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Graphical Fidelity I Expect This Gen

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
This heinous 5 year development time is almost certainly significantly due to covid and having to make significant changes for cross gen development. Covid will have been a thing for almost 2 years by the time the game ships. I'd be amazed if it hadn't added at least 6 months to development and the same for developing for 2 different generations. It could well be more than that.
lol I am tired of everyone blaming covid. The game was originally slated to be released in mid 2021 then delayed six months just like every other Sony game last gen. This game is no different.

There is this big misconception that covid has delayed productivity. Thats not the case in every industry and especially not in the tech industry where people love working from home, and productivity has increased. It's why several companies have allowed people to work from home permanently because corporate fears of people jerking off at home were unfounded. It might be slightly different for video game developers importing and exporting gigs of data but with 1 Gig internet available everywhere, thats really not that different from the internet speeds you get at work. Look at insomniac, they shipped two games, one next gen during covid while working from home.

If I had to guess, this game was in development hell just like horizon 1 which also took 6 years because they wasted a year and a half switching back and forth between horizon and another new IP. Though the fact that they have dozens of hours of animated cutscenes tells me a big part of the budget went into that.
 
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oldergamer

Member
Cringe Engine 5... Seriously, looking at Metahuman tech and what Unity bought yesterday, this might be the worst generation when it comes to uncanny valley, the graphics are there but the animations still have a loooong way to go.
calling bullshit on that. you're complaining about very advanced motion capture and thinking what? that it looks fake?
 

ZywyPL

Banned
calling bullshit on that. you're complaining about very advanced motion capture and thinking what? that it looks fake?

You literally have a side-by-side comparison, what more do you need? The footage on the right looks great but only in static screens, when you pause the video, but in motion it's not that good anymore, the animations don't keep up with the visuals. It's the opposite of LA Noire, where it has arguably still the best facial mo-cap but it's the graphics that immediately gives away it's not real.
 

Arioco

Member
I expect it will be very marginal.

Like the same polygonal complexity as last gen with a shiny coat of RTX.


Same polygonal complexity? Highly unlikely, geometry is precisely one aspect where the leap from GCN to RDNA has been HUGE. I'm talking like x8 more polys in tessellation benchmarks.


Haven't you seen any of Unreal Engine 5 demos?
 
You literally have a side-by-side comparison, what more do you need? The footage on the right looks great but only in static screens, when you pause the video, but in motion it's not that good anymore, the animations don't keep up with the visuals. It's the opposite of LA Noire, where it has arguably still the best facial mo-cap but it's the graphics that immediately gives away it's not real.
The Matrix demo and TLOU II have the best facial animation I’ve seen…
 
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rofif

Can’t Git Gud
I think you've got it wrong, "Metahuman tech" isn't something you plug into your Unreal game and it makes metahumans for you on the spot. Metahuman is an figure creator; you design your characters, then when you have one you like, you kind of export it (or rather cloud-process it) for use in your game. No Metahuman you use inside a game is "stock", they're all characters a designer customized and exported. I'm sure there are some applications for creating NPCs and other characters as needed (and there should even be ways to modify Metahumans with costumes, accessories, or other cosmetic changes,) but that's not the purpose of the Metahuman Creator tool. It's a "before" tool, not a "during" tool.

ctyv9qx.jpg


So, for example, this scene in Matrix Awakens, that's not just a ton of Metahumans generated in realtime. Those characters would all be made and exported (this segment of the sequence was actually video rather than realtime) to be in the scene. Same with the characters that wander around the city in the realtime exploration, they were customized by hand and added into the game even though they're regular nobodies in the world. Also, once a Metahuman is created, it still has to be optimized so that a version of each Metahuman can fits within the constraints of the entire game that is being built. (Also of note is that Keanu and Moss were apparently not built using Metahuman Creator, but that's for a different thread.)

Metahuman Creator makes it easier to create those characters to be in the world, but it doesn't automatically make them for the player or even for the designer. And it doesn't affect the graphic fidelity of what you would expect this gen; it just should help the character modelers of game development get to a high level more consistently.
This is the only scene in that matrix demo that is prerecorded apparently.
And while the characters you can see in the city have good fidelity, they all look 90% the same. But it's not a focus of that matrix demo
 

Sosokrates

Report me if I continue to console war
Could we get an installment that looks like this, this generation? I think yes if guerilla upgrades their engine to be on par with UE5, the matrix
demo looks as good as this in real time.

iw


I would of thought not because Render farms take hours to render 1sec of cgi of that quality.
but I m pretty sure the tech for realtime visuals and pre rendered is quite different, so maybe realtime tech will catch up sooner then people think.

