Upcoming graphics pushers?

[Insomniator]

Anything like Crysis 3 coming out to push the limits again? Anything using Unreal Engine 4 soon?

 

[ImpulsE69]

VR is the limit pusher at this time.

 

[lupi]

There's maybe 3 main engines being used and no one really looking to push a more visual one out that I'm aware of (for non vr). Main gpu limit now will be increase in screen size and resolution.

 

[cmdrdredd]

VR is the limit pusher at this time.

Which is lame cause it's low resolution and most games that are being made specifically for it aren't pushing the graphics to new levels.

 

[ImpulsE69]

Which is lame cause it's low resolution and most games that are being made specifically for it aren't pushing the graphics to new levels.

when your ps4 can output 1080p to two screens at once at 90hz get back to me on that. I'm personally tired of the bitching about VR, if you play consoles ,you have no reason to care that VR isn't highest end graphics. It is still doing twice the work of any non VR PC game and 2.5 or more of any console. (I can't speak to PSVR but I know it isn't 1080).

To your point though -- consoles are still what are holding most advances up. VR is a completely different subject really. It's limitations are simply due to having to double it up.


Other things...

The immersion in a low poly/cartoony game of Rec Room blows away anything non VR that's come out no matter how pretty it is and the highest capable cards still struggle for the more graphically intense things. Blame the graphics cards people and all the people buying them just to mine crypto for the stagnation. The rest is basically being put on console and ported to PC which is nothing new.

I am so glad I don't get hung up on graphics. It allows me to enjoy things and worry more about the gameplay etc - which many companies really fail at. I don't care if I'm on ultra for everything. As long as I can make out what it is supposed to be, I can go back and forth from new state of the art games to pixel/retro games etc without a worry.

 

[Yakk]

Consoles dictate developement, sometimes PC games have a couple extra features bolted on.

More important than graphics IMHO is fluidity; high FPS & low latency, which VR requires to be effective. DOOM is a great example of developers paying particular attention to frametime fluidity and not overdoing it with their scalable rendering engine. They could've kept a fixed rendering engine requiring overblown hardware specs to render properly, just like the old CryEngine game, but having the fine tuning capabilities of Vulkan, they didn't need to.

 

[Zenoth]

I hesitate, but... maybe Battlefront 2? There's not much really.

Between UE4, Frostbite (whichever version of it is the latest) and CryEngine... I honestly don't see much of a difference in most modern cases, unless of course the art-style is distinguished, made stylish on purpose and looks unique from something more typical or 'common' like photo-realistic graphics. I honestly don't think that we'll see another Crysis happening on PC again. We might be surprised here and there a few times, sure... but being "WOW!"'ed like we've been from something so far ahead of its time like Crysis or even H-L2 were during their year of release? Nah. I do think that those days are either gone, or it's purely a matter of will (and resources) from big developers to actually do it again.

But doing it for the sake of doing it means nothing for game-play, it's only for technology. Not saying that pushing the limits and the technology isn't important (of course, it is technically), but if the game itself sucks it just won't do any good for the developers themselves (and for any future attempts to do it). Because other devs will look at a would-be Crysis-style graphics-pusher 2.0 and its failure to sell (because it sucked, for example); and they'll just say "nope, not again, won't risk it; and it's too expensive anyway". My two cents.

As of now and from what is gonna be released this year that we've seen, there's honestly nothing that really WOWs me in terms of graphics 'pushing'. I'm not saying that the games look bad. Many of them look phenomenal. We've come a VERY long way with graphics since the past 10 years alone (or basically since Crysis 1 and HL2). But what I'm saying is that I'm not seeing anything that is blatantly what I'd call 'Ahead of its time'. All I'm seeing is 'What the current gen can, and should do', but no more (and what the current gen does IS good, don't get me wrong).

 

[Insomniator]

Yeah, I'm not really interested in VR, or moving up from 1440p quite yet. I do wish we'd see a Crysis like WOW factor -- something to crush 1080/ti's atm that isn't 3 monitors plus 200hz.

