Star Citizen Live: Graphics Engineering Q&A

4 February 202201:12:512,204 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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star citizen live graphics engineering q a starring ellie brown hi everybody welcome to star citizen live uh graphics engineering q a i'm your host jared huckabee and if you've never seen star citizen live before it's where we take about an hour out of our friday and spend time with our developers explore a bit of their process sometimes put them on the hot seat and make them face the questions that come from you our star citizen uh backer uh this week we have mr ali brown let me find your there we go mr ali brown director of graphics engineering aly how you doing man hello i'm doing good thank you uh welcome back to the show it's been a while thanks for having me and and and i want to point out i i want to do this to to
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to celebrate ali not to throw everybody else out but ali actually came to me and asked to do this show he uh he he saw a bunch of the ques he saw a bunch of the questions that folks had uh after uh citizencon uh about the graphics presentation and stuff like this and he's like hey i'd like to do a q a and talk more to the backers about the stuff and like i i did that thing where my eyes turned into like cartoon like what like the developer came to me and asked me to do a show so so i want to a pre uh all of us to put our appreciation out there and thank ally brown ahead of time for for coming to us and asking you the show now as we usually do we put up a thread in uh spectrum uh where we collect questions from the backers and let backers vote up the questions that they
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want to see answered most we collected those and went through them and if i were a professional i would have had them up on my screen before i started the show give me just a second ally tell us about your childhood i'm kidding here we go all right so so right off the bat uh ellie the number one question by a wide margin i mean it wasn't even close uh had to do with vulcan uh so uh in general why don't you start if you can give us a general status update uh on vulcan where we're at where we're going how's it going what can you tell us okay so um yeah vulcan is obviously going to be the back end of our new renderer which we've called gen12 um and
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the vulcan side of it is going pretty well um but ultimately it's limited by our progress on the gen12 renderer until that's complete vulcan can't be complete so at the moment we've uh as we've been developed on the gen 12 when we're very vulkan's always been playing catch up basically just as soon as something works the new renderer we look at vulcan make sure it works and then bring it back up to speed so it's just lags ever so slightly behind so in terms of like features for the vulcan render we're probably about 75 something like that um of that being completed but probably slightly less when you start factoring in performance because vulcan will perform slightly differently to direct text we were using in the past um probably a naive type of first version we run internally might not be quite as fast but obviously we don't want to ship that to you we want the
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ship the faster version so probably you know somewhere between 60 and 75 depending on how much performance work there is but uh a lot of that has been done like i said it's playing catch up to gen 12 and gen 12 is progressing very well now and once we type of which you know it's not far off and once we finish the gen 12 aspect we'll throw a bunch of bodies on the vulcan side and that will i think very quickly come up so we're not expecting a big difference between gen 12 uh release and then the vulcan release very soon after now if i uh correct me if i'm wrong here uh parts of the gen 12 rendering render have gone out in previous patches and even upcoming patches with 317. um this isn't going to be like a light switch kind of thing where where one day there's a patch and suddenly everything looks differently
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no and we would be lovely if we do that but the type of continuous live release means to do that we would have to keep both sets of code in parallel for like a whole year and it's too painful for to maintain both when we have constant features we're working on so as we finish something uh we live in type of a experimental stage for a while where we internally turn it on for the graphics programmers and then once we're confident we turn it on for the rest of studio and then the next patch that happens to come out will benefit from that so we've already i think as citizencom you already mentioned that all the post effects already converted we've been focused on getting the geometry done which is the biggest part of the game um at the stage we are today in the in our live uh in our stream internal uh we have all of the opaque geometry is kind of done which is the vast majority of the game uh and then the shadows are coming straight after that they're basically done just
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awaiting some testing so um the really the big bits are left actually is just to deal with the transparent geometry and then a few miscellaneous effects like i don't know the blackout effect and and things like that type of the the final piece of polish um but yeah the hard parts have been largely tackled i mean transparency is still a problem there's plenty of issues there but the bulk of it is type of making very good progress and won't be too much longer so i just wanted to be clear that uh we want to reiterate again before we move on that this is already coming out and releasing in parts and sections of it are turning on and stuff like this so they so so backers are already seeing the work and results of some aspects of it they'll see more aspects of it in 317 they'll see more aspects of it in 318. and then there will be a release we'll have more this
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year yeah it's faster and faster so there will just be a time when it's like okay that everything has now been converted over but it but it again it won't be like a big boom like you logged in on one on thursday and the game ran one way you logged in on friday friday now the game runs a different way it's it's already in progress it's already happening it's already releasing it's a little bit after a little bit after a little bit kind of thing yeah the minister and parts of it there will be bigger differences than other but the problem is a pc market like pc game everyone's machine is different so some people will be bound by that maybe they've got a really old gpu maybe they've got a single four core system versus an eight core system so everyone's gonna have different performance characteristics so there will be some unlucky person somewhere where gen 12 makes no difference to them and there'll be
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someone else who sees their framework triple it's it's hard to give a general rule but the each stage we expect to see benefits um probably the biggest ones might come towards the end because the focus initially is going to be getting things working getting things so they don't regress and get worse in terms of a performance time as far as the backer seats but in terms of actual performance improvements maybe i'll have once it's all working it'll be like right pylon let's see what's actually not working as it should in terms of performance and then the final uh switch to vulcan is probably the biggest change and that one is gonna be a bit of a binary you either use a block but using vulcan or you're not um everything else is gonna be more gradual all right um next step let's talk about uh uh let's see if we can hit some like some general gen 12 vulcan and
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performance related stuff all at once here uh cpu parallelization and scene rendering so uh i'm just going to read this directly here am i correct this is the person asking am i correct to say that when scene rendering is turned on for gen 12 and phase one that we will get some level of cpu render parallelization other than the parallelization we already have for visual visual visible objects across batch workers and cpu cores or is the parallelization only coming between phase two and three the latter being the optimization of the multi-core scene rendering and bye-bye render thread completely i'm mainly asking for the sake of high core count low single clock speed cpu users so that's quite a technical question um yeah so yeah each stage will get improvements in
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that regard for the people that have high core core counts low low clock speed um the parts many parts of the render are outwardly multi-threaded um and basically the gen 12 work is moving more and more to them multi-threaded stages and less and less work ends up having to be done on the single core what what this person's correctly called our render for head which is which will always remain on a single core but in the final final version of vulcan it will do almost no work so everything else will be paralyzed but yeah it will be every every single milestone will give benefits so every release we expect from now until the job's 100 finished you'll get an improvement uh while we're hitting you with the big ones let's just get some of the big ones out of the way here uh will the game always be so cpu intensive or will it move to a gpu intensive uh uh scenario