I know hes biased but Tim sweeny thinks realtime visual effects and engines like UE5 will replace the say its currently done.
There are many advantages of being able to render in realtime.

It would be interesting to see what cgi quality could be done with like 10 3090tis and like 1tb of ram on UE5.
 

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
Could we get an installment that looks like this, this generation? I think yes if guerilla upgrades their engine to be on par with UE5, the matrix
demo looks as good as this in real time.


Yes. Matrix proves this. At least in cutscenes, on rails sequences and close ups.

Its a travesty that the most talented dev at PlayStation was forced to slave away on a 1.8 tflops 1.6 ghz machine 9 years after launch. This is the kind of shit that makes people quit this hobby.
 

Sosokrates

Report me if I continue to console war
Yes. Matrix proves this. At least in cutscenes, on rails sequences and close ups.

Its a travesty that the most talented dev at PlayStation was forced to slave away on a 1.8 tflops 1.6 ghz machine 9 years after launch. This is the kind of shit that makes people quit this hobby.

Huh?

The PS4 was very nice hardware wise. It provided a great next gen leap, all things considered it will go down in history being a good leap.
 
Yes. Matrix proves this. At least in cutscenes, on rails sequences and close ups.

Its a travesty that the most talented dev at PlayStation was forced to slave away on a 1.8 tflops 1.6 ghz machine 9 years after launch. This is the kind of shit that makes people quit this hobby.

Not even close. Matrix doesn't look anywhere near the CG in the Horizon cinematic trailer. That's being produced on a render farm, not from live hardware out there today.

The business reality is that with a game like Horizon selling 20M+....you can't have an early gen blockbuster be next-gen exclusive.

Not a big deal to me. Horizon FW looks better than any of the true next gen games anyways. Is it peak next gen? No. but it looks fantastic and will sell a massive amount.
 

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
The business reality is that with a game like Horizon selling 20M+....you can't have an early gen blockbuster be next-gen exclusive.
I hate the business reality excuse. This is a first party game. Business reality doesnt apply to them because they need to justify their new $500 consoles. Third parties wont do it so the onus is always on first party. And now Sony is turning into EA and Activision?

Whatever happened to legs? Look at Miles. Everyone thinks its a PS5 game and only buy it whenever they get a PS5. It is the third best selling sony game ever. Sony can and SHOULD take the loss. Besides, up until last quarter, the PS5 was the best selling console of all time with an install base larger than when MGS2 and MGS4 launched. All of those are just excuses for greed.

They held back an entire generation to make money faster.
 
I hate the business reality excuse. This is a first party game. Business reality doesnt apply to them because they need to justify their new $500 consoles. Third parties wont do it so the onus is always on first party. And now Sony is turning into EA and Activision?

Whatever happened to legs? Look at Miles. Everyone thinks its a PS5 game and only buy it whenever they get a PS5. It is the third best selling sony game ever. Sony can and SHOULD take the loss. Besides, up until last quarter, the PS5 was the best selling console of all time with an install base larger than when MGS2 and MGS4 launched. All of those are just excuses for greed.

They held back an entire generation to make money faster.

Miles is also selling tons on PS4. Horizon FW was started before PS5 dev kits were ready. These games are huge productions right now I just don't think it's realistic to have the biggest titles going exclusively next gen for the first 2 years.

2023 is looking to be next-gen only though. I really feel God of War is the last major cross gen game.
 
I hate the business reality excuse. This is a first party game. Business reality doesnt apply to them because they need to justify their new $500 consoles. Third parties wont do it so the onus is always on first party. And now Sony is turning into EA and Activision?

Whatever happened to legs? Look at Miles. Everyone thinks its a PS5 game and only buy it whenever they get a PS5. It is the third best selling sony game ever. Sony can and SHOULD take the loss. Besides, up until last quarter, the PS5 was the best selling console of all time with an install base larger than when MGS2 and MGS4 launched. All of those are just excuses for greed.

They held back an entire generation to make money faster.
This is the thing that's been pissing me off so much about Sony since releasing PS5! They're doing very little to justify the $500 we spent. Instead, they're actively slitting in our faces with things like: raising the price of games, barely improving ps4>ps5 "upgrades" like Uncharted 4 remaster and Ghost of tsushima directors cut, being slow as fuck to bring features like vrr to ps5, and focusing on PC while simultaneously not upgrading ps5 versions of God of War when they release the far superior PC versions.
 

