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Graphical Fidelity I Expect This Gen

Just watched the latest trailer for First Descendant. That is the minimum of what I expect from this gen, not this apologetic Spiderman 2 crap people are twerking for. Kinda makes you realise that people who are making excuses for all these pathetic looking "next gen" games are bunch of cultists, hence why I just refused to engage with them at this point.
Just watched it. Holy shit what is this game? Visually looks incredible. Is it multiplayer or a story thing or what?
 

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
Just watched the latest trailer for First Descendant. That is the minimum of what I expect from this gen, not this apologetic Spiderman 2 crap people are twerking for. Kinda makes you realise that people who are making excuses for all these pathetic looking "next gen" games are bunch of cultists, hence why I just refused to engage with them at this point.
Wow. Never heard of this game. Looks really good despite being a cross gen game.

Shame its a coop shooter.
 

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
Which is my point, if we're getting cross gen games that look like that then I don't know how people are making excuses for current gen only games that look nowhere near as good.
I legit think Spiderman 2 is cross gen and Sony is just hiding the PS4 version. They hid the fact that Miles was cross gen until just two months before launch. i wouldnt be surprised if this game comes out on PS4 after launch. The faster traversal seems to be the only next gen thing about the game and they could just limit flying speed in the PS4 versions.
 
I legit think Spiderman 2 is cross gen and Sony is just hiding the PS4 version. They hid the fact that Miles was cross gen until just two months before launch. i wouldnt be surprised if this game comes out on PS4 after launch. The faster traversal seems to be the only next gen thing about the game and they could just limit flying speed in the PS4 versions.
It’ll run on the steamdeck. They’ll port it. Meaning that almost nothing is then stopping the PS4 version except the character switching and slingshot maybe? Could just have a longer loading time after you press square to switch and I’m not convinced the slingshot can’t be done on PS4 with lower quality assets to load in
 

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
It’ll run on the steamdeck. They’ll port it. Meaning that almost nothing is then stopping the PS4 version except the character switching and slingshot maybe? Could just have a longer loading time after you press square to switch and I’m not convinced the slingshot can’t be done on PS4 with lower quality assets to load in
Yeah, but steamdeck has an SSD and a more better CPU.
 

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
In a world where Horizon 2 runs just fine on PS4 I see no reason why SM2 wouldn't do the same. I however do not think there's a PS4 version as Sony seems to have moved on.
I am going by Ratchet's PC port. it seems to be more CPU bound than anything. Yes, in terms of visuals, they could port it down, but the loading stuff they do with the SSD like portals in Ratchet and character switching in Spiderman, is very likely CPU bound and should be possible on the steam deck. PS4 is a different story.
 

Edder1

Member
I am going by Ratchet's PC port. it seems to be more CPU bound than anything. Yes, in terms of visuals, they could port it down, but the loading stuff they do with the SSD like portals in Ratchet and character switching in Spiderman, is very likely CPU bound and should be possible on the steam deck. PS4 is a different story.
All you gotta do is make adjustments to how those things are handled on PS4. Yes, you may not be able to replicate it 1:1 how it works on PS4, but you can always make adjustments for specific hardware by applying different techniques. Plust those things make a small part of those games, hence why it really shouldn't be too much of a hassle.

Now in contrast to this you get games like Uncharted 4 (released 2.5 years after PS4 launch) which in no way shape or form can be downported to PS3 while preserving anywhere near the same look and the same physics. I'm still waiting to see games this gen that we can definitely say will not be possible on PS4 unless they drastically make adjustments to visuals and they look like something entirely different.
 
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All you gotta do is make adjustments to how those things are handled on PS4. Yes, you may not be able to replicate it 1:1 how it works on PS4, but you can always make adjustments for specific hardware by applying different techniques. Plust those things make a small part of those games, hence why it really shouldn't be too much of a hassle.

