Support NeoGAF

[arkhamguy123]

Hours into FF16 and while I’m liking the story and combat more and more and it’s a decent game MAN these graphics are not it as the kids say lol

Finished the forest section and man I can think of so many cross Gen games that look better comparing forest to forest TLOU2, RDR2, GoT, The Last Guardian, Uncharted 4, Horizon 1 and 2, Days Gone just off the top of my head. Honestly the forest section of the PS4 ports of Uncharted 3 and AC4, PS3 games ultimately look about on par. Hell I don’t even know if looked as visually appealing as Halo 3 opening level. It’s all just SO washed out. It feels like someone set my tv to like the desaturated setting. It’s maybe, MAYBE if I’m being generous on halo infinite level of visual fidelity. And it only reaches next gen during the big monster fights I guess.

This game is weird graphically. Very inconsistent. Even my gf who is not a gamer is watching me play and she even said the graphics look lame and demon souls and horizon 2 crush this game. But she likes the story a lot.

 

[alloush]

The funny thing is that Nolans latest movie cost just $100 million. He's actually one of the few directors who makes sub $200 million movies and regularly comes under budget. his most expensive movie was Tenet which was around $170 million and he crashed a real plane for it. Dunkirk, his war movie, was actually cheaper around $100-150 million.

The most expensive movie made so far is Avatar 2 which had a budget of over $300 million with marketing pushing it over $430 million. There is no way these games cost $500 million. Sony said $200 million for HFW and TLOU2 which is hilarious considering the Avengers movies cost around $250-300 million and were paying RDJ $75 million alone. Tory Baker and Nolan north are probably taking him less than $200k.

In fact, Hacksaw Ridge, Mel Gibson's masterpiece had a budget of just $45 million. I have no idea what kind of scam these studios are running but they need to do a better job of managing budgets and scope of games.

You’re right. The biggest movies don’t have a budget as big as Halo’s. Something is fishy, devs are either too incompetent or they are sucking the publishers dry. But no way they are that incompetent that they create a subpar piece of shit with a $500m budget!

 

[Emet_bp]

Go and play HFW on PS4, it looks virtually identical save for resolution, foliage draw distance and maybe hero lighting.

Well... actually that's not true. Foliage draw distance is not only difference. Foliage is also a lot more dense, more detailed. Many models are packed with more polygons (some are a lot more complex). Also Aloy and other character models have more polygons.

Btw. talking about graphics... GT7 is a croas gen game and is underrated when it comes to its graphics.
At its worst it can look just good but at its best it looks like something that could do as a PS6 game.
Anyway... i would like to see morr graphics modes in GT8 to choose from. Right now the base is 4K60 without RT and 4K30 with RT for replays (+ 4K20-30 with more complex RT in photo mode). They could give us gameplay mode @ about 60fps and something like dynamic 1200-1600p with optimised RT (i.e. not applied to other cars and objects around the track - in photo mode RT reflections are applied to every or almost every object / whole scene).

 

[Azurro]

I don't care if it's canned, a cutscene, or whatever arbitrary criteria anyone wants to use, I haven't seen something as impressive as Final Fantasy XVI in a long, long time. The environments are impressive, the animation is sublime, the magic looks incredible and the big eikons fighting on the screen are some of the best I've seen in years.

 

[Go_Ly_Dow]

I don't care if it's canned, a cutscene, or whatever arbitrary criteria anyone wants to use, I haven't seen something as impressive as Final Fantasy XVI in a long, long time. The environments are impressive, the animation is sublime, the magic looks incredible and the big eikons fighting on the screen are some of the best I've seen in years.

I just completed a certain Eikon fight last night, around halfway into the game and couldn't believe my eyes. Feel the game strikes the perfect graphical balance for an FF game between aiming for an animated CG look with splashes of photo realism. 7 Remake and 15 were also good in this regard but 16 definitely takes it up a notch.

 

[Pharaoh 117]

Yesterday I re-watched the Forbidden West reveal trailer and the game presented there is graphically beautiful. I`m still waiting for the PC version but it seems to me the game was downgraded big time. Is that the case?

 

[SlimySnake]

Yesterday I re-watched the Forbidden West reveal trailer and the game presented there is graphically beautiful. I`m still waiting for the PC version but it seems to me the game was downgraded big time. Is that the case?

Yes. Gg saw naughty dog, insomniac, bend and sucker punch get away with downgrades and figured they could go back to their e3 2005 days.

 

[Pharaoh 117]

Yes. Gg saw naughty dog, insomniac, bend and sucker punch get away with downgrades and figured they could go back to their e3 2005 days.

Thought as much. It was a while since I saw that trailer and I was blown away by the graphics. Same with the Hellblade 2 reveal. Senua's face looks stunning but it also seems heavily downgraded in the most recent trailers, even if it's one of the better looking current-gen titles. I really don't know why devs keep writing checks their ass can't cash. I'm hoping this doesn't happen to Fable since I loved what they showed there.

 

[Negotiator101]

Thought as much. It was a while since I saw that trailer and I was blown away by the graphics. Same with the Hellblade 2 reveal. Senua's face looks stunning but it also seems heavily downgraded in the most recent trailers, even if it's one of the better looking current-gen titles. I really don't know why devs keep writing checks their ass can't cash. I'm hoping this doesn't happen to Fable since I loved what they showed there.

The first Hellblade 2 was in engine, the last two trailers was in-game and both look comparable.