GymWolf

Member
Miles is also selling tons on PS4. Horizon FW was started before PS5 dev kits were ready. These games are huge productions right now I just don't think it's realistic to have the biggest titles going exclusively next gen for the first 2 years.

2023 is looking to be next-gen only though. I really feel God of War is the last major cross gen game.
To be fair it's not like 2-3 years ago someone like sony didn't had the equivalent of the ps5 hardware or very close to it...
Gpu and cpu are nothing special and the ssd maybe were a bit slower, but still 100x times close to ps5 actual hardware than ps4 hardware (that has a 5400 rpm analogic hard disk)

It was not a choice dictated by lack of hardware, even if you don't have the exact ps5 specs you can start working on a very similar hardware and make ajdustmenst when you have the final kit, maybe the game woulnd't be full nextgen like when you start working since day one on a ps5 final kit, but still far beyond what a ps4 can do.

This was mostly a greed move from sony.
 

Lethal01

Member
Could we get an installment that looks like this, this generation? I think yes if guerilla upgrades their engine to be on par with UE5, the matrix
demo looks as good as this in real time.



This is a great example of how we are clearly several gens away from even joking about being close to photorealism.

here's some fun tech though
 
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NahaNago

Member
Miles is also selling tons on PS4. Horizon FW was started before PS5 dev kits were ready. These games are huge productions right now I just don't think it's realistic to have the biggest titles going exclusively next gen for the first 2 years.

2023 is looking to be next-gen only though. I really feel God of War is the last major cross gen game.
I agree with this. How they released games at the start of this gen is how I thought they should have done. Release a couple of first party exclusives for next gen like maybe one or 2 each year for the first 2 years and have the rest be crossgen and if the crossgen games are still selling like crazy on the older console then continue to support the last gen until sales finally die down.
 

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
Miles is also selling tons on PS4. Horizon FW was started before PS5 dev kits were ready. These games are huge productions right now I just don't think it's realistic to have the biggest titles going exclusively next gen for the first 2 years.

2023 is looking to be next-gen only though. I really feel God of War is the last major cross gen game.
They had 10 tflops AMD GPUs in 2016. Nvidia's 1080 Ti which is basically the equivalent of a PS5 was also available. THey had SSDs and 8 core 16 thread CPUs available too.

Not to mention the fact that the first Gonzalo leaks showed they had a working SoC in 2018. I think late 2017 (3 years before launch) is the PERFECT time to start development on next gen games that are now taking 5 years to make. Thats when Todd Howard started dev on Starfield. Thats when Bluepoint started dev on Demon Souls. Console devs have been doing this throughout history. Kojima made the first MGS4 reveal when the PS3 didnt even have a GPU listed in the spec so he just used a PC GPU.

This is just greed man. 2023 is next gen only but we are only a year away and we have only seen Spiderman which doesnt even look as good as the Matrix. I am guessing they are once again making the game native 4k for some bizarre fucking reason which is leaving them very little GPU power to push the visual fidelity. I wouldnt be surprised if Greedy Jim Ryan is forcing them to make it cross gen. Otherwise blowing your entire GPU budget rendering native 4k is just too dumb of an idea from a technically accomplished studio like Insomniac.

We are in the graphical fidelity thread two years into the gen and Sony hasnt even shown us what the future looks like. By this time last gen, The Order had already been released. Bloodborne was a month away. DriveClub had set a new bar in rain simulation. Infamous had set a new bar in open world games. KZSF had melted eyes two years earlier. And Naughty Dog had set the standard for what the PS4 was capable of a year earlier with that infamous Uncharted 4 teaser they ended up matching in TLOU2.

Only Epic has done that so far and maybe Ubisoft with Avatar, but they still havent shown any gameplay either. At this point, people in this thread would just like to see whats coming because 2023 looks pretty barren right now.
 

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
This is the thing that's been pissing me off so much about Sony since releasing PS5! They're doing very little to justify the $500 we spent. Instead, they're actively slitting in our faces with things like: raising the price of games, barely improving ps4>ps5 "upgrades" like Uncharted 4 remaster and Ghost of tsushima directors cut, being slow as fuck to bring features like vrr to ps5, and focusing on PC while simultaneously not upgrading ps5 versions of God of War when they release the far superior PC versions.
I dont want this to become a Sony bashing thread since MS, Nintendo, EA and Activision are all equally at fault here, but man MLB The Show 2022 trailer just shows how far behind the curve Sony has been. Fifa, NBA 2k, and even Madden got next gen visual upgrades at launch a year and a half ago. Fifa had frostbite hair that looked like Aloy's CG hair in that trailer available just a couple of weeks after launch of next gen consoles.
 

