Dust-by-Monday
Member
It's up to the art team to create great looking environments and fine tune the lighting to make their games look their best.
"real time" lighting doesn't always mean it's better. Even real life looks like ass sometimes.
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Graphical Fidelity I Expect This Gen
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"real time" lighting doesn't always mean it's better. Even real life looks like ass sometimes.
BlownUpRich
Member
Yeah they should be, we aren't playing them in model viewers.
BlownUpRich
Member
OMG please upload more of those! Those look fantastic.
Cumulus
Member
There is no "fine tuning" static lighting anywhere outside of completely static environments....
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ResetEraVetVIP
Member
Games don't need polygons to look good either, should we just go back to Sega Genesis and SNES?
Dust-by-Monday
Member
Yes there is. It's up to the artists to decide how the scene is lit. They can literally do whatever they want to make the game look however they want.
Cumulus
Member
As long as it's at least mostly static, because that's the limit of static systems. No way around that.
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realcool
Member
Hero. Lighting.
This is an issue with most games.
Dust-by-Monday
Member
Wait, so you're saying RE9 is not static?
Cumulus
Member
Wait, so you're saying RE9 doesn't look vastly better with PT?
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Dust-by-Monday
Member
I thought we were talking about ray tracing? Path tracing looks awesome, but it's quite expensive.
Cumulus
Member
Path tracing is a subtype of ray tracing. Ray tracing has somewhat been redefined as a low cost hybrid in games, but the term really encompasses so much more.
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Dust-by-Monday
Member
I get that path tracing and ray tracing is how we move forward with real time graphics. It makes sense, but since our consoles are underpowered for those technologies, we end up getting games that have horrible image quality, running at 720p internal resolution and then trying to upscale to 4K with artifacts, flickering and smearing all over the screen. How in the world does that look any good? It makes me feel like we've regressed in graphical fidelity in favor of doing things in real time that don't NECESSARILY NEED TO BE real time. That's all I'm saying.
SlimySnake
Flashless at the Golden Globes
One thing that stood out to me in RE9 was just how many wall textures had reflections on them. And i dont mean mirror reflections. Just a light sheen bouncing off sunlight. So many games last gen would be lacking this altogether. RE9 does have some excellent wallpaper textures especially in racoon city, but the way the sunlight bounces off of them gives them that next gen look most other games just lack. SH2 did this really well as well.
its entirely possible to bake those in but so many games dont bother. I would like to know why. Is it because they are technically reflections?
Just went back to RE4 to see how it looked in 2023 and man it looks rough lol
Bojji
Gold Member
Player and enemies aren't static. With PT they look like they belong to the environment, they don't "glow" in any way:
You also have realistic shadows and reflections (even pools of blood have reflections) everywhere. Full suite that makes the game looks next gen.
vs. state of the art for PS4 gen - Uncharted, where anything dynamic and not baked in the lighting stick out like a sore thumb:
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Cumulus
Member
Consoles are just budget hardware. They get "good enough", and if that isn't good enough for someone then he's always free to upgrade to a capable PC. Most Devs have really been reluctant with stressing the console hardware, so I'm glad about every single one with more ambition.....Or budget like Capcom to simply implement several systems.
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Dust-by-Monday
Member
Those path tracing screenshots look great, but it's not achievable on my PS5 Pro :-(Player and enemies aren't static. With PT they look like they belong to the environment, they don't "glow" in any way:
You also have realistic shadows and reflections (even pools of blood have reflections) everywhere. Full suite that makes the game looks next gen.
vs. state of the art for PS4 gen - Uncharted, where anything dynamic and not baked in the lighting stick out like a sore thumb:
Also, I'm hoping that Naughty Dog's true PS5 game will look a lot better than that Uncharted: Lost Legacy screenshot.
Bojji
Gold Member
In theory PS6 should be able to run it on the same settings - it's in the same ballpark as my GPU (assuming that PT performance will be as good as on Nv).
