VFXVeteran
Banned
All:
This thread is a pure TECHNICAL thread that allows members to discuss a game's graphics and how it meets the qualifications of considering it having next-gen visuals. It is NOT a thread of a subjective nature. Coming in here and trying to push saying, "this game has next-gen visuals because it looks pretty" isn't the thread you want to be in. Go to that particular game thread and discuss all you want. This thread is about seeing an industry movement towards a higher form of rendering that can't be done with the previous generation console hardware. This thread is about comparing how a game ranks with regard to pushing visual techniques to the next level.
I'm going to start by giving a link to my last work in the film industry. It was a test for Scoob published by WB. I created every single shader in this spot while the artists created the lights, characters, animation and lighting. I'm proud of this work because I used every single advanced shading technique to date. The renderer is using a path-tracing called Arnold (widely known by many studios). I'm showing this to establish a fixed "target" that game studios will continue (over the years) to try to achieve. This shot has no tricks. It's pure brute force path-tracing with shaders for any material you can think of (fabric, hair, gloss, diffuse, etc..).
Please forgive the low res quality. It's something I can't get a higher res version of.
Let's talk about some target criteria for next-gen graphics:
PBR - physically based rendering was the key technology last generation. While several games used it, the quality of every game wasn't the same. I can only name a few games that used really well done PBR shaders. It's pretty challenging to implement an uber shader that covers all materials and it's most definitely bandwidth consuming. This should be standard in most next-gen games and therefore shouldn't be considered a "next-gen" feature unless it's doing something different like some example footage later down this thread. In any case, these shaders aren't possible in games or any realtime hardware right now. They are using complete energy-conserving BRDFs and couple with path-tracing, it's just not feasible. But some games have come close.
The Order 1866
Resident Evil Remake:
Hair - Still a big mountain to climb in realtime. Even though many games throw a crap ton of polygons into a scene (i.e. UE5 or FS2020), hair is still a big problem. Not only is the fur rendering expensive but the shading is even more expensive. In my short, I used 4 BRDF specular lobes with the fur including a backscatter term used. The only game that I've seen start to pay attention to fur on this level is Black Myth.
Reflections - RT reflections aren't just mirror materials. In fact, very rarely do we see mirror surfaces everywhere. My shot actually does reflections for the costumes and is apart of the specular BRDF (GGX) with an anisotropic functionality. We'll most likely see RT reflections that are mirror or combined with some technique to blur them. That will approach CG, but still a few years off of the brute force approach. Some games have implemented all the RTX features but I'll post the first one out the gate.
Battlefield V
Lighting - this is a make it or break it feature in the rendering pipeline. You can't have good visuals without good lighting. And that covers a LOT of things: Global Illumination, Environment lighting, Area lights, shadows, self-occlusion, and ambient occlusion. The Scoob shot uses area lights, GI, environment lighting, etc.. this is what we should look for when judging whether a game is getting close to this to be considered next-gen quality. All the old lighting tricks are -- old. Save for a few techniques that are extremely well implemented (i.e. RDR2, FS2020 and UE5 demo), we are still seeing light probe GI, SSAO, and cube map environment lighting. We are specifically looking for a game that breaks this trend and moves towards CGI. FS2020 is one such game. It has the most accurate lighting I've ever seen in a game and that's just one of the things noted in this sim that's done above and beyond current gen:
FS2020
Metro: Exodus
Control
FX - special effects is so difficult for games these days. It's almost always that there isn't enough bandwidth to order transparency triangles. That gets to be a huge bottleneck on top of trying to use cutouts properly. It simply crushes the advantages of a deferred renderer because you try to avoid the triangle sorting but have no choice but to switch to forward rendering for transparencies. On top of just rendering the sprite cards, you've got actual physics systems to go with it. At Lockheed, I'm literally learning alot about physics and why it's so expensive getting the calculations precise when launching a rocket. Thats' a whole different branch of mathematics which simply bogs the CPU down alot. We've been studying CUDA to see if we can get some GPGPU compute going but 1) the graphics card has limited memory and 2) it still operates in 2D coordinates. That's strictly a limitation of the hardware that the industry has adopted over the years. What game is showing some incredible promise in regards to physics-based sprites? Black Myth, and Control comes to mind. I also remember the Nvidia FX plugin added to Batmobile awhile back.
