Why does GTA4 still have more advanced shadowing than other games?

[futurefields]

It is still rare to see games which cast shadows like this (without mods) ^

Why?

 

[shortylickens]

I've seen more and more, but yes its rare.

The main reason is real time shadows actually take a lot of processing power.
And shadow maps need to be very high quality in a wide variety to look real.

Also, occasionally a really crappy game with have awesome shadows but nobody plays it so......

 

[Dankk]

Off the top of my head, Hard Reset has some pretty awesome dynamic lighting/shadows.

 

[Morbus]

GTA 4 is one of those rare games where the developers realized that the best thing they can do for graphics is to improve graphics, not (just) textures.

 

[Blitzvogel]

The way dynamic shadows are implemented requires a pretty high resolution shadowmap that doesn't lend itself to having over-blocky penumbras as it extends out while the lighted areas dissipate gradually in a realistic looking manner. On top of that, GTA4 was running Euphoria, general AI, animation and game code, not to mention had interactive water (limited by still interactive).

 

[Zenoth]

The STALKER games also have very impressive dynamic lightning effects (resulting in great shadows as well).

 

[toughtrasher]

GTA 4 is one of those rare games where the developers realized that the best thing they can do for graphics is to improve graphics, not (just) textures.

9000% agree. It's all about textures these days and sad thing is a lot of gamers don't even realize it...

 

[lamedude]

It was all about textures in þe olde days too. Many thought HL2 looked better than Doom3.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

It's because dynamic lighting is very computationally expensive and the last gen consoles didn't really have the kind of hardware capable of doing this well, so it wasn't built into a lot of games, mainly due to the prevalence of lowest common denominator development.

Games which were developed on the PC only or saw a lot of specific love for the PC versions to show case the graphics are the games that typically get this kind of effect, as posted above Hard Reset has a lot of dynamic lighting in game on a lot of the weapon projectiles, enemies and in the environment. The STALKER series has good use of dynamic lights, as does Metro 2033 and Last Light, both were heavily improved PC versions of the console counterpart.

 

[Denithor]

As I recall, GTA4 was one of the first games that really, seriously benefited from having a quad-core CPU (like, ran like crap on dual core chips). Everybody always bad-mouthed it, saying it was due to poor conversion from console version, but now I wonder - could it have been due to the shadows?

 

[PrincessFrosty]

As I recall, GTA4 was one of the first games that really, seriously benefited from having a quad-core CPU (like, ran like crap on dual core chips). Everybody always bad-mouthed it, saying it was due to poor conversion from console version, but now I wonder - could it have been due to the shadows?

No shadows are calculated on the GPU and not the CPU.

The requirement of the quad core in my opinion came down to the large scale use of the euphoria engine which allowed the blending on animations and physics for the pedestrians and vehicles, physics calculations which are relevant to game play (that change the game state in some meaningful way) have to be done on the CPU and that's something that really takes advantage of more cores.

There were some optimisations to be made for GTA4 on the PC it turned out but for the most part the whining at performance was from people with outdated PCs who had wildly unrealistic expectations, there's really not a great deal of evidence that the game is unoptimised.

 

[imaheadcase]

Because game engines. Most game engines do certain things well and not so much others. Be it more items on screen, better particles, etc.

 

[TeknoBug]

Destiny and Watch_Dogs has awesome shadows.

Oh and shadows are CPU bound in many games, turning shadows off in Planetside 2 takes a load off the CPU, not GPU.

 

[Zodiark1593]

Shadow maps not only require a fair amount of processing time, they're also memory hungry, which is why shadows on the PS3/360 looked blocky as low res shadow maps were used.

In absence of dynamic lighting, baked lightmaps done correctly can still look very good, and oftentimes, a mix of the two can be used.

 

[Blitzvogel]

It's because dynamic lighting is very computationally expensive and the last gen consoles didn't really have the kind of hardware capable of doing this well, so it wasn't built into a lot of games, mainly due to the prevalence of lowest common denominator development.

I would disagree. Both consoles were quite adept at it, with global shadowing being quite the norm in many games. Even the PS2 and especially the Xbox have some very fine examples of good dynamic shadowing. The 360 and PS3 were just the first systems to have excess amounts of GPU capability and video memory to virtually make it a defacto requirement.

No shadows are calculated on the GPU and not the CPU.

The requirement of the quad core in my opinion came down to the large scale use of the euphoria engine which allowed the blending on animations and physics for the pedestrians and vehicles, physics calculations which are relevant to game play (that change the game state in some meaningful way) have to be done on the CPU and that's something that really takes advantage of more cores.

IIRC Euphoria exclusively has one core dedicated to it in the 360 and PC versions and 2 SPEs for the PS3. I would consider GTA4 very vector processing intensive especially when all the non-graphics settings are maxed. Any pre-Sandy Bridge dual-core is going to have a very bad time when you consider that the 360's Xenon has 128 bit SIMD on each of it's three cores and it wasn't until Sandy Bridge that 256 bit SIMD was introduced on x86.

Both the Xenon and Cell's vector & floating point processing capabilities were a key in keeping up with the PC despite the long generation. Even with horrible general scalar processing compared to even circa-2005 dual cores like Athlon x2s, SIMD is more important for a console environment. Interestingly, the the 360 and PS4's 8x Jaguar cores have half the theoretical SIMD of the Cell BE (being half the clock speed but same SIMD width as the Cell's PPE and SPEs). But the scalar processing is multitudes better and caches much bigger. Thank god for GPGPU

 

[reallyscrued]

Because Unreal Engine 3 is everywhere.

 

[Alok_Awasthi]

Because gta 5 is yet to release for PC