Even without PT, games with lumen and RTGI show massive differences already - but too bad low ray counts and shimmering sometimes outweigh those benefits...
Dust-by-Monday
Member
That's my exact point. Often times by using all of these expensive features means we get worse performance, lower image quality, artifacts, smearing, shimmering and it just makes me not want to play the game.
Meanwhile, I can boot up AC:Unity and it looks AMAZING, yet it's all recalculated lighting. Obviously it doesn't have stuff like Nanite for LoD issues, but at least it's pretty clean looking and in my opinion, still looks excellent today.
Bojji
Gold Member
Yeah, many games even on PC show super low precision, there should ALWAYS be option to use uber settings for stuff like that - for futureproofing.
Real time lighting is the way forward but devs shouldn't cut everything else to such a degree that in the end game looks so bad that no one notices any good lightning, hahaha. UE5 games on consoles sometimes end up like that (720p shimmering mess). Maybe they should just leave advanced effects on current gen only in 30fps modes...
My SS still look decent but they are nowhere near how they look on HDR OLED when I play. Capturing HDR gameplay is absolute shit on Windows (PS5 converts pics nicely to SDR). I end up with two files, .jxr is washed out and .png has crushed blacks.
SlimySnake
Flashless at the Golden Globes
This is the most Silent Hill 2/UE5 looking hallway in the game. Stunning.
I switched to the Baked lighting mode in this level and it was actually very close to the path traced version. Slightly brighter lighting and AO coverage in path tracing, but otherwise fairly comparable.
Edit: here is the non-RT version.
I switched to the Baked lighting mode in this level and it was actually very close to the path traced version. Slightly brighter lighting and AO coverage in path tracing, but otherwise fairly comparable.
Edit: here is the non-RT version.
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SlimySnake
Flashless at the Golden Globes
lol I went back to Avatar for the sixth time to try and finish it. Skipped a story cutscene and they started me facing the aftermath of what looked like a nuke lol. in my defense, the main game has first person cutscenes where your character is mostly stationary so nothing really happens in them. I am trying to get to the DLCs which switch to third person cutscenes, but my god this game is boring.
The lighting in that destroyed area was very cool. it's kinda like Racoon city in that its brown but they use a lot of volumetric effects to give smoke and fog elements a very thick look. Sadly, the area after that is mostly rocky terrain being dug up by massive human machines and those rocks look straight up ps3 quality. I know they used mesh shaders on foliage, but they really need to get vitualized geometry support. Im done with these ugly rock textures.
The lighting in that destroyed area was very cool. it's kinda like Racoon city in that its brown but they use a lot of volumetric effects to give smoke and fog elements a very thick look. Sadly, the area after that is mostly rocky terrain being dug up by massive human machines and those rocks look straight up ps3 quality. I know they used mesh shaders on foliage, but they really need to get vitualized geometry support. Im done with these ugly rock textures.
kevboard
Member
This is the most Silent Hill 2/UE5 looking hallway in the game. Stunning.
I switched to the Baked lighting mode in this level and it was actually very close to the path traced version. Slightly brighter lighting and AO coverage in path tracing, but otherwise fairly comparable.
Edit: here is the non-RT version.
I mean, of course it's close. both versions use path traced lighting, it's just that one of them does it in real-time, and the other is prerendered.
Maxpayne has better faces:
Sarcasm aside, it is very easy to make amazing looking game these days if you have very limited assets scope. You don't need PT for that either.
And yes, PT solves all lighting issues developers are faced with when they develop games. The fact that you can't put more than few dynamic lights at the same time even in 2026 means rasterization has to go away eventually.
Each time you add proper light that casts shadows you effectively square computation needed. So with 6 light sources casting light and shadows have not 6 times computation requirement but 6 x 6 x 6 x 6 x 6 x 6.
