Graphical Fidelity I Expect This Gen

yes, the look. Im sure the physics based rdr2 water on PC has better fluid simulation. But in terms of rendering, horizon fw has so many different kinds of water, and it does all of them beautifully. Deep ocean, still ponds, beaches, rivers, reflections, refractions. its godly.

This is what ghost water looks like.

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This is horizon fw water.

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And they said, no thanks, we will release our own garbage tech. No shame.

Horizon is good, but Sea of Thieves is still better.

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Just an FYI, all the path traced games so far have been hand implemented by Nvidia who has been sending their own engineers to add it. This was true for Cyberpunk, wukong, indy and doom. Doom was done in just 3 months. I am assuming Nvidia devs are now at Capcom adding path tracing.

Basically its all sponsored. No one else seems to be going all in on path tracing. devs are content with ray tracing for now. i think we will see more of the same next gen, but at higher resolutions. the jump from ps5 to ps6 is likely going to be 3-4x max. and i dont think gamers will be ok with 720p versions of path traced games in 2030.
I think the reasonable target is comprehensive RTGI becoming dominant in most games as we enter the next-gen (maybe some more rudimentary games can do PT, plus some PS4/early PS5 remasters/remakes with it), then perhaps scaling up to PT around the time a PS6 Pro launches with that possibly being a major selling point.

Once RTGI is in and common, then adapting that into PT should be pretty straightforward. This gen we've been straddling an awkward line of some of those new paradigms being present while barely having the horsepower to consistently implement them all in an effective way. But once they become standard and act as a baseline, then devs get to fully reap the rewards in terms of streamlining development pipelines, better incentivising their implementation.

If next-gen is built around and optimised for RTGI, Virtualised Geometry, Neural Texture Decompression, Dense Geometry Format, Motion Matching & Advanced ML Image Treatments, then it should be a no-brainer to take advantage of them. You could see storage and memory bandwidth requirements for a given game cut in half (no baking data, single LoDs, massively reduced texture and geometry data), resulting in higher quality visual systems that act in a more consistent and coherent way for players while devs get to save time not having to bake lighting over and over or creating LoDs. And space saved can be used for more assets and/or higher quality assets and/or reducing install sizes.
 
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Epic has been constantly improving performance with each upgrade. There is a guy who covers UE5 version upgrades on youtube. Every version comes with new features like nanite foliage or mega lights or nanite tesselation. Every other version improves lumen performance. you can easily measure this. It's up to the devs to build their game on that version. They dont. Could Tim Sweeney send some of his engineers at all of these firms to sort out issues? maybe. but are we at a point where devs have to be babied and we are ok with it?

Expedition 33 devs had a total of 4 programmers. not graphics programmer. total of 4. and they were able to upgrade to 5.4 and deliver a stable 60 fps game. other bigger devs didnt. wukong, sh2, stalker all shipped on UE5.1 when UE5.4 was already out. literally 4 versions behind.

UE5 gets more hate this gen than any other engine. So again, i dont understand how gamers are accepting of this.
I wasn't shitting on the tech, but rather on the monopolistic approach by Epic. I should have clarified that.

And the critique to gamers isn't aimed at UE5 per se (since it's one of the only engines actually improving fidelity: I've always praised it when it works).

Speaking of Days Gone: the remaster is comically bad.

Sony doesn't care.

They released a single good remake this gen, then said fuck off to everyone and stopped caring about graphics.

This remaster proves yet again that Sony's first party games are stuck on ps4.
 
I wasn't shitting on the tech, but rather on the monopolistic approach by Epic. I should have clarified that.

And the critique to gamers isn't aimed at UE5 per se (since it's one of the only engines actually improving fidelity: I've always praised it when it works).

Speaking of Days Gone: the remaster is comically bad.

Sony doesn't care.

They released a single good remake this gen, then said fuck off to everyone and stopped caring about graphics.

