What’s the one graphical feat that’s impressed you the most this gen?.

The fact regular buildings have visible interiors in Spiderman

facial animations

Great characters animation
Lighting
Kratos beard

Madmackem said:

For me it's materials and the way light plays on them.

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Yeah, I'm going to go for this too. I think it's more effective than a really high resolution texture. Plus, you can apply it to most artistic styles. Can't wait for Ray tracing to get less-demanding and widely used in about 8 or so years.

The Witcher 3 global hairworks
Battlfront II 4K/60fps gameplay
Nier Automata animations

PBR and lighting in general.

gotta agree with lighting. It gives an immersive experience that I haven't felt since I was a kid.

one of the recent in-game pics I took in Spider-Man. I just hung there for a while in awe.

Horizon Zero Dawn - Beautiful Landscapes, amazing character and enemy details, fantastic animation. Facial animation not so much, but it is a gorgeous game.

Not much of a feat guy, but Spider-Man's shoes are pretty cool.

Lighting and particles. I think the first time I saw a huge difference with previous gen was with Infamous First Light. PS3 couldn't manage to display that many particles which emit light.

Assassin's Creed Unity was also a good lighting showcase, especially in Versailles.

Now obviously it's not that impressive.

Image quality. Jaggies seem to be a thing of the past.

Definitely PBR.

CaviarMeths said:

Not much of a feat guy, but Spider-Man's shoes are pretty cool.

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PBR for sure. Looking at last gen titles the shading looks so flat without it. And it still improving as well.
Also the faked SSS on skin shaders is working out great.

In short, this gen: wood looks like wood, metal like metal and skin like skin.
Last gen: everything is wood

volumetrics.



fog, light shafts, dusty environments. it makes shit look SOOO good.

screen space reflections...it might not be ray tracing, it might have limitations, by my god does it help ground everything. seeing spideys reflection in the glass as you run up a building. seeing everything reflect in the wet streets real time, and dynamically...hell, driveclub's rain wouldn't be the same without it.

also ND and their animations...they continue to impress the hell out of me and continue to be so far ahead of the curve within this industry.

I think I have to go with all the forms of TAA we got this generation. Volumetric lighting was my first thought, but at the end of the day, it's much easier to go back to a game with simpler lighting and still find it beautiful than it is to deal with shimmering everywhere.

A temporally stable image adds so much to the presentation.

Also, does Ray Tracing count as "this gen"? :P

Dracoonian said:

Yeah, I'm going to go for this too. I think it's more effective than a really high resolution texture. Plus, you can apply it to most artistic styles. Can't wait for Ray tracing to get less-demanding and widely used in about 8 or so years.

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Yeah, Dragon Quest XI doesn't use particularly large textures but it still looks fantastic, partly due to PBR.

Character Animations. Particularly what we saw from Naughty Dog during the TLOU 2 demonstration. Far more immersive than current VR for me.

Raindrops in Homefront: The Revolution.

HDR and how amazing it can make particle effects look, even in some really ancient games. Infamous Second Son comes to mind, the color in the neon power is absolutely wild.

KORNdog said:

volumetrics.

fog, light shafts, dusty environments. it makes shit look SOOO good.

screen space reflections...it might not be ray tracing, it might have limitations, by my god does it help ground everything. seeing spideys reflection in the glass as you run up a building. seeing everything reflect in the wet streets real time, and dynamically...hell, driveclub's rain wouldn't be the same without it.

also ND and their animations...they continue to impress the hell out of me and continue to be so far ahead of the curve within this industry.

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Lol. The one I was going to say was Driveclub and its rain.

Have seen some really beautiful graphics and effects this gen but the rain on the windshield was the only one that made my jaw drop.

The water, skies and sunsets in Sea of thieves. Really unmatched by anything I've seen.

DLSS and Raytracing. I'm more excited about DLSS since it creates great image quality and boosts performance significantly.

