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The direct and indirect overhead of that offloading is less than 15 microseconds (as seen from PPU), so every piece of code that takes more than that to execute can be offloaded.

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The actual execution, when you look at the full machine, is fully asynchronous.

The beauty comes from the fact that we can synchronously (from the looking of code) offload any task to SPU and synchronously wait for results to continue. We've built a simple and beautiful system based on virtual threads (fibres) running on two real hardware threads. If some code slows down the frame, move it to SPUs and forget about it. That alone cuts the working set from around 90MB per level in 2033 to a window of around 20MB in Last Light, which is impressive considering that the total number of animations more than doubled. For example we've completely revamped our animation system (animations use a lot of memory), we've added complex VBR compression for tracks and even started to stream animation data on-demand from DVD/Blu-Ray.

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Even before we'd started work on Last Light (although Metro 2033 was already kind of running on PS3 to prove out the tech) we'd heavily focused on improving our memory usage. Also, some really specific stuff to handle in order to pass gazillions of TCRs. In short, that's the consistent lack of memory and processing power in addition to always fighting DVD access latency. For example, I was really surprised to find out that simply playing video with the built-in decoder takes 10 per cent of all available memory on 360! Surely we didn't use it. We were quite well prepared for consoles from the start, because the engine itself was originally designed with them in mind, but I am not saying that we didn't encounter a few surprises. A six-core Intel i7 paired with three GTX Titans in SLI is just about enough to sustain 2560x1440 at 60 frames per second - but even here the game's super-sampling anti-aliasing options are off the table and don't even think about 4K. As for the RSX, the only thing we offload from it to the SPUs was post-process anti-aliasing.' Metro: Last Light has a scalable engine challenging enough to humble even the most powerful gaming PCs in the world. So it doesn't matter that much that their R&D expenses are more than twice the budget of our whole game. The good thing for us is that we have really talented engineers here, and we can try 80 per cent of these ideas in 20 per cent of time (and money), and we are staying focused. I am not even speaking of everybody's ongoing R&D in locomotion and character animation, especially facial animation. For example Killzone's approach to AI's senses or Battlefield's ongoing research with HDR audio, or Halo's automated LODs. (That was a joke!)īut the graphics aren't the only aspect that makes up the tech. The other two are kind of old-skool and not interesting. Crysis was interesting in the way they fake real-time global illumination. For me, graphics-wise Battlefield was interesting because of the way they do lighting - its tile-based Compute-oriented lots-of-non-shadowing lights approach was quite radical, especially for artists. In general, the tech is always limited by the platforms/hardware it has to run on. In this piece, we'll be going in-depth on some of the technical innovations found in Metro: Last Light, we get some remarkable behind-the-scenes information on how 4A dealt with the challenging PlayStation 3 architecture, and perhaps best of all we get a unique insight into the long-term potential of the next-gen consoles - from a rendering architect who clearly knows his stuff. Forthright, completely open, highly opinionated and passionate about what he does, Shishkovstov is a brilliant interview subject - and when Deep Silver offered us the opportunity to talk tech with him once more, we couldn't say no. Of all the tech interviews we've published over the years, one of our favourites remains the Metro 2033 Q&A with 4A's chief technical officer Oles Shishkovstov. The latter is the focus of this latest Digital Foundry article. It lacks in mega-bucks investment, but despite that deficit, it aims to make up the gap in terms of good storytelling, atmosphere and simply exceptional technology.

Into the fray steps the recent-recently Metro: Last Light from Kiev-based developer 4A Games.

No single console gaming genre is as fiercely competitive as the first-person shooter, and whether it's Call of Duty, Halo, Crysis, Killzone or Battlefield, these are franchises defined just as much by their technological distinctiveness as they are by colossal budgets that run into the tens of millions.