E-Cat
Member
Elder Scrolls VI in 2028 on PC.
And maybe a possible Kingdom Come sequel if Warhorse ever make one and ditch CryEngine for UE5.x.
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Graphical Fidelity I Expect This Gen
- Thread starter ResetEraVetVIP
- Start date
And maybe a possible Kingdom Come sequel if Warhorse ever make one and ditch CryEngine for UE5.x.
E-Cat
Member
This is a thread about graphical fidelity in games. What are you doing here?
Personally, what kind of games I like and what kind of graphical fidelity in games I like have almost zero crossover. Not because that's the way I prefer it, but because that's the way it is.
Honey Bunny
Member
The water in the stream looked incredibly fake to me
Balducci30
Member
What other games have water that looks better? Maybe it looks fake in comparison to the rest of it - but I dunno I don’t see a lot of waterfalls like that where you actually see the breaks in the water and it falls and hits the stream and create an effect like that
CamHostage
Member
Of this clarity? I don't have a list of water effects like this, maybe this is up there/beyond what's top-notch work. (Generally waterfalls in games use a mostly flat surface or set of surfaces and animate several effects over the surfaces to simulate water flow, which is efficient for gameplay performance purposes but you can see the seams and basicness if you get too close.)
However, how many games use "physics effects" like this falling water? Probably lots, given that it's an animation. Watch it for a second (especially the edges) and you can see its loops. The developer used an offline tool called Houdini, simulated the waterfall effect/effects in time, and exported it for realtime use. It can take hours or even days to simulate the water system, but once you have it, it "plays" back in the time that you need it. Add some additional effects of a fog/splash where the fall meets the river as well as maybe other alternative effects combined in and the falling water feature is complete. (The main waterfall effect itself might actually even be a flat or cylinder of animation, which would look great from certain angles but would break as an illusion if you moved around it and saw the perspective follow you, and if you notice the camera always looks at the waterfall then walks away then looks back, you can see that the designer avoided this issue in his presentation of his work.) Somebody else with technical knowledge could break down how this particular effect/set of effects is done, but it seems familiar as an effect type to me.
This waterfall might look particularly great against what you see in other games because it's the only waterfall in a small area. Depending on how many of these effects across a game and how much each module takes up in data (plus depending on how performance is affected by an asset of that scale, given that it must look good animating near and far,) a game might have to simplify the effect to actually employ it across its entire landscape.
But it's a cool waterfall, very nice looking whatever methods the designer chose to use.
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CamHostage
Member
I can see in 96 pages of posts here that we're all breaking with anticipation for when Unreal Engine 5 games actually start shipping (so far, all we've had from professional studios is Fortnite and the Matrix Awakens demo,) but good news! The first mainstream game using UE5 is finally here...
(Okay, okay, R-Type may not be the bang-up UE5 showstopper gamers are salivating for, but it's still notable as a commercial game released using the development tools. The next few mainstream games using it will be Layers of Fear, Tekken 8 (Tekken 7 was one of the first mainstream UE4 games, BTW,) probably First Descendent, and hopefully but unfortunately likely not STALKER 2, with others like Hellblade 2, Maximum Football, the Arc remaster, Robocop Rogue City, and some other stuff scheduled in the year, with probably some reveals for 2023/2024 UE5 games still to come once showcase season kicks off.)
(Okay, okay, R-Type may not be the bang-up UE5 showstopper gamers are salivating for, but it's still notable as a commercial game released using the development tools. The next few mainstream games using it will be Layers of Fear, Tekken 8 (Tekken 7 was one of the first mainstream UE4 games, BTW,) probably First Descendent, and hopefully but unfortunately likely not STALKER 2, with others like Hellblade 2, Maximum Football, the Arc remaster, Robocop Rogue City, and some other stuff scheduled in the year, with probably some reveals for 2023/2024 UE5 games still to come once showcase season kicks off.)
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Honey Bunny
Member
I didnt watch the whole vid, but the water running close by at 4:20 looks almost comically bad, far worse than most modern games I've played.
