MUH GRAPHIX!

Why does it seem like game graphics haven't really improved all that much in the past couple of years?

How long do you think it is before we have photorealistic graphics indistinguishable from real life?

...

the improvements are mostly happening on consoles. PC development has too small of a return, and high end PC development has an even smaller audience. The hardware may be something like 8 times more powerful than what is present in consoles, but without the developers willing to pump into the resources with the financial burden on their shoulders, interest in a high-end project dies before it even begins development. Uncharted 4 is more technically advanced than any game to date, looks better too. In theory it's possible to get better visuals on modern PC hardware, but in reality it's not happening because it requires an absurd amount of time, skill, and money, and it's uncertain whether the game would do well on PC to justify it.

No publisher is interested in funding a project like that too, due to historically low PC game sales, the only kinds of PC games publishers are interested in are multiplat titles with PC being the last in priority, free to play titles, or other casual games that are easy to make returns on.

Game graphics have improved tremendously over the last "couple years". There was a serious lull during the latter half of last-gen because most devs were still trying (and obviously failing) to squeeze Crysis 1 level visuals out of the last-gen consoles. As soon as new consoles arrived graphics made a huge jump up, suddenly every game had PBR and post processing effects finally became high quality instead of the blurry, hacky shit we had before. Every game has real-time reflections now, volumetric lighting is becoming the norm as well, I could go on.

The current consoles are weak compared to a current PC BUT they are fundamentally similar in their architecture (aside from the unified memory shenanigans) which means it's easier to scale graphics up and down now. It's easier to make a PC port look genuinely better and it's easier to port a PC game down to consoles than it ever was before.

As for the current benchmark in PC graphics, vid related is as close as we've come to photorealism. There is no better looking game than the new UT in 2016. If you can't see the insane jump up in quality from, say, Crysis 3 (2013) you're blind.

Diminishing returns/technological plateau, graffix development primarily being for consoles

Is that why the slant eyed Jew, who ignored the platform for decades, finally started bringing games to the platform?

What is Black Desert Online?

That looks absurdly good, why the fuck has Epic taken so long though? Are there still only a couple devs + community working on it?

They should make it their main project and actually market the thing to compete with Overquake and revive the UT vs Quake fanboy wars which they now stand to win definitively by virtue of not being derivative CRAPCUNTS bullshit.

Answer to question 2 is yes, which also answers question 1. And they're not going to make it their main project because they have no real business model for it yet. They would disagree and say they have one, but they don't. They want to keep the game free and somehow profit off of a fraction of ingame content created by users - basically PAID MODS allover again - and it's not going to bring in enough money to be viable imo. They would need a huge community to make that shit work, if it can ever work. Part of the reason I don't think it would work even if they had a huge community is, the typical UT player doesn't care about cosmetics in a game enough to spend money on that shit. Paid cosmetics are for casual shit games like LoL and TF2. And before you defend TF2, you just called Overwatch shit and Overwatch is literally a TF2 clone.

Also, new Quake will be decent, especially once they add the inevitable classic mode that is literally just Quake 3 with better graphics and different maps. And id already failed with f2p once before so I'm optimistic they will be smart enough to charge an upfront price for QC.

I'd pay $60 in a heartbeat for UT4 if they finished the game and I'd imagine that anyone actually interested in arena shooters would do the same, given that most are likely adults with jobs by now.

60 is a console price, a proper PC game costs 40-45. Especially for a multiplayer only game I find 60 unreasonable.

Consoles.
That's the honest reason.
I miss the days when console gaming and PC gaming were completely separate things and independent entities that had their own games. When they started to merge around the late 90's to early 00's is when the industry started to favour consoles. It was basically multiculturalism in gaming form.

>Mixing everything ends up getting rid of actual diversity which causes everything to be streamlined and terrible, leading to the worst of both worlds
That's a depressingly accurate analogy.

On the technological end, we're pretty close to being able to do photorealistic graphics, but creating all the assets for such a game isn't easy. You have to make extremely detailed models, texture it really well, it all takes a ton of time and money.
The average PC can't really run such high-end graphics, consoles absolutely can't, so there isn't that much incentive for developers to push the limits, even if they happen to have the money for it. Plus, when it comes to making a game fun, the extra effort may be better spent on developing physics, because while graphics are definitely not bad in most modern games, physics often leave much to be desired.

I don't want more graphics, I want optimization so I don't have to buy overpriced hardware again.

kill me please

That's a vintage meme right there, nowadays it's best to simply vote with your wallet. If you think something is super nice then give developers money so that they have incentive to continue making good shit. If a developer has been making games that pander to some shit casual audience and suddenly they make a genuinely good game that you like a lot, you should give them a bunch of money so they continue to make good games and the amount of money you give them is based on whether you think it's a good investment and how much extra money you have to spend on this kind of stuff. Like if an incompetent studio like Bioware suddenly made a game that was tolerable for once but still not good, that wouldn't be as nice as an investment as a competent studio like Rockstar deciding to make a game for core players rather than the masses.