Now in contrast to this you get games like Uncharted 4, which in no way shape or form can be downported to PS3 while preserving anywhere near the same look and physics. I'm still waiting to see games thisbgen that we can definitely say will not be possible on PS4 unless they drastically make adjustments to visuals and they look like something completely different.
Matrix demo exclusively gives me the feeling that this could never be done on PS4

Oh and the UE5 first “valley” demo with the elf girl but that’s not something we have access to
 

Edder1

Member
Matrix demo exclusively gives me the feeling that this could never be done on PS4

Oh and the UE5 first “valley” demo with the elf girl but that’s not something we have access to
Matrix is definitely one, but it isn't a compete game and therefore we still can't use it as a crutch in this argument. But yes, no way you're doing that demo on PS4.
 
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Alsoooooo

I’d get crucified for saying this in any other thread but I stand by that this generations 60FPS chasing and childish obsession (“No 60fps! No buy!” “Only 30fps? Fuckin embarrassing”) has further plummeted us into a graphics recession and has neutered and held back tech advances

If the PS3 and PS4 had the same 60fps or die mandates we’d not have gotten the great and visually stunning games we got. That’s just a fact
 
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Robbinhood

Banned
Y'all loco.

You seen what a HDD does to Ratchet, same would happen for Spidey. Also you can't just "lower the traversal speed" if missions are designed around that.

There's no PS4 version.
 

Edder1

Member
Y'all loco.

You seen what a HDD does to Ratchet, same would happen for Spidey. Also you can't just "lower the traversal speed" if missions are designed around that.

There's no PS4 version.
Not in current state, but those things can be worked around if last gen versions are also part of development. I'm still of the opinion that fidelity would suffer quite a lot in case of Ratchet, but Spiderman 2 visuals are just not that impressive to get significant visual downgrade.
 
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PeteBull

Member
Alsoooooo

I’d get crucified for saying this in any other thread but I stand by that this generations 60FPS chasing and childish obsession (“No 60fps! No buy!” “Only 30fps? Fuckin embarrassing”) has further plummeted us into a graphics recession and has neutered and held back tech advances

If the PS3 and PS4 had the same 60fps or die mandates we’d not have gotten the great and visually stunning games we got. That’s just a fact
I agree once we get game looking like the matrix demo, for such quality its understandable to not have 60fps mode for base ps5, maybe only for upcoming ps5pr0.

So far i didnt see anything current gen only that screams- 30fps only- lets see how starfield actually looks on xsx, but even here we gonna get 60fps on pc at least.

Spiderman2, ratchet, fh5, upcoming forza motorsport, demons souls, returnal, ff16, hell even horizon fw and its even more graphically impressive expansion/dlc all got 60fps modes, so im ok with 30fps only if game actually is well above those previously named in graphics, akin to lvl of the matrix demo, then i will accept it w/o complains.

Well one exception is MS Flight Sim but its not really that much of a game, altho yes, this thing is so heavy on cpu i understand xsx cant run it in 60.
 
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CGNoire

Member
Was watching Midway last night and the big war scenes just made me depressed because we havent seen anything like this 22 years after Medal of Honor Allied Assault's Saving Private Ryan inspired Normandy beach landing, and 20 years after Call of Duty's Enemy At the Gates inspired stalingrad charge. I watched the DF review of Modern Warfare 2 and they have no epic war scene. Instead they had an upside down chase sequence with you hanging upside down from a helicopter shooting at trucks on a highway. A ship setpiece inspired by Uncharted 3 with containers going back and forth in a storm. And an open world sniper level, yay?




Uncharted 2 and 3 had brought us so close to matching Hollywood, but almost 15 years later, it feels like we are decades behind. And I dont mean visuals, just the scale and ambition is completely MIA in games nowadays where devs just want to make copy pasta side quests for 100 hour snoozefest instead of anything even remotely ambitious.

Id rather have PS4 quality visuals if I can get some epic war scenes with hundreds of AI planes or soldiers. It was so disappointing to see FF16 tease big war scenes and then just completely fail to deliver on that scale. I get it. Game development is hard. But games are taking 5-6 years to make nowadays anyway. So instead of wasting 6 years on 200 fetch quests, maybe spend that time working on AI systems that can handle more than 10 enemies on screen at once?

It is downright embarrassing tbh.

That scene looks awesome.
 

