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There has been some confusion that our anti-aliasing uses the CPU – it does not. 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 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. We did our best – so it’s sometimes disappointing after so many late nights to see flippant remarks, over constructive criticism. 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. A basic overview of this rendering method can be found at. SHIFT 2 has a completely new engine which is a deferred, light pre-pass renderer. I’m going to use this post to give you some background on our engine and what’s coming up in the first patch. My name is Martin Griffiths and I’m PC Lead on SHIFT 2 Unleashed. Shift 2 – what’s coming in the first patch (NoGrip Quote)
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