 

[Musilla]

 

[SlimySnake]

Hours into FF16 and while I’m liking the story and combat more and more and it’s a decent game MAN these graphics are not it as the kids say lol

Finished the forest section and man I can think of so many cross Gen games that look better comparing forest to forest TLOU2, RDR2, GoT, The Last Guardian, Uncharted 4, Horizon 1 and 2, Days Gone just off the top of my head. Honestly the forest section of the PS4 ports of Uncharted 3 and AC4, PS3 games ultimately look about on par. Hell I don’t even know if looked as visually appealing as Halo 3 opening level. It’s all just SO washed out. It feels like someone set my tv to like the desaturated setting. It’s maybe, MAYBE if I’m being generous on halo infinite level of visual fidelity. And it only reaches next gen during the big monster fights I guess.

This game is weird graphically. Very inconsistent. Even my gf who is not a gamer is watching me play and she even said the graphics look lame and demon souls and horizon 2 crush this game. But she likes the story a lot.

You might want to check your HDR settings. Check out the gamingtech video. The PS5 system level hdr settings dont play well with this game. Turn off HGIG and use dynamic tone mapping. increase in game brightness to 5 if the default 2 is too dark. I dont think the game is washed out at all.

The forest area is ok. get to the open world area i linked and you will see it.

regardless, the game's graphics arent what I consider next gen, it's the eikon/titan fights. you played the first one and called it next gen. thats it. otherwise its a somewhat decent looking PS4 game with some truly gorgeous areas like the one i linked. I actually got to a couple of other open world areas and they were rather underwhelming. the foliage is impressive but the lighting wasn't. i hope to revisit those areas in a different lighting setting. Dusk time doesnt make the visuals pop.

 

[SlimySnake]

Well... actually that's not true. Foliage draw distance is not only difference. Foliage is also a lot more dense, more detailed. Many models are packed with more polygons (some are a lot more complex). Also Aloy and other character models have more polygons.

Btw. talking about graphics... GT7 is a croas gen game and is underrated when it comes to its graphics.
At its worst it can look just good but at its best it looks like something that could do as a PS6 game.
Anyway... i would like to see morr graphics modes in GT8 to choose from. Right now the base is 4K60 without RT and 4K30 with RT for replays (+ 4K20-30 with more complex RT in photo mode). They could give us gameplay mode @ about 60fps and something like dynamic 1200-1600p with optimised RT (i.e. not applied to other cars and objects around the track - in photo mode RT reflections are applied to every or almost every object / whole scene).

Still minor differences that you wont notice even if you put them side by side. hero lighting on aloy during gameplay is the one true standout. You can see it here. Foliage does get a boost but nearly everything else looks the same. lighting, draw distance fog masking, water rendering, world detail is virtually identical. It's a fucking miracle on the PS4 but to me it shows just what was possible on this hardware if the devs simply reduced their resolution targets a bit.

As for GT7 and ray tracing, well check out the new F1 DF video. They turn off RT as soon as the racing starts. Menus, pre game realtime cinematics, and replays run at 30 fps with full ray tracing at native 4k with some drops to 3840*1720. But when they turned on peformance mode which drops resolution to 1440p, the gameplay with no RT went to 120p but scenes with RT on only went up to 45 fps despite the DRS dropping all the way down to 720p according to their counts.

For some reason, simply dropping the resolution by half isnt giving them the 2x boost in framerate like it does in non-RT modes. Thats probably why PD never patched in RT on track and why Forza devs have only enabled RT gameplay on PC. Its either a memory bandwidth issue or a cpu bottleneck on consoles. The AMD CPUs might be 8 core 16 threads but they are lacking the 32 MB cache and most games arent properly multithreaded so having 16 threads is clearly not enough.

Thankfully both F1 and Forza seems to be going all out with RT on PC so hopefully PD does the same whenever they port GT7 to PC. Jimbo said 2 years so it will probably come out by March 2024.

 

[Emet_bp]

As for GT7 and ray tracing, well check out the new F1 DF video. They turn off RT as soon as the racing starts. Menus, pre game realtime cinematics, and replays run at 30 fps with full ray tracing at native 4k with some drops to 3840*1720. But when they turned on peformance mode which drops resolution to 1440p, the gameplay with no RT went to 120p but scenes with RT on only went up to 45 fps despite the DRS dropping all the way down to 720p according to their counts.

Yes, I have seen that. The thing is it was about 45fps (actually 45-55 on PS5) with RT reflections, RT shadows and RT global illumination and with everything applied also to the track surroundings.
GT7 menages to get 20-30 fps (maybe more but there is a 30fps cap) in photo mode at native 4K.
I'm pretty sure halving the resolution (around 1440p) + optimalisation (apply RT reflections only to our car + track surface and only some closest surroundings) and they could get 50-60 fps (good enough with VRR). Of course ramp up the setting for replays and photo mode at 30fps and leave alternative options if somebody prefers higher res or a locked 60fps (or more).

 

[SlimySnake]

1. I'd say HBS and to some extent HFW are clearly next gen games, yes. Burning Shores in particular is way way way ahead of anything last gen. I simply don't believe your claim that HFW on PS4 looks close to that fidelity. On a a youtube video on a phone, then yeah, it'll be a good resemblance, but actually playing it on a great big 4k tv (which is after all an essential part of the experience), I'd bet that's a massive difference. I mean, it's 30fps for a start, so that's a huge downgrade right away, before we even start on the quality of graphics one can capture in a screenshot. By your logic, Doom 2016 is a PS3 game because it runs on a Switch. Frankly, it's bullshit.

2. No comment on the second para except to say that mistakes imo is a strange thing to focus on when assessing Sony first party graphical output of last gen, considering they produced about 95% of the best looking games of that generation. But ok, it's an opinion I guess.