Old games used usually 1-2 lights sources, around 2010 3-4 these days around 5-6. Everything else was faked with fake lights or some pixel recoloring but that meant no shadows. So you have 1 light from get go for sun shadows and sun light, then 2-4 in room and usually 1 around player at all times for those shadowed or dark areas. Rest is faked. The amount of work needed to light up areas is insane and you need whole pack of people to properly light everything rather than just to put some lights and be done with it. Then there is optimization aspect, Ton of performance issues with graphics comes with too many lights crossing each others area. This literally forces you to design areas, levels differently because even if light is completely obscured by say wall it's within it's light area so placing another light on outside of wall causes extra calculations.
Bonus Cyberpunk2077 PT goodness because why fucking not. I mean look at it:
meech
Member
Well, Chris Brown did not need a game to do that....
RSMan
Member
GymWolf
Member
Maxpayne has better faces:
Sarcasm aside, it is very easy to make amazing looking game these days if you have very limited assets scope. You don't need PT for that either.
And yes, PT solves all lighting issues developers are faced with when they develop games. The fact that you can't put more than few dynamic lights at the same time even in 2026 means rasterization has to go away eventually.
Each time you add proper light that casts shadows you effectively square computation needed. So with 6 light sources casting light and shadows have not 6 times computation requirement but 6 x 6 x 6 x 6 x 6 x 6.
Old games used usually 1-2 lights sources, around 2010 3-4 these days around 5-6. Everything else was faked with fake lights or some pixel recoloring but that meant no shadows. So you have 1 light from get go for sun shadows and sun light, then 2-4 in room and usually 1 around player at all times for those shadowed or dark areas. Rest is faked. The amount of work needed to light up areas is insane and you need whole pack of people to properly light everything rather than just to put some lights and be done with it. Then there is optimization aspect, Ton of performance issues with graphics comes with too many lights crossing each others area. This literally forces you to design areas, levels differently because even if light is completely obscured by say wall it's within it's light area so placing another light on outside of wall causes extra calculations.
Bonus Cyberpunk2077 PT goodness because why fucking not. I mean look at it:
Wtf they did to the npcs models?
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Nothing. That's how npc models look in C77 with path tracing. The base models were always top notch but the game flat rasterized lighting couldn't show you details which usually are baked in and C77 didn't bake those in thus giving this gamy flat "last gen" vibe. But when you enable PT all that face geometry, etc. all give proper shadows etc. which give faces and models depth they lacked that was usually solved with hero lighting in cutscenes.
Also worth noting is that initial implementation of PT in C77 used Ray Reconstruction that added benefit of improving reflections but completely butchering face detail. Later on they revised it (like 3/4 year later) and now faces look properly awesome.
While stuff like hard objects like cars is what people most focus on it's actually NPC's that are improved the most. If you look PT on off they look like completely different models somehow. Especially those random npcs on street that don't have hero lighting cutscenes etc.
sorry for crappy screenshot from yt video but this shows you the difference what proper shadows give you and what proper materials give you when you have PT. Everything from shadows to texture has different look to it because of how material bounce lighting differently vs normal restirized lighting model.
YeulEmeralda
Linux User
Back in the day FF10 looked fantastic and it's not like that game would come out on PC so you couldn't compare it.
Bojji
Gold Member
And motherfuckers are changing this engine to UE5... I'm still not in "acceptance" stage.
Probably around when PT was introduced which had bad Ray Reconstruction handling that improved a lot reflections but at cost of little details like faces.
Secondly PT unlike rasterization is resolution dependent. Meaning the lower res they less rays are shot and you get less detailed image. Sure it works over larger models etc. like cars and buildings but very small models like faces, noses etc. start to lose detail quick. Recently people get 5090s and run PT now with 4k at decent framerates (which counters ghosting etc.)
T4keD0wN
Member
If you mean the video, it definitely has reshade/lut and uses camera mods, it even lists them in the descriptions.