Vick

Gold Member
Yes, these also make it obvious we still have a long way to go, but I think in 15~25 years we can get there, hope some of the people in this thread get to live to see it.
Sure. We already have a completely real-time and not baked photorealistic (read the definition of this term) city and near photorealistic characters superior to many, even recent, pre-rendered ones.. but it will take us another 25 years, the same time it took real-time graphics to go from this:

final-doom-2b825.jpg


To this:

u1Qncli.gif


EG6Cscb.gif


Before we get even close to joking about being close to photorealism.
 

Elog

Member
This is a confusing thread. Graphics in applications such as games is developing at a breathtaking speed. Are we complaining about that?

Or are we having a discussion about the fact that hardware matters less at this point and the mathematical side of graphics matters more? That fact seems to confuse those that have been used to measure graphics in TFLOPs.
 

ChiefDada

Gold Member
This is a confusing thread. Graphics in applications such as games is developing at a breathtaking speed. Are we complaining about that?

Or are we having a discussion about the fact that hardware matters less at this point and the mathematical side of graphics matters more? That fact seems to confuse those that have been used to measure graphics in TFLOPs.

Can you explain further, specifically bolded portion? I thought TFLOPS = mathematical aspect of GPU performance.
 

Elog

Member
Can you explain further, specifically bolded portion? I thought TFLOPS = mathematical aspect of GPU performance.
My point is that in a graphics engine you have a virtual 3D environment and a view point that at a certain frequency results in a 2D image being projected to a screen (TV/ monitor).

Of all the calculations that a GPU does to create that 2D image, only a tiny fraction actually results in that image. Or in other words, the GPU productivity is very very low (DL2 is a prime example for this - the GPU is completely tapped out in terms of capacity with very little to show for it).

Right now almost all the interesting developments in graphics is how to optimise the mathematical calculations between the 3D environment and the 2D projection - that is where the low hanging fruit is to improve graphics and not in adding more transistors. At around 10 TFLOPs you hit diminishing returns on the GPU side of things hard.

The difference between UE4 and UE5 is all about the math and not the GPU as such. A lot of people are still living in the 'resolution world' that was at the center of last generation since going from 720p to 900p to 1080p and to 1440p had very good visual returns without changing much in the games as such, i.e. add TFLOPs, increase resolution with the same game and bingo. We are not there anymore - once at 1440p or higher the resolution game is secondary to improve graphics.

Edit: Just to highlight what I mean (I have used this link before) - this is a video which depicts a new mathematical model for fluid simulations. The point is to show that changing the math can reduce the amount of calculations required for in this case a fluid simulation by more than 90%. The math side of graphics is where the real developments are happening at the moment.

 
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SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
This is a confusing thread. Graphics in applications such as games is developing at a breathtaking speed. Are we complaining about that?

Or are we having a discussion about the fact that hardware matters less at this point and the mathematical side of graphics matters more? That fact seems to confuse those that have been used to measure graphics in TFLOPs.
This is just a continuation of the era thread which was created years ago with the expectation we would have next gen graphics at the start of the gen. Nothing too technical. We didnt have a good idea back then so I remember people used to post UE4 engine demos like the Rebirth demo to predict what graphics would look like next gen.
 
This is a great example of how we are clearly several gens away from even joking about being close to photorealism.

here's some fun tech though

Several gen? Have you seen the first 1 min 40 secs of this video?
We will be there with PS6 and next Xbox thanks to advancements being made with deep learning.
The next gen will have its own NN processor (ASIC) to run dozens of NN models to handle what you think isn't possible.
We would be able to do what UE5 did for static objects, for characters and visual effects (particles).
and ML models will handle all the world simulation (physics, npc ai, water, weather, lighting, shadows, reflection, cuastics, vfx, uprender,etc)

We will have End-game / Oasis like graphics and density in next gen, you heard it here first!



Advancements in ML will do the impossible
 
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Lethal01

Member
Sure. We already have a completely real-time and not baked photorealistic (read the definition of this term) city and near photorealistic characters superior to many, even recent, pre-rendered ones.. but it will take us another 25 years, the same time it took real-time graphics to go from this

To this

The city isn't photorealistic and the characters aren't even close, so yeah, we need consoles that are 20x stronger atleast along with many new ways of handling things..
Deep learning is why I'm not saying 30 years instead of 15.
 