3. Ubisoft showed that Star Wars game that does indeed look like the best graphics yet (imo) but then who knows how it'll actually run on consoles. I'm guessing it'll be 720p-ish upscaled if you want to play at 60fps. That doesn't look great at all. So who knows what it'll actually look like on a big TV. Maybe it'll be nice and sharp, but I doubt it. I thought the Avatar game disappointed, personally. IMO overall fidelity was worse than Ratchet and Burning Shores. Seemed to be running at 1440p-ish at 30fps from some analysis I saw, but that mentioned the probability that that was achieved via reconstruction. Let's say they're doing a base of 1080p at 30, then. That's 1/4 of the pixels of Burning Shores, for a game that IMO looks worse anyway. That's what I mean by Sony's ascendancy. It's not the graphics per se. It's the overall performance they're gleaning compared to other devs.

I'm not sure what you're referring to with Microsoft? Fable looked decent, but only tiny bits of gameplay. Certainly nothing better than Ratchet, say. Forza? Isn't that the game you were berating for ages for its wasteful 4k visuals?

I honestly can't remember anything else being particularly impressive...?

Starfield, Fable, Avatar, Star Wars, Hellblade and FF16 (though only during setpieces) put to shame anything sony showed this E3. They arent even close. I have posted several HFW to Avatar comparisons. if you dont see it, you dont see it. I dont see the point in continuing the same old arguments. lets agree to disagree.

Avatar's internal resolution is 1440p. It's 4k FSR 2 quality which means an internal resolution of 1440p. 1080p is if they were doing FSR performance. 1440p 30 fps was also the target of the first UE5 tech demo and the Matrix average target which had a range of 1620p-1080p. It's frankly what you should expect from next gen games on PS5.

Doom and Witcher 3 on the switch were port downs. HFW is a port up. The game was developed around the constraints of the base PS4. i dont even know why thats a point of contention. I posted the video above that shows just how similar these games look. The upgrade is basically what you see on PC from low to ultra settings. noticeble but not generational. I can buy this argument for Ratchet since its SSD stuff can simply not be done on PS4, but HFW is a PS4 game through and through.

The fact that Demon Souls, Ratchet, Horizon, TLOU Part 1 and Spiderman 2 look worse than these latest games tells me that sony devs are lagging behind. I said this last year when I saw Horizon, but a cross gen game like HFW beating out DS and Ratchet kinda proved that those games werent really next gen. People used to get upset over me calling them PS4.5 games but I guess we now see that they were indeed just that.

 

[SlimySnake]

Yes, I have seen that. The thing is it was about 45fps (actually 45-55 on PS5) with RT reflections, RT shadows and RT global illumination and with everything applied also to the track surroundings.
GT7 menages to get 20-30 fps (maybe more but there is a 30fps cap) in photo mode at native 4K.
I'm pretty sure halving the resolution (around 1440p) + optimalisation (apply RT reflections only to our car + track surface and only some closest surroundings) and they could get 50-60 fps (good enough with VRR). Of course ramp up the setting for replays and photo mode at 30fps and leave alternative options if somebody prefers higher res or a locked 60fps (or more).

The problem with RT is that even if you make some optimizations to reduce RT settings, the BVH structure needs to be built all the same and stored in vram. So if the bottleneck is vram, it wont do much. Otherwise, we wouldve seen 1080p 60 fps modes already.

Forza does have RT reflections during gameplay so maybe they can just focus on 1-2 RT effects like reflections or shadows and leave RTGI for PC. But RTGI, Shadows + Reflections during gameplay is probably a pipe dream on consoles. This is why we need mid gen refreshes.

 

[Alex11]

Tried Dead Space Remake, it may not be ''nextgen'' or whatever as that description has lost all its meaning, but I gotta say it impressed me, IMO the lighting is superb, those constant flickers of shadows and lights are awesome.
Another thing that impressed me is the color banding, seeing how much of the game are dark areas and high contrasts.
The weakest thing is probably the SSR, could have used some RT there, as there are many metal things and whatnot.

 

[SlimySnake]

I got into the arc raiders alpha. Looks like shit. Definitely not what the trailers showed it to be.

Its also a warzone style game. i thought it was a PvE shooter, but after running around for 10 minutes trying to find a gun, I quit. If this is what the Battlefield devs have been working on then color me disappointed. Complete trash.

 

[TheRedRiders]

Holy Moly, what do you guys think of the second Titan boss fight in FF16, one of the biggest and best fighting sequences I have seen in a game since Kartos vs. Kronos in GOW 3. Makes the Horus boss fight in HFW look like a bunny hopping in the garden.

Timestampped link, spoilers for those who haven't gotten this far.

 

[Lethal01]

Holy Moly, what do you guys think of the second Titan boss fight in FF16, one of the biggest and best fighting sequences I have seen in a game since Kartos vs. Kronos in GOW 3. Makes the Horus boss fight in HFW look like a bunny hopping in the garden.

Timestampped link, spoilers for those who haven't gotten this far.

IT looks extremely bland and standard, the same "stand on a platform and attack the enemies arms" that we have been doing since the days of super nintendo, but now with some Realtime cutscenes that have really unremarkable combat choreography or stick you into an autorunning segment that you can't lose.

Again, Asura's wrath level gameplay complexity but far less impressive in everything but graphics.

 

[Feel Like I'm On 42]

Well... actually that's not true. Foliage draw distance is not only difference. Foliage is also a lot more dense, more detailed. Many models are packed with more polygons (some are a lot more complex). Also Aloy and other character models have more polygons.