Black Myth
Batman Arkham Knight
This thread is a pure TECHNICAL thread that allows members to discuss a game's graphics and how it meets the qualifications of considering it having next-gen visuals. It is NOT a thread of a subjective nature. Coming in here and trying to push saying, "this game has next-gen visuals because it looks pretty" isn't the thread you want to be in. Go to that particular game thread and discuss all you want. This thread is about seeing an industry movement towards a higher form of rendering that can't be done with the previous generation console hardware. This thread is about comparing how a game ranks with regard to pushing visual techniques to the next level.
I'm going to start by giving a link to my last work in the film industry. It was a test for Scoob published by WB. I created every single shader in this spot while the artists created the lights, characters, animation and lighting. I'm proud of this work because I used every single advanced shading technique to date. The renderer is using a path-tracing called Arnold (widely known by many studios). I'm showing this to establish a fixed "target" that game studios will continue (over the years) to try to achieve. This shot has no tricks. It's pure brute force path-tracing with shaders for any material you can think of (fabric, hair, gloss, diffuse, etc..).
Please forgive the low res quality. It's something I can't get a higher res version of.
Let's talk about some target criteria for next-gen graphics:
PBR - physically based rendering was the key technology last generation. While several games used it, the quality of every game wasn't the same. I can only name a few games that used really well done PBR shaders. It's pretty challenging to implement an uber shader that covers all materials and it's most definitely bandwidth consuming. This should be standard in most next-gen games and therefore shouldn't be considered a "next-gen" feature unless it's doing something different like some example footage later down this thread. In any case, these shaders aren't possible in games or any realtime hardware right now. They are using complete energy-conserving BRDFs and couple with path-tracing, it's just not feasible. But some games have come close.
The Order 1866
Resident Evil Remake:
Hair - Still a big mountain to climb in realtime. Even though many games throw a crap ton of polygons into a scene (i.e. UE5 or FS2020), hair is still a big problem. Not only is the fur rendering expensive but the shading is even more expensive. In my short, I used 4 BRDF specular lobes with the fur including a backscatter term used. The only game that I've seen start to pay attention to fur on this level is Black Myth.
Reflections - RT reflections aren't just mirror materials. In fact, very rarely do we see mirror surfaces everywhere. My shot actually does reflections for the costumes and is apart of the specular BRDF (GGX) with an anisotropic functionality. We'll most likely see RT reflections that are mirror or combined with some technique to blur them. That will approach CG, but still a few years off of the brute force approach. Some games have implemented all the RTX features but I'll post the first one out the gate.
Battlefield V
Lighting - this is a make it or break it feature in the rendering pipeline. You can't have good visuals without good lighting. And that covers a LOT of things: Global Illumination, Environment lighting, Area lights, shadows, self-occlusion, and ambient occlusion. The Scoob shot uses area lights, GI, environment lighting, etc.. this is what we should look for when judging whether a game is getting close to this to be considered next-gen quality. All the old lighting tricks are -- old. Save for a few techniques that are extremely well implemented (i.e. RDR2, FS2020 and UE5 demo), we are still seeing light probe GI, SSAO, and cube map environment lighting. We are specifically looking for a game that breaks this trend and moves towards CGI. FS2020 is one such game. It has the most accurate lighting I've ever seen in a game and that's just one of the things noted in this sim that's done above and beyond current gen:
FS2020
Metro: Exodus
Control
FX - special effects is so difficult for games these days. It's almost always that there isn't enough bandwidth to order transparency triangles. That gets to be a huge bottleneck on top of trying to use cutouts properly. It simply crushes the advantages of a deferred renderer because you try to avoid the triangle sorting but have no choice but to switch to forward rendering for transparencies. On top of just rendering the sprite cards, you've got actual physics systems to go with it. At Lockheed, I'm literally learning alot about physics and why it's so expensive getting the calculations precise when launching a rocket. Thats' a whole different branch of mathematics which simply bogs the CPU down alot. We've been studying CUDA to see if we can get some GPGPU compute going but 1) the graphics card has limited memory and 2) it still operates in 2D coordinates. That's strictly a limitation of the hardware that the industry has adopted over the years. What game is showing some incredible promise in regards to physics-based sprites? Black Myth, and Control comes to mind. I also remember the Nvidia FX plugin added to Batmobile awhile back.
Black Myth
Batman Arkham Knight
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