Game graphics hitting a wall?

Originally Posted by Gnaddel

That Project Offset trailer looks nowhere near crysis. More Dark Messiah 'ish than that actually. Nothing wrong with a game being similar to Dark Messiah though!

Um think they ment on a graphical level, not gameplay.

[sillyeagle]

Originally Posted by MaxFX

Yeah offset will probably be something special as its supposed to be Intels Larrabee push so it will be exiting to see if and how much raytracing it will get as we know thats what Intels talks about

So heres hoping that it will be the next big thing!

Phil Taylor was Senior PM at MS ACES studio before he went Intel to work on Larrabee. He is a very active blogger and forum junkie, so his Larabee blog is packed full of insider info.

http://www.futuregpu.org/

[nekrosoft13]

Originally Posted by Medion

I think devs are more console-centric than they've ever been. Most games are made with consoles in mind, and as such, you generally see a slightly upscaled version on the PC. On the plus side, I've noticed more PC games come to market without the need for a patch. I own several games that don't even have a patch available.

how is no patches a plus side? games still have bugs, you just don't get any fixes for them

[MaxFX]

Originally Posted by sillyeagle

Phil Taylor was Senior PM at MS ACES studio before he went Intel to work on Larrabee. He is a very active blogger and forum junkie, so his Larabee blog is packed full of insider info.

http://www.futuregpu.org/

Okey nice will check it out to se what going on
And as jolle said, think his spot on. the difference to the eyes arent that easy to made anymore as we allready come this far. just take a look at just Crysis and it's hard to se how they can do much for atleast know to blow that away. it will take time and much better/stronger hardware for that I think. and it's pretty good as it is as it looks crazy so now wheres the next gfx hardware that can make the damn Crysis playable

And e.x Mirrors Edge how good dont that game look and plays supersmoth. that is one game that impressed me a lot and a nice, fun on top of that so what more do one need.
Forget, FEAR2 dont look that shappy eatier. looks pretty awesome I think so im more then happy

[MaxFX]

Originally Posted by jolle

The framerates you get with modern high end GPUs can attest to that.


But I think we´re really starting to see the that steep curve on diminishing returns.
You need alot more power to push the quality a step further, the higher you go.
(for example, if you add 1000 polygons to a Quake 1 model, its huge improvement, if you add 1000 polys to a character in crysis, its not going to be that big a difference)

And aliasing is a bigger issue now then ever really, a good example of that is something I noticed a really long time ago.
First time I ran Dawn, the NV tech demo, with and without high levels of AA, the difference there was pretty much the difference between realtime and offline rendering.

And now that´ve really started to use SSAA a whole lot, you notice the huge difference in IQ it does.
One of the early sequences in Crysis Warhead where the character moves through some vegitation, that sequence was night and day with and without SSAA.
MSAA really doesnt help much at all in such scenarios, and using TSAA type solutions will result in probably worse performance then pure SSAA as you´re now doing MSAA and SSAA on pretty much the entire screen, possibly more as there are layers of textures with transparency.

The creeping and crawling you get in the image in motion with aliasing and also with lacking texture filtering becomes more and more of an issue the better the graphics you get, as it contrasts a whole lot more with the image then in for example Quake 1.


Raytracing dont seem that much of a real lift to realtime IMO.
You can do exact reflections, and some other stuff, but a raytraced shadow, like a stencil shadow need alot of work to become soft, and that is really expensive.
It´ll prolly be another tool in the toolbox though, alot of offline rendering today use some raytracing for certain stuff, where its appropriate, but not for everything.

Judging by developer response is not really something they´re all that excited about, but rather something Intel want´s to use to leverage the game onto their playing field, to compete with NV and ATi who has been in the realtime rasterizing business for years and years.. but again, it´ll be another tool to work with.

+1 very well said and as you say the devs dont really seem that overhyped about it. as Carmac and the other top devs says it will be a mix of them both to get it to the future as they can take a litte from here and a little from there so to speak

[NarcissistZero]

I agree with others that consoles are holding things back a bit, but PC games are really still progressing and looking better and better despite that. As someone who played the Xbox versions of Fallout 3, Mirror's Edge and Left 4 Dead, I promise you that the PC versions of those games are more than slightly enhanced, looking much better even on the base assets level.

I don't think anyone is in a rush to challenge Crysis... maybe if Crysis sold way over expectations and made PC gaming hip again, but it didn't sadly. I think some games like Mirror's Edge and Cryostasis challenge Crysis when maxed out, but don't quite match it. We probably won't see something that really trashes Crysis until the next generation of consoles come out (though games like Rage, Bioshock 2 and Dragon Age might surprise us, if given their PC due like I bet they will be).

(I wonder if the PS4 and Xbox 640 will even have games which surpass Crysis on max settings? The Wii could easily influence them to scale back their technological improvements. I don't even know when we'll see the next consoles... I think it might be a while).

[XDanger]

Crysis killed it for the next 2 years.

If only CE2 had Physx effects and destructible enviroments It would be perfect.

That and HL2 CM level textures.

[Buio]

Originally Posted by jolle

But I think we´re really starting to see the that steep curve on diminishing returns. You need alot more power to push the quality a step further, the higher you go. (for example, if you add 1000 polygons to a Quake 1 model, its huge improvement, if you add 1000 polys to a character in crysis, its not going to be that big a difference)

Which does put some more understanding in why NVidia are pushing PhysX and going for general GPU processing etc.

To be honest, I think animation, AI and physics can add as much to immersion as graphics and I look forward to more development in those areas.

[ASUSEN7900GTX]

i think people might see crysis as a tech demo tha a game as crytek stopped the support of patches many bugs still keep the game har on any hardware and warhead well that was more of a game than crysis.

I think crytek did a ubi(double agent) on crysis and left it as it was since maybe they knew the game wasn´t finished, and where is that rumored patch with super graphics they talked about? Yet a sales trick?

well i enjoyed fallout 3 adn some other games now i will sink into FEAR 2 and left 4 dead ok no crysis graphics but could still ahve a lot of value as a game

well anyways there will be challengers to crysis and who knows what crytek is cooking up mean while.

[LycosV]

I think NarcissistZero nailed it. We aren't going to see killer graphics until the next gen consoles come out. PC games just don't have the market potential that console games do, and because of that noone invests a lot of time into PC exclusives.

Once the next generation of consoles comes out we'll see a huge jump in graphics and then stagnation again, it's a cycle.

[Lfctony]

Originally Posted by nekrosoft13

how is no patches a plus side? games still have bugs, you just don't get any fixes for them

That's not what he said Nekro. He said that many games come out without needing a patch, which is a good thing.

[ralinn]

Hmm, I still wouldn't go as far to say that consoles are holding PCs back. I think they're completely different things. If anything, I'd say Crysis held the PC back... like NarcissistZero said, Crysis didn't do as well as expected. There's only a minority of people willing to pay out the money that Crysis requires to play at its full potential and I don't think thats the fault of consoles. IMO the Crysis jump was too far too soon. Developers have learnt from that and aren't willing to go all out on graphics when they can still make things look amazing on current hardware.

I said it before, I'll say it again. It's easy to create a game with great graphics like Crysis but Art and Art direction is everything if you want to make a game look good and run on current hardware. A fine example of this would be Mirror's Edge PC and COD4 PC. I'd even stretch to say WoW as there are a lot of people that still love its style and it also runs great on their PC.