Btw. talking about graphics... GT7 is a croas gen game and is underrated when it comes to its graphics.
At its worst it can look just good but at its best it looks like something that could do as a PS6 game.
Anyway... i would like to see morr graphics modes in GT8 to choose from. Right now the base is 4K60 without RT and 4K30 with RT for replays (+ 4K20-30 with more complex RT in photo mode). They could give us gameplay mode @ about 60fps and something like dynamic 1200-1600p with optimised RT (i.e. not applied to other cars and objects around the track - in photo mode RT reflections are applied to every or almost every object / whole scene).

This. The lack of graphics mode options is weird from a developer who prides themselves on giving players tons of options and who has a perfectionist image.

 

[Feel Like I'm On 42]

Still minor differences that you wont notice even if you put them side by side. hero lighting on aloy during gameplay is the one true standout. You can see it here. Foliage does get a boost but nearly everything else looks the same. lighting, draw distance fog masking, water rendering, world detail is virtually identical. It's a fucking miracle on the PS4 but to me it shows just what was possible on this hardware if the devs simply reduced their resolution targets a bit.

As for GT7 and ray tracing, well check out the new F1 DF video. They turn off RT as soon as the racing starts. Menus, pre game realtime cinematics, and replays run at 30 fps with full ray tracing at native 4k with some drops to 3840*1720. But when they turned on peformance mode which drops resolution to 1440p, the gameplay with no RT went to 120p but scenes with RT on only went up to 45 fps despite the DRS dropping all the way down to 720p according to their counts.

For some reason, simply dropping the resolution by half isnt giving them the 2x boost in framerate like it does in non-RT modes. Thats probably why PD never patched in RT on track and why Forza devs have only enabled RT gameplay on PC. Its either a memory bandwidth issue or a cpu bottleneck on consoles. The AMD CPUs might be 8 core 16 threads but they are lacking the 32 MB cache and most games arent properly multithreaded so having 16 threads is clearly not enough.

Thankfully both F1 and Forza seems to be going all out with RT on PC so hopefully PD does the same whenever they port GT7 to PC. Jimbo said 2 years so it will probably come out by March 2024.

Forza director insists ‘we’re not misleading you’ over in-game ray tracing | VGC

“When you’re racing and when you are playing the game, ray tracing is on.”…

www.videogameschronicle.com

This is inexcusable if it's true Forza won't have RT reflections on console!

 

[Feel Like I'm On 42]

Starfield, Fable, Avatar, Star Wars, Hellblade and FF16 (though only during setpieces) put to shame anything sony showed this E3. They arent even close. I have posted several HFW to Avatar comparisons. if you dont see it, you dont see it. I dont see the point in continuing the same old arguments. lets agree to disagree.

Avatar's internal resolution is 1440p. It's 4k FSR 2 quality which means an internal resolution of 1440p. 1080p is if they were doing FSR performance. 1440p 30 fps was also the target of the first UE5 tech demo and the Matrix average target which had a range of 1620p-1080p. It's frankly what you should expect from next gen games on PS5.

Doom and Witcher 3 on the switch were port downs. HFW is a port up. The game was developed around the constraints of the base PS4. i dont even know why thats a point of contention. I posted the video above that shows just how similar these games look. The upgrade is basically what you see on PC from low to ultra settings. noticeble but not generational. I can buy this argument for Ratchet since its SSD stuff can simply not be done on PS4, but HFW is a PS4 game through and through.

The fact that Demon Souls, Ratchet, Horizon, TLOU Part 1 and Spiderman 2 look worse than these latest games tells me that sony devs are lagging behind. I said this last year when I saw Horizon, but a cross gen game like HFW beating out DS and Ratchet kinda proved that those games werent really next gen. People used to get upset over me calling them PS4.5 games but I guess we now see that they were indeed just that.

I agree with everything you said except the forgone conclusion you make about Horizon "beating" Demon's Souls and Ratchet. Those games look more "next gen" than Horizon. They weren't "ported up" because if they had been Sony would released them on PS4 too, no?

They also have more of a "next gen" feel even if Horizon FW is maybe more "beautiful". Look at that Nefarious City level in Ratchet. There's nothing in Horizon that's on thar level of processing.

 

[SlimySnake]

I agree with everything you said except the forgone conclusion you make about Horizon "beating" Demon's Souls and Ratchet. Those games look more "next gen" than Horizon. They weren't "ported up" because if they had been Sony would released them on PS4 too, no?

They also have more of a "next gen" feel even if Horizon FW is maybe more "beautiful". Look at that Nefarious City level in Ratchet. There's nothing in Horizon that's on thar level of processing.

I dont know why Sony didnt release them on playstation, but if we use the same logic then TLOU Part 1 is a true next gen game. We clearly know its possible on playstation 4, right?

Ratchet i will concede cant be done on PS5 but only because of its SSD stuff. I think the visuals can run on the PS4 at 900p or so like HFW. DS too. We will find out soon enough when Ratchet launches on the PC. Again, its all about tflops man. If it runs at native 4k 40-50 fps with RT with just 10 tflops, its easily running at 900p 30 fps on a base PS4 with no RT. Just look at Miles, same exact pixel counts and framerate target and its a base PS4 game. If they had only launched Miles as a PS5 game, would you say it was ported up or ported down?

Nefarious city is amazing but go to any open world level in Ratchet and it pales in comparison to HFW's open world levels. I do agree that nefarious city looks better than anything in horizon, but like to like comparisons leave a lot to be desired.