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
Matrix demo exclusively gives me the feeling that this could never be done on PS4

Oh and the UE5 first “valley” demo with the elf girl but that’s not something we have access to
Here is the Matrix demo running on a steam deck. Looks like something close to 500p 800*600 with resolution quality set to 50 so im guessing closer to 360p if not less.



Steam deck has the SSD and CPU going for it though. No way in hell does the PS4 run it even at that low of a resolution.

That scene looks awesome.
the movie is full of scenes like that. its a gorgeous looking movie especially in 4k hdr.

All you gotta do is make adjustments to how those things are handled on PS4. Yes, you may not be able to replicate it 1:1 how it works on PS4, but you can always make adjustments for specific hardware by applying different techniques. Plust those things make a small part of those games, hence why it really shouldn't be too much of a hassle.

Now in contrast to this you get games like Uncharted 4 (released 2.5 years after PS4 launch) which in no way shape or form can be downported to PS3 while preserving anywhere near the same look and the same physics. I'm still waiting to see games this gen that we can definitely say will not be possible on PS4 unless they drastically make adjustments to visuals and they look like something entirely different.
In terms of GPU, yes you can make changes to get it to run on a 1.8 tflops GPU. I think i posted the steam deck footage here a couple of weeks ago and it ran the game fine at medium settings around 800p using FSR2 hitting almost 60 fps at times. For 30 fps, they could probably hit 900p without using fsr at medium settings on a base PS4.

However, as we saw in HDD vs ssd benchmarks, their loading is actually CPU bound. With a powerful CPU, game runs fine on an HDD. Just a few seconds longer in portals. But pair it with a shitty last gen CPU and it literally crashes. So i highly doubt that jaguar CPUs could even run that thing even if they were willing to add longer portal times in HDD.
 
With no due respect.
The gulf of graphical fidelty between this and that trailer is astronomical, and comparing the two is comical.
The lighting is simply in a different dimension and combined with the geomtric density nothing is coming close in real time on these consoles.

They look similar in the same way avatar frontiers of pandora looks similar to Avatar the way of water.
This is realtime on PS5!…watch this and come back to me.
 
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Killer8

Member
We are talking about sports games but Its actually pretty crazy how shooting games get overlooked and never get mentioned in graphical discussions. We focus way too much on action/adventure games.

Star Wars Battlefront 1 is easily TOP 4 Best Looking Game of All-Times even by today's standards.
You couldn't watch this entire video and tell me this doesn't look better than 99.99% of games released today.
Look at the amount of effort the devs put into this. Taking over 100,000 photogrammetry photos.
This is when devs actually still cared about graphics.

If this was revealed at gamecom as a single player action-adventure game? Everyone would call it next-gen!
Yet its a 2015 game.

I mean look at 50 secs to 1:20 sec and 3:50, then 5:00, its just insane!


The reason it looks so good, and still does, is due to photogrammetry. Essentially fully textured 3D scans of real life environments. A lot of the games which are considered the best looking use the technique: Cyberpunk 2077, Death Stranding, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Horizon Forbidden West, Battlefield, Resident Evil 7 and Village, Red Dead Redemption 2, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, Metro Exodus, Forza Horizon, Demon's Souls remake, A Plague Tale... the list goes on and on as it's becoming standard. It's even used in movies and TV shows like The Mandalorian. The environment artist for Star Wars Battlefront who worked at DICE is now art director at Quixel, who were bought by Epic in 2019, so you're going to see their huge asset library used more and more in UE5 titles. This was their most recent demo reel:



A personal favorite demo:



A very quick demo of what can be achieved (hopefully now that Halo is switching to Unreal Engine):

 

setoman

Member
You avoid how it looks pretty much CGI..
He's in total deny. Not sure why. He also thinks shots from the Enemy unity demo are not close. Even DF did a comparison with the blu-ray version of the matrix to showcase how close it is.

Lets say before Epic released the demo, they had made an unrelated reddit thread from an anonymous user with close up pics from that scene. Not a single person in that thread including Lethal01 Lethal01 would know it wasn't from the movie.