Never liked these videos where they crank up depth of field to 700% just to make it more cinematic, it feels terrible to actually play like that.
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Some more random npcs in C77 with PT on/off, NO MODS:
As you can see above it doesn't look good. No indirect lighting, only strong phong shading. Her plastic shirt looks horrible because it relies entirely on normal mapping with no lighting at all. Her eyes and fingers look horible because even at ultra lighting there is not enough resolution to cast proper self shadowing so everything "glows". And this is actually the best situation for normal rendering, close source of light singular.
Here PT resolves everything and that bad looking npc (which is standard pretty much in all open world games) becomes actually pretty nice looking lady. The little details like her fingers and eyes now are awesome, her plastic shirt makes more sense, quality of materials also rose up significantly and they aren't just texture blob.
Here is when you find no light near and game has to rely on fake lighting in game aka ambient light:
You know that look from playing other games. That's why developers don't like foggy areas etc. without adding strong lights somewhere in scene. She looks like PS4 character.
But let's give it PT treatment in scene where there is no direct light and only ambient scattered light:
Now it makes sense. Everything look correctly now. Her head doesn't look like Final Fantasy VII cloud anymore. Her bra/shirt also isn't flat but has intricate detail, bumps, meterial, it's streached etc.
Ever wondered why black skin characters look so wrong ? That's because a lot of what makes black skin color work is actually shadows and subsurface scattering. And with PT effects are dramatic:
Here without PT:
Looks like normal no. Pretty standard black person in game these days. Let's look at the guy with PT:
Yoooo, that's a different person alltogehter.
Another. This npc as far as npcs go in C77 is pretty good even without PT because his eyes aren't shown and his clothing is pretty simple.
But let's take this guy and give him PT treatment. Suddenly we go from good looking NPC to hero level in other games characters:
As you can see above it doesn't look good. No indirect lighting, only strong phong shading. Her plastic shirt looks horrible because it relies entirely on normal mapping with no lighting at all. Her eyes and fingers look horible because even at ultra lighting there is not enough resolution to cast proper self shadowing so everything "glows". And this is actually the best situation for normal rendering, close source of light singular.
Here PT resolves everything and that bad looking npc (which is standard pretty much in all open world games) becomes actually pretty nice looking lady. The little details like her fingers and eyes now are awesome, her plastic shirt makes more sense, quality of materials also rose up significantly and they aren't just texture blob.
Here is when you find no light near and game has to rely on fake lighting in game aka ambient light:
You know that look from playing other games. That's why developers don't like foggy areas etc. without adding strong lights somewhere in scene. She looks like PS4 character.
But let's give it PT treatment in scene where there is no direct light and only ambient scattered light:
Now it makes sense. Everything look correctly now. Her head doesn't look like Final Fantasy VII cloud anymore. Her bra/shirt also isn't flat but has intricate detail, bumps, meterial, it's streached etc.
Ever wondered why black skin characters look so wrong ? That's because a lot of what makes black skin color work is actually shadows and subsurface scattering. And with PT effects are dramatic:
Here without PT:
Looks like normal no. Pretty standard black person in game these days. Let's look at the guy with PT:
Yoooo, that's a different person alltogehter.
Another. This npc as far as npcs go in C77 is pretty good even without PT because his eyes aren't shown and his clothing is pretty simple.
But let's take this guy and give him PT treatment. Suddenly we go from good looking NPC to hero level in other games characters:
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March Climber
Member
Saying this shouldn't mean "get rid of PT/RT."
Saying this should mean "Console hardware needs to upgrade."
GudOlRub
Member
I imagine that for a period the artists were just chilling and adding little details like this to the assets while the design team were having that rumoured identity crisis where they didn't know for sure what they wanted this game to actually beDetails down to the caulking, just ridiculous
Dust-by-Monday
Member
Yes but until the hardware is there, let's avoid making our games look like garbage on the current consoles.