But goy, how are you going to run the cool new effects with Nvidia Gameworks™ if you don't buy the newest GPUs? And you wouldn't want these games to miss out on such cool features, would you? This way it works out for everyone, you get to see cool gwafix, developers get big paychecks from us, and we get more shekels from selling you GPUs!

:^)

it looks good for an mmo, but it's nothing groundbreaking

PCs can use controllers though.

Third person platformers died off because by nature they're gonna have to look and play pretty wacky, and wacky/cartoony stuff isn't "mature" enough for your average enlightened gamer in the current year. The only games that are still wacky are either PC focused (because the PC audience didn't fall for the "muh cinematic" craze quite to the same degree as consoletards) or mobile games.

And consoles can use keyboards.
Your point being? Most people don't use controllers for PC, so companies act accordingly.

looks nice, i'm tired of the game not actually having a piss filter but every single light being piss

...

...

Those ue4 demos look pretty nice. One question, are those objects "dynamic"? Idk what you call it, but if a character would sit on that couch, would it move? Like are there any physics or is that couch hard like it was made out of metal or something like that.

Because you are looking at AAA games that only care about profit and cutting edge = high investment for little return.

I doubt I will live that long, lighting is the biggest issue and lighting realistic enough that you can't tell it's fake takes a fuckload of power.


I love UE4, just fucking around with the tutorials you can make beautiful environments with little effort.

I WANT IT NOW

I just want more games to enable infinite draw distance or some shit to get rid of items popping up or textures loading.

High end gramphics are expensive for a majority of users.

/thread

console players are the niggers of gamers

any way to download and "play" this?

Install UE4 and get on the forums / asset store and look for demos. The store has a heap of great stuff people give away because they dev for fun .

I see a lot of bullshit being sold, where do you find the free shit?

Interesting. Why they don't make games in it? I could see a nice story game set in that apartment. A 1 hour game released on steam for 1.99$

The forums have the bulk of it, search for whatever you are after and you will either get it for free or get a couple of things you can rig together to do what you want.
I wanted waves generated by wind and while a guy was selling it for $50 on the store I found 2 people giving it away on the forums.


It's very easy to make small scenes that look great, skilled level designers can shit them out so fast they do it for fun without actually using the levels.
If you are going to use someones level just be sure to check the licence / message them first so you stay out of court.

KILL ALL CONSOLE USERS!!!

ACTUAL CONSOLE WAR NOW!!!

this i'm tired as fuck of games not allowing you to put custom values for things like draw distances otherwise once you replay them in 10 years with much more powerful hardware it all goes into the trash

That theory has been discredited many times you stupid nigger

Don't be retarded user, diminishing returns are a thing even if they aren't as bad as that shitty bait image claims.

Yes, it is, but we haven't reached that point yet, we're not even fucking close to reaching that point, as the original image implies. We will only reach that point once graphics hardware is physically incapable of reproducing finer details on meshes past a certain point

So you are telling me that in the lowest set of images the 3rd pic is 10 times better than the second?

even if we can't throw more detail in, even if we can't increase monitor resolution du eto it being too great for our eyes to discern a difference there will always be frame rate

also the fact that cgi movies aren't rendered in real time is testimony that we still have a long long way to go

Goddamn it satan, stop being retarded and baity

We ARE getting deminishing returns for the detail put in now a days.

It's more that that we'll probably really see the issues past 4k resolution or so.

I know PIXAR doesn't render their movies in real time because they're oldschool and are used to using their old PIXAR Image Computers. But don't a lot of smalltime Hollywood people use Source Filmmaker nowadays to make CG films in realtime?

You're fucking retarded because you greatly overestimate the ability of modern developers to add fine details to models. Its not an exact science, modelling is an art

Proofs?

CGI still looks like artificial shit. Painted models were way better. As is hand-drawn stuff for animation.

Song?

The only really decent CGI movies I've seen are from PIXAR. Probably because they have the biggest legacy and was founded by the man that quite literally invented computer animation, Edwin Catmull

Pic related, although no screenshots do this short any justice, and its nowhere on YouTube. Its the obligatory short that plays right before Finding Dory

Finding Dory is a shit movie by the way don't watch it

no

Most cars and distant people in modern movies are CGI.
Any scene with large pools of water splashing (floods and the like) are also CGI.
You've likely never even noticed CGI in many movies you thought were entirely practice.

Consoles. Now quit being a faggot, OP.

I meant practical

The answer is pretty much consoles and the industry seeing them as the standard. Combined that with absolutely shit-tier optimisation from shitty devs AND consumers who don't give a flying fuck about performance and think that shit like No Man's Sky, Ass creed etc have good graphics… yeah you're not going to see any advancements.

The best one can hope for is simply no graphical fuck ups like insanely shitty textures we see all the time. A dedication to a STANDARD of graphical quality is all I ask for these days. Although I fucking hate the DRM on it (and many other things), MGSV is one of the few modern games that gets a good balance of graphics, performance, detail and presentation.