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at some point so the goal of gen12 is to remove a large chunk of the cmp cpu work so that will naturally mean it's more gpu bound um but even if there was no cpu cost from from the graphics team from my department the rest of the game is still big and complicated you know it's a very ambitious game so uh there's lots of work by all the other teams uh to reduce the cpu load and yeah i mean the engine team in the game team it's an ongoing thing that it's constant work to improve the performance uh massive strides have been made but at the same time the game's growing so you see you know what might be minor improvements but actually if we hadn't been adding features you would be probably getting a much faster frame it but you know the game has to be completed so yeah um i'd imagine do all these relatively intense cpu work on this game compared to a much more simple platform
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or something but yeah we we want to move into position where we're gpu bound from our team that's what we want and then we're type of limiting factor and then we can you know we can push the gpu effects harder then for the people that have gpus that can handle it and then we can scale it back and give people a good frame rate that they don't have uh such powerful gpus so yeah i think so i think we will move to be more gpu intensive but we have to be realistic that it's a complicated game they'll always have a decent amount of cpu load yeah it's it's it's interesting because there's an interesting challenge because we are running a live environment in the middle of our attempt to make the game so it's it's you you you you you build the universe out as it is and then you do something that makes it less cpu intensive and and puts more in the gpu
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and it's great but we don't just stay there we then add more to the game more features to the game more places the game more things that end up being cpu intensive and then you have to work to bring that that new stuff over to the cpu and then somebody comes in and adds more stuff to the game which adds more cpu stuff and it's like okay let's move to let's see what we can do to move that you know on there so it's this it's this constant uh uh neverending challenge of development here uh because even after the day when we go live and we say 1.0 and stuff development of star citizen doesn't stop you know we we keep moving we keep adding more planets we keep adding more systems i mean this train doesn't stop so so it's it is going to be a forever challenge uh for your team and all the teams all the performance teams to just constant to constantly not just optimize for
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what is there today but to continuously you know improve on everything else that comes tomorrow eventually it becomes slightly easier um the initial you know we've done a lot of building a lot of core technology um as we get further along we'd hope there wouldn't be so much core type of foundation like building the structures that allow us to build the universe it'll be more hopefully game features you know iterating on the phone adding more like mechanics um which should hopefully not be as intensive you know you're either mining or you're hacking you're either shooting or you're you know whatever the mechanics are they hopefully won't pile up forever um that's maybe different to the gpu side we'll constantly add visual effects you know for whatever machines can handle we'll add it but uh
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yeah hopefully on the game side which is where we've struggled with cpu uh speed that was e slightly but we'll yeah the game's gonna always be growing and if the cpus can handle it there will be no reason not to add more complexity yeah i i i think it's i think it's safe to say it's in our dna we're going to push this stuff as far as it goes we're going to keep pushing it so there's there's not likely to ever be just open overhead we're going to keep pushing that that's in our dna here uh let's see next question here when vulcan support does get implemented are you expected to look further into mesh shader pipeline and the benefits within um my shaders are something that certainly interests me greatly uh that we would really love to look at um one thing we maybe have to temper that
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with is that the adoption rate currently isn't huge among the market um for this new technology i think rough numbers i mean maybe 30 or something of our player base um but that's obviously going to grow over time and we also have to take in by the time you actually make the technology that the adoption rate would increase by the time you release it but still we have to be careful in what we use it for like if we made the use of these new mesh shaders which is a new way of building and rendering geometry if that was our core only method of rendering geometry we would lose half our player base and that would be a huge storm so we have to be wary that that's not a possibility now you can use it for optimizations which is one of the main benefits but also then you're benefiting an optimization to the highest power gpus that may not actually need it that much um so it's a difficult
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question the ideal use is something that can type of improve the visuals but then the people with the greater power gpus with the more modern gpus get to see these new visuals but somehow doesn't impact the experience of the the slightly less powerful gpus to still play the game um we really want to cut people off but there's not so much and i don't know very interpreted as holding back um it's more bang for buck you know if we're not doing messages we're doing something else we're doing some of the benefits as many people as we can but at some point the tide will turn and the benefits will be clearer by using mesh haters than they will by focusing elsewhere so it's definitely something that's very interesting for us and there's a few areas we've been uh discussing that we would like to use them potentially but yeah gen 12 is the focus so type of that's one light until gen 12 shift
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okay um this may be a little outside your wheelhouse but we'll we'll try it we'll see what we get has there been any internal testing of linux using vulcan this person is using vulcan the backdoor question about linux basically so um yeah well i'll pre-phase it with uh i generally don't have much involvement with linux that'll be more engine team and other stuff but i do know aspen um so in the graphics team internally i don't want an extent i think most of our guys don't win linux for the game however and gen 12 is our focus and windows support um however i know some of our employees have played the game and frequently play it via i'm told lucas and proton are the libraries they use on the next um and that they get reasonable performance already now switching to vulcan will make that
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existing method of running uh linux much faster and should you know theatrically give you uh comparable or even better performance on linux so i mean i'm not sure if that's the only way we'll support this i'm not sure if there's gonna be a native client that's a question for somebody else for engine team or cr but but i'm told there was there was a way and that way it's going to get faster with linux but we haven't tested ourselves yet um linux type of sorry the vulkan sport isn't a point where you could directly compare a to b like i said we're missing the transparent geometry at the moment so it'll be a bit unfair to compare like it might even run faster you've been missing parts of the game so until the type of got vulcan finished is only one point we'll be able to do a fair comparison um uh and i'll probably just sit in there just because people ask um i'm told and again this is not my area but there
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isn't uh an issue with vulcan at the moment easy enter cheat which i believe epic are looking into and there was sdks being released uh in the coming months and when they are released we'll be integrating them to try and resolve that issue um but again outside my sphere of knowledge i'm just dumping information i knew there would be linux questions so yeah yeah it's it's i saw it and i'm like this is like a 1980s sitcom backdoor question where they're they're they're trying to use the topic of one thing to back door a subject or another but i figured you know i can i could you know every once in a while uh let's move into some we got some questions here that are mostly about uh keeping visuals up to date uh uh one of the um ongoing concerns uh because our game has been in development uh for a while and because we've been running a live
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environment during that development since 2013 when the hangar module that came out lots of questions have to do with how you're going to keep things up to date so uh with the dev cycle being so long for star citizen how do you deal with the ever changing graphics tech and rework and still keep moving forward i think every aaa studio with its own engine has this the same challenge really keeping up to date um they constantly have to make new post effects as new technology or new ideas come about in the industry that's not massively different to us to any other type of i don't want to name them but i'm sure you'll know of the type of the ones that aren't part of massive using big engines or have multiple studio uh publishers um