P.S Just remembered the cauldron level in Horizon BS. Thats a linear level like the nefarious city and might stand toe to toe with it. I will probably take some screenshots of the two later tonight.

 

[SlimySnake]

Forza director insists ‘we’re not misleading you’ over in-game ray tracing | VGC

“When you’re racing and when you are playing the game, ray tracing is on.”…

www.videogameschronicle.com

This is inexcusable if it's true Forza won't have RT reflections on console!

Wait, where did I say it wont have RT reflections on console? RTGI is PC exclusive, RT reflections will be on consoles.

They have been rather transparent about this.

Forza Motorsport will support Ray Tracing Global Illumination on PC

Turn10 has just confirmed that the PC version of Forza Motorsport will support Ray Tracing Global Illumination.

www.dsogaming.com

Forza does have RT reflections during gameplay so maybe they can just focus on 1-2 RT effects like reflections or shadows and leave RTGI for PC. But RTGI, Shadows + Reflections during gameplay is probably a pipe dream on consoles. This is why we need mid gen refreshes.

 

[Feel Like I'm On 42]

Wait, where did I say it wont have RT reflections on console? RTGI is PC exclusive, RT reflections will be on consoles.

They have been rather transparent about this.

Forza Motorsport will support Ray Tracing Global Illumination on PC

Turn10 has just confirmed that the PC version of Forza Motorsport will support Ray Tracing Global Illumination.

www.dsogaming.com

Sorry I misread what you said. Did you know though that the latest demo had no RT reflections, which is why a lot of people are speculating that it in fact won't have RT in gameplay on Series X?

There's a lot of confusion about this game now. Did you check out the quote from the link I posted?

 

[Omega Supreme Holopsicon]

Unfortunately, I've still haven't seen these graphics/details in any announced UE5 game.

 

[Alex11]

Holy Moly, what do you guys think of the second Titan boss fight in FF16, one of the biggest and best fighting sequences I have seen in a game since Kartos vs. Kronos in GOW 3. Makes the Horus boss fight in HFW look like a bunny hopping in the garden.

Timestampped link, spoilers for those who haven't gotten this far.

It is a spectacle, that's for sure, as is every FF game, but a few points here, which of course are just my opinions:
- It isn't fair, for lack of a better word, to compare FF to HFW in terms of scale of the battles, HFW is a bit more grounded, so it can't ever match FF, in fact there are few games that can compare to FF games in terms of scale, spectacle and just in general for the weirdest things happening.
- While amazing, in this fight, it seems to me you have little control, it's more or less a cinematic with QTE events, and I don't mean it as a criticism or mockery, opposed to HFW where you have full control.
- HFW goes graphically for a more realistic approach, while FF for a more CG anime look, at least to character faces, as some locations do appear to have a more realistic touch.
- And of course one is an open world with a full dynamic time of day and one is not.

Not a fan of either, all round for graphics I prefer HFW, but artistically I prefer FF, if that makes any sense.

 

[SlimySnake]

Sorry I misread what you said. Did you know though that the latest demo had no RT reflections, which is why a lot of people are speculating that it in fact won't have RT in gameplay on Series X?

There's a lot of confusion about this game now. Did you check out the quote from the link I posted?

Just read it. they specifically said that RTGI wont be on during gameplay last year. They were just talking about RT reflections.

Forza Motorsports’ in-game ray tracing seems to encompass both reflections and ambient occlusion. However, Esaki clarified that the footage shown in the recent Xbox Showcase trailer features full global illumination – which calculates lighting bouncing off of surfaces onto other surfaces – which he stressed was set to feature in some “non-gameplay” sequences.

I didnt know about there being no RT reflections in the E3 demo. The other article i linked seems to confirm that its still there. Paging Turk1993

 

[Turk1993]

Just read it. they specifically said that RTGI wont be on during gameplay last year. They were just talking about RT reflections.



I didnt know about there being no RT reflections in the E3 demo. The other article i linked seems to confirm that its still there. Paging Turk1993

Every footage had RT outside the pre release gameplay footage from Forza monthly that was captured from Series X.

 

[SlimySnake]

F Feel Like I'm On 42 As promised here are some Ratchet Nefarious city vs Horizon Cauldron comparisons. also some screenshots showing how Ratchet doesnt look that hot in the open world levels. Demon Souls though, yeah that game is definitely pushing asset quality and texture quality i havent seen this gen. Maybe its the tesselation thats making everything pop but going from ratchet to horizon to demon souls really made DS level of detail stand out.

 

[CGNoire]

Still minor differences that you wont notice even if you put them side by side. hero lighting on aloy during gameplay is the one true standout. You can see it here. Foliage does get a boost but nearly everything else looks the same. lighting, draw distance fog masking, water rendering, world detail is virtually identical. It's a fucking miracle on the PS4 but to me it shows just what was possible on this hardware if the devs simply reduced their resolution targets a bit.

As for GT7 and ray tracing, well check out the new F1 DF video. They turn off RT as soon as the racing starts. Menus, pre game realtime cinematics, and replays run at 30 fps with full ray tracing at native 4k with some drops to 3840*1720. But when they turned on peformance mode which drops resolution to 1440p, the gameplay with no RT went to 120p but scenes with RT on only went up to 45 fps despite the DRS dropping all the way down to 720p according to their counts.

For some reason, simply dropping the resolution by half isnt giving them the 2x boost in framerate like it does in non-RT modes. Thats probably why PD never patched in RT on track and why Forza devs have only enabled RT gameplay on PC. Its either a memory bandwidth issue or a cpu bottleneck on consoles. The AMD CPUs might be 8 core 16 threads but they are lacking the 32 MB cache and most games arent properly multithreaded so having 16 threads is clearly not enough.

