ID Tech 5 is bad engine isn't it?

[Maximilian]

Except of course that it can't - not even close.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/opengl-directx,2019.html

OpenGL is at the level of DX8

Article from 2008 (nearly 7 years ago srsly??) combined with sweeping statement and zero backup.

9/10
Good post
Would read again
Moderate interest in a follow up post

 

[BFG10K]

Tech5 games are massive for no reason. WolfTNO was 40gb. Evil Within is 60(!). Ridiculous for the visual they provide. Dragon Age: Inquisition is 25gb and looks just as good if not better than WolfTNO.

The technology was designed for last-generation consoles with limited performance and memory (i.e. to work by constantly streaming off optical media).

It could be re-designed to take advantage of PCs but alas, with Carmack gone, it's unlikely to get the treatment it deserves.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

Tech5 games are massive for no reason. WolfTNO was 40gb. Evil Within is 60(!). Ridiculous for the visual they provide. Dragon Age: Inquisition is 25gb and looks just as good if not better than WolfTNO.

Stupid megatextures.

This is simply untrue.

They're massive because they have a lot of unique texture detail. Rather than having a few base textures that are used to pain large swaths of the level by repeating them over and over, they use a more painterly approach where designers can make every part of the level unique.

The issue of the pop-in is in large part due to the fact that consoles hardware is diabolically bad, often reading data from disc in real time, or at best a HDD, that streaming process is laggy and slow, they come with very little system memory and very little GPU memory.

If the engine was designed around streaming off a SSD, and from PCs with 16Gb-32Gb of RAM and 4-6Gb of VRAM you could stuff most of the textures into memory and have next to no pop in. It's just a side effect to pandering to console users.

On the flip side, this technology on consoles looks a lot better than other engines on the consoles, this kind of tiered streaming is the only way they can manage this size of textures on such limited hardware.

 

[Rakehellion]

Except of course that it can't - not even close.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/opengl-directx,2019.html

OpenGL is at the level of DX8

That article is from 6 years ago and talks about how Direct X 11 (which didn't even exist then) is better than OpenGL 3 (we have version 4 now.)

Comparing future technology to past tech is so unbiased.

 

[Rakehellion]

This is simply untrue.

They're massive because they have a lot of unique texture detail. Rather than having a few base textures that are used to pain large swaths of the level by repeating them over and over, they use a more painterly approach where designers can make every part of the level unique.

The issue of the pop-in is in large part due to the fact that consoles hardware is diabolically bad, often reading data from disc in real time, or at best a HDD, that streaming process is laggy and slow, they come with very little system memory and very little GPU memory.

If the engine was designed around streaming off a SSD, and from PCs with 16Gb-32Gb of RAM and 4-6Gb of VRAM you could stuff most of the textures into memory and have next to no pop in. It's just a side effect to pandering to console users.

On the flip side, this technology on consoles looks a lot better than other engines on the consoles, this kind of tiered streaming is the only way they can manage this size of textures on such limited hardware.

True. I never had issues with pop-in on Wolfenstein using a hard drive. I'm sure the PS3 was a different story.