Yeah, RT isn't necessary for good self-shadowing. You just need a good rendering pipeline and need to make sure the parameters are properly optimized.
-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
-
We have made minor adjustments to how the search bar works on ResetEra. You can read about the changes here.
Yeah, RT isn't necessary for good self-shadowing. You just need a good rendering pipeline and need to make sure the parameters are properly optimized.
Ghost has great art direction and lighting which sell the presentation but the textures(outside of character models) are the most dated I've seen in any recent aaa game. Years behind the curve
Great video, really enjoyed the video. Solid choices. However I need to see Cyberpunk for myself to make a decision on it.
I wish Gears 5: Hivebusters would at least have gotten a mention. It's absolutely stunning.
I wish Gears 5: Hivebusters would at least have gotten a mention. It's absolutely stunning.
If I remember it right they only use Screen space shadows for character accessories like hair, and clothing, as you can see it's the hair self shadow that's missing in that pic but the body itself can cast shadow on the body.
But with that said, screen space shadows is not a new thing for base consoles and it could've very well been implemented atleast for character accessories if they had it properly optimised in the pipeline.
Actually regarding the eye, you can see this problem with the eye when you have RTAO turned on and it's quite dark (The GI at Psycho doesn't really help with it)
No RT:
RTAO+GI
Imo in the above, the non RT one looks considerably better even if a bit less accurate, also notice the light leak on the top part of the yellow bar which is on the inside of the car. Then you have cases like below where the non RT ver looks totally wrong and overly lit, but RT version still has the weird eye problem
No RT
RTAO+GI:
But then you have cases where RT really really works (can't see the eye here, but since it's not super dark it didn't have the glow problem here)
RT off:
RTAO+GI
Game also frequently omits character parts from the BVH like this. At first I assumed maybe it's cause the missing parts are metal parts and may have issues with reflections, but they don't really do secondary reflection anyway. Plus the arms are covered in a coat, which is omitted from BVH as well. It's not really among the best RT reflection implementations imo, Control has it better and obviously Watch Dogs legion.
It also does this weird thing where it enables certain SSR only when RT is on, but disables the SSR if you turn off RT...like what's the point of disabling the SSR, and why link it to RT here if 90% of that particular reflection is SSR anyway. All in all I don't think RT in this game is as "perfect" and "complete" as some may pass it off to be. The GI itself while good in most cases has flaws and but even then it's not a game changing look like Metro 2033. Overall I'd still say Control is the RT king because of its "completeness"
Last edited:
The use of RT appears to be the primary consideration for this list. Cyberpunk 2077 doesn't look as great in motion when you factor in things like NPC animations.
Yup, this.
Yup, this.
Miles is too high. Demon's Souls and Flight Sim are too low. I'm guessing Hivebusters came out too late or they just don't count DLC.
Actually regarding the eye, you can see this problem with the eye when you have RTAO turned on and it's quite dark (The GI at Psycho doesn't really help with it)
No RT:
RTAO+GI
Imo in the above, the non RT one looks considerably better even if a bit less accurate, also notice the light leak on the top part of the yellow bar which is on the inside of the car. Then you have cases like below where the non RT ver looks totally wrong and overly lit, but RT version still has the weird eye problem
No RT
RTAO+GI:
But then you have cases where RT really really works (can't see the eye here, but since it's not super dark it didn't have the glow problem here)
RT off:
RTAO+GI
Game also frequently omits character parts from the BVH like this. At first I assumed maybe it's cause the missing parts are metal parts and may have issues with reflections, but they don't really do secondary reflection anyway. Plus the arms are covered in a coat, which is omitted from BVH as well. It's not really among the best RT reflection implementations imo, Control has it better and obviously Watch Dogs legion.
It also does this weird thing where it enables certain SSR only when RT is on, but disables the SSR if you turn off RT...like what's the point of disabling the SSR, and why link it to RT here if 90% of that particular reflection is SSR anyway. All in all I don't think RT in this game is as "perfect" and "complete" as some may pass it off to be. The GI itself while good in most cases has flaws and but even then it's not a game changing look like Metro 2033. Overall I'd still say Control is the RT king because of its "completeness"
Yeah, the ray-tracing effects are going to make the inaccurate fresnel/cornea reflections stand out even more. Regardless, small cavities that are supposed to be in shadow are not handled well in this game, with or without ray-tracing.
I agree that Control does a better job at tying everything together.
Something that needs to be understood about real-time ray-tracing in current games is that performance still has to be taken into consideration, so you're not going to be getting offline quality reflections/shadows/GI in RTX games right now. While ray-tracing as a feature has a ton of potential, it can also look not so great when it needs to be performant. It's actually really disappointing to see how much has been omitted in the BVH for Cyberpunk, and prevents me from being too impressed with the reflections in the game, even at pyscho quality.
In my eyes, for last gen, there is no question. Last of Us Part II easily. Start of this? Well, I still haven't played Demon's Souls or Miles, but Cyberpunk on my rig (which is quite a monster) is about as good as it gets!
Yeah, I'd put Ghost in there somewhere.
It will definitely have lower RT effects not matching the highest PC settings. AMD.