This remaster proves yet again that Sony's first party games are stuck on ps4.
Sony has turned into another badly behaving towards its customers publisher this gen, aiming for quantity over quality and quick low effort cash grabs.

Days Gone remaster is a great example of this. I actually had just necro'd the Days Gone thread this morning because I was playing it for the first time in months thinking by now they would've patched and fixed the broken dyamic shadows. They are fucking pixelated and constantly shifting around and a huge eye sore. Pssr also is very unstable in this game.

No patches no fixes and the audio still sounds horrible, conpressed and anything not right near our character can't be heard. So that zombie hoard that's 200 ft away is muted.

The shame is that this remaster did actually get improved visuals unlike the majority of "remasters" from Sony this gen, where all they did was change rrsolution and fps. Couldve been a great remaster but Sony doesn't care about their own customers now. It's all about milking us this gen
 
Sony has turned into another badly behaving towards its customers publisher this gen, aiming for quantity over quality and quick low effort cash grabs.

Days Gone remaster is a great example of this. I actually had just necro'd the Days Gone thread this morning because I was playing it for the first time in months thinking by now they would've patched and fixed the broken dyamic shadows. They are fucking pixelated and constantly shifting around and a huge eye sore. Pssr also is very unstable in this game.

No patches no fixes and the audio still sounds horrible, conpressed and anything not right near our character can't be heard. So that zombie hoard that's 200 ft away is muted.

The shame is that this remaster did actually get improved visuals unlike the majority of "remasters" from Sony this gen, where all they did was change rrsolution and fps. Couldve been a great remaster but Sony doesn't care about their own customers now. It's all about milking us this gen

The best thing is that game got ton of patches since it was released (I have it permanently installed so I saw all those patches) and I launched it few weeks ago - it still had the same stuff. Lack of 120Hz switch in the menu or on/off option for frame rate cap is criminal.

Can anyone know which version have rtgi if they didn't mark them? Lol.


Most of the time it's very subtle. Their biggest mistake was to use cutscenes as well in this video, according to NXG cutscenes use 30fps RT mode regardless of that is set for gameplay.
 
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Ah ok! How is it?
Pretty good so far! But I adore Tsushima so I'm quite biased.

Unless I'm seeing things, to me it does look like side characters are also part of the RTGI BVH now.
But the experts here will probably be able to verify that better than be

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The range for it to happen does seem to be quite limited though
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So I've been waiting a bit to share, but I just finished Silent Hill f, and with hardware Lumen/"secret ultra settings" enabled on PC, at this point I can confidently say that it looks better than both Cronos and Silent Hill 2 Remake. It's just an absolutely stunning game when allowed to display at it's full potential.



Here's a bunch of shots. I'll spoil tag some of them that give away story details:

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Spoilers:
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Here's some playable CGI, oooops I mean a PS4 game from 10 years ago that looks better than 99% of PS5 games. Marvel 1943 and Hellblade 2 are the only games that give that CGI feel that the Order 1886 gives and frankly what most PS5 games should look like given the specs vs PS4...





 
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Here's some playable CGI, oooops I mean a PS4 game from 10 years ago that looks better than 99% of PS5 games. Marvel 1943 and Hellblade 2 are the only games that give that CGI feel that the Order 1886 gives and frankly what most PS5 games should look like given the specs vs PS4...






Gota love how people always lie and put 4k 60fps in the video titles

Also is this game playable on shadps4? Driveclub is coming along nicely
 
Here's some playable CGI, oooops I mean a PS4 game from 10 years ago that looks better than 99% of PS5 games. Marvel 1943 and Hellblade 2 are the only games that give that CGI feel that the Order 1886 gives and frankly what most PS5 games should look like given the specs vs PS4...






The Order, The Last Guardian, Bloodborne, Driveclub, except for Tsushima Sony made 60fps patches for every game I don't really want to replay and didn't made any for the ones I do. Life is pain man...
 