Its funny because Lumen has made further huge improvements from that demo, especially on how it handles skin, hair, transparency and reflections (multi-bounce reflections aka reflections within reflection) which would improve reflection on screen and iris. That scene would look even better under 5.3 than it did on 5.0.

for example here are some of the improvements to Lumen.
  • Support for high-quality mirror reflections on translucent surfaces
  • Improved GI and occlusion on characters for thin geometry (such as folds in shirts, nose, and ears) and better integration with hair grooms
  • High-quality reflections on translucency now support material roughness (rather than being restricted to mirror-only)
  • The Surface Cache is now driven by feedback for Software Ray-Traced (SWRT) reflections, providing higher-resolution reflections and faster reactions to scene changes
  • Better approximation of secondary bounces in reflections with Hardware Ray Tracing (HWRT) hit lighting
  • Two-sided foliage support in HWRT hit lighting
  • Lumen Reflections support more than one bounce when Hardware Ray Tracing (HWRT) is enabled with Hit Lighting

lumen_multi_bounce.png



16m16s
 
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SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
I feel like we are not talking enough about this incredible 2024 next gen showpiece from Square Enix.

X3HKftS.gif

2BKpwuK.gif


FF7-Rebirth.gif



I honestly cant believe this is a PS5 exclusive running on Unreal Engine 4. This started dev AFTER the UE5 demo was released and they still chose not to upgrade to UE5. Like wtf is the point of being exclusive if you wont even make it a graphics showcase. This shit looks virtually identical to FF7 on PS4. Just now in an open world apparently thanks to the powah of the ssd. GTFO.

They didnt even bother updating the running animations. Remember when AC games would come out every year and yet still have massive improvements in animations? Why have we stagnated all of a sudden?

Really dont understand how they simply chose not to upgrade the character models. Laziness personified.
 

Lethal01

Member
Agreed.

Because it looks better than CGI. It looks photorealistic.
Go outside, you clearly forgot what real life looks like,

mathew-o-opal-marketing-heromonolith-001b-png.jpg


Can you not tell how innacurate the lighting on just about everythign here is, I'd say it's pretty glaring, it's amazing we have gotten so far in realtime, but we hot a long way to go.

What do you think of this?


I think it looks nice, much closer to competing with what you can do pre rendered than the Matrix demo.
on account of it being prerendered.
 
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Lethal01

Member
I feel like we are not talking enough about this incredible 2024 next gen showpiece from Square Enix.

X3HKftS.gif

2BKpwuK.gif


FF7-Rebirth.gif



I honestly cant believe this is a PS5 exclusive running on Unreal Engine 4. This started dev AFTER the UE5 demo was released and they still chose not to upgrade to UE5. Like wtf is the point of being exclusive if you wont even make it a graphics showcase. This shit looks virtually identical to FF7 on PS4. Just now in an open world apparently thanks to the powah of the ssd. GTFO.

They didnt even bother updating the running animations. Remember when AC games would come out every year and yet still have massive improvements in animations? Why have we stagnated all of a sudden?

Really dont understand how they simply chose not to upgrade the character models. Laziness personified.

I'm so hype I'm gonna explode, Switching to UE5 mid development just sounds like it would be an absolutely terrible idea. But I do hope they have the time to with the next installment. The character models only really need some slight improvements but from their clothes I can already see they fixed the glaring issues I had with them which is nice atleast, I don't see a reason for their running animations to change though.
 
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SimTourist

Member
The CGI argument seems a bit strange because CGI is not some singular entity, there is crappy CGI out there as well that games definitely manage to beat, it's all a matter of budget, time and manpower. As for high quality CGI games are nowhere close to it and never will be simply because you can always render more and better stuff when you're not forced to do it in 33 milliseconds or less.
As for the industry not taking the leap forward visually that we all expected I think it's again a matter of budget, all previous jumps required a massive budget increase to the point where it became unsustainable and a lot of dev studios closed down. To make that next jump in fidelity you'll need even more money, time and people and it's simply not realistic when your game needs to sell over 10 million units just to break even.
The other side of the coin is that for casual players the graphics have long reached the point of good enough and further investment in graphics won't increase your player base by a noticeable amount. The reality is that the best selling games on the market are not the most visually advanced: Minecraft, Fortnite, CoD, Zelda, Mario, GTA 5. GTA 5 has been a top 10 seller for 10 years now and is built around 2005 hardware specs. On the other hand many visually advanced games failed to attract a big enough audience to continue: Ryse, The Order, Driveclub, Alan Wake/Quantum Break, Crysis, etc. It used to be that graphics alone could sell games, but it's no longer the case.
 