Whats funny is that the reason I made this thread is after seeing a trailer on reddit of -- Kingdom Hearts Toy Story -- on PS4 of all games. The neighborhood scenes look so clean/realistic even in cartoon/CGI form. Maybe its the lighting, style or perspective but it looks awesome to me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ix4muaZj1s

 

[BSim500]

I do wish we'd see a Crysis like WOW factor -- something to crush 1080/ti's atm that isn't 3 monitors plus 200hz.

I doubt you will anytime soon. Crysis was released in 2007 as a PC exclusive during the tail end of the "PC gaming = PC first" Golden Age. These days, they won't even make an AAA game that isn't cross platform given 80-90% of sales are console (and 90% of the 10-20% PC sales are typical mid-range hardware). As others have mentioned, everything rests on being designed to weak-sauce consoles, and the main thing that PC's scale up beyond that is resolution.

I have mixed feelings about the overused "but can it run Crysis" thing as well. On the one hand, it's well remembered as a "benchmark game". On the other hand despite looking good Crysis games have never really been well optimised on the Ultra settings everyone seems to have an irrational obsession with. I keep thinking back to "OMG, Crysis 2 is gonna be badass, look at how much horsepower it needs on Ultra! That's a go-ahead for me to blow $1,000 on a new rig" that turned out to be "it runs slow due to massive over-tessellation of invisible underground water" that halved performance with literally nothing to show for it. Even Crysis 3 is similar in terms of "I'm buggered if I can see what's the difference between Very High and High, vs what I'm losing all those fps / fluidity of gameplay for".

There have been games since that try to look good. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter or Everybody's Gone To The Rapture (CryEngine) did a pretty good job. But as for expecting the same "WOW" factor year after year, it's simply that we're well into the realms of depreciating gains. In terms of game engine capability, the biggest FPS jump was from 1987 (The Colony) to 1993 (Doom) to 1997 (Quake2) then 2007 (Oblivion). From 2007 to 2017 has been far flatter. Skyrim still looks 10x better with a few mods than most games using "superior" engines. Then you get "train wreck" examples like Mirrors Edge Catalyst running 20fps on a GTX 970 on "Hyper" due to 'needing' +4GB VRAM for those 'glorious' wall textures whilst 10-year old Portal 1 runs 300fps on a 1050Ti, uses 600MB VRAM and ends up looking better overall running 10x faster on hardware twice as slow, ie, a 20:1 performance disparity...

The bottleneck hasn't been engine limitations for a long time. It's been developer laziness, incompetence and "designed for consoles who make up 90% of sales, so why bother putting any effort in for <5% of customers who own top-end rigs?" attitude. And that's something that all the future CryEngine 26, Frostbite 19 or Unreal 31 engines in the world isn't going to fix.

 

[cmdrdredd]

To your point though -- consoles are still what are holding most advances up. VR is a completely different subject really. It's limitations are simply due to having to double it up.
...

The immersion in a low poly/cartoony game of Rec Room blows away anything non VR that's come out no matter how pretty it is and the highest capable cards still struggle for the more graphically intense things. Blame the graphics cards people and all the people buying them just to mine crypto for the stagnation. The rest is basically being put on console and ported to PC which is nothing new.

I am so glad I don't get hung up on graphics. It allows me to enjoy things and worry more about the gameplay etc - which many companies really fail at. I don't care if I'm on ultra for everything. As long as I can make out what it is supposed to be, I can go back and forth from new state of the art games to pixel/retro games etc without a worry.

The question was about graphics specifically. As in getting closer to photorealism. VR isn't doing that as I said. Your feeling of immersion or whatnot has no bearing on the discussion.

 

[BSim500]

Whats funny is that the reason I made this thread is after seeing a trailer on reddit of -- Kingdom Hearts Toy Story -- on PS4 of all games. The neighborhood scenes look so clean/realistic even in cartoon/CGI form. Maybe its the lighting, style or perspective but it looks awesome to me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ix4muaZj1s

^ I think the issue may be partly the absurd modern game design trend of stuffing a dozen over-exaggerated blur filters (Depth of Field, Motion Blur, Radial Blur, Vignetting), etc, which seemed to start up around 2012-2013. When this then gets adopted industry-wide, then people get habituated into accepting blurry games and try and pretend it's somehow normal for your world-saving in-game super-hero's vision to be worse than my 91yr old grandmother's pre-cataract-surgery, even though effects like "wall of blur" Depth Of Field at stuff you're directly looking at or Chromatic Abhorration aren't even remotely realistic (nor make any logical sense in rendered games that aren't captured through any optical lens). Then after playing a dozen of those, along comes a new game without all the fake post-processing blur "enhancements", and gamers often react with a "Wow, this looks so clear and natural".