Balducci30
Member
We’re gonna have to agree to disagree then. I pay very close attention to water in games and that looks and behaves more like water than any game I’ve played
Honey Bunny
Member
Ok, we'll disagree there, but tell me do you also pay close attention to water in the real world? It looks nothing like water in a stream. It is the colour of a blue raspberry soft drink and has the fluid dynamics of a bedsheet being shaken.
sankt-Antonio
Banned
I've been wondering why there is no shump game on PS5 that could be a showcase for 120fps 4k native. Hope this games delivers that.
Balducci30
Member
I do. I mean to me there’s a clear difference - is it at the level of real life? No. But as a stream of water falling into a stream it looks more accurate than most - and it behaves more like water than most games at least in an illusory way - it looks 3D and like it’s actually effecting the water below.
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Honey Bunny
Member
I do. I mean to me there’s a clear difference - is it at the level of real life? No. But as a stream of water falling into a stream it looks more accurate than most - and it behaves more like water than most games at least in an illusory way - it looks 3D and like it’s actually effecting the water below.
I'm not talking about the waterfall. Go to the timestamp I gave you.
CamHostage
Member
Ah, I mean, that'd be cool, but there's no promise in the spec sheet about 4K 120 support... or are you talking about the VR feature set? I think that's specific to the overworld (that museum area that looks kind of like a UE avatar in R-Type world) and some special version of the launch sequence. They have not specified if or how you can play genuine R-Type levels in VR. I'm not sure if R-Type Final 3 Evolved uses Lumen for its lighting (supposedly the look is close to Final 2, so I'm not sure why they moved to UE5 other than that it was there,) but if it does, I don't think you're going to get 120FPS even with a simple side-scrolling 3D shootemup.
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sankt-Antonio
Banned
CamHostage
Member
It's color-toned to have a fantasy look to it and blend with the surrounding pastoral world, so it does have that blue tint (as do some of the buildings in shade) which looks funny if you examine it. There's a lot of levels to the simulation though, including animating textures and a range of surface levels, so IMO it's a pretty good collection of water effects.
Either way though, this guy is an aspiring environment artist, not a water effects/simulation developer. Probably he used a lot of the same Houdini or Brushify or Fluid Flux systems that you can find out there if you had to put water features into your game projects.
Ah it's not actually affecting the water below. Watch closer and you can see the layers of effects stacked up, including a separate sequence for where water hits the rocks and then a layer of mist to blend out the falling water element to the running water surface and other transition spots. It looks like one seamless water system because the artist was able to work on just this one water feature, so you have the sheeting waterfall going into the plumes of water bubbles running down the river with the same gentle curls of water and foam. Most game makers wouldn't have that luxury of having their requirements for water effects to work for just one use in their game world, where they could fine-tune it so all the simulations run so complementary to each other. In this case, the environmental artits could handle each part of the water flow just right and it looks great all out together.
Just be aware that it's a mixture of effects and the waterfall effect is probably built independently from the river effect. When you know this, you come to appreciate how complicated this stuff is to put in games.
It all looks like the same water to us... but of course there is no "water" inside this videogame scene.
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Balducci30
Member
Went to it - it looks all right to me, I care more about the way water moves and it seems to warp around the rocks and shit vs. most games where it seems like just a flat plane
Represent.
Represent(ative) of bad opinions
Man, Burning Shores looks fucking amazing.
Grildon Tundy
Member
Their naming convention is so confusing, even the official Sony YouTube page got it wrong.
Layers of Fear = 2016 title
Layers of FearS = 2023 title
Or is this a demo where they revamped the 2016's graphics to flex nuts? I'm so confused
Edit: you know what? I think they changed the 2023 title to be Layers of Fear. If you Google search it, it shows "Layers of Fears" for the steam link, but the actual steam page dropped the last S. What a rollercoaster!
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CamHostage
Member
It was called Layers of FearS at first, in that it is a remaster/mashup of the two games in the series so far, but then they just did the modern reboot-title thing of just starting over from jump again.
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Represent.
Represent(ative) of bad opinions
Its truly an amazing looking game. By far the best out imo. Doubt it will be topped this year. Fucking stunned while playing it.
Im basically filling up the PS5 SSD with screenshots.
I am WOWed
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CamHostage
Member
It is possible that the waterfall is a simulation with depth in 3d space. (Looks like it to me actually, and I'm not sure how it works with like irregular shapes or disconnected particles or flowing sheets but apparently you can do that in a big looping geometry cache, if you have the headroom in the game to import it.) Still an animation, still has some issues with using inside a full-scale game if it's not optimized and pre-afforded, but it worked for his project.