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but yeah i don't see that being massively different uh we only have a couple of differences internally and one is we can't wipe the slate clean every couple of years when we release the game or however frequent a big studio might so we can't say well that was good we we did mostly good but we didn't like that technology so we're gonna next time we need a different one we have to build that while we're while we're running we have to build the next version of whatever it is so that that doesn't introduce some complexities uh but overall it's not especially for the graphics team it's not been a problem for us um most things are straight replacements you know you replace the old bloom effect for a new bloom effect you replace the old shader with a new shader it's not a a major problem and that's it you know i've been in a very uh quick dev cycle on a previous company and it's not that much different i don't find a major challenge the one point that i
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would say is different though is the art the art pipeline and the artwork we have we have to maintain everything that's been built we can't say oh we've done this new technology but these five spaceships don't work anymore that's just not an option so everything we make has to remain backwards compatible and what we tend to do is save for the art pipe and make a new shader that can do i don't know like the tint system for the spaceship so we can more easily roll out new skins it may not work in an old spaceship but we have to that system won't work an old spaceship we'll ship two versions of the shader the new one the old one and then somebody when they get the chance we'll go back to that ship assign the new shader maybe fix up anything then he's fixing up and then then we're good again but you know we can't demand that they work at the same frequency so we'll do the new technology and they will opt into it
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when they get round to it which you know might be the next week it might be a few months but eventually these things uh and once we get close to type of like you know 80 adoption we'd have to poke people with a stick to try and get over the hurdle so we can delete the old technology and that's constantly happening we have lots of different technologies that are type of in-progressive type of being rolled out across the assets so that's the biggest issue but it's not really a technology issue it's more of a data management issue with the size of the content of the game which is very huge i don't even know how many spaceships we have now but it's yeah big numbers it's a lot uh no it it it's a it's an issue that that people who have played other mmos uh at least the mmos that have survived uh for a while see it's just the the the the world of warcraft or or star wars old republic or star trek online just i'm trying to think of the sci-fi ones that
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are out there uh you know they're they're all they're they're constantly making updates replacing shaders uh and stuff like this that they don't they don't throw out their engine and start with another engine it is constantly you know adding and upgrading and and and just you know just you know swapping parts out eventually you know you start getting into the ship a thesis conversation where have you replaced every every part at some point is it still the original one uh and that's a question for video game philosophers not for dummies like me who just talk on the video let's move to another one here's an interesting follow-up will star citizen graphics get outdated or surpassed by other engines like unreal five lots of chat about unreal five in the uh in the chat because
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that's the current hotness yeah i mean similar questions the previous one in in regard that every developer that is not using unreal or or any big engine is going to have that same question uh uh and it's it's not really that different to be honest than the last 10 15 years you know maybe since you know say unreal three came around you know when we started to see these big engines and also the publishers that have been joining more devs together so i don't think it's anything new this obviously that always was going to be the big new shiny thing and some company not always the unreals but sometimes it'll be the other devs will come up the new shiny thing and everyone will learn from that and they'll trial it and that will look at the you know success or failure of that engine that game and see if that technology survives test of
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time and if it does other studios will naturally you know make their own version of that and absorb it into their pipeline um so you have this i think that's just the natural ebb and flow of the industry somebody will push head in one area the other people will eventually catch up it's continuous i don't think it's always one engine though i um there is things that the large companies can push much harder on which like i say the tooling um because they are selling a product to use their engine for people that maybe are not even professional game devs sometimes so they have to make the tooling very powerful and easy to use it's less of a focus when you have you know professional devs uh they're very used to the engine um so yeah it's it's something i'm not gonna pretend that we don't look at say uh the latest ue5 technology and see that that's pretty good you know there's some
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really impressive stuff there uh the mana in particular is very interesting yeah i'm not particularly worried as long as we continue to develop our engine as long as we continue to maintain and grow our graphics team and keep up the latest technology yeah we will be there just yeah it just doesn't mean that the day after unreal implement98 we're gonna implement tonight and there is sometimes obviously when the latest thing comes down there is always this and we're not talking about nana here specifically just in general but the assumption that that solves all of life's problems and then you wait six months or a year and you find out that it solves a subset of problems it's not you know it's not the solution to everything um there is many aspects uh to a full package of full engine like we've got all unreal so as long as we continue to maintain
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the engine and grow the graphics team and everything we should have no issue keeping up with the you know cutting edge i think so yeah i mean our visuals are still cutting edge now those areas the engine that we have we are extremely proud of that will uh match or surpass our vendors and those areas that are not as good that we need to improve um so i i don't see a major issue there um and for example they've picked unreal so i'll talk about that but the nanite tech with it improves the type of quality of geometry that that's super powerful in some areas it's it's a benefit everywhere but the main thing is type of natural geometry so for planets and things like this that could be a great benefit but it doesn't do as much for some other types of geometry internal spaces and i think our quality on our type of interiors has been extremely high for a number of years and matches any other game i see so you know
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it's not that we don't want much better you know natural geometry but yeah we'll get there um yeah but i'm not worried yeah as long as we you know maintain the development maintain the team as long as you're not going to fire tomorrow we're all good right one more question on the topic kind of a follow-up here uh i'm glad you said the main the the the maintaining anything because that's literally this question the game in his engine has already allowed the graphics to evolve massively compared to the original kickstarter days but can this be maintained to keep up with modern titles does the engine have a limit it was there going to be a point where we can't improve i don't think so it's almost the opposite um first off like an engine isn't a single thing obviously that has
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a limit you hit it and then you stagnate or you kind of replace it it's many many different subsystems and subsystems of the subsystems and these like i mentioned before are being constantly iterated or replaced uh and that's not a problem that's not wasted that's just the natural evolution of software um so in terms of where can we maintain it i think it's the opposite i think we're accelerating quite quickly i think the initial years was finding out of say for the graphics team is finding our feet we obviously inherited a code base learning that and then brought more people on board to have a better understand and start to develop that code base and more recently on the graphics side we'll obviously replace the renderer so now it is 100 hours uh i i understand our understanding of every nook and cranny of it um and then once that's done
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with type of uh our rate is going to be much greater be able to keep up with new technology um and that's the big motivator for gen 12 and the performance was one but the secondary one was to be able to adapt uh to new technology and create new pieces of uh new features much more quickly so yeah i think actually again as you know assuming the team stays the same or grows in size we've got plenty of uh capacity now to develop things much quicker than we have done in the past and we need to obviously because to keep up with the big engines but yeah uh i'm not considering that way i think we're going to be pushing a lot more visuals in the coming years uh chat is having a bit of a row about the difference between gen 12 renderer and dx12 uh are are we doing dx12 are we not doing dx12 what what's this