Thankfully both F1 and Forza seems to be going all out with RT on PC so hopefully PD does the same whenever they port GT7 to PC. Jimbo said 2 years so it will probably come out by March 2024.

Yep been saying this all along what your really seeing with HFW is a massive budget increases more than anything else. Same with ragnorak. These arsnt next gen games. Massive budget increase like this are normal for cross gen periods while R&D teams work behind the scenes for there first true next gen game...assuming that ever happens this gen.

 

[CamHostage]

Unrecord is doing little special with the poly count, and may not be doing any particular high-end processes with lighting (it actually can't do some things Lumen would do because the gaining technique uses captuted light in textures); it's photogrammatry and naturalistic filters mixed with the bodycam viewpoint.

This game is made in UE5, but it's not really the advanced features of UE5 which makes it look so captivating.

 

[Hunnybun]

Starfield, Fable, Avatar, Star Wars, Hellblade and FF16 (though only during setpieces) put to shame anything sony showed this E3. They arent even close. I have posted several HFW to Avatar comparisons. if you dont see it, you dont see it. I dont see the point in continuing the same old arguments. lets agree to disagree.

Avatar's internal resolution is 1440p. It's 4k FSR 2 quality which means an internal resolution of 1440p. 1080p is if they were doing FSR performance. 1440p 30 fps was also the target of the first UE5 tech demo and the Matrix average target which had a range of 1620p-1080p. It's frankly what you should expect from next gen games on PS5.

Doom and Witcher 3 on the switch were port downs. HFW is a port up. The game was developed around the constraints of the base PS4. i dont even know why thats a point of contention. I posted the video above that shows just how similar these games look. The upgrade is basically what you see on PC from low to ultra settings. noticeble but not generational. I can buy this argument for Ratchet since its SSD stuff can simply not be done on PS4, but HFW is a PS4 game through and through.

The fact that Demon Souls, Ratchet, Horizon, TLOU Part 1 and Spiderman 2 look worse than these latest games tells me that sony devs are lagging behind. I said this last year when I saw Horizon, but a cross gen game like HFW beating out DS and Ratchet kinda proved that those games werent really next gen. People used to get upset over me calling them PS4.5 games but I guess we now see that they were indeed just that.

RATCHET STILL LOOKS BETTER THAN ANYTHING OTHER THAN THE NEW STAR WARS GAME!!

Honestly, the above is such a load of nonsense it's hard to know where to start.

"Put to shame"?? Sony only really showed Spider-Man 2, and that looked as good as anything other than Star Wars. There's been a ridiculous amount of screeching about SM2, and it obviously does share a hell of a lot with the first 2 games, but the section at the fish market, with entirely new assets etc, looked great. Like, clearly a level above anything in the first game.

I'm betting right now that people will be surprised at just how good it looks once they actually see more of the game.

 

[arkhamguy123]

RATCHET STILL LOOKS BETTER THAN ANYTHING OTHER THAN THE NEW STAR WARS GAME!!

Honestly, the above is such a load of nonsense it's hard to know where to start.

"Put to shame"?? Sony only really showed Spider-Man 2, and that looked as good as anything other than Star Wars. There's been a ridiculous amount of screeching about SM2, and it obviously does share a hell of a lot with the first 2 games, but the section at the fish market, with entirely new assets etc, looked great. Like, clearly a level above anything in the first game.

I'm betting right now that people will be surprised at just how good it looks once they actually see more of the game.

Yikes. I don’t know if I could disagree more…. Ratchet trades blows with HZ2, a cross Gen game. It’s gonna run on the steam deck. Which makes it technically less than a PS4 game.

All the games SlimySnake named absolutely eat it alive. It’s not that impressive outside of nefarious city and that lava mining planet honestly.

EDIT: holy shit I just realized upon re reading you actually said Spider-Man 2 looks as good as anything other than Star Wars. Okay that tells me all I need to know, have a good day sir disregard my response.

 

[Neilg]

So, right, they are a preset animation of a 3D space where the datapoints play out the elements to time.

However, in addition to the strengths you mentioned of encountering lighting or easing out of that 2D layering, I believe you can also apply shaders or even materials to a VDB, as well as adjust parameters of density and color balance? So unlike flipbook 2D exports of these 3D elements where they will pretty much always look the same (barring some 2D manipulation effects,) the existent 3D nature of the VDB lets you continue to treat it as a living element in the scene with some dynamic adjustments possible. Same explosion mushroom cloud, for example, but it can have a different intensity and brightness and scale to look pretty different if reused, and it can have the natural difference of lighting of a different location or a different ToD or shadowing so that it looks like it's happening correctly inside the scene.



Usage of VDBs in realtime applications seems still experimental and limited (there are parameters to edit but from what I'm reading there's still some pain points which have evolved over time as realtime VDB integration becomes more in use... can you stretch/squish or offset a VDB?) So I'm not sure where this is or where it's going, but it seems like the tools for it keep changing, and there's a lot of component apps/plugins to play with, so maybe we'll get some novel uses of VDB elements in games now that such bulks can be dropped in...

*Also, we're talking about this as an "animation", but I believe that's not entirely accurate? Kind of akin to the 2D GIF, there can be a single-image "frame" of a still VDB. The use of static VDB data seems less exciting conceptually unless you take it to massive structural levels of volumetric datapoints to actually build volumetric things in a game, or if you don't need your clouds to ever move, but if you needed a Bunny Cloud for some model in a game, I would believe the file you make would end up being a VDB?