They aren't looking like garbage. IT's just that once you see how good PT looks you instantly think old look worse. Old lighting method simply doesn't have ability to show asset creators makers anymore in full glory.
Like Cyberpunk 2077 with non PT mode is BEAUTIFUL looking game that imo is still not beat till this day with that kind of detail at that scale. PT just takes it to another level like you are playing PS6 game today. Frankly I don't expect next gen games to hit PT everywhere, it will be scaled back version.
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March Climber
Member
Honestly I don't think it's garbage.
You have simply seen a glimpse of the future and now have to cope with the present. I've been in your exact spot since seeing PT Cyberpunk last year.
We can't unsee it and it has spoiled current gen for us. The last time this happened for me was the first Crysis. Far beyond anything released when it came out.
analog_future
Resident Crybaby
I mean shit, the PS5 Pro is 16.7 tflops. So if the 20 number is true we're looking at less than a 20% jump over the PS5 Pro.
Every sign leads me to believe the PS6 will be all about affordability, AI tech, and ray tracing. It's not going to be some huge leap over what we have now.
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CowboyLou
Member
Games hit the end of history by the end of PS360 gen, or early PS4 gen at the latest. The rules of design have largely been set in stone since then. The "open world game" blueprint was finalized with Far Cry 3. A lot of the big live service games got their start then, and some of them are still going. In the decade since, most games are just bigger/prettier versions of PS360 era design tenets. Iiterative advancement at best, or no advancement at worst. Pick up almost any modern game and there's nothing conceptually separating it from games fifteen years ago. Most of the gameplay innovation in recent years has happened in multiplayer games, not singleplayer.
We can blame budgets and risk aversion but I blame the limits of imagination first. I sure don't know where game design goes next. I don't think it's "better physics" or "better AI" or "better reactivity". Strive for these things, yeah, but they're not going to take game design to the next level by themselves. I have no idea what the future is, or if there's a future.
At least we still have pretty graphics to look at.
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Cumulus
Member
What we have now + decent RTGI in nearly all situations + some PT cases + Nanite-Level VG-systems in most engines would actually allow a pretty substantial jump in the visuals and should be quite possible if AMD doesn`t completely fail their RT performance uplift targets. This time we`ll not get new resolution and framerate-targets after all (I think), so that performance uplift can go straight into the visuals and systems.
I´ll stay optimistic as long as possible
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Bojji
Gold Member
Some more random npcs in C77 with PT on/off, NO MODS:
As you can see above it doesn't look good. No indirect lighting, only strong phong shading. Her plastic shirt looks horrible because it relies entirely on normal mapping with no lighting at all. Her eyes and fingers look horible because even at ultra lighting there is not enough resolution to cast proper self shadowing so everything "glows". And this is actually the best situation for normal rendering, close source of light singular.
Here PT resolves everything and that bad looking npc (which is standard pretty much in all open world games) becomes actually pretty nice looking lady. The little details like her fingers and eyes now are awesome, her plastic shirt makes more sense, quality of materials also rose up significantly and they aren't just texture blob.
Here is when you find no light near and game has to rely on fake lighting in game aka ambient light:
You know that look from playing other games. That's why developers don't like foggy areas etc. without adding strong lights somewhere in scene. She looks like PS4 character.
But let's give it PT treatment in scene where there is no direct light and only ambient scattered light:
Now it makes sense. Everything look correctly now. Her head doesn't look like Final Fantasy VII cloud anymore. Her bra/shirt also isn't flat but has intricate detail, bumps, meterial, it's streached etc.
Ever wondered why black skin characters look so wrong ? That's because a lot of what makes black skin color work is actually shadows and subsurface scattering. And with PT effects are dramatic:
Here without PT:
Looks like normal no. Pretty standard black person in game these days. Let's look at the guy with PT:
Yoooo, that's a different person alltogehter.
Another. This npc as far as npcs go in C77 is pretty good even without PT because his eyes aren't shown and his clothing is pretty simple.