Edder1

Member
In terms of GPU, yes you can make changes to get it to run on a 1.8 tflops GPU. I think i posted the steam deck footage here a couple of weeks ago and it ran the game fine at medium settings around 800p using FSR2 hitting almost 60 fps at times. For 30 fps, they could probably hit 900p without using fsr at medium settings on a base PS4.

However, as we saw in HDD vs ssd benchmarks, their loading is actually CPU bound. With a powerful CPU, game runs fine on an HDD. Just a few seconds longer in portals. But pair it with a shitty last gen CPU and it literally crashes. So i highly doubt that jaguar CPUs could even run that thing even if they were willing to add longer portal times in HDD.
You missing my point. In their original design no you cannot make it run on PS4 competently, but you can make design adjustments and implement different techniques to make it work on PS4. There's ways around these things. Instant level switching was done before on prior gen consoles, it just used to be done in a way that made sense for hardware at hand. Things like instant character switching can also be masked on weaker hardware, for example you can create loading screen by making a pre-rendered movie before the switch.

The main thing is the overall visual fidelity, which I have no doubt can be downported because it's nothing impressive. As for things like requiring fast CPU or SSD when it comes to certain gameplay elements, I believe that you can get around those by having different design approach. This is different to something like Matrix demo that cannot be done on PS4 no matter what, because the overall fidelity and visual makeup of the game is very much tied to things nanite and lumen which require very specific hardware.
 
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Neilg

Member
I think everyone needs to come to terms with the fact that graphics aren't a magic black box that infinitely scales with tech. This isn't about turning a feature on anymore, raising the bar means hiring an additional 100 people for 3 years and keeping them happy, motivated, well paid and performing at the top of their game. With no mismanagement getting in the way either. The order was built to be a showcase and was unprofitable. That's why there isn't another.
 

PeteBull

Member
I feel like we are not talking enough about this incredible 2024 next gen showpiece from Square Enix.

X3HKftS.gif

2BKpwuK.gif


FF7-Rebirth.gif



I honestly cant believe this is a PS5 exclusive running on Unreal Engine 4. This started dev AFTER the UE5 demo was released and they still chose not to upgrade to UE5. Like wtf is the point of being exclusive if you wont even make it a graphics showcase. This shit looks virtually identical to FF7 on PS4. Just now in an open world apparently thanks to the powah of the ssd. GTFO.

They didnt even bother updating the running animations. Remember when AC games would come out every year and yet still have massive improvements in animations? Why have we stagnated all of a sudden?

Really dont understand how they simply chose not to upgrade the character models. Laziness personified.
It still looks vastly superior to ps5 (so current gen;p) exclusive forspoken, same company nonetheless, that bullshot trailer from forspoken looked genuinely next gen, till we saw real gameplay/demo i had high hopes for the game, but tuff luck ;)
 

PeteBull

Member
I think everyone needs to come to terms with the fact that graphics aren't a magic black box that infinitely scales with tech. This isn't about turning a feature on anymore, raising the bar means hiring an additional 100 people for 3 years and keeping them happy, motivated, well paid and performing at the top of their game. With no mismanagement getting in the way either. The order was built to be a showcase and was unprofitable. That's why there isn't another.
Its a combo of having strong enough hardware, talented team and giving them enough money and devtime, flagship switchgames, that sell like hotcakes and get much love, so both zeldas, had everything in the equation but strong enough hardware, so they looked worse from AA ps4 games and still dipped below 30 at nasty low resollution, some things cant be made on some hardware, compromisses had to be made.

