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18 ■ CGW Ja n u a r y / Fe b ru a r y 2 014 GAMING option of running the game from the hard drive instead of the disc, a move that has its own benefits. Gilbride says, "All games are installed to the hard drive in- stead of running from the disc. This allows us to load data into memory much faster than we could previously." Dan Greenawalt, creative director at Turn 10 Studios, the facility responsible for the Forza Motorsport 5 game on Xbox One, affirms this capability. "Thanks to the higher computa- tional power of the Xbox One's GPU, as well as the dramatical- ly improved memory bandwidth of the console's ESRAM, we can fit more effects into less time when rendering, dramati- cally increasing the quality of the images." There is a perception that the new console generation isn't only about power, and the other features that these units tout are a testament to that sort of thinking. When you add Blu-ray players, app stores, motion and voice interactivity, and cloud- based gaming, you begin to see that more power is just the tip of the iceberg. Even still, as we progress through this next generation of games, the power will increasingly be used to enhance the immersive quality of the graphics. Game Graphics By now, many of you will have checked out the numerous graphics comparison videos that can be found on YouTube and various game sites. Immediately, thanks to the titles having more memory on hand, we can see a greater level of graphic clarity, both in the near and far scenes. The number of higher- resolution textures has increased, along with the application of normal maps and enhanced lighting methods. But, this is only scratching the surface. We can anticipate developers employing the power of parallel GPUs, allowing them to execute multiple operations simultaneously without bottlenecks. This means more complex shading on surfaces in games. Forza 5 Motorsport is using this power to help convey the most realistic car visuals to date. "When it came time to thinking about how we could im- prove our graphics for Forza 5," says Greenawalt, "we wanted to move beyond mere polygon counts." Turn 10's approach came through a physically-based render- ing solution. Physically-based rendering simulates the interac- tion of light on material surfaces. It employs algorithms that accurately depict light reflection and absorption on any sort of material. For the cars and world in Forza 5, Turn 10 created thousands of real-world materials using this method. By using albedo maps to specify the amount of light that gets absorbed/ reflected on an object's surface, the artists can give every object more realistic and variable surface characteristics than ever before. "All these materials are built to reflect and refract light pre- cisely as they do in the real world," explains Greenawalt. The extra memory and processor power will also be utilized to bring real-time global illumination and raytracing to games in this generation of titles. Geomerics, a middleware developer, is bringing its own real-time global illumination lighting technol- ogy, Enlighten, to the new console platforms. "For Enlighten, specifically, I'd probably single out the increase in memory as the single biggest win," says Rob Precious, direc- tor of business development at Geomerics. "Enlighten was capable of running happily on the PS3 and 360, but it was tough getting developers to free up the memory we needed. For devel- opers used to squeezing into 512 mb of RAM, the 8gb of memory available on new hardware seems almost limitless!" Voxels will also be making a comeback with the help of the PS4 GPU compute cores. Resogun, a side-scrolling title from Housemarque that was available at launch for the PS4, is bring- ing voxels (three-dimensional pixels) to the next-gen screen. In the case of Resogun – which plays like the old arcade game Defender – the entire game world is made up of voxels that are accelerated on the GPU side to allow the game to explode with millions of tiny particles and with little or no frame rate hit. ■ SUPERGIANT GAMES is using the newly available power on the PS4 by adding more content to the levels in its upcoming Transistor title.