(This is all very techy talk, way beyond my understanding, but I like when this thread isn't just complaining about what doesn't exist yet and instead gets into the things still coming or just now emerging after figuring out the logistics...)

yeah, this is all absolutely correct. The biggest advantage of a real volume is that you can simulate it, then drop it in the game engine and it looks right. You can easily tweak how dense the smoke is, how much light it absorbs - you have tons of art direction control over it in-engine. the look of a flipbook is pretty well baked in comparison.
If you want to change or refine the simulation details too, it's a very simple process of pointing the reference at the new set of frames. The biggest advancement we're going to see in games in the next 5 years is all about removing barriers. Right now when making assets, when it's done, you have to make the LOD's, bake the normals down etc - it's a huge pain in the ass and takes forever, meaning once an asset is in game, it's a shitload of work to modify it in any way. The closer games get to an artist making something and that thing being in the engine, the better and more refined games will be. Cutting out the tedium is a huge focus of modern game development tech.

Simulation software I use day to day only recently added the ability to squash/stretch/skew grids. Running them in real time is all very new, very experimental, and subject to a lot of development in a short space a of time.
Lots of work is being done to use neural network/ai based compression, and early papers show you can get incredible fidelity in a pretty small package.
This is one of them -


But there are many ultra-smart people putting resources into this now. It's pretty exciting!
I'm pretty sure the clouds in horizon burning shores are vdb's - thats why they don't move, and how they've been able to sculpt details into them, but it's also why you're able to fly all around them. I find animated vdb's being used mid-combat much more exciting though, the potential for really spectacular effects is huge and FF16 is only just scratching the surface.

edit: lol the zibra compression looks shit, it's super flickery.
Nvidia's is better, but it doesnt highlight real time use, so it's probably too slow to decompress to use in games -

Hours into FF16 and while I’m liking the story and combat more and more and it’s a decent game MAN these graphics are not it as the kids say lol
... It’s all just SO washed out. It feels like someone set my tv to like the desaturated setting.

This is a bug with certain tv's, I encountered it on my qn90a. You need to go into the ps5 image output settings and change rgb output from automatic to limited. It's outputting black levels at a few notches above 0, but the codec is telling the tv to use the full range.
Change that and it'll look much better. It's still in HDR so you're not actually losing any color information. It's a stupid bug, the first 15 minutes into it I could tell something was wrong because the video clip on psn showed a clip from the same area and it had a shitload more contrast.

 

[GymWolf]

IT looks extremely bland and standard, the same "stand on a platform and attack the enemies arms" that we have been doing since the days of super nintendo, but now with some Realtime cutscenes that have really unremarkable combat choreography or stick you into an autorunning segment that you can't lose.

Again, Asura's wrath level gameplay complexity but far less impressive in everything but graphics.

Pretty much.

Gaffers are always confused about cinematic games being the death of videogames or the best thing ever, it's quite amusing.

 

[GymWolf]

F Feel Like I'm On 42 As promised here are some Ratchet Nefarious city vs Horizon Cauldron comparisons. also some screenshots showing how Ratchet doesnt look that hot in the open world levels. Demon Souls though, yeah that game is definitely pushing asset quality and texture quality i havent seen this gen. Maybe its the tesselation thats making everything pop but going from ratchet to horizon to demon souls really made DS level of detail stand out.

Ratchet looks like absolute ass in many open areas, not a surprise for people without sony goggles.

 

[Represent.]

Yikes. I don’t know if I could disagree more…. Ratchet trades blows with HZ2, a cross Gen game. It’s gonna run on the steam deck. Which makes it technically less than a PS4 game.

All the games SlimySnake named absolutely eat it alive. It’s not that impressive outside of nefarious city and that lava mining planet honestly.

EDIT: holy shit I just realized upon re reading you actually said Spider-Man 2 looks as good as anything other than Star Wars. Okay that tells me all I need to know, have a good day sir disregard my response.

It really doesn’t matter at all what device a game can run on.

Crysis ran on a 360.

Whether a game runs on steam deck or not is irrelevant. ALL that matters is how the game looks.

 

[Neo_game]

Sorry I misread what you said. Did you know though that the latest demo had no RT reflections, which is why a lot of people are speculating that it in fact won't have RT in gameplay on Series X?

There's a lot of confusion about this game now. Did you check out the quote from the link I posted?

I think there was RT reflection when the car was coming in pit box. But anyways I am not sure it is worth it. F1 23 still does not look next gen with all the RT features

 

[SlimySnake]

RATCHET STILL LOOKS BETTER THAN ANYTHING OTHER THAN THE NEW STAR WARS GAME!!

Honestly, the above is such a load of nonsense it's hard to know where to start.

"Put to shame"?? Sony only really showed Spider-Man 2, and that looked as good as anything other than Star Wars. There's been a ridiculous amount of screeching about SM2, and it obviously does share a hell of a lot with the first 2 games, but the section at the fish market, with entirely new assets etc, looked great. Like, clearly a level above anything in the first game.

I'm betting right now that people will be surprised at just how good it looks once they actually see more of the game.

lol just look at the screenshots above. the game falls apart as soon as you go into an open world. The linear levels do look better but nothing that screams next gen. I suggest you play Guardians of the Galaxy which was also fairly linear, also looked mediocre in the open world levels, but as soon as you went indoors, the asset quality and graphics fidelity went up several notches. ratchet might edge it thanks to its art style and better ray traced reflections, but its not a generational leap over guardians by any means.

here are some more screenshots i took last night.