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no immediate reason for the dx12 we picked the gen 12 name well we started planning this render long before we'd necessarily settle 100 on vulcan and it would we just depict something um so you know dx12 was type of has a numbering system um at the time vulcan and the other apis didn't happen in wing so it's like 12. everyone understood what dx12 was in the industry so we went with something that had the number 12 in it um it helps pin down to this piece of tech and then the next one if you call it the new renderer then you have the new new end or the better renderer so it's called gen12 um but you know in the end we decided the vulcan was the the better choice for us because of the the linux aspect and a few other uh technology points of view made it slightly better for us um but it wasn't a big deal it wasn't you know we could have gone dx 12 but at the moment there's no pressing reason for us to
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implement the x12 um we could it wouldn't be a huge effort um put a couple of guys on it for some number of months and you would eventually uh pop that out but unless we have a reason to believe there was some new technology on dx12 or or some platform or something that required that there is no reason for us to really go there at the moment so for now there's no plans for directx 12 but the engine is set up in a way that we very much could implement another api if we needed to you know if the success of the vulcan comes along or the x-13 is is the thing that we need to make the world better then we will do that fair enough all right let's get let's let's move more into like life in in the game and how this stuff actually like manifests and and stuff for players in the game uh will we have more refined graphics
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settings soon uh currently our options are very limited and somewhat confusing um yeah i have to admit we've not spent a great deal of effort there as you'll probably see from the comment but the we've been holding off for a while because of we were mostly cpu bound then graphics options are generally to try to squeeze out performance um generally you know we generally want at the highest quality most time and and it's only to scale back and mostly would not be gpu bound so there wasn't a huge deal huge motivation for scaling the engine back um all the folks have been getting the cpu cost down which is what the servers need it's what the clients need so that's been the focus and then implementing gen 12 changes the way the render works so it would change the way we'd expose the options so if we're
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going to get 1012 done and then we're going to have a fresh look at these options they will probably have quite a radical change we're going to simplify them a lot but then also we'll have an advanced section they'll be much more complicated than we have now but um yeah at the moment i think there's four different quality settings but we're gonna maybe change that up maybe reduce that a bit but then um the memory management is something we're probably gonna push much further yeah but yeah we're definitely gonna have a whole bunch of new options and make sure that the options we have give you some meaningful change some of the settings we have there you can change things to high or low reduce draw distance to increase them you'll find that the frame rate doesn't really change and it's a point they're saying so why have it so we're going to set them based on what it needs to change the frame rate by a certain fraction so you know high or might be 20 slower than
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medium and low might be 20 faster that would be the motivation and if it doesn't change performance we won't expose it so far up to that while we're in the graphics settings options here uh would it be possible to add a windowed borderless mode to the graphics setting vastly improves the quality of life for multi-monitor users which is a fairly substantial part of the player base we already support a borderless window mode but um i'm going to gather because they've talked about multi-monitor they're probably meaning that i think it centers onto your main monitor at the moment and it locks the resolution of your center monitor so you can't drag that out to spam two or three monitors and customize the resolution if you don't say if you've got three 4k monitors maybe you don't want to run at 12k uh unless you've got a monster gpu so yeah um yes definitely it's a bit of an embarrassment we haven't quite got to
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that yet that's definitely something that's very high on our priority list to post that to fix his stream as soon as gen12 was done um yeah so resolution scaling and then picking you the size of the monitor and let you uh the window and let me move it around yeah yeah definitely yeah it it there is some version of it there but it doesn't have the features that a lot of people expect it to have and internally we all we already have the resolution scaling which is one aspect of it that people have been asking for as well but that doesn't quite work why you are yet so there's just a few bugs there and then the changing of the size of it shouldn't be a complicated issue so yeah i can't can't give an exact time frame but it it definitely will be we'll be looking at that very soon i tend to play almost everything in windowed borderless because i need to switch over to teams or email or something on another monitor very easily
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uh you know because you know just in the middle of the day cr will ping me or something i just i just gotta i always have to keep an eye on the left on the left screen while i'm playing on the middle so windows borderless makes that makes that experience a lot easier for me there can be some quite uh technical differences between when you run the the full screen uh borderless and the exclusive full screen you get it depends on lots and lots of factors but there is changes in performance potentially one depending on your system either could be faster and is also changing the latency as well uh generally full screen exclusive is less latency but yeah a pain when you're getting messaged by someone and you know discord or something and you want to alt tab well i i i don't i don't ever worry about latency i i suck at any latency so it doesn't matter a couple fractions of a second aren't
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gonna isn't the difference between me being good enough or not i'm just bad um uh are there any plans to let us turn off temporal aaa or and get rid of the ghosting that it brings ah that's a funny one i got halfway through it i was like yeah so temporal aaa anti-aliasing um is one form of what we call a temporal accumulation system it uses data from a previous frame to basically just make things cheaper it opens the door to a whole host of new technologies now anti-aliasing is one of them and the most obvious but it actually is a major way we can reduce noise in all of our rendering um and also it can help you introduce blending effects you can blend
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between two things like for example uh currently our planet uh terrain uses the temporal blending to blend between all the different ground textures in terms of turning off temporal a if you turn it off then you don't just turn off anti-lacing you turn off all the temporal blending system so you'll get noisy shadows noisy occlusion no blending on the terrain so yeah it's not quite as simple as turning it off and this is an unfortunate reality of modern rendering and you'll find that in many engines like 78 of them is the case because it gives you so much performance um it lets you spend it on everything else and usually it's only type of quite bespoke quite uh narrower focused games that can afford
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to not use it and can blow the you know bandwidth on a different form of a that's usually more expensive like msa unfortunately probably a hard off at the moment is not possible um we can potentially expose the option but it would probably have to come out if we did that for massive warning that what you're about to do is going to break the visuals you know what i don't want to see is the graphics moment we're seeing pictures of our game looking awful and broken and people posted look how bad this game looks so um but maybe there's a halfway house maybe we can maybe there's decrease the strength of it but with a warning that you know some effects will become more noisy as a result of that so you'd think that it's you know just gonna make the image crisper or type of sharper but actually you'll be degrading it in other ways yeah um so maybe not a hard off but there might be some some flexibility now we can have a
00:34:30