Honestly, it's the incredible AA that some developers have put out this gen. Horizon even at 1080p looks absolutely pristine. Last-gen AA methods are so far behind.

Gbraga said:

I think I have to go with all the forms of TAA we got this generation. Volumetric lighting was my first thought, but at the end of the day, it's much easier to go back to a game with simpler lighting and still find it beautiful than it is to deal with shimmering everywhere.

A temporally stable image adds so much to the presentation.

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Agreed.

Horizon had some moments where my jaw hit the floor. Shit looked like a impressionistic painting from the 19th century with robo-animals.

Animation in Uncharted 4 and Street Fighter V

Honestly, resolution and frame rate. Image quality is definitely improved compared to the previous gen of barely 720p and frame rates are improved across the board with many games now being 60fos on console. Other than that, open world complexity.

DriveClub weather.

The upgrades in animation, model and lighting quality in games.
Things look amazing now.

Photogrammetry

The sky in Forza Horizon 3. It's so convincing and well done, I think any game attempting a realistic sky should use their sky method. It feels like it has real depth and volume and doesn't look like a flat domed texture that spins around.

Pankratous said:

DriveClub weather.

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This for me also. There hasn't been a single other moment this generation that has floored everyone from pc to Xbox to PS4...

The leaked videos/GIFs and their accompanying threads were glorious.

There is a few wow moments for me this gen, driving into the Duscae region in FFXV (PC version), Uncharted 4's superb consistency with all it's great character models & Hellblade's up close animations that i thought were pre rendered.

Scale in Star Citizen


It's not one specific graphical feature but the way all of them work at this gargantuan scale.

Materials based shaders and reflections and smoke tech.

Metel looking like metal, wood looking like wood.
But to be honest its a number of better things graphically this gen, that creates an overall better looking game.

VR for sure. Superhot looks like Virtua Fighter 1 but it's still totally believable once you're inside it, hiding behind a crude white polygon desk.

the water in golden sun

I think that volumetric lighting and atmospheric effects are one of the best things brought by this generation of games.

When, for example, FromSoftware went from Demon's Souls to Dark Souls, despite being impressed by the scale of Dark Souls' world I was disappointed by its lack of atmospheric effects. In Demon's Souls almost every environment had some little atmospheric detail, some fog, some ashes in the air, little things that made the world seem more believable and real whereas in Dark Souls they exist but are used much more sparingly, probably due to technical limitations.

It was a very pleasant surprise when I started playing Bloodborne and saw those effects return in full force.

I think it's still Horizon for me, absolutely amazing detail for an open world game, from a purely technical level Breath of the Wild on Wii U is pretty crazy, even with the frame drops.

I think as motion cap has become the norm, animation fidelity is getting better and better, culminating in something astonishingly naturalistic like in tlou 2 e3 demo. now, it remains to be seen how much of that carries on to the base gameplay, but across the board I feel like animations - which are one of the absolute key components to achieving realistic aesthetics in visuals - are simply getting better and better

that said, I still vastly prefer something stylised with good art design. I think breath of the wild looks sublime, and every single time the sun glints off waving grass, I pause to stare

RTX raytracing.

Draw distance, image quality, resolution, animations.

Special mention to facial animations or generally humans.. Those in Detroit Become Human act like real persons. Amazing.

Physically-based rendering makes everything look better across the board. Add to that the improved lighting from this gen, and we get the stunning games we've been getting now.

uncharted 4 jeep crash fire


that shit looks real

indirect lighting/global illumination

still so many games that do not do this well. volumetrics are nice, but they are more commonplace now.

Can we count unreleased games? If so TLoU 2 animation it was literally like watching a movie complete flawless animation.

But I doubt it well be as flawless as the trailer when its released.

texture detail. I want to touch everything. I want to poke the dirt, the buildings, the weapons, Geralt's face...

Photogrammetry

PBR was a game changer, imo.