Haven't played all these, but have played TLoU2, Demons Souls and Miles. At times and during big set pieces, fights and cut scenes Miles can look incredible, but yeah at times a bit inconsistent. But Demons Souls environments are just amazingly cool at many times and TLoU2 is just on another level, especially for last gen. Though I suppose it lacks a bit of variety of some of the other games.
Anyways, personally I would bump TLoU2 and Demons souls up a bit and maybe miles down.
Anyways, personally I would bump TLoU2 and Demons souls up a bit and maybe miles down.
Flight sim looks the closest to reality with no caveats. With the caveat of having humans traversing an environment, TLOU 2 is the closest to reality. Both are incredibly consistent and rarely have moments where the illusion crumbles. Those would probably be #1 and 2 on my list. Not sure which id put first.
Do you disagree that an avg person would almost certainly find Flight sim to be the most realistic looking game if they watched a few mins of typical gameplay footage of all the games on this list? Of course its much easier to simulate reality at further distances and when not having to render humans in locomotion through an environment. That is what I meant by caveats.
To be fair, that's a caveat in almost every game. In any game there will be a point where the camera is so close that the asset quality begins to fall apart, depending on what viewing distance they were optimized for. You have to draw the line somewhere, based on gameplay expectations.
Oh it absolutely looks fucking real in normal gameplay circumstances. The average person likely would not know it's a game. But it's not 100 percent there yet. Reality doesn't break when you get close to it.
It's still astonishing visually.
FF7R was such an insanely inconsistent game visually. Some moments would look like a CG cutscene, others looked like it fell out of the early Xbox 360 era. Some of the environmental textures and geometry, fuckin woof.
Final Fantasy VII Remake and Cyberpunk are the very definition of inconsistent, visually speaking. Sometimes they look great, other times they look terrible.
When I look at how consistently great games like The Last of Us Part II look, or Red Dead Redemption 2 from a couple of years back, there's no way I could put FFVIIR or CP2077 anywhere near the top of the list.
When I look at how consistently great games like The Last of Us Part II look, or Red Dead Redemption 2 from a couple of years back, there's no way I could put FFVIIR or CP2077 anywhere near the top of the list.
Right. Still a lot of work to be done. Granular materials like sand should have simulated grains, for instance.
Quantum Electrodynamics would like to have a word with you /s
Can't argue with that list, Cyberpunk really is incredible to look at and probably the best game I've seen on PC, I'm amazed everytime I play it. Driving around the city at night is so good. I don't think an open world game has been done with this level of detail before.
Speaking of RT needing to be performant, does the fact that most RT effects in games only use a single bounce for calculations problematic?
RDR2 looks really good, unfortunately not a 2020 game. Are control and Metro also 2020?
For all of it's identity and logistical problems I think The Avengers looks stunning visually. The game running on the Series X/PS5 looks phenomenal and I can only imagine how good the next gen upgrade will be.
And Ghost of Tsushima running on the PS5 is nothing short of stunning. It could easily pass for a next gen game.
And Ghost of Tsushima running on the PS5 is nothing short of stunning. It could easily pass for a next gen game.
I don't know how anyone can look at Cyberpunk on a capable PC with RT on and come away being not impressed at all. Of course with a game of that scope it's not going to look as consistently good as something like TLOU 2 but as an overall package it's hard to top. Just the many female NPCs in the game look ludicrously good and better than anything I've seen bar a few Capcom RE Engine characters. The normal lighting even without RT looks incredible too.
I mean, it completely depends on what's exactly being bounced. Many ray-tracing GI algorithms use irradiance caching to speed up the process, and there are some nifty things you can do with that information in terms of calculating diffuse interreflection. However, simple single bounce ray-traced GI is not going to look very good compared to offline monte carlo methods. Not even close. I wouldn't necessary call it problematic, but if that was all that when into calculating GI with ray-traced solutions then it wouldn't be very noticeable.
Thankfully, most convincing real-time solutions incorporate a lot more than just ray bounces into the final result.
EDIT:
As for non-GI ray-tracing, it depends. Shadows use shadow rays, reflections use reflected rays, etc. If you want really accurate reflections, you're gonna want more than one bounce, but ultimately what determines how many bounces are necessary are the materials the incident rays intersect with.
Last edited:
I also wouldn't be expecting miracles with the patch given the next gen consoles(though admittedly unoptimised) can't brute force the last gen version to 60 properly. RT in particular is going to be a struggle especially without DLSS. My 2070 Super can't even hold 1080/30fps properly without it when most of the RT is turned on.
They probably haven't actually seen it running on a good PC. CP2077 and Flight Simulator are true next-gen visuals with a good setup.
Attention to technology details. Doom64's art is built around graphical functions that don't come standard on modern hardware, like the N64s three point filtering. We had a whole virtual texture atlas pipeline built just for that shader, cut down the whole geometry rendering into a single draw call because of it as well.
Not really, it's still running the same engine as Origins from 2016 with some minor upgrades at best. You could argue it looks worse than the last 2 games in the franchise. Animation wise it is incredibly dated now by AAA standards.
I'm surprised Fenyx didn't make it. Its one of the best looking games I've ever seen. All those colours really pop on my QLED.
I agree, but all these games have their flaws imo. Overall it's an impressive looking game with high framerate. I'd at least put it above Ori, which in the end is a simple 2D game.