look at that when we look at the graphics options to see if there's something that makes sense um yeah it's a tricky one though it's an unfortunate reality nobody likes temple ia in the company like no especially ui people hate it because of the potential messengers um uh yeah you'll find everyone from vfx hates it because it kind of smudges out their particle effects it's not a nice thing nobody appreciates alternative but it's amazing what it can do it is vastly superior to the alternative so it's tricky but maybe you know some people some people just want the image sharp as having like sharpening controls or tweaking that is okay but the ghosting the ghosting is specifically which this person mentioned is tricky because that is a product of using the data from the previous frame in an area screen where you don't have data from the previous
00:35:16
frame so if you turn the camera quickly or somebody runs in front of you you don't know what was there previously so you have to make it up and basically what you're seeing when there's the ghosting is sometimes actually the lack of temporal data so that's type of a clue as to what you might get if you didn't have temporary so yeah for any issue it's just going to move very slowly yeah um we'll see what we can do see if there's something that can happen when we look at the graphics options you can kind of help with that this person enabled auto hdr on windows 11 and says it looks extremely good can we expect native hdr in the future did i say hdr the first time or did i say something else they enabled auto hdr in owner's eleven it looks good can we expect native hdr
00:36:04
in the future yes absolutely um so we already support hdr through most of the pipeline you know all the rendering is hdr um unfortunately there was two things that we left to do to complete that um one is our color processing so uh generally what happens is you you produce your image in a high dynamic range and then you crunch it down to a low dynamic range which is the bit you know hdr needs to modify um but then we then color correct it just like you would in a film you like adapt the colors you try and produce a mood and that process is built in low dynamic range and as a result of that it's it's not and it's an art because an artistic process we can't just turn it into hdr it needs to go back to art we need type of review how would they would like to do this color equation in hdr it's a reasonably known problem other
00:36:52
studios have tackled it but that's just the piece we haven't got to um and then there is a minor bit of work into like making sure that it works in all the different types of hdr there is so many different formats and so many different blindness screens and monitors of you have to do a bit of careful q a to make sure that you actually get good results um there's no point just testing on my fancy hdr screen and then having a natural consumer one might actually look good so yeah there's two two little bits to finish off and uh the continuing theme here is after gen 12 we really just want to get gen 12 done but yeah that that's quite high on the list um it initially was not as important because hdr monitors were relatively rare for the pc market compared to consoles which you'd play on a tv which tends to support hdr um but it's definitely become a lot more
00:37:39
popular now uh see uh while we're on graphics things we got a nice little collection of graphic settings questions here um will you add an option to turn camera based motion blur off but keep object-based motion blur on yes and i'm slightly ashamed that we don't i know that uh digital family friends uh have pushed hard for that and yeah um yeah clearly um the camera motion blur is uh contentious to say the least um object motion blur has some some public backing far more than the camera motion blur which is notoriously
00:38:25
hated by a lot of people good for cinematics great cinematics makes it amazing wonderful for cinematics yeah while you're in the fast-paced action uh it's controversial yeah and i think i think there is a slider i don't i can't know what's exposed we have type of ability to tone it down but yeah most people were just like off i don't want that part of it it doesn't add anything um but things like um character animations and gun reloads and stuff can look a lot better with some object motion blur if it's you know at the right level not too in your face we just optimized the game until it was at 240 frames a second and then your eye does it for you the human eye can't see more than 60 frames a second i'm just kidding right true i'm just kidding we don't have a frame rate
00:39:12
why do i poke the bear sometimes i don't know i have a pulse control problem as players consider gpu purchases should they expect vram usage to keep increasing as the game is developed that's a just one um so we've had to be quite careful in the past with the amount of video memory use we have you know backers that are backed early on that don't have quite so powerful gpu so um they don't hold us back we're just trying to make sure that we type of don't rule them out of the game so we've been quite smart in how we've used the memory and we make sure that they're still able to win the game obviously the performance will be not as good on their machines um so yeah i think with three to four gigs you can run the game quite comfortably
00:39:59
and get decent visuals um so and i think type of the four gig region will stay running the game quite nicely for quite some time i don't think there's a technology reason why the minimum needs to increase but what will happen is we have all these different pools of memory and how much use for textures how much use for geometry and so on and the type of the core amount remember you need to run everything without textures without measures is increasing over time and eventually out of your four gigs if we end up with three gigs to do the bare basics then your one gig left won't give you a lot of textures in a lot of geometry you'll still be able to run the game but eventually yeah you'll start getting diminishing returns eventually um uh and there's elements of that already like when we added planets gas clouds these things all took up memory so i think gas clouds are budgets like 300 megs 400 x
00:40:46
or something so that has to come from somewhere and if your machine doesn't have it you're getting less of something to pay for that now one thing we are going to do is with gen 12 um as a necessity of the way vulkan works the memory management is much more explicit basically rather than uh directx or nvdon video intel managing the memory for you it's left largely to yourself as a developer but as a result of that we're going to be or we are much more strict with how we use the memory and what we're going to do is what a few other games have done this type of expose that to you in the advanced graphics options so you can see exactly what memory using and type of balance that as you see fit so if you want you want your more textured memory and then you will sacrifice something else then that's your choice and you can dab of see how this is how we're adapting rather than being hidden from you slightly at the moment and the other thing that a lot of people
00:41:33
maybe don't realize is resolution you run the game has a huge impact on the map memory so when i'm saying like four gigs is okay if you're trying to win the game you know 8k or 4k widescreen or something you are taking a huge amount of memory for the bare bones just getting the screen rendered without any geometry or textures in there so you leave very little room for them if we expose it to you and show it to you you'll be much more clear and people with that don't have as much memory will be able to make a smarter decision how they want to use it if they're interested obviously we'll have automatic settings do our best job but yeah should you want to delve into that so to answer the question yes vram used to will steadily increase but i don't think i'm minimum will increase for a while i think it will be quite stable for quite some time um especially the four gig region is gonna be okay but yeah um we definitely want to be
00:42:21
able to push to the eight and more eventually as as you know and we need to because like for example the consoles have you know more memory than four gigabytes significantly so and we need to be beating them so we need to use it but we just need to keep something in but in reserve for the uh for the for the four gig people all right so let's uh uh let's move out of the graphics options and into the the the the graphics as people experience them in the games here uh what they actually see on the screens right off the bat here how are you planning on handling the graphical toll as players enter a system when multiple space stations millions of objects thousands of players all in one location uh current because currently xenothreat
00:43:09
can sometimes cause a rather nifty uh powerpoint presentation uh for people uh sometimes even when they there's like less than 30 hanging around i think a lot of that will be cpu issues usually i mean it would have to profile each case but when we've looked at things like zenfra it's nearly always a cpu cost um and generally if you know say in a space battle like xenophob you know in terms of polygon count it can't be that high i mean you're in space like there was a limit to what you can see on screen um even if half the screen is filled with space that gives you an enormous amount of budget to spend you know on the bizarre arm space um so yeah we do have some things like gas clouds which are more expensive in space but otherwise it's not usually a gpu concern in space it's a cpu now uh to be the same drum again gen 12 is
00:43:59