I am not going to go into the Sony devs vs other devs argument because it might be misconstrued as system wars, but i will just say that they were the kings for the first two years with games like Demon Souls, Ratchet and HFW leading the pack, but things are different in 2023.

 

[arkhamguy123]

It really doesn’t matter at all what device a game can run on.

Crysis ran on a 360.

Whether a game runs on steam deck or not is irrelevant. ALL that matters is how the game looks.

Um. Yes it does. That is totally bereft of any logic. What is crysis on Xbox 360 supposed to prove? Crysis 2 and 3 also ran on Xbox 360.

To say it’s irrelevant is just denial. It’s that simple.

 

[arkhamguy123]

lol just look at the screenshots above. the game falls apart as soon as you go into an open world. The linear levels do look better but nothing that screams next gen. I suggest you play Guardians of the Galaxy which was also fairly linear, also looked mediocre in the open world levels, but as soon as you went indoors, the asset quality and graphics fidelity went up several notches. ratchet might edge it thanks to its art style and better ray traced reflections, but its not a generational leap over guardians by any means.

here are some more screenshots i took last night.

I am not going to go into the Sony devs vs other devs argument because it might be misconstrued as system wars, but i will just say that they were the kings for the first two years with games like Demon Souls, Ratchet and HFW leading the pack, but things are different in 2023.

I swear they went out of their way to make Spider-Man 2 look that bad.

I thought the “captured in real time on ps5” 2021 reveal was underwhelming enough and they went about 10 notches under that

 

[SlimySnake]

Man I wish I could post some screenshots of an FF16 cutscene I just watched. This one character model that I cant even mention because its so spoilery looks leagues ahead of everyone else in the game. It's straight up CG quality.

Why the rest of the characters including the main character don’t look as good is beyond me.

I don’t think I’ve ever played a game so uneven before.

 

[arkhamguy123]

Man I wish I could post some screenshots of an FF16 cutscene I just watched. This one character model that I cant even mention because its so spoilery looks leagues ahead of everyone else in the game. It's straight up CG quality.

Why the rest of the characters including the main character don’t look as good is beyond me.

I don’t think I’ve ever played a game so uneven before.

I’ve never played a game more in my life where you know exactly where the team spent all the money, effort and time on and which parts they rushed it to meet the release date for their publisher. It is whiplash in some parts.

I’d say about 80-90% of it looks PS4 and about 10-20% looks PS5 kinda cgi ish. Also could you spoiler tag which character? I’m playing through the game now keeping a look out.

 

[SlimySnake]

I think there was RT reflection when the car was coming in pit box. But anyways I am not sure it is worth it. F1 23 still does not look next gen with all the RT features

You can check out just how little a difference path tracing makes on the new digital foundry cyberpunk video where they compare ps5’s non rt mode to the full blown path traced pc mode. 90% of the time you cant tell the difference. 5% of the time the difference is massive. The rest is actually worse because it darkens areas the devs didn’t want darkened.

The fact that it comes at a massive cost of 5x in terms of pixel count and framerate, you have to wonder if simply improving your fidelity and lighting engine would be a better use of gpu power.

The rt hit in f1 is 2-3x. For a very minor visual gain. Just not worth it. They need to instead improve their core lighting engine and add better weather effects and asset quality.

 

[ChiefDada]

Man I wish I could post some screenshots of an FF16 cutscene I just watched. This one character model that I cant even mention because its so spoilery looks leagues ahead of everyone else in the game. It's straight up CG quality.

I'm 99% sure I know which scene you're referring to and yes it was glorious.

I’d say about 80-90% of it looks PS4 and about 10-20% looks PS5 kinda cgi ish. Also could you spoiler tag which character? I’m playing through the game now keeping a look out.

You'll know it when you see it.

 

[ChiefDada]

F Feel Like I'm On 42 As promised here are some Ratchet Nefarious city vs Horizon Cauldron comparisons. also some screenshots showing how Ratchet doesnt look that hot in the open world levels. Demon Souls though, yeah that game is definitely pushing asset quality and texture quality i havent seen this gen. Maybe its the tesselation thats making everything pop but going from ratchet to horizon to demon souls really made DS level of detail stand out.

Burning Shores cauldron has the best looking gameplay visuals to date imo. But I thought they lock it off after completion? How were you able to get back in? I would love to revisit.

 

[ChiefDada]

HARD PASS!

I do NOT want my video games to look like this. Completely devoid of any sense of passion or artistic vision.

 

[SlimySnake]

Burning Shores cauldron has the best looking gameplay visuals to date imo. But I thought they lock it off after completion? How were you able to get back in? I would love to revisit.

I never did it during the story. just wandered in while flying one day. its cauldron theta. I really dislike the cauldrons in this game so I still havent finished it.

I’ve never played a game more in my life where you know exactly where the team spent all the money, effort and time on and which parts they rushed it to meet the release date for their publisher. It is whiplash in some parts.

I’d say about 80-90% of it looks PS4 and about 10-20% looks PS5 kinda cgi ish. Also could you spoiler tag which character? I’m playing through the game now keeping a look out.

lol nah. its a major spoiler. You will know when you see it.

I will wait a month before i start spamming it in this thread. its glorious.

Just got to the desert area. Back to looking like a PS3.5 game.

 

[Feel Like I'm On 42]

I think there was RT reflection when the car was coming in pit box. But anyways I am not sure it is worth it. F1 23 still does not look next gen with all the RT features

Definitely not worth it but if the resources that should be gained by not using it aren't being put to good use, I'd still prefer FM to have it.

My thing is don't lie about it esp when in it's absence (at recent Not e3) it's not looking so good (on SX).