Most games have just a flat plane for waterfalls for a number of reasons, but one is that they just have a general subset of waterfall effects for all the waterfalls in the game. Use Waterfall A and Lake C here, use Waterfall B and Lake C again over there, etc. This Cliffwood project, as I mentioned, has the luxury of working the various water sim/effects systems together on its one water feature.
The cool thing about modern physics sim systems is that you could build your varieties of water systems to interlock for a given water feature, so you'd get that where the water falls in sheets and then those sheets create matching bubble patterns and also the sheets which hit the rocks wrap around and roll into the river. You can see in this video how all the water is simmed as a single feature so that all the ebbs and downspouts and course changes of the water work together. Of course, it took time to render, it could take a serious toll on your performance and deployment, and cannot be changed once imported, but the end result is a great sense of flow.
It's worth comparing this to emerging realtime solutions like Fluid Flux, which is pretty amazing in a different way. (And I'd love to see a game that just played with its water calculation systems. Many games will use this in the future, but I just want like a puzzle game with beachballs and ducks and this rushing tide!) But you can see in its "real" water flow as the land fills up with water and then flows over the falls how it too must "fake" its effects. It turns on and off layers of its effects system to replicate each aspect of running water it uses to present its effects. And even as astounding as this water system is, it could use additional particle and fog effects to cover up some of its seams. Many of its effects harken back to what you call a "flat plane" of water, but it's got such a cluster of all these water effects (including underwater caustics and waterfall velocity/viscosity and and flow over/around obstacles and such) that it all combines to create one impressive waterflow system, from lake to river to waterfall to ocean.
The water in that Cliffwood Village project looks more smooth because it was made at a higher quality offline and simmed for the exact course of the waterfall and river, but then again, that water is doing all that it can do, and if you were to swim or splash in it or divert the river, the water effects would fail. Fluid Flux meanwhile has some seams if you look close, but it's not static, it can flow and react and be played with. So maybe by comparing the two you can see the difference in pre-made water versus state-of-the-art realtime water, and where we've been versus where new games could go.
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That good? Would you say it looks better graphically than the main game?
Balducci30
Member
Well, yes I have looked into fluid flux and fluid ninja - like at the videos in the past. Because I’ve been itching for realistic looking water in games since I was a kid (and fire for that matter) - currently I know of no games that I have played that have an actual fluid sim happening like fluid flux does. Even if it’s faked - I would kill to see that in a game over an animation or non interactive water. Sea of thieves water looks great but - not interactive. Forbidden wests water looks great in some ways - kinda has decent interactive effects but it’s clearly not simulated. The village water looks better than that to me even if it is an animation - but If it’s not remotely interactive then it’s basically pointless to me how realistic it looks just staring at it. I want to see a fluid sim in an AAA game - just cus it takes me out so much to see everything look and behave realistically and then the water or fire looks like shit or behaves like shit
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Lethal01
Member
They've got the best excuse, there are still a ton of customers with only PS4 and more people to sell to is better for them.
But do the birds leave footprints in the sand though? If not, then the game is shit graphically
That number is shrinking hella by the day. I read somewhere a game has sold better on the ps5 than the ps4 but can’t recall which game and where I read that.
rofif
Can’t Git Gud
The level and density of detail is absurd
This is hella crazy. I gotta get the dlc nowBut do the birds leave footprints in the sand though? If not, then the game is shit graphically
That number is shrinking hella by the day. I read somewhere a game has sold better on the ps5 than the ps4 but can’t recall which game and where I read that.
Polygonal_Sprite
Member
Playing through Burning Shores at the moment but tbh if someone told me it was cross gen it wouldn’t surprise me. Yes the clouds are very nice looking when you’re actually up in the sky but most of the time you’re on the ground.
It’s very very similar looking to Forbidden West imo which is to say that it’s a stunning looking game despite it being cross gen.
It’s very very similar looking to Forbidden West imo which is to say that it’s a stunning looking game despite it being cross gen.