one of the major parts of the solution for cpu performance but it's not the only part and when it comes to xenothread that will be the game code there will be a lot happening there there'll be a lot of lasers firing a lot of ai there'll be a lot of all sorts of things happening and the optimization there is largely going to come from the game teams i think um obviously as we're moving as much as we can from the rendering side of it from the graphics the cpu cost of that will free up more time for them uh but ultimately i think we'll get to a point where we'll will get better but then it'll be on to their teams type of then take the mantle and push it further so um yeah i think we can handle it for the graphic side uh we will as we do gentiles we'll definitely improve how easily we can handle it but then the game team and the engine team will have to continue to optimize which they're doing
00:44:47
every day there's constant emails work being done on that side it's a it's a good uh chance to remind uh folks that i was reading the question from the backer so you know the though those when the backers the one who said thousands of players all in one location that is not your opportunity to run to reddit and say disco said there'll be thousands of people in one location i was reading the question from the backer that's the pact between you and me you mean you no no no no i'm talking to the people who are watching that stuff no reddit thread about how jared said there were going to be 10 000 people in one place that's not what i said i read
00:45:34
the question as the backer wrote it hold on hold on i gotta give me a second alley i gotta do this i gotta make sure people to understand [Music] all right and because you guys did so good because because we have this pat i'm gonna ask the question you guys have been waiting for will there ever be practical night vision that players can use well much in the same vein where you have don't want to promise thousands of players to the backers um i can't promise game design
00:46:23
issues um i think there's various game designs are interested in it but i will not speak on their behalf but what i can do is talk about night vision implementations and how it's done and leave it to the designers as to what that means in star citizen so in terms of night vision almost every game up until the last couple of years has done the same thing which is make the screen go a bit green change the colors a little bit brighten it up a little bit and job done there's your night vision um you know so that's fine um it it you know we can do that no problem um but recently we started to see people going a little bit further um and i don't think has played the call of duty modern warfare but they did a significantly better implementation um it's worth looking up but they they really push the boat a little bit
00:47:10
further and try to emulate exactly what night vision does or particular model of night vision they do the spectral stuff right yeah so they type of better approximate what each color looks like when looked at under infrared uh the infrared color so they type of convert the colors that you would see well that we know an artist says this is going to be a red can they do the maps and figure out what that looks like under infrared camera um and the other thing they do is for things that have uh particularly non-standard type of uh unexpected type of brightness in infrared like a reflector or you know red light or or whatever either certain materials that reflect very brightly they would the artists have marked this up so they have this data to give you the much more convincing uh visual so yeah that's definitely in
00:47:59
the vein and one we the one thing we have to be careful of is the amount of artwork we have means we can't just go and ask the artist to go and flag up every single material they've ever looked at um but we do already have various markup on materials so that we the rough surfaces that the types of things they're made of so we can retrospectively type say oh all the ones were made of metal this is how they should respond all the ones that are made of like you know reflective strips they respond like this so there should be scopes to do something like that um and that's definitely what aspire to i can't promise because we're not doing that right now and until design say today is the day you make the night vision mode um that's the day i can talk more freely about it but yeah it'd definitely be an interesting thing i'd love to explore all right so uh uh what i'll tell backers right now is the is the next time we have the opportunity to talk to
00:48:47
todd pappy oh well we'll squeeze that question in there and and see what he has to say what are the technical limitations on the cloud volumes introducing noise when being viewed uh from a near horizontal angle uh so did read that right there so yeah um so the the cloud technology is something our engine director has been pirating for some time so i want to care for a second i want to speak on his behalf um many different things we talked about i mean my remit but this is definitely his baby um but i do know a bit about how it's implemented so i can speak a little bit on it um the clouds are built from there's many different stages that go into that process to build the clouds um
00:49:35
and each of them say i can't remember it's a five or six different stages each of them has been rnd and multiple different alternative solutions for them and we're constantly finding new ways and prove ways to replace each section and the noise in particular particular at the um horizontal angle we mentioned is because the way the clouds work in our engine and most of us is you type of you have like an imaginary way that's fires through enter the distance and type of you sample or you you take samples along that point along that way so say i take 50 samples between here and the horizon and i ask i want some calculation to decide how much cloud cover there is each of these points then add them all up and i eventually come up with the final contribution of clouds but if you imagine if you're looking from orbit straight down or from the ground straight up the amount of cloud
00:50:22
cover you see versus looking horizontally is like hugely different like you know you can look through like 100 kilometers of clouds versus one kilometer if you look straight up so when you're winning say 50 samples over 100 kilometers there is like a huge amount of error and that would show as like type of a stepping blocky artifact to so you don't see blockiness and stepping we randomize the where we sample that ray so it turns into noise we have begin to r d solutions that will vastly improve that there's already many mechanisms to try and minimize that but one thing that's showing very good promise is we kind of do an initial render basically of the clouds at low resolution i think it's quarter or an eighth resolution try and identify where the cloud is like where is the noisy parts where is the most of the detail and then when it comes to do the main tracing of the
00:51:09
clouds we put all the the rays and the samples where we need them so we have without saying oh this part of the scene is like there's a fringe here it's like a silver lining on the cloud that looks really nice but it's noisy so we'll fire you know many more samples there and this next part of the screen would be a big foggy nothing's happening no point spending all of our gpu on that so yeah we cut back on that point so it kind of optimizes it at the same time as improving the quality on different areas of the screen so that's looking promising um i'd say but because it's the engine team managing when we're talking about releases and stuff but it's it's there is definite improvements coming on that side of things um and it's going to continue to be put on for you know thank you you see we've we've only got eight
00:51:56
minutes but i think we can squeeze uh some more and maybe maybe we can go a little bit over the time here uh does the rtx does rtx get the team any closer to figuring out a solution to the lack of reflective surfaces or mirrors in the game uh had to come up didn't it um so yeah so we have plenty of like shiny surfaces in the game but i i gather they mean like mirror like full-on mirror reflection like really really clean um yes i know um for true mirror-like surfaces ray tracing is the only sensible way to solve that problem there's no real alternative you are however much simpler solutions for bespoke cases like the many games where you've seen like water reflection
00:52:45
or a single mirror uh like a typical mirror and that's stuff they can be handled just by rendering the scene again from a different perspective usually at lower quality of some type of compromise to stop it being har the performance um and they're quite viable and we could definitely would probably consider doing that um especially because it's quite simple and for the mirror case it's a nice easy way to work um it does require just a little bit constraint from the artist not to do like a hall of mirrors they'd have to you know you put a mirror in a bathroom and ideally but when we when we're told aren't to test this in the past they'll do it and then behind the bathroom they'll be like a bengal or something and you're like no please put them in a location that's why you can never give players a handheld mirror it'll just become a nightmare yeah i mean you kind of basically could but you were just half the performance literally of the game so um yeah um and the engine although it would you
00:53:34