Now we getting rumors about next switch being roughly on pair with ps4 undocked and ps4pr0 docked, coming next year, so nintendo fans best case scenario will be roughly(or even below) xss lvl when docked, and we all remember well how any demanding game(or matrix demo;p) runs/looks on xss :p
 

SimTourist

Member
I think everyone needs to come to terms with the fact that graphics aren't a magic black box that infinitely scales with tech. This isn't about turning a feature on anymore, raising the bar means hiring an additional 100 people for 3 years and keeping them happy, motivated, well paid and performing at the top of their game. With no mismanagement getting in the way either. The order was built to be a showcase and was unprofitable. That's why there isn't another.
Yeah, I think some people get confused when you tell them about diminishing returns, they think that we've a hit a wall and can't progress further, but what it means is that it takes exponentially more time, money, manpower and hardware resources to get a jump that doesn't seem as impressive as in the past. When I was younger I though that progress was linear and steady and things would improve wholesale but that isn't the case. Some technologies have been lost or sidelined for other things, things like TressFX hair sim for Lara Croft instead of mass adoption we still have wooden fixed hair made with alpha cards, volumetric smoke in PC versions of Mafia 2 and Batman Arkham Knight, dynamic cloth and glass simulation in Mirror's Edge, fluid and frost simulation in Cryostasis, etc. At the time these things could only run on beefy PCs but modern console hardware should be powerful enough to incorporate these things more often, yet we still have mostly PS2/3 era solutions for these problems.
 

SABRE220

Member
The reason it looks so good, and still does, is due to photogrammetry. Essentially fully textured 3D scans of real life environments. A lot of the games which are considered the best looking use the technique: Cyberpunk 2077, Death Stranding, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Horizon Forbidden West, Battlefield, Resident Evil 7 and Village, Red Dead Redemption 2, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, Metro Exodus, Forza Horizon, Demon's Souls remake, A Plague Tale... the list goes on and on as it's becoming standard. It's even used in movies and TV shows like The Mandalorian. The environment artist for Star Wars Battlefront who worked at DICE is now art director at Quixel, who were bought by Epic in 2019, so you're going to see their huge asset library used more and more in UE5 titles. This was their most recent demo reel:



A personal favorite demo:



A very quick demo of what can be achieved (hopefully now that Halo is switching to Unreal Engine):


I remember some developers and journalists hyping visuals close to the rebirth demo as possible on the next gen consoles and visuals close to the assasins creed 2 cgi lol...jesus how far did we land.
 

SABRE220

Member
Yup i remember on era etc the insiders, developers and journalists were going overdrive on creating hype, claiming stuff like the rebirth demo was something we could realistically expect and that even the ass creed2 cgi was not far from the realm of possibility in overall visuals. I remember holding myself from believing the rebirth demo was possible but they claimed it was done on a 1080ti and it might even be surpassed by the gens end etc.
 

TrebleShot

Member
I think we’ve hit a a point where art style alone isn’t enough.

Like look at FFXVI it’s got great art style and visuals completely let down by resolution frame rate and upscaling. Almost ruins some beautifully created assets to blurry messes and in the 30 mode it’s sharper still not sharp and stuttery.

So I think moving forwards these consoles will have to be very expensive future devices.
 

Lethal01

Member
Its a combo of having strong enough hardware, talented team and giving them enough money and devtime, flagship switchgames, that sell like hotcakes and get much love, so both zeldas, had everything in the equation but strong enough hardware, so they looked worse from AA ps4 games and still dipped below 30 at nasty low resollution, some things cant be made on some hardware, compromisses had to be made.

Now we getting rumors about next switch being roughly on pair with ps4 undocked and ps4pr0 docked, coming next year, so nintendo fans best case scenario will be roughly(or even below) xss lvl when docked, and we all remember well how any demanding game(or matrix demo;p) runs/looks on xss :p

I'll take Mario oddyssey on undocked switch over jedi fallen order any day.
 

