Dust-by-Monday
Member
It's up to the art team to create great looking environments and fine tune the lighting to make their games look their best.
"real time" lighting doesn't always mean it's better. Even real life looks like ass sometimes.
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Graphical Fidelity I Expect This Gen
- Thread starter ResetEraVetVIP
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"real time" lighting doesn't always mean it's better. Even real life looks like ass sometimes.
BlownUpRich
Member
Yeah they should be, we aren't playing them in model viewers.
BlownUpRich
Member
OMG please upload more of those! Those look fantastic.
Cumulus
Member
There is no "fine tuning" static lighting anywhere outside of completely static environments....
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ResetEraVetVIP
Member
Games don't need polygons to look good either, should we just go back to Sega Genesis and SNES?
Dust-by-Monday
Member
Yes there is. It's up to the artists to decide how the scene is lit. They can literally do whatever they want to make the game look however they want.
Cumulus
Member
As long as it's at least mostly static, because that's the limit of static systems. No way around that.
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realcool
Member
Hero. Lighting.
This is an issue with most games.
Dust-by-Monday
Member
Wait, so you're saying RE9 is not static?
Cumulus
Member
Wait, so you're saying RE9 doesn't look vastly better with PT?
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Dust-by-Monday
Member
I thought we were talking about ray tracing? Path tracing looks awesome, but it's quite expensive.
Cumulus
Member
Path tracing is a subtype of ray tracing. Ray tracing has somewhat been redefined as a low cost hybrid in games, but the term really encompasses so much more.
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Dust-by-Monday
Member
I get that path tracing and ray tracing is how we move forward with real time graphics. It makes sense, but since our consoles are underpowered for those technologies, we end up getting games that have horrible image quality, running at 720p internal resolution and then trying to upscale to 4K with artifacts, flickering and smearing all over the screen. How in the world does that look any good? It makes me feel like we've regressed in graphical fidelity in favor of doing things in real time that don't NECESSARILY NEED TO BE real time. That's all I'm saying.
SlimySnake
Flashless at the Golden Globes
One thing that stood out to me in RE9 was just how many wall textures had reflections on them. And i dont mean mirror reflections. Just a light sheen bouncing off sunlight. So many games last gen would be lacking this altogether. RE9 does have some excellent wallpaper textures especially in racoon city, but the way the sunlight bounces off of them gives them that next gen look most other games just lack. SH2 did this really well as well.
its entirely possible to bake those in but so many games dont bother. I would like to know why. Is it because they are technically reflections?
Just went back to RE4 to see how it looked in 2023 and man it looks rough lol
Bojji
Gold Member
Player and enemies aren't static. With PT they look like they belong to the environment, they don't "glow" in any way:
You also have realistic shadows and reflections (even pools of blood have reflections) everywhere. Full suite that makes the game looks next gen.
vs. state of the art for PS4 gen - Uncharted, where anything dynamic and not baked in the lighting stick out like a sore thumb:
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Cumulus
Member
Consoles are just budget hardware. They get "good enough", and if that isn't good enough for someone then he's always free to upgrade to a capable PC. Most Devs have really been reluctant with stressing the console hardware, so I'm glad about every single one with more ambition.....Or budget like Capcom to simply implement several systems.
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Dust-by-Monday
Member
Those path tracing screenshots look great, but it's not achievable on my PS5 Pro :-(Player and enemies aren't static. With PT they look like they belong to the environment, they don't "glow" in any way:
You also have realistic shadows and reflections (even pools of blood have reflections) everywhere. Full suite that makes the game looks next gen.
vs. state of the art for PS4 gen - Uncharted, where anything dynamic and not baked in the lighting stick out like a sore thumb:
Also, I'm hoping that Naughty Dog's true PS5 game will look a lot better than that Uncharted: Lost Legacy screenshot.
Bojji
Gold Member
In theory PS6 should be able to run it on the same settings - it's in the same ballpark as my GPU (assuming that PT performance will be as good as on Nv).
Even without PT, games with lumen and RTGI show massive differences already - but too bad low ray counts and shimmering sometimes outweigh those benefits...
Dust-by-Monday
Member
That's my exact point. Often times by using all of these expensive features means we get worse performance, lower image quality, artifacts, smearing, shimmering and it just makes me not want to play the game.
Meanwhile, I can boot up AC:Unity and it looks AMAZING, yet it's all recalculated lighting. Obviously it doesn't have stuff like Nanite for LoD issues, but at least it's pretty clean looking and in my opinion, still looks excellent today.
Bojji
Gold Member
Yeah, many games even on PC show super low precision, there should ALWAYS be option to use uber settings for stuff like that - for futureproofing.
Real time lighting is the way forward but devs shouldn't cut everything else to such a degree that in the end game looks so bad that no one notices any good lightning, hahaha. UE5 games on consoles sometimes end up like that (720p shimmering mess). Maybe they should just leave advanced effects on current gen only in 30fps modes...
My SS still look decent but they are nowhere near how they look on HDR OLED when I play. Capturing HDR gameplay is absolute shit on Windows (PS5 converts pics nicely to SDR). I end up with two files, .jxr is washed out and .png has crushed blacks.