know you'd hope like a say a handheld mirror would be smaller some parts of the engine will not be able to scale down so like the number of pixels will be less so that's great you'll save on something but there'll be certain aspects the game will not scale down so if just one tenth of the screen size doesn't mean it'll cost ten times less it might still only cost like fifty percent of us so you know who wants to take a 50 frame rate hit to have a handheld mirror um so yeah i mean and if you played any racing games which have rear view mirrors you'll always see the lower quality they get in the in the rearview mirrors or they have such a bespoke engine to manage that and that's like a core feature um unfortunately we've got an extremely complicated game before we consider mirrors but yeah um so first for small mirrors like you yeah you'd probably just render the theme flipped that is something we've been considering um it hasn't been a really strong need for it but there is uh some news from some departments
00:54:21
asking for it um which is all i'll say there but the um yeah but for when you get to the fully general case like you know seeing your reflection in a spaceship for curved surface ray tracing is the only real answer there uh for some reason there's a person named donkey aura in chat who just said all game devs are lazy uh i've only spent the better part of eight years proving otherwise but you do you will the game get realistic snow weather that is not identical to dust storms uh for instance the dust particles on hurston appear to be the same as on microtech with just a different color so two parts the answer one is um i don't know if the dust particles are
00:55:10
literally the same particles on it and the two examples again there but they might be the same they might be different um there is the tech there already for them to be different uh we or have a system that type of quite complicated ground effect system it's not strict speaking weather it's the wind kicking up whatever's on the ground so if there's snow on the ground and there's a lot of wind it will kick the snow up and we already have the ability to do different effects per uh we call it surface type each type of material on the ground um so that in effect could be done now um it's more of an asset vfx type question from the art teams however it's not to get probably the real answer it's not snow it's snow being kicked up in a blizzard basically um to get actually uh strong winds to get a full-on snow full on weather that's something different um and it is on our internal road map uh i think a lot of people are quite
00:55:59
excited to get onto that um but it's i don't have a timeline i can show on at the moment but yeah it will clearly when we implement full-on weather that will be a bespoke effect you know snow does not look like you know dust you know it has a specific look and you know you'd expect rain and all the other types of weather hail or whatever so it's on there it's it's it'll be coming one day not today all right uh before we let you go we got to get into the the buzzwords here dlss and fsr again i'm reading the reading the question from the backer here this is planned for later on but i believe in a spectrum post it was stated that we may be getting dlss before fsr due to one manufacturer's popularity over the other based on statistics my question stems from one upscaling
00:56:48
technology benefiting everyone whereas the other benefiting only one party there is actually no question i guess so they just want an update on dlss and fsr and whether one will be coming before the other one and if it's based on popularity or something i guess that's the question they actually forgot to include a question that's okay i get that i get a picture um so yeah i mean those two technologies um they obviously aim to do a similar goal but in the way they're implemented they're completely different um and they have quite different performance different quality uh and different suitability to have the engine and the problem you're trying to solve um and also how easy they are to integrate um is quite different um it's they fit into different type of areas of the pipeline and we
00:57:34
have both of these techniques introduce a few complications to the engine because particularly for ui because most games you know there's my game world uh upscale it slap my ui on my 2d ui and that says you know how many bullets you've got or whatever and you're going and then job done last type of the frame but our ui is largely in the world and also we don't have one type ui we have so many types ui we have you know the options menu but then other than that we have like mobile glass which is almost like a traditional ui but it's not it's still in the world you can still see behind you people running up to you while using it we have the holographic ship ui we have the mfds we have uh a type of uh icon of all different names you haven't but like things that are in the world type of inner fort they call it you know when you're gonna talk to someone and it comes up with the options there's so many different types of ui and none of these play nicely with the lss or fsr um so there's some work for
00:58:23
us to figure out there um but yeah as they mentioned the market share isn't equal one is currently supporting every gpu um if they can afford a performance and the other is on a much smaller percentage uh i think 30 percentage might be type of the region you've been looking at for dlss at the moment yeah for me it's not really a question of a versus b um they're type of gonna be considered independently on their own merits you know can we implement one how long will it take how do we implement it um but yeah i can't pretend that market share it's definitely a factor though like you know if we have something that's going to benefit 99 people or 100 percent of people we want to implement that over some of the benefits 10 of people but on the other side you know say we implemented one of them and it didn't give great results we under no
00:59:11
obligation to implement that and i don't want to pretend that we haven't or also any other company hadn't implemented technology that is only benefiting a subset of the people you know if we implement hdr we talked about earlier if you don't have a hdr monitor tough luck uh ray tracing don't have uh you know rtx card or playstation d tough luck uh in optimizations for one cpu brand or the other or face over ip these are like many examples where it benefits a subset you know that's not that's not great to be benefiting a subset but you know we wouldn't have any of them technologies or ever have any of them if we only tried to satisfy 100 of the people all the time so it's more of a independent decision bang for book i can see both of them being implemented um and probably the time tournament is probably the largest factor to be honest
01:00:01
chat is currently that's not the right scene what is this i don't know i heard the wrong scene hi everybody a chat is currently saying it's the wrong button that was the wrong button uh chad is currently uh arguing about whether dlss and uh uh fsr is better and and and they're getting pretty contentious there for saying dude do you want to jump in on the you don't want to do it i can't answer what is better or worse um i will leave that i mean that's technology owned by two different companies who are integrating it individually so you know up to them um but what i will say is um dlss has a distinct advantage in the way that it's currently style in that it is using more information that goes into it so it has a better chance of giving a good
01:00:48
result uh fsr is intentionally takes less information in so it there's a limitation to what it can actually achieve um so there was a fundamental limitation there now either of them could change tomorrow you know these are two independent companies make their own decisions on how this technology works but yeah at the moment it's it's more the upper limit is higher for the lss because of the inputs they take in and that's a decision you just you just make you know yeah your technology can work different ways you know people we talked earlier about uh temple uh solutions if you use data from the previous wayne you have a much better chance of doing a good result you introduce a whole bunch of potential issues with ghosting and you'll get one person that thinks that's a fair trade-off and other people that think that's not a good trade-off so yeah it's not a subject of what is better but the if you had a static camera
01:01:36
then having the more information theaters gives you a chance of giving a better image but i'll leave it to the public to decide what's actually better okay let's uh let's get some last ones in that we're technically a little bit over time but if you're game just a handful more here um will we see hud visibility improvements this is always the the perennial question current bodies like ela crusader etcetera planets are nearly impossible to fight against during daylight because the terrain blows out the targeting info yes um obviously we have the the ui team would have their their party on this as well but we constantly hear from them and actually spend a good time today talking about this issue with the ui team um it's not a trivial problem uh we
01:02:25
we have things that are you know insanely bright in the game where you're looking straight at the sun and there's always subjective nature as whether that should be blinding you know it is incredibly bright or um you know and it is a factor in real life like but yeah there is many times when it's not as legible as you'd want um so what we've done on our side we've done quite a few different shaded changes which are mostly done that type of in the process have been brought into the ui pipeline to be used in the game but these are things like adding uh drop shadows underneath text um we have uh ways like you probably noticed when you use the mobile glass it darkens the scene and changes the exposure to give a better chance of standing out we have a new bloom and type of drop shadow background blur effect that we can apply behind the ui to kind of smudge out some of the details and today we just got a request
