficulty however with tessellation and esp. displacement mapping is that it requires changes to the whole content authoring pipeline step and how our artists build objects. So it isn’t as easy to use as some of the other DX11 features, but definitely one of the more powerful features going forward.
(4) Take up of DirectX 10 in games was pretty slow – do you think the same might be true this time around with DirectX 11? [Please give your reasons for your answer.]
Yes I agree that the transition to DirectX 10 was slow. One of the main reasons for this, in my view, was that it was tied into Windows Vista which unfortunately had lower adoption than one would have hoped for (from our perspective).
This tie in was, however, necessary for technical reasons, as DirectX 10 got a much needed clean slate implementation and a new driver model which was required to continue on.
Now with DirectX 11 and Windows 7 we have a very different, and much better, situation for 3 reasons:

  • DirectX 11 isn’t limited to Windows 7, it will also work on Windows Vista so everyone that is already using Vista will be able to use it. This is a huge benefit for everyone involved.

  • Windows 7 is an excellent OS for gamers (but please use the 64-bit version!) and I predict a vast amount of the gamers that are still on Windows XP, which is now a 8 year old operating system, will upgrade to Windows 7 and as such go directly from DirectX 9 to DirectX 11 awesomeness.

  • Thirdly, many game developers have also been “stuck” on DirectX 9 and Windows XP as this have been the primary and very large user base that they have been developing for. This created a Catch-22 situation as many gamers didn’t see the benefit of upgrading to Windows Vista & DirectX 10 as there were few games that supported it fully.
Now with Windows 7 and DirectX 11, it feels like there are a lot of developers that are planning to make the jump directly from DirectX 9 to DirectX 11, which will help solve this Catch-22 situation and provide gamers with another great reason to upgrade.
(5) Can you confirm that the new techniques that you develop using DirectX 11 now on AMD hardware will be used in multiple future titles?
We have over a long time, since the absolute first early internal versions of DirectX 11, been working with it and building in support into the Frostbite 2 engine to fully utilize it.
And yes, these techniques and support will be used for multiple game titles as our technology foundation here at DICE going forward.
(6) What is OIT, why is “OIT” a big deal for you guys, and does DirectX 11 give you a solution to the problem?
OIT (“order-independent transparency”) is a solution to an age old problem in real-time graphics: How to render transparent surfaces and have them be correctly sorted against each other to look right. This is a very difficult problem to solve efficiently, and it has limited the way we create content in games where we have to be very restrictive of how we use transparent surfaces and how they interact with each other.
Now with DirectX 11 it has finally become possible to implement correct order-independent rendering of transparent surfaces (OIT). By taking advantage of that, pixel shaders can do atomic operations and scattered writes out into memory to collect multiple “layers” of the transparent surfaces. These layers are then sorted and correctly blended together using a compute shader.
We are interested in the possibilities that this opens up for us, where our artists can create content in totally new ways that was next to impossible before. For example having glass objects scattered around and inside glass buildings or having particle effects in-between windows of vehicles & buildings without getting sorting issues or rendering artifacts.
Although, as many of our games are competitive online games, we also must be very careful here as it wouldn’t be fair if a person with a DX11 card gets to see through glass buildings while someone with a DX10 card cannot. That would not be lead to good balanced game play.
(7) The ATI Radeon HD 5870 is the world’s most powerful GPU that you can buy today – and it has almost 3 Teraflops of compute power. That’s great for Hi-Definition gaming… But how much do you think you need for eye-definition gaming, and when do you think the good folks at AMD will finally be able to satisfy your demands for more horsepower or does this go on forever?
Give me 2-3x the computer power and 2 GB video memory (for frame buffers & textures) and we’ll deliver the eye-definition resolutions for our future high-end full DX11 games in highest possible level of detail. Fortunately, I’m optimistic that AMD will get there quite soon!
We want this development of ever more powerful GPUs to continue for a _long_ time forward. There are simply too many interesting techniques and opportunities both within real-time graphics and general compute for games going forward. Techniques that require enormous amounts of horsepower to be able to implement or improve upon to create the life-like interactive environments we and the gamers want in our games.

If this development continues on for next to forever (or say the next 20-30 years), until we reach a “Star Trek holodeck” / “The Matrix” level of interactivity and visuals – then that’s more than fine with me!
(but let’s skip the evil AI, ok?)
(10) AMD seems to have taken the world by surprise with the early release of DirectX 11 hardware. What has been your experience of the HD 5870 so far?
The HD 5870 is a very impressive graphics card, both in pure raw performance and with the support for all the new DirectX 11 functionality. The drivers are very robust and the few issues we’ve had have been fixed quickly.
 
Read some of this a while back, very good read. It explains a lot :D.
 
Fuck, they already sold one to me and I've got to tell you-seeing games in DX11 is the shit. DX9, DX10, suck ass in comparison.
 
Ill bet Six!!! I am contemplating weather I should get it or not, Ill wait for Beta then I'll decide
 
Well, I'm just not an ATI fan so until Nvidia releases their new architecture I'm fucked. Plus my motherboard won't do Crossfire.
 
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