Google+ Skip to main content

Redout: A Technical Analysis on the Offline Dynamic Resolution Scaler

Building a virtual world means striking a balance between making it vivid, rich with objects in number and details, and render fluidity. The aesthetic research we have been pursuing on Redout started long ago, renovated itself not only once, twice, or even three times, but it’s a continuous process of innovation and emulation to improve every aspect of the visual fidelity of our game. As the first sentence implies, that needs to be balanced with going easy on the hardware so that the best possible experience can emerge. When you are racing faster than the speed of sound, fluidity matters. In light of recent events, to help spread information and data instead of estimates and guessing, we want to cover the methodologies we use to work towards this balance.

Resolution Scaling

When porting games to consoles the standard approach is to benchmark, profile, then pick a resolution that guarantees the best compromise between visual quality and framerate hiccups. That’s a static resolution approach, which doesn’t scale too nicely with the increased performance demands of deferred rendering and most novel techniques attached to it (complex pixel shader, post process effects, screen space effects, etc…).

Most modern game engines support some kind of asymmetry between the frame buffer and the render target, allowing hybrid rendering solutions between different resolutions. More and more  4k games nowadays render the main game at a lower resolution than 4k (typically 2k or 1080p) and UI elements at native 4k. Some other games prefer a more creative approach to hybriding, such as rendering the game at full resolution and applying post process effects onto a downscaled frame buffer (which usually means a separate, specific, texture layer).

Dynamic Resolution Scaling (DRS, or Dynamic Resolution Adaptation, DRA) is a technique that allows to change the frame buffer resolution on the fly. This is a very expensive operation that requires the entire stack of texture buffers to be reallocated at runtime, and therefore is usually avoided in real time operations. Epic Games worked around the issue implementing a method to get rid of the buffers reallocation, picking the texture size needed from the full-resolution one stored in memory.

Alex Vlachos talks extensively about DRS and adaptive rendering in his 2016 GDC talk about Advanced VR Rendering Performance.

Offline Scaling

Most DRS solutions are online, meaning they dynamically scale resolution or some quality settings depending on a sample of the previous frames (typically a low number, to enhance responsiveness). Online scaling is basically the only possible solutions in most games, because the permutations of the player position, camera position, rotation, field of view and quality settings tend to infinite.

In Redout, you race on a whirling racetrack (*except when you don’t). But still, a racetrack. This means we have some control over the player position and rotation, which can be reasonably predicted.

We came up with a novel approach to the problem, diving into autonomous profiling: we let an AI racer go through all the tracks, sampling frame deltas and track positions. By collecting this data, we are able to know the approximate performances on every track piece (a segment that makes up the entire racetrack) and we can save it offline, meaning we don’t need to spend cpu time analyzing performances nor memory to keep the historical deltas. As a by-product, we can ease up the early pre-pass using precomputed visibility.

The best part of all this system is that its effects are very hard to notice.

This is an example of the earliest public implementation of the screenpercentage method, where the left portion of the screen is rendered at 50% and the right one at 100% (both vertical axis percentage, as mentioned below): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uye_QlIXTe4

And here is a second example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePfKwmuebcs

Consider that both examples are missing anti-aliasing, which mitigates any downscaling artifacts, or any post-process effect which may actually hide those artifacts, and the cost-benefit ratio of this technique is pretty evident.

This is how the profiling looks on Xbox One X:

Each column identifies a track piece index (typically 150 meters long in-game), which gives us a very cheap (performance-wise) way to check where the player is. Each row identifies a racetrack. The number inside the cells shows the screen percentage we have to downscale to, if we want to keep the 60fps mean. Here is the data for the entire game:

Screen PercentageOccurrenceResolution / Notes
100%0.27%3840 x 2160
90%11.48%3456 x 1944
80%59.22%3072 x 1728
70%18.00%2688 x 1512
60%4.04%2304 x 1296
50%1.94%1920 x 1080
0%5.05%CPU hiccups

To underline how confusing this whole topic is, there has been controversy even on the use of percentages (even from sources like Forbes).

Computing the screen percentage by a single axis (specifically, the vertical one) is a standard practice in the industry because it simplifies every operation related to aspect ratio and screen manipulation. We use the same “r.screenpercentage” method as everyone else, properly documented by Unreal Engine devs in the source code (you need to be logged in and granted access by Epic Games to see it). Also, think 4k, 1080p, 720p, etc… They are all one-dimensional measurements of the vertical axis.

Explaining the framerate hiccups

When it comes to profiling and optimization, the first step is segmenting between CPU and GPU issues. GPU issues comes, strictly speaking, by three main parts: geometry rendering, post process, and lighting. In most games, they occupy pretty much the same percentage of the rendering pipeline. There are many ways to optimize all of them while you are building your games and measuring their performance indicators. When these ways aren’t viable and you are pixel-bounded, you have to lower the resolution. Or find an alternative, like the dynamic scaler we discussed above.