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They had 10 tflops AMD GPUs in 2016. Nvidia's 1080 Ti which is basically the equivalent of a PS5 was also available. THey had SSDs and 8 core 16 thread CPUs available too.

Not to mention the fact that the first Gonzalo leaks showed they had a working SoC in 2018. I think late 2017 (3 years before launch) is the PERFECT time to start development on next gen games that are now taking 5 years to make. Thats when Todd Howard started dev on Starfield. Thats when Bluepoint started dev on Demon Souls. Console devs have been doing this throughout history. Kojima made the first MGS4 reveal when the PS3 didnt even have a GPU listed in the spec so he just used a PC GPU.

This is just greed man. 2023 is next gen only but we are only a year away and we have only seen Spiderman which doesnt even look as good as the Matrix. I am guessing they are once again making the game native 4k for some bizarre fucking reason which is leaving them very little GPU power to push the visual fidelity. I wouldnt be surprised if Greedy Jim Ryan is forcing them to make it cross gen. Otherwise blowing your entire GPU budget rendering native 4k is just too dumb of an idea from a technically accomplished studio like Insomniac.

We are in the graphical fidelity thread two years into the gen and Sony hasnt even shown us what the future looks like. By this time last gen, The Order had already been released. Bloodborne was a month away. DriveClub had set a new bar in rain simulation. Infamous had set a new bar in open world games. KZSF had melted eyes two years earlier. And Naughty Dog had set the standard for what the PS4 was capable of a year earlier with that infamous Uncharted 4 teaser they ended up matching in TLOU2.

Only Epic has done that so far and maybe Ubisoft with Avatar, but they still havent shown any gameplay either. At this point, people in this thread would just like to see whats coming because 2023 looks pretty barren right now.

Sure, they had 10 TF cards

They didn't have a next-gen engine ready to go. They didn't have production assets tailored to the new engine. Re-tooling everything for next-gen takes a while. They were able to hit the ground running, just like GoW:R. You think production has gotten longer, then next-gen production would have been even worse.

Do I like it? Not necessarily. I'd prefer next-gen. But the business case is completely obvious, and combine that with shortages of hardware and Sony is doing the right move. And even with Horizon: FW being cross-gen it's still basically the top visuals the medium has at the time of release.

I'm honestly not that impressed by The Matrix during gameplay. It looks good, but isn't blowing me away. Horizon looks more impressive due to the art direction.
 
This is a great example of how we are clearly several gens away from even joking about being close to photorealism.

here's some fun tech though

Several gens? We already reached it with the matrix demo in certain parts…Try maybe 1 or 2. The PS6 will be a powerhouse. ~40 TFLOPS or more and will have perfected CG quality visuals…the horizon trailer is perfect doable IMHO on PS5..The fluid and fire simulation has some ways to go but yes that trailer is doable now…the hair tech is here (check FIFA 22) the geometric density is here.
 

Haggard

Banned
yep. I dont know how anyone can say that after we have already seen the matrix.
The "photorealistic"-goal isn`t about best case 99% static scenarios and still images, you know.
Nanite and Lumen have lots and lots of issues/performance limitations despite being the most advanced overall solutions out there and making a lot of compromises, especially in lighting.
The moment this kind of fidelity is supposed to be interactive and "compatible" with more than just concrete or stone deserts we`re again talking about an exponential jump in necessary computing power.
Actual photorealism, or the closest we might be able to get is when we reach path-traced territory and that is still far off.
 
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Lethal01

Member
Several gens? We already reached it with the matrix demo in certain parts
We haven't at all.

Try maybe 1 or 2.
2 is what I was thinking, so ps7, which would be atleast 13 years away at the rate we are going.

the horizon trailer is perfect doable IMHO on PS5..The fluid and fire simulation has some ways to go but yes that trailer is doable now…the hair tech is here (check FIFA 22) the geometric density is here.
It's just not. it's just on another level from the gameplay.
 
We haven't at all.


2 is what I was thinking, so ps7, which would be atleast 13 years away at the rate we are going.


It's just not. it's just on another level from the gameplay.
1. Yes certain parts are indistinguishable from reality…few parts buts its there…

2. I agree with this…maybe even with PS6

3. Only because it runs on PS4 also… :)
 
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