I regularly replay a lot of older games and constantly notice exactly the same effect switching back and forth from pre-2012 games which aren't stuffed full of blur shaders and they somehow look much "cleaner" and more natural for it, even though texture resolutions are lower. It feels like you're actually "allowed" to look around your screen without having Vaseline smeared over every area except the very centre for absolutely no reason whatsoever.

It might be worth trying disabling DoF, etc, in other games then testing them for 20mins. If they feel cleaner / more realistic (especially outdoors), there's your answer. It took me a while to figure out half the stuff in Ultra presets is entirely subjective as to whether they make a game look better / cooler or simply worse / irritatingly stupid.

 

[WiseUp216]

Cyberpunk 2077 on REDengine 4 will be probably be quite the looker. Shame that we still have like 2 years to wait.

 

[ImpulsE69]

The question was about graphics specifically. As in getting closer to photorealism. VR isn't doing that as I said. Your feeling of immersion or whatnot has no bearing on the discussion.

Fair enough - my point about VR was simply that it is pushing the need for cards that can do more which in turn also allows better graphics and fps. I see it as an advantage in a world where things have stagnated.

 

[cmdrdredd]

^ I think the issue may be partly the absurd modern game design trend of stuffing a dozen over-exaggerated blur filters (Depth of Field, Motion Blur, Radial Blur, Vignetting), etc, which seemed to start up around 2012-2013. When this then gets adopted industry-wide, then people get habituated into accepting blurry games and try and pretend it's somehow normal for your world-saving in-game super-hero's vision to be worse than my 91yr old grandmother's pre-cataract-surgery, even though effects like "wall of blur" Depth Of Field at stuff you're directly looking at or Chromatic Abhorration aren't even remotely realistic (nor make any logical sense in rendered games that aren't captured through any optical lens). Then after playing a dozen of those, along comes a new game without all the fake post-processing blur "enhancements", and gamers often react with a "Wow, this looks so clear and natural".

I regularly replay a lot of older games and constantly notice exactly the same effect switching back and forth from pre-2012 games which aren't stuffed full of blur shaders and they somehow look much "cleaner" and more natural for it, even though texture resolutions are lower. It feels like you're actually "allowed" to look around your screen without having Vaseline smeared over every area except the very centre for absolutely no reason whatsoever.

It might be worth trying disabling DoF, etc, in other games then testing them for 20mins. If they feel cleaner / more realistic (especially outdoors), there's your answer. It took me a while to figure out half the stuff in Ultra presets is entirely subjective as to whether they make a game look better / cooler or simply worse / irritatingly stupid.

I am very happy when I can turn chromatic aberration, film grain and other post process effects off. I guess they think it makes the game seem more cinematic?

 

[cmdrdredd]

Fair enough - my point about VR was simply that it is pushing the need for cards that can do more which in turn also allows better graphics and fps. I see it as an advantage in a world where things have stagnated.

Oh I completely understand that. I just don't think the game engines have kept up of late. I mean a lot of games are using engines that are quite old at this point. I think cryengine has shown the most potential. I know unreal engine 4 has been used too but many of those titles weren't as impressive to me. I thought by now we would have games on par with the UE4 tech demos.

 

[magomago]

VR is the limit pusher at this time.

100% Accurate.

VR's demands are massive. 2x1080p at 90Hz cannot be done today smoothly enough. True future is probably going to be 2x4K at 120Hz.

PSVR is scratching the surface for what can be done, and GPUs still have a long way to go.

 

[Borealis7]

i actually think 4K is the main pusher right now. make any game playable at 60FPS min.