Xbox One Creators Program. (Performance)

I'm curious how much detail you all have been able to push on using the regular console to develop games.
I'm finding it to be near the performance of my iphone 8, and no idea why.

Perhaps it might be because I'm using 2K Textures for my rocks and stuff?
Maybe Deferred Rendering?
Maybe real time (Sun or Moon) light?
Maybe the Standard Shader?

But here's an example (image) No rocks in this image though. But nevertheless I face the same issue.
As you can tell, there's not really that much going on.


Even if I turn off the god rays, same issue.

I'm getting nearly 30FPS and it's not a steady 30FPS, it's a jerky kind so you can't even really turn the player without noticing the hiccups.

I know it certainly should be able to handle more detail than this, does getting a devkit really open that much more power for FPS? The stats for the creators program doesn't seem like it would really be that bad off performance wise (4 Gigs of ram), full GPU Utilization, CPU 4 primary cores and some shared cores.

My main goal with the creators program is to get a really good demo or at least really good test for Xbox to test out for a Dev Kit. But if the full power of the Xbox isn't much different than this, then console dev just isn't for me, because I could have sworn the Xbox could hit more than 300K Triangles before killing performance and certainly more than 50 shadow casters and 247 batches.

my iphone can handle more detail than this and stay steady.

 

I can barely see anything. If you think this is bright enough for players, I'd say your screen is way too bright and gives you the wrong impression.

 

Well I see everything perfectly fine. And I'm assuming this is why any game that does have dark scenes in it, have brightness sliders, as no two screen ever look the same. This is literally the single biggest problem I have with game design, is how no two screens are a like. So what looks perfectly fine on my screen, will look literally so dark you can't even hardly make out the moon on somebody elses screen.

There's a moon (obviously).
11 Connifer Tree's (With very low LOD at even the ones near you).
And some grass with a detail density of around 0.35 and a detail distance of 50 meters.
Terrains with a detail level of 200 (Highest setting) to keep polygon count down.

That's literally all there is in that image.
Bam - jagged FPS. lol.

 

I have recently used a colorimeter to profile all my screens to get as close as possible to soft proofing standards for print media, so I'm inclined to say "mine is correct, yours is wrong". Check a histogram of the right half of the image:



All your detail is in the lowest ~10% of the spectrum. No wonder that's completely gone on some screens. I can see that all those things "are there", but in a room with some amount of daylight it would be literally unplayable for me becaus things are too hard to see.
You need to move the important parts of your image more towards the middle of the histogram, so that a player with an overly dark screen can still play the game, and the parts that end up in the full-black spectrum of the screen aren't important. Additional sliders are good to have but imho you should aim to have a game be at least playable accross the majority of screens without any customization by the user.

Maybe try using mesh terrain instead of the unity terrain component.

Are those speedtree trees? I've heard jokes about it being "slow tree".

 

How do games like Alien Isolation achieve such darkness and yet keep it vivid for most people? But then again, I believe they have a slider at the very start of the game for this very reason lol..

The reason I ask, is because you mentioned my details are in the ~10% range.
But lets say I got them to the 50% range (the halfway point) I'm guessing you mean, wouldn't that make the bright screens, too bright?

Sorry never really used Histograms in many things, so never realized their importance.

 

Oh sorry forgot to answer everything.

Yeah they are speedtree's, but I optimized the models to be the least detail as possible, for initial testing and such.
Like 700 polys or less.

What would the benefit of using a Mesh Terrain over the Unity terrain for performance gains? Last I checked the Terrain would get distant parts and optimize it by lowering Poly counts and such and only give you the extreme details up close.


But honestly, the point of this thread though, was to see how much anyone else has pushed.
The profiler isn't helping much in this case because nothing is really going bad in it.

The only problem I really ever run into is culling the trees, but the weird part is, if I turn off Shadows, insta 60 FPS steady.

But that still begs the question though, certainly the Xbox one can handle more than just a few realtime shadows. heck my shadow distance is only set to a few meters. My iPhone can handle more than that many realtime shadows. And my computer, doesn't even fade hardly any FPS with 60,000 of these trees on my map.

So I'm thinking this really has something to do with the UWP Limitations.
Not the pure Xbox Hardware limitations.

I mean I made sure to switch it to 'Game' mode instead of 'App' mode.
But I still think it's UWP Limitations, not the hardware. I mean if you look at the Creators Program, the games released aren't of high graphical fidelity. And perhaps maybe it's not made for that? And I can understand if it isn't. My only problem is, despite being a registered @Id Dev with Xbox, I really really hate to try and get a dev kit if my game just plainly won't work on the system. I know we can't talk about @Id stuff here, just wanted to point this out.

 

I think they rarely are really useful, but they are an impartial objective way of proving when the spectrum is cut off at one end, or there are gaps there from insufficient bit depth or lossy image manipulations.

More contrast and more light in the important parts (doors, corners, obstacles). Here's a comparison:

On desktop I've seen the terrain component take 20+ ms per frame, and I can render a static ~9 million poly terrain in less then 10 ms I think. That probably was even before support for very large meshes was in Unity. Polycount is not all that important imho. At least on desktop. Dunno about xbox.

Try turning those off JUST on the trees. Still the big increase in framerate?

This thread looks relevant:

https://forum.unity.com/threads/uwp-xbox-one-poor-performance-enhanced-access.504884/

 

@Martin_H

Sorry took a minute was reading through all of the thread you posted lol.
Yeah, I think I should just build my game for PC and eventually just try to get a DevKit.

Seems like UWP stuff is really just a hackaround for getting it to work on the Xbox.


But dang that's crazy how that a Mesh of that amount of polygons renders faster than the terrain.
I might give it a shot. Is there anyways to keep my current splatmaps from terrain and put them on mesh terrain?

 

Maybe with a terrain to mesh asset from the assetstore. I don't know of an easy out of the box way. But I have little experience with terrain, so you better ask someone else about that.

 

Thanks man. I'll consider my options from here on out. A lot of insight you gave me.
Back to deving I go Take care man.

 

Sorry to revive the debate, but any hint as to how to optimize for UWP ?

Also, is there a bit difference in performance with the ID@XBOX kit ?