The CPU’s workload, on the other hand, gets often simplified to “moving objects around” and similar scope sentences, which are quite far from the truth. While we can agree it’s hard to find CPU-bound games nowadays, they still exist for many reasons.

Unreal Engine has a very intuitive way of displaying debug information on frame profiling: it splits the frame time (the time the entire process took from the end of two frames ago to the closure of the last frame) into the Game Thread time, Draw and GPU time. The Game time shows how long executing the code took; the Draw time shows how long the CPU took to prepare things for the GPU, and the GPU time shows how long the video card took to finalize the rendering. While these tasks run in parallel most of the time, the frame time is not just the longest of the three, as CPU and GPU need to synchronize to avoid very bad things to happen. This visualization gives a quick look at the problem: especially at early stages optimizations, this is enough to get the size and direction of a potential performance issue, before diving into much deeper profiling systems.

Back to the scaler data we collected, you can see there are some black cells. Those are where most of the noticeable framerate dips happen, and that’s because, in these sections we are looking at a CPU problem, mostly due to the sheer number and objects or materials that needs to be drawn. This is exactly where we concentrate all our optimization efforts.

On average, the speed of a Redout ship during a race ranges between 600km/h (372mph) to 1500km/h (932mph), depending on the racing class. At these speeds, crossing the city of Los Angeles latitudinally would take 4:42 mins to 1:52 mins. This should give an idea of what challenge it is to build a game world suitable to these speeds, while not making it look barren, and why the number of objects on screen can sometimes become a problem.

Why console optimizations take time

It’s hard to talk about this topic without breaking NDAs. Nevertheless, someone already did, describing the woes of console patches both from devs and platform holders point of view.

Long story short, releasing content on any console needs to go through a long, difficult and often unpredictable certification process, a form of Quality Assurance by the platform holder, which comes after the QA done by the developer. This creates a sometimes large time gap between when the game developer has completed work, and when the players will get that content.

This is also the reason why you often see less-than-average performing games on consoles improve drastically over time, sometimes several months after release. It’s not that the developers are unaware of performance issues: the whole process is inevitably shifted forward by a certain timespan. For an answer to the obvious question of why developers can’t fully optimize their games before the first console launch, we redirect to the article linked above: it’s a really worthwhile read in all cases, wrote by one of the most important indie devs out there – Rami Ismail.

The future of Redout: non-technical considerations

A Redout Xbox patch is rolling out on January 11th, which will sensibly improve performance for all Xbox users. Announcement of this patch was supposed to come the same day of the release, because that’s the best way to go for a small title like ours, but current things standing, we have no choice but to announce it now. This is optimization work we have concluded months ago. We are currently working on yet another patch, which release date cannot be confirmed yet.

Next time you download an update, it might still happen that Redout won’t be flawless: we’ll keep improving it. Or, it might even be that we already did, and the patch you wish for is already in the submission process tunnel. The team has been working tirelessly on performance improvements since the original release on PC. We have been submitting enhancement patches over patches and we’ll keep doing it for as long as possible.

Valerio Di Donato

MSc in Game Technology from the IT University of Copenhagen. Founder of 34BigThings, Game Director for Redout and Hyperdrive Massacre.

10 Comments

  • Good on you guys for doing this, although it’s a shame that you were ever even forced into the position to. Digital Foundry is a click-baity joke looking for controversy wherever possible to increase their viewcount and ad-revenue. No offense to your game or anything I just find out of all of the other choices they picked your niche independent developed game to do a test on, there’s like 90 other games they have not tested for the X yet, many big AAA titles.

    I think they have gotten tired of posting video after video of the X roasting the competition and thought they had something that could fuel the fanboy flames in your game, obviously that backfired horribly on them and I hope it actually damages their credibility publicly as if this article won’t.

    Anyway, thank you for posting this, it was a good and insightful read.

  • peter brown says:

    Any Chance of implementing HDR into it as well like the ps4 pro has?…..Thanks…..Love your game!…….Its a blast!……….Had lots of enjoyment out of it!……Bought it first on ps4 pro and enjoyed it so much i bought the xbox one x version too as i am a console gaming enthusiast and have both systems…..Was slightly dissapointed it had no HDR on xbox one x as i had gotten used to the lovely effect it has on the ps4 pro version…..Thanks

  • bmosvg2015 says:

    This is a great read as well as the other article you posted about certification. Sadly, this should have been your initial response and not the threat of a lawsuit. That was just frivolous and childish and you know it. In the future I suggest using the 24 hour rule before commenting. Wait 24 hours and see if you feel the same way and then comment. You won’t come off so douche … or you may. Some people are just a$$holes.