PeteBull

Member
I'll take Mario oddyssey on undocked switch over jedi fallen order any day.
Most of us would, in terms of quality of game overall, but since its a topic about graphical fidelity, mario loses and its not even close :)

Edit: including vid of SW Jedi Fallen Order on pc maxed settings here, watch it in 4k, just incase my fellow nintendo/mario fans can see whats in store for them in 2 gens, so not next switch but switch 3
 
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SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
Go outside, you clearly forgot what real life looks like,

mathew-o-opal-marketing-heromonolith-001b-png.jpg


Can you not tell how innacurate the lighting on just about everythign here is, I'd say it's pretty glaring, it's amazing we have gotten so far in realtime, but we hot a long way to go.
I was talking about the Matrix cutscenes.
I'm so hype I'm gonna explode, Switching to UE5 mid development just sounds like it would be an absolutely terrible idea. But I do hope they have the time to with the next installment. The character models only really need some slight improvements but from their clothes I can already see they fixed the glaring issues I had with them which is nice atleast, I don't see a reason for their running animations to change though.
Mid development? FF7 shipped in April 2020. PS5's UE5 demo was set to be revealed at GDC in March before covid pushed it back to May, but it was done.

They literally started development after the UE5 demo was shown to the world and said to themselves, hey we will stick with last gen tech, last gen hair, last gen character models. it is laziness, plain and simple.

Besides, UE5 is backwards compatible so its not like its a brand new engine. They just didnt want to put in the minimum effort required to transition to a new engine. Fucking Remnant 2 devs started development in 2019. Lords of the Fallen 2 devs started development in 2020. These are practically indie devs compared to Square Enix's A team. Simply shameful from these so-called AAA devs. They should turn in their badge and resign.
 
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Killer8

Member
I feel like we are not talking enough about this incredible 2024 next gen showpiece from Square Enix.

X3HKftS.gif

2BKpwuK.gif


FF7-Rebirth.gif



I honestly cant believe this is a PS5 exclusive running on Unreal Engine 4. This started dev AFTER the UE5 demo was released and they still chose not to upgrade to UE5. Like wtf is the point of being exclusive if you wont even make it a graphics showcase. This shit looks virtually identical to FF7 on PS4. Just now in an open world apparently thanks to the powah of the ssd. GTFO.

They didnt even bother updating the running animations. Remember when AC games would come out every year and yet still have massive improvements in animations? Why have we stagnated all of a sudden?

Really dont understand how they simply chose not to upgrade the character models. Laziness personified.

I suspect a lot of what's in Rebirth started development a long time ago while the first Remake was being made, when Square Enix saw money on the table realized the scale of the project and chose to divide it up into a trilogy. I wouldn't be surprised if part three also looks similar, perhaps moving to UE5 but not using any of the advanced tech like Lumen.

Obviously everyone wants to make the best possible looking game they can, but weirdly part of me doesn't want Rebirth and part three to look radically better than FF7 Remake. This was all meant to be one game originally and it would create a strange contrast if over the course of the trilogy you go from the PS4-based Remake to a truly next-gen, photo-real UE5 showcase for part 3. You would almost need a remake of Remake at that point to keep the trilogy to the same standard.

FF7 Remake is still a very beautiful game on PS5 so I wouldn't mind keeping that as the baseline standard for the trilogy. Not moving to UE5 is disappointing though if only because Nanite is black magic from what i've see of it in Remnant 2 and would lend itself well to more open environments due to its elimination of LOD pop-in.
 

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
The illusion guy who released 60 fps patches for BC PS4 games on PS5 has unlocked the 30 fps cap in Demon Souls in their native 4k 30 fps mode and surprise surprise it goes up to 48 fps!

F3QoyXkWcAAfk2t

F3Qq3-OWMAAnl8Y


Lots of performance being left on the table here. Uncharted 4 on PS5 hits 48 fps in its native 4k mode after ND uncapped the framerates. Just goes to show that BP essentially gave themselves a PS4 level pixel budget of 1080p 30 fps. I bet this game can be easily ported to the PS4. Maybe 900p 30 fps at worst.
 

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
I suspect a lot of what's in Rebirth started development a long time ago while the first Remake was being made, when Square Enix saw money on the table realized the scale of the project and chose to divide it up into a trilogy. I wouldn't be surprised if part three also looks similar, perhaps moving to UE5 but not using any of the advanced tech like Lumen.