Feel Like I'm On 42
Member
Can someone tell me why Jedi Survivor doesn't have an option for 1440p native res without rt reflections/ao and instead we get an 1100p game upscaled to 1440p?
ResetEraVetVIP
Member
ChiefDada
Member
Yessir I've been telling anyone who will listen to me here - the cauldron is the best looking playable area I've seen in recent memory.
Pharaoh 117
Member
Ok that 1st shot looks insane.
Polygonal_Sprite
Member
That's was never going to happen this gen as we're seeing now. It's almost impossible to double the console CPU performance on PC (at least at the moment).
SlimySnake
Flashless at the Golden Globes
There seems to be a bug with cal’s hair with RT turned off on PC. Also introduces some other artifacts too. Glitches etc. they probably didn’t want that in the console versions.
Polygonal_Sprite
Member
Finished Burning Shores. Very impressive just like Forbidden West visually especially the final battle! Definitely in my top 5 best looking PS5 games along with Demons Souls, Rift Apart, Returnal and Plague Tale II.
GG are really far ahead in terms of human face rendering imo even on NPC’s and side quests but my god that engine has some absolutely atrocious pop in even at medium distances while flying. I’m glad it’s being addressed for Horizon 3.
I’d personally much rather GG reboot Killzone next because we’ve just had Forbidden West, Burning Shores, a VR game and there’s apparently a remake of the original Horizon aswell as a multiplayer Horizon GaaS in the works on top of the TV show. It’s a bit overkill for one franchise imo.
GG are really far ahead in terms of human face rendering imo even on NPC’s and side quests but my god that engine has some absolutely atrocious pop in even at medium distances while flying. I’m glad it’s being addressed for Horizon 3.
I’d personally much rather GG reboot Killzone next because we’ve just had Forbidden West, Burning Shores, a VR game and there’s apparently a remake of the original Horizon aswell as a multiplayer Horizon GaaS in the works on top of the TV show. It’s a bit overkill for one franchise imo.
Omega Supreme Holopsicon
Banned
Aren't console cpus running at like 3Ghz? And aren't they like ryzen 3 or ryzen 2? We are now on ryzen 5 on pc, and it is capable of 5+Ghz. Each ryzen jump also is like 20 to 30% increase in IPC. And we also now have the 3d version of the latest ryzen which gives a further jump in performance.
Kataploom
Gold Member
Damn I'm probably the only one not only not impressed with HFW graphics, but actually disliking the strong uncanny valley feel it gives me... that and the "photo studio perfect" lighting which feels to unnatural, damn... Technically speaking, yes, I can see it, but the game is ugly AF in my eyes, wish I'd see it as all of you see it
Polygonal_Sprite
Member
There's definitely much more powerful PC CPU's available than what's in the consoles but my point was for current gen only games (especially unoptimized pieces of shit like TLOU, Gotham Knights and Jedi 2) you cannot double consoles performance even using the top Intel chips. Hell getting a locked 60fps in those games is almost impossible nevermind a locked 120fps.
mrqs
Member
I really think we're at a time where we should aim to do different things.
I'm playing Jedi: Survivor, and there's so much detail everywhere that it almost feels like noise. I mean, something like TLOU 2 can look pretty clean sometimes. Just adding geometry and textures doesn't make for a good-looking game.
RDR 2 is still the most beautiful thing I've ever seen, and that's because of the lighting and simplicity.
Maybe we could focus more on great lighting and physics and less on infinite geometry and details.
TheKremlinBossMan
Banned
I have to say despite all of the negative press Jedi Survivor is one of the best looking titles out right now. Phenomenal lighting and geometric density.
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Turk1993
GAFs #1 source for car graphic comparisons
GOW: R looks better and runs at higher fps/res.I have to say despite all of the negative press Jedi Survivor is one of the best looking titles out right now. Phenomenal lighting and geometric density.
All from 60fps mode
ChiefDada
Member
GG really went absolutely NUTSO with the detail at all levels (geometry, textures, particles, draw distance) and I'm still not over the new lighting in the cauldron. The new cinematics now rival TLOU Pt. 1 even though I prefer TLOU aesthetic. The awful pop-in is really the only negative (and it's a major one imo) keeping me from calling it the best looking game, pound for pound. Shame there's no word for upcoming patch to solve this.
