Image quality: While the dynamic resolution system is impressive, the reality is that the game spends the overwhelming majority of its time well under full 1080p. When combined with sparse anti-aliasing coverage this often results in scenes exhibiting aliasing and blurring artefacts simultaneously. This is further impacted by limited texture filtering, smearing surface textures at oblique angles. In fact, the selected texture filtering has a stronger impact on overall presentation than resolution.
Half-rate animation: While the game operates at 60fps, active entities within the world will actually animate at half-rate when they reach a set distance from the player. We're basically seeing 30 frames of animation per second while the game continues to operate at 60 in these situations. Halo 5 often places huge numbers of entities within each scene. You can have multiple Spartans fighting alongside locals against a huge hoard of enemy forces. In the busiest of scenarios, we see more active on-screen enemies than in any other Halo game. Yet, managing so many actors in a scene places additional strain on the CPU which could drop performance. It would appear that this system was implemented to prevent such a load from tanking the frame-rate. It's successful but, more than any other sacrifice made, it looks rather jarring during normal gameplay. The distance in which enemies begin to animate at half-rate is just a bit too close to the player for our liking.
Lighting and shadows: Halo 5 makes heavy use of pre-calculated lighting in order to improve rendering speed with more dynamic shadows and light sources limited to active elements within the scene. In order to improve rendering speed, a number of tricks are employed here that have an impact on visual quality. For instance, dynamic shadows are regularly culled from view near the player, while shadow maps exhibit noticeable jagged artefacts. The greater issue is the way in which the game swaps between the different levels of quality. The constant adjustments being made ultimately create a sense of instability across the world.
Gallery:
Alpha effects: Smoke, fire and other alpha blended operations require more from the GPU and can drop the frame-rate in close proximity to the viewport. 343 has taken two different approaches to this problem. Firstly, alpha effects used during gameplay are rendered at a lower resolution much of the time. This requires less from the GPU and as a result, performance remains smoother. Environmental effects use a different approach - when the player's view is in close proximity to any sort of constant alpha effects, the effects in question are culled from view.
Texture quality: Despite the move to a more realistic materials system, the actual resolution of many assets leaves a lot to be desired. Throughout the game we stumbled across low resolution textures and normal maps applied to key surfaces. The prevalence of these textures contrasts with otherwise high resolution assets leading to an inconsistent appearance. The surface of Meridian in particular stands out as an area that needs additional work with chunky, low resolution tyre tracks impacting an otherwise beautiful scene.
Level of detail: As in many games, object detail is adjusted based on proximity. This means that models use lower quality assets from a distance with higher quality models swapped in as players moves closer. The issue here is that these LODs often appear too close to the player and lack any sort of transition. Debris is also used liberally throughout the game to add extra detail to the terrain. As in previous games, a type of dithering is used to transition these elements into view. In Halo 5, many of these elements continue to exhibiting dithering patterns even when the player is standing right on top. 作者: DarthVadar 时间: 2015-10-27 23:26
