Most impressive DX11 title from a tech perspective

[Carfax83]

DX11 has had one helluva run I have to admit. It came bundled with Windows 7 back in July 2009, so that's 7 years. Despite some limitations and inefficiencies (which were ameliorated over time though updates), developers managed to create some very impressive titles using this API.

In fact, I'd say in the last year or so that DX11 has likely reached its pinnacle. DX12 is getting ready to take over, though it will perhaps be another year or two until it starts to gather some serious momentum.

Anyway, the question and the topic is simple. What DX11 titles do you find the most impressive from a technological perspective? Please explain why if you're able to. I'm also going to include a poll and list some options which will include several of the biggest DX11 titles released over the years, but obviously this should not preclude you from stating another opinion if you find that you don't agree with my choices..

However, the choice should only include RELEASED games, and not games that are currently in development.

 

[Carfax83]

For my vote, I voted for The Division. Although the game itself leaves much to be desired (they should have made it primarily a single player game with a more detailed story and co-op option), The Division never ceases to astonish when it comes to technological prowess.

One of the most important aspects of any engine is how it handles the CPU. The Division, which uses the Snowdrop engine has perhaps the best CPU utilization of any DX11 game I've ever played; and I've played many. It scales to six threads, which only a few DX11 games can do, and it has very balanced thread usage. The excellent CPU utilization surely played an important part in displaying the massive amounts of detail on screen whilst still managing to deliver high frame rates. Memory usage is also exceptional, as this game is very efficient with both VRAM and RAM. In fact, considering how detailed it is, it has never gone over 5GB of VRAM usage from my experience..

The game also uses some very expensive graphical effects like real time global illumination, although this effect was used very sparsely to be sure. But it also makes copious use of some other graphical effects like volumetric smoke and fog, and lit particles. Last but not least, the game is absolutely massive in size and scale and many buildings can be entered and exited seamlessly without any loading screens.

 

[nurturedhate]

I feel it has to be Battlefront. Fantastic hardware scaling. Great optimization. Crysis 3 and TW3 deserve nods but neither of them ultimately pulled off what Battlefront did. The Division deserves something I just don't know what. That game world is a joy to run through but the rest of the game places it squarely in the flames of a dumpster fire.

 

[Yakk]

I voted Battlefront although my first choice is DA:I, I just didn't want to vote "other". I felt Battlefront was close enough to DA:I to warrant the vote.

I consider both these games to the pinnacle of DX11 achievement technically.

That being said I'm glad too see DX11 finally being put to rest on AAA games, waaaaay overdue for DX12.

 

[Spjut]

I was always impressed with Battlefield 4. It had great multicore support and managed utilizing high-end GPUs great while still scaling back all the way to the then seven-year-old Geforce 8 series.

 

[poofyhairguy]

I voted other because I think Farcry Primal looks amazing.

 

[Squeetard]

I voted Tomb Raider. Having just started and finished it on a gtx 1080. On ultra it looks amazing. But what got me is the totally smooth animation and parkour flow.

 

[Enigmoid]

Crysis 3 - I played on an extremely low end config and the optimization is mind-blowing (1080p 30-40fps low-mid on a 660m). Other games like Witcher 3 can't even run lowest settings at 730p (<25 fps).

 

[Zstream]

There is a difference to me between several things.

AI Animations
World layout
Combat animation

It seems as if games only follow two of the three. Heck, I find many MMO's prettier than many AAA FPS games.

 

[crisium]

Battlefront, runner up ROTTR.

 

[Carfax83]

I'm actually a bit surprised that Star Wars Battlefront has taken such a commanding lead. Whilst the Frostbite 3 engine is top notch and a great performer, Dice usually makes their games with a lot of baked assets, especially when it comes to lighting. The use of mostly baked assets is a big reason why Star Wars Battlefront runs so well in fact. Real time dynamic lighting is much more performance intensive..

It's a shame I couldn't put Doom on the poll since it's not DX11, but Doom makes use of a great deal of real time dynamic lighting and shadows, which is crucial to what makes the game so impressive.

 

[Yakk]

Johan Andersson over at DICE is constantly developing bleeding edge lighting research calculations which he's presented at Syggraph before and I believe he is also continuously incorporating into the Frostbyte engine.

This is probably one of the reasons each Frostbyte game keeps looking better and better. (Even Mirror's Edge which was designed to look ultra "clean" plain).

 

[dogen1]

Johan Andersson over at DICE is constantly developing bleeding edge lighting research calculations which he's presented at Syggraph before and I believe he is also continuously incorporating into the Frostbyte engine.

lol he's just one guy on the team. other people at dice have presented stuff too

 

[Yakk]

lol he's just one guy on the team. other people at dice have presented stuff too

Yup, quite a few of them. Lots of blogs too, good reads all around.

 

[dogen1]

Yup, quite a few of them. Lots of blogs too, good reads all around.

Yeah, they might be the best engine team in the world. I don't think anything will surpass battlefront for a while, other than battlefield 1 of course.

 

[Carfax83]

Yeah, they might be the best engine team in the world. I don't think anything will surpass battlefront for a while, other than battlefield 1 of course.

Not even Star Citizen? Like I said above, Frostbite 3 is an exceptional engine and I consider it top tier for sure. But DICE has historically relied on using baked assets in their games to increase performance, since their games are mostly multiplayer focused..