But let's take this guy and give him PT treatment. Suddenly we go from good looking NPC to hero level in other games characters:
Amazing comparison.
Looking at performance targets provided by Kepler. In raster it should be close to 2x PS5 Pro:
And Pro is not reaching that 16TF real time performance in any game. So 2x jump is quite realistic unless memory bandwidth is too low so even universal compression can't save it...
SlimySnake
Flashless at the Golden Globes
there are IPC gains so it will at least be 100% faster than the Pro which is still using the RDNA2 architecture. but in terms of raw rdna 2 tflops its only 20% yes.
in terms of raw performance, it would put it somewhere along the lines of a 5080 in standard rasterization which is less than 3x more powerful than the base ps5 equivalent 6650xt which is around 10.7 tflops. i suppose isnt too bad. But still depends on them delivering ray tracing/path tracing performance on top of the standard rasterization gains. MilD is saying 12x ray tracing but they said 2-4x for the pro and it didnt really translate to 2x-4x better performance. For example, AC Shadows runs at 1440p 30 fps on the base PS5 with ray tracing and on the pro it runs at 1080p 60 fps with ray tracing. if it was 2x more powerful, it wouldve run it at 1440p 60 fps. if it was 4x, wouldve run it at 1800p 60.
For Reference, 4090 is over 3x faster, and the 5090 is well over 4x faster than the base PS5. Even if the $1,200 xbox is 25% faster than the PS6, we are looking at 4090 performance at best.
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I don't think rasterization will be as prominent as PS5 era. If PT won't go into next gen consoles as standard then heavy RT GI will, the lower version of raytracing. It is used right now by some games but that RT is barely the baller it could be and ps5 rt is not standard while on ps6 it should be.
That issue is mostly solved with latest DLSS. Pretty much all artifacts are gone, ghosting, shimmering, and not just for PT but also DLSS which had it's own problems as well. Alas PT is that kind of technology that benefits from higher resolutions as higher resolution = more rays resolving small detail a lot better.
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SlimySnake
Flashless at the Golden Globes
Ha! i was looking at techpowerup charts too. Surprised to see 5080 being less than 3x more powerful than the 6650xt. But i was disheartened to see the 5090 way up there at 4.3x more powerful. the 5090 wouldve been 3 years old by the time the ps5 comes out in 2027, 4 years old if it came in in 2020. In comparison, the PS5 was just as powerful as the 2016 Nvidia flagship the 1080 Ti plus ray tracing features not included in the 1080 Ti.Amazing comparison.
Looking at performance targets provided by Kepler. In raster it should be close to 2x PS5 Pro:
And Pro is not reaching that 16TF real time performance in any game. So 2x jump is quite realistic unless memory bandwidth is too low so even universal compression can't save it...
lets hope, it gets delayed and we get a late clock boost like the ps5 got in its last couple of years bringing it up from 8 to 10+ tflops.
You will always need raw gpu power. Path tracing/ray tracing only helps with lighitng, shadows and reflections. You still need compute power for everything else. more objects on screen, more detailed assets, better geometry, better foliage, bigger draw distance, better volumetric effects, more NPCs, better physics, rain and weather effects, destruction, hair rendering, skin shaders, pretty much everything is done on the compute units. Having fewer compute units than the pro is just silly even if the clock speeds are much higher. at the very least, they shouldve kept the compute units at 60.
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Bojji
Gold Member
Developers are super slow with new tech. Mesh shaders and RT debuted in 2018, we can count on one hand games with mesh shaders (and first one was AW2)...
RT is far better adopted but it's still a super tiny percentage of games on consoles (even with Pro on the picture). With PS5 being the lowest common denominator for PS6 cross gen - we will see raster games for many more years...
It's quite sad that 2027/28 console will be slower than top GPU from 2022. It will also be just 25% faster than top GPU from 2020 (3090), ha!