    Clearly your not at total fault here. Microsoft allowed that patch to go through and it’s not good and judging by the PC and PS4 Pro builds, doesn’t represent your work the way it should. It happens. I Get that. In the end, your game doesn’t run at the advertised 4K and maintains 1080p more times than not. Personally, I’m OK with that. The framerate issues are what bothered me more.

    Also, It would haven’t hurt DF to reach out to you and show you their results and get your take since to-date, this is the first patch that has been questionable. But since they are an independent company, they really don’t have to. With the exception of John, who does make the clickbait analysis videos, the crew at DF does a good job and I haven’t seen a malicious comment about any game or developer. Including yours. They’ve actually helped to get games patched when the developer missed some things.

    The bottom line, you made some great points and provided some great information to back it up. However that doesn’t excuse your over-reaction to their analysis. As I gamer, I WANT you to do well. I also WANT to buy your product. I WANT to support you. Don’t give me a reason not to. Get the resolution and framerate issues sorted on your game and I WILL buy on Xbox One X.

    • XRJ64 says:

      The clickbait-part aside, I absolutey agree with bmosvg2015. I bought and loved Redout on PC but that childish response (“fake news”, “this is a pure, straight lie”, “click-baiting”) and that lawsuit threat almost makes me feel ashamed of having supported 34BigThings. I get it: You work hard on your game, you put your blood, sweat and tears into it and then you get shitstormed for all the wrong reasons. But it’s not DigitalFoundry 34BigThings should be mad at, but these elitists calling 34BT lazy. 34BigThings’ response was highly unprofessional – imagine every developer reacting like this whenever any reviewer gets something wrong about their game. Yes, I know that DF’s analysis was not a review – but you should get the idea.

  • JCK says:

    Very interesting read. I’m happy you’re updating the game as i do enjoy it. I subscribe to DF and find their game analysis excellent and informative so it’s a shame your initial reaction was so heated but i get why.

    Can you give us the option to select which music tracks are available to play in game? The ones with the distorted guitar are that bad i’ve had to switch the entire music soundtrack off which means i’m missing out on all of the excellent electronic music 🙁

    Otherwise awesome game 🙂

  • A reader says:

    What an insightful article. Had a lot to learn. I really enjoy the technical side of video games, and I have been subscribed to DigitalFoundry for years. Overall, their analyses are very informative and on point. But, as with any benchmarking and technical analysis, there is always the possibility of mistakes. The people that harassed you on twitter are rife (console tug-of-war fanboys), and you should not take them seriously. They are a very small subset of consumers at best. Unfortunately, DF videos naturally attract such people a lot (since there is no other way to measure console performance except looking at analyses by DF/VGTech/NX GAMER etc. (DF being the most well-known and mainstream source of such information). So, fanboys naturally often amass around contents made by DF. However, being an avid viewer of DF for years, I know first hand that it is never DF’s intention to cater to these people. DF try their best to give technical insight without being opinionated or biased. But, it is not in DF’s hands how certain fanboys interpret their findings. It’s a very common theme in the comment sections of DF or VGTech videos to call developers “lazy” or “incompetent”, and they are rampant in relevant twitter posts and talks as well. These are just internet trolls. You should not let your emotions get ahold of you. It is drawing more unwanted criticism and mockery towards yourself than anybody else (for example, the forbes article you quoted). I think this is hurting your image more than anybody else’s. You definitely do not deserve all this.

  • Truth Hurts for Real says:

    Very interesting read. It’s sad that it had to come to this because a site that claims to be impartial resorts to this clickbait.
    The fact of the matter is that the Sony fan base has always the most mentally unstable and challenged, just look at sites like GAF and ERA to see the truth.
    True intellectual poverty and it’s too bad Digital Foundry cater to such failures at real life. Their YouTube comment section is always a joke with nothing but no-life trolls and they just stand idly by enjoying the clicks instead of truly inspiring technical discussion. An absolute travesty!

  • Kebab says:

    This dynamic resolution method sounds like a complete waste of time to have implemented and a much more ineffective compared to online scaling, and I don’t see a reason in this article as to why you’d chose offline scaling instead. This doesn’t compensate for load on the system, so if you’re racing solo, you’re still getting the same resolution as when there are five other racers.

  • I loved the game but the latest update you implemented for the PS4 makes it insanely difficult for the casual player. I had reached Mars before and was loving it for the speed and the experience. Now I can’t even get past the first boss track higher than 3rd place! I thought I was losing my mind because there was no warning about this whatsoever. Why not introduce a higher selectable difficulty for those kind of hardcore gamers who can give away entire weeks without loss of pay or a drop in their grades? It is a big shame as I was enjoying it so much and was showing it to all my friends. Is there nothing you can do about this?

Leave a Reply to bmosvg2015 Cancel Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.