C CGNoire we can have a silly, light hearted screenshot war in here to decide what is the best ue4 game between jedi and days if you want, the purple retards are great at making screenshots of games so i have a lot of ammo (even if a lot of the best are not avaialable anymore, you are lucky) :lollipop_squinting:

I'll start:

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Random npcs on a camp with no dialogue
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Ingame no cutscene face self-shadowing, pretty rare even today if my memory is correct, and incredible face details if i may

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You can't fucking tell me this look much worse than yotei...
I think it looks better. The realistic artstyle trumps fhe look of JS aswell its just im a whore for that offline RTGI enabled look of JS. It maxed on PC can often look like SW Episode 3 cgi. No RTGI hold everything back to mine eyes.

That reminds me. I need to get Days Gone on PC. .....but my PCs power supply is broken and causing random crashes at the moment :(
 
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Here's some playable CGI, oooops I mean a PS4 game from 10 years ago that looks better than 99% of PS5 games. Marvel 1943 and Hellblade 2 are the only games that give that CGI feel that the Order 1886 gives and frankly what most PS5 games should look like given the specs vs PS4...






The lead engine programmer for that game is currently the lead engine programmer on sony santa monica, expect Cory game to look great
 
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So I've been waiting a bit to share, but I just finished Silent Hill f, and with hardware Lumen/"secret ultra settings" enabled on PC, at this point I can confidently say that it looks better than both Cronos and Silent Hill 2 Remake. It's just an absolutely stunning game when allowed to display at it's full potential.



Here's a bunch of shots. I'll spoil tag some of them that give away story details:

nVaJyLb3OVEVWSyQ.png
QUmUKoNWScMQ5R4u.png
6mv9ejM71YrtSA9H.png
wgTA688I5kWpN0n3.png

QLNzZKr9TowCs5xP.png
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Spoilers:
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absolutely jaw dropping. kevboard on suicide watch.
 
Idk guys. I shat on Yotei as much as anyone. I just played the first 30 minutes and it blew me away if I'm being honest. AC Shadows is better in pure technical terms but Yotei just fucking destroys it artistically. It sounds like cope but this one definitely hits different when playing for yourself.
 
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Someone replied to me the other day in the Ghost of Yotei review thread saying that this generation of consoles doesn't have the power to render realistic water physics.

The joke writes itself
 
Idk guys. I shat on Yotei as much as anyone. I just played the first 30 minutes and it blew me away if I'm being honest. AC Shadows is better in pure technical terms but Yotei just fucking destroys it artistically. It sounds like cope but this one definitely hits different when playing for yourself.
I've been praising the art for ages, its just that it should be much better technically...
 
Anything else but lumen/RT would be unfeasible for a team of that size for launch, Lumen is still a more feasible choice, but it would be nice to get a full RT post-release update if they can get assistance from Nvidia.

Wukong on UE5 already offers both for example and Cyberpunk got it added after launch. Dont know how closely they work or if at all, but they got dlss upgrades pretty fast after release, itd be a nice PR win for Nvidia to help these devs.
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Lumen kind of limits the potential quite a bit (especially in the mansion) even if you mod in ray reconstruction (i believe the game uses hw lumen, but i didnt bother checking to verify)

But at least the game has amazing designs and artstyle (among many other things) so its still a visual feast.
Adding HW Lumen option is not a big ask development wise - it's literally a checkbox in project's settings.
It may however result in additional work for the art and QA teams, especially if this wasn't planned from the start.
A good approach here would be to plan it from the start in which case art would be authored for both modes by default (this mostly comes down to some specific requirements for geometry to be made for HW path to run well) and QA will just expect to check both modes and budget accordingly.
 
The one thing Yotei excels at is rendering convincingly looking, non-cardboard mid-distance to far-distance vegetation/foliage (playing on PS5):

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It not only looks great, it's also animated properly.
Even the tiniest trees on the slopes of Mount Yotei at the very end of the horizon are moving realistically (just a few pixels) if you look at them closely:

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