Other developers like Crytek and Epic have made implementing dynamic lighting for a wide degree of light souces a priority, and CryEngine is doing some things that have never been seen before for games when you look at Star Citizen. It's a shame that as of the creation of this post, there are no real AAA games using the Unreal Engine 4. Unlike last gen, most big studios decided to develop their own engines rather than license another..

Gears of War 4 which will be coming out this October is probably the first real AAA developed Unreal Engine 4 game, and it will use some very impressive technologies such as real time global illumination with bounce lighting.

 

[SPBHM]

it's very difficult to be objective with this and separate things like art and personal preference from the equation...
but I guess I pick Crysis 3 considering it's the oldest of the bunch and developed as multi platform for the old gen of consoles and PC.
BF4/Battlefront is also fairly impressive and so are all the others I suppose... if personal preference was the main thing I would pick Witcher 3 from that list,

 

[TheRyuu]

Why separate BF4 and Battlefront? Are they not using the same/very similar engine?

It's hard to pick one game and I think it's also hard because games can be cleaver and you don't know about it because all you wind up seeing is the pretty shiny graphics.

There's some public documentation about GTA5's graphics[1] and maybe there's other pieces like this for other games although it's probably pretty rare. The issue here is that it's hard to judge from a "technological perspective" because we don't have the complete picture a lot of the time. We have games like Metro 2033 (and sequals) that were pretty impressive for their time their engines were designed about being efficient streaming stuff to the GPU.

I think beyond picking games with "pretty graphics" the question you've posed in the OP is basically impossible to answer so good luck finding an answer. What you're really asking is what game ran well and looked pretty since it's apparently quite hard to have your cake and eat it too.

[1] http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2015/11/02/gta-v-graphics-study/

 

[Grooveriding]

BF4/Battlefront are both on Frostbite, but Frostbite is constantly being update with newer and newer features. Battlefront, while a pretty terrible game, really looks incredible AND performs very well. Frostbite is an engine that looks incredible and performs very well.

The Battlefield 1 beta opens next week. People should try it out. Incredible looking game and it performs very well.

 

[dogen1]

Not even Star Citizen? Like I said above, Frostbite 3 is an exceptional engine and I consider it top tier for sure. But DICE has historically relied on using baked assets in their games to increase performance, since their games are mostly multiplayer focused..

I was just going by stuff I've played or seen. Haven't seen much of Star Citizen, nor do I know much about it. I also think that pre-processing isn't necessarily a technical disadvantage. A smart balance of pre-baked and dynamic lighting is best.

 

[Carfax83]

Why separate BF4 and Battlefront? Are they not using the same/very similar engine?

Yes, but Battlefront is using a much more updated version of Frostbite 3 that has support for things like PBR and other advanced graphical effects. Battlefield 4 was using the earliest version of Frostbite 3, which I'm certain had no support for PBR. I also remember playing BF4 when it came out and the draw distance was really bad, especially for shadows. The version of Frostbite 3 that Dragon Age Inquisition used improved draw distance significantly, and I'm positive that the updated version for SW:BF enhanced that even more.

I think beyond picking games with "pretty graphics" the question you've posed in the OP is basically impossible to answer so good luck finding an answer. What you're really asking is what game ran well and looked pretty since it's apparently quite hard to have your cake and eat it too.

Not impossible to answer, but highly subjective I admit.

 

[Carfax83]

I was just going by stuff I've played or seen. Haven't seen much of Star Citizen, nor do I know much about it. I also think that pre-processing isn't necessarily a technical disadvantage. A smart balance of pre-baked and dynamic lighting is best.

I agree that a balance of baked and dynamic lighting is best, which is why I love Doom so much, because it offers the perfect balance of that. With Doom, what you expect would be considered dynamic lighting, is dynamic. For example, when the Doom marine fires the plasma rifle, the light from each round affects the environment as it travels towards its destination.

But in SW:BF, this is not the case. If a Storm Trooper fires his rifle, the light that you would expect from the laser bolt itself does not affect the environment. I remember seeing the Digital Foundry Face off for SW:BF and being very disappointed at this. You can see it for yourself in this video at 1:39:

 

[DarkKnightDude]

Battlefront does look pretty astounding. Plus the photogrammetry was amazing. The rocks actually looked like rocks.

 

[Madpacket]

For me Crysis 3 looks a cut above the rest here. If you have the hardware to run it at Max settings at 1440P the game looks absolutely stunning. It must be old now but still the best looking overall. Star Wars Battlefront looks great when you first play it but then you notice it has a certain cheapness to the look, like copy / paste of game assets poorly taken from the movies. Kind of hard to explain. IMHO BF4 looks better (and is infinitely better multi player). Tough choices and personal preference but Crysis 3 just has that polished look with awesome animations, very expressive facial capture. Amazing lighting, decent AI. It just does everything well and even has an interesting campaign.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

I think the title that stuck out for me the most is GTAV, although admittedly I've not played some of the others. And I'm not even sure that could be summed up to be due to DX11 because I don't think it's effects unique to DX11 that really make the game, what stood out was the sheer vastness of the game and just how much unique content there was. The only other game I've really noticed this in was RAGE and that was largely due to megatexture in the IDtech5 engine. Something we've become used to for a long time is reapted use of textures and models in games and it's almost eerie to see unique looking areas that don't exist anywhere else in the game. I've enjoyed that more than any kind of new particle effect or shader.

I think once we have a sort of "mega geometry" to compliment the new size of texture libraries, we'll see something really special, hopefully that should be a fairly easy extension of tessellation, but who knows at this point.