01:03:13
to also clip out extra bright details behind something so say if somebody's got a torch or there's some particular bright light just behind in front of you then you bring up mobile glass we'll type of clip that type of extreme bright highlight out um but this is the type of and then type of getting it into the engine and getting into the actual assets on the ui team so we've done quite a lot of work there and they're looking to try and uh integrate some of that into the ui pipeline and they come in weeks months yeah and it's definitely something actively talking about and improving yeah and uh folks may want to check out uh it was just uh it was just november or october it was relatively recently uh we did one of these qas with simon bersie the director
01:04:00
of ui and stuff and he asked this the same question went to him and you can see his answers uh it's not the kind of thing that moves particularly faster changes to too much in in in three or four months so the so the answers he gave you there will probably still be uh applicable today so you can check out that star citizen live uh from just a couple months ago what graphical improvements uh coming are you personally most excited about this probably won't be the answer everyone wants but i just want i just want frame rate frame rates king for me tell it solid 60. that's no good um so yeah for me it's a frame rate uh once we have solid 60 uh my interest will pick elsewhere um there is somewhere as the engine visually that i certainly want to see improve vastly
01:04:50
um but not before frame rate um that's number one for me um i've had to pick a second though just to pick someone's interest maybe uh our global illumination i'll have a lighting system is is lacking that's probably the the area that we are furthest behind over engines everything else is on a power better than your average competitor but the global illumination system is is not where we wanted to be so uh that would help the visuals and really help the art teams as well so that's what i'd like to see then we'll leave you with this last question how do we get to 60 frames a second what's the what what what what's the mat what's the magic bullet is there a magic bullet or is it is it 50 other smaller things that all have to happen in succession uh to get us there different answers for every single
01:05:40
person obviously different machines you know some people might always be getting north of 60fs all the time some people will never hit 60fps for me it's three things it's gen 12 first um once we finish gen12 which is our cpu optimizations we shift our focus to gpu optimizations and the graphics settings to give people control over how their gpu has been used and then after um the one part that i have no control over is just the rest of the engine in the game code which will which we talked about earlier when we talked about cnfl the particularly challenge area is a game where we get a ton of players or you know city and whatever else on screen uh or things like expo halls sometimes should be challenging like this is where we uh where the other rest of the company will have to take their or they are taking their type of part of the problem on but yeah for for our side it's definitely just gen 12 and then after that immediately
01:06:26
after that we'll look at the gpu side of it um to give you some more flexibility there networking i really want to see 60fps after this um especially there will be situations like i said would be more uh troubling but difficult that the i'm hoping a lot of the game for most people you know that's the target in addition to graphic stuff it's there's networking stuff there's the there's the meshing there there there's there's streaming there's just uh optimizations in in the actual assets themselves there there's there's you know further lod development it's it's it's everything it's it's there is if you take if there's one answer you take away from for this question folks there is not one thing that will get us where we're going and and that's that's
01:07:15
the truth for any game and on any platform especially true for one as big and as ambitious as ours it takes the work of almost every team in every aspect of star citizen to get us where we're going and that includes to our performance goals so so it will not be i just i just want to disabuse anybody of the notion that there will be a magic day where we throw out a patch and it will just be and everything better you will you will see just like with vulcan when we talked about at the beginning of the show it will be it will be implementation after implementation after implementation after implementation that gets us uh where we're going and then uh like a uh like getting used to cold or hot water it'll just it's it'll just we'll just suddenly be there and it'll be where we need it to be so so one thing on that we're going to add
01:08:03
is the um something i spoke about as citizencon and i've talked about on some of the spectrum is that i would like to improve some of our type of um debug stats type of get for the backers so they can kind of understand their performance a little bit better um because you know some points for cpu bound uh and a better cpu or more cores or faster calls would be the what you need and at some point it's cpu and i want to more clearly display that to the users or the ones that are interested in that so they can better understand why their framerate is what it is and whether there is anything they can do and especially obviously if they're gpu bound it does become fully under my control well i guess art as well obviously they're producing the content we're putting on the screen but um ultimately like the graphics and rendering um is under our controls when it when your gpu bound the graphics options we provide you uh and how our technology works will be
01:08:51
you know that's all we need to get to 60 but if you're cpu bound then it's more complicated picture um yeah but we're hoping to like inform people because there is a lot of misinformation and confusion sometimes about the performance of the game um because it has changed so much and it has been difficult in stages and yeah i just want to clarify it for back a second no nonsense this is this is where your framework is at um hopefully that will help people understand and help them improve their framework as well and see the improvements like as they come so they can see their gpu time reducing uh or the cpu you know the cost of the rendering side of the gpu side rendering side of the cpu decreasing as we release gen 12 you know even if they happen to be in the xeno at that moment and still not getting maybe quite the framework they want all right so that about wraps it up uh
01:09:38
ali thank you so much for taking the time to be on the show uh this week uh uh specifically again like i did the beginning uh for for coming to us and then asking to to do a show and asking to speak to the backers and and share your information we uh uh if i'm allowed to speak on their behalf i know that we all appreciate it um some housekeeping stuff uh remember uh stars uh or inside star citizen uh came out yesterday with looks at with a look at refueling coming in the upcoming alpha 317 as well as the hover quad i have no idea when the hover quad comes out keep your eye on the robertsspaceindustries.com i'm not involved in that stuff so i don't know i just make the videos um i do want to i do want to add i saw some comments about the christmas tree in in in in in tom's uh background uh he filmed that back in
01:10:28
december that's how long a lead time some of this stuff has so don't give him too much crap for he doesn't still have his christmas tree up i asked that was filmed back in december so go easy on him uh heck the refueling thing was filmed in november so it's that's that's how far the lead and how those things go uh then uh uh next week we've got an oops all sprint report edition of inside star citizen we'll be checking out all kinds of aspects of star citizen development in next week's ise and uh then we'll be right back here on friday with another star citizen live and i can't remember what it is or who's on it right now so i'm bad at my job uh also remember xenothreat is ongoing now i believe it's moving into phase two uh if it hasn't already it will uh soon so so check that out as well as the this month in star citizen post on the
01:11:16
robertsspaceindustries.com website where there's all kinds of activities uh happening in the month of february including uh quoramore and and more more and more uh and then finally uh last thing uh i have not moved to the uk yet i see some people like why did he build the same background uh no i am in a completely virtualized background none of this is real uh i'm actually still on vacation at disney world uh you were you were you were witnessing a simulacrum of disco uh but uh we uh we uh i relocate to the uk uh in april after this current season of isc is done well we move in the hiatus so uh so yeah so it'll all look different come april uh who knows what it'll be
01:12:03
it'll probably be me standing in the lobby of the new office with a bunch of paint buckets and ladders while they're still working on it we'll see so for star citizen live uh that's ally brown director of graphics engineering uh i'm jared huckaby i'm in charge of the sheep dip and we'll see you next week everybody take care

Transcript from YouTube’s automatic captions — punctuation and Star Citizen jargon are approximate. The video itself is hosted by CIG on the official channel.