Obviously everyone wants to make the best possible looking game they can, but weirdly part of me doesn't want Rebirth and part three to look radically better than FF7 Remake. This was all meant to be one game originally and it would create a strange contrast if over the course of the trilogy you go from the PS4-based Remake to a truly next-gen, photo-real UE5 showcase for part 3. You would almost need a remake of Remake at that point to keep the trilogy to the same standard.

FF7 Remake is still a very beautiful game on PS5 so I wouldn't mind keeping that as the baseline standard for the trilogy. Not moving to UE5 is disappointing though if only because Nanite is black magic from what i've see of it in Remnant 2 and would lend itself well to more open environments due to its elimination of LOD pop-in.
They have no problems switching to fully CGi cutscenes in the middle of the game that are a generation ahead of the ingame realtime cutscenes, i doubt they care about games coming out 4 years later looking too different. ;p

I am not asking for photorealism. THey couldve kept the same artstyle and improved character models, material quality, hair rendering and foliage quality to be more like this fantastic CG scene from the game.

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Whats even more disappointing is that the switch to UE5 wouldve saved them dev time and resources. The new immortals dev diary points out how switching to Lumens from baked lighting saved them over a dozen hours per scene. We know nanite is a massive time saver on its own. Had they put in a little initial work moving to UE5, they wouldve probably got work done earlier.

Every time i hear about games being too expensive and taking too long to make, i see them using last gen engines and just laugh at the suggestion.
 

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
Here is the immortals dev diary for those interested.

On Nanite saving dev time:
Earlier this year, we talked about some of the amazing tools we’ve had at our disposal as one of the first studios to release a AAA game using Unreal Engine 5.1. There’s Nanite, for example, which automatically adjusts the details the player sees based on distance, letting us build huge, detailed 3D objects that look every bit as good up close as they do from virtual miles away. The additional surface detail of our objects provide significantly more places for lighting to bounce off of.

On Lumen saving dev time:
We also make extensive use of Lumen, which lets us add incredibly realistic-looking dynamic lighting to those more detailed Nanite objects, which interacts with lighting far better than before, resulting in prettier environments. And it lets us do so dramatically more quickly than before: In Unreal 4, we’d have to balance dynamic lights with “baked in” lighting for any area, a process that would take literal hours to complete. Lumen lets us light things pretty much instantly—with lighting effects that look fantastic.

On Niagara saving dev time:
There’s also Niagara, which lets us easily implement and modify graphical effects like fire, smoke and magic. Thanks to Niagara, we don’t have to build each and every effect separately; we can take an existing effect that’s used widely across the game world and modify it for different scenarios so it looks different each time – something that wasn’t possible before.

Other UE5 features improving productivity:

And these are just some of the more visually noticeable features; Unreal 5.1 also features tools that make things work more smoothly behind the scenes. Streaming Virtual Texturing, for example, essentially reduces the memory required to show large, detailed textures to the player. The One File Per Actor system lets our team all work in a single environment simultaneously, rather than requiring us to “check out” a whole level to make the smallest of tweaks. And World Partition intelligently loads and unloads bits of the world as needed, allowing us to create enormous environments that don't slow the game to a crawl, make load screens necessary, and/or incinerate anyone’s video cards.

More here including videos of Nanite and lumens in action:

Lumen on off comparison is nuts.

 

Neilg

Member
Whats even more disappointing is that the switch to UE5 wouldve saved them dev time and resources. The new immortals dev diary points out how switching to Lumens from baked lighting saved them over a dozen hours per scene. We know nanite is a massive time saver on its own. Had they put in a little initial work moving to UE5, they wouldve probably got work done earlier.

It's still not mature enough for most things, there are bugs in nanite and lumen. They almost certainly span off a small team to explore moving to UE5, the team will have tried, documented the issues they saw, and they decided that staying in their lane would be better for actually getting the game done. For something of the scale of FF7pt2, I dont blame them.

Yes, it saves dev time, but it drops the frame rate significantly in the process and if your game is already taxing, it doesnt help.
It is the future but it's a brute force solution, we dont have the hardware needed to just turn it on across the board. Lumen flickers a ton with challenging spaces, with lower powered GPU's and an interior lit by light from outside with small windows, it completely falls apart and needs bounces turning up to a level that makes a 4090 sweat.
 
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