Another upcoming game I'm excited for simply because I love the series is Tekken 7, which out of nowhere seems to be looking really damn good. Although it has some performance issues and some graphical annoyances right now, overall the presentation is crazy good. The detail on the characters, the expressions on their face, all combined with the unmatched animation and mo-cap quality Tekken has had in the past makes it so that you can take a screenshot at almost anytime and have something you could easily make a promotional picture out of.

I think they know it themselves too and have added in slow motion for key moments in t he fight, slowing down the game to nearly a crawl at times to show that yes, the characters' expressions, clothes, enviornmental physics (etc) all look amazing at any time.

Although it definitely still needs some fucking work before it's released on home platforms. The japs are still the only devs doing anything right.

Witcher 3 was alright too I guess. Fuck that downgrade. Consoles caused that, too.

lol poorfag

I'm currently running an R9 Nano I bought almost a year ago. Because I'm not poor. Here's the thing - if you have an actual, salaried job, a $500 card is chump change, unless you have a filthy 3dpd slut leeching your resources away. Consoleplebs can't even dream of this, leddit's PCMR NEETs aren't really any better - nothing but consolefags that have a vague reason to harbor a superiority complex, even though their taste is just as terrible.

Consoles and their need for cheap hardware. If the best hardware didn't cost as much, we'd be able to fit that in consoles and still sell them for ~$400, and we'd have a better increase in graphical fidelity.
But as long as consoles continue to sell really well, and have cheaper pieces of hardware, we'll be seeing a minor increase in graphics.

This was intentional, and it looks worse than it is on that shit-tier jpeg

More like Finding Kino

this image doesn't demonstrate what you think it does.
and there is a point of diminishing returns. polygon counts used to effect the shape of major model features, now only minor features.
we're at the point that detail is realistic at a few arms lengths. the diminishing returns are that increasing poly count now alters how close you can get to a model without breaking illusion.
more importantly, scenes can get longer view distance and more object dense.

I still don't understand why graphical fidelity is valued so much more over graphical design. Like, and it's pretty well a rhetoric at this point since I'm quite sure anyone in this thread would answer yes, would you seriously rather view a gorgeously designed room with an expert layout made to lead and affect the player in ways that allow the developer to create a synergistic effect in the game, but rendered in shitty ps1 graphics? or would you rather see SJW menstrual blood and vomit smeared all over the walls rendered in beautiful photo-realistic 4K graphics?

Now this is taking it to an extreme and of course one might argue that we can have the best of both worlds, but the time and resource investment required to make games in such high detail means that bigger development teams become a necessity and that the size of the teams means that in order for goals to be achieved, homogenization must be enforced and actual design must be discarded in favor of meeting the graphical standard.

Graphical limitations force developers to think creatively and ultimate make a better product.

...

The issue is that "photorealistic" only really applies to photos. There is not yet any such thing as "videorealistic" except for perfect, clean, unchanging environments like demonstrates. That doesn't work for very many video games.

See, when you're moving around it makes it much easier to spot inconsistencies, especially when things don't change. Everything ends up being all shiny and perfect like an Apple store where everything's been coated with teflon so dust and grime slides off.

Can you imagine the ABSURD processing requirements to make a 100% destructable 3D photorealistic world that takes into account every fucking particle larger than a fleck of dust (smallest the human eye can reliably discern) at 60FPS? Because that's what it will take to make a "videorealistic" video game.

Think of the videorealistic all-CGI characters in, say, the Transformers movies. It takes millions of dollars and months of rendering to make like 1 second of that shit. And you want a video game that can do that kind of work in real-time? Ha!

We already have photorealistic graphics indistinguishable from real life. But a game that has videorealistic graphics? I'd guess we are at least 50 years and a MAJOR computer revolution (like, say, quantum computing) before it's even remotely realistic.

making shit look nice is very expensive and sometimes it is not worth it to put most of your resources on pretty effects.

If you do you can end up with games like uncharted 4 or battlefront, looks great but but it fucking sucks to play them

more like fucking trash movie

Graphics and gameplay is in a constant tug-of-war with the size of the rope being determined by budget.
If our polycounts and texture resolutions were still PS2 grade we'd be able to cram games to the fucking burst in content. And then on the opposite end of the spectrum you see games like The Order 1886, a game so graphically intensive that the AI and overall game content was stunted because more than half of the studio was artists.
You won't see a game with UT4 graphics with the amount of content that rivals the likes of WoW and TF2 for a long time. You can get close to this idea by doing iterative sequels like Cowabooty or the Yakuza series where graphics and content evolve alongside each other.
But really if you get good resolution, textures and maybe some aliasing in there, even sub 8k poly models can look phenomenal. But you got all these retards in the industry that think that you need to cram as many polygons into the models as possible(8th gen console games often have 20-60k polycounts on main character models).

Just gonna correct myself for 'Anti-Aliasing' before some nitpicky retard thinks pointing that out invalidates my entire argument

Found it, Carpenter Brut - Paradise Warfare

I shouldn't be surprised by Pixar churning out sequels that are mostly likely going to be shit, but what wass wrong with it?

Was it forgettable like Monsters University & Brave? Was it awful like the Cars movies?

user, why are you so stupid? Were those 10 words up there really too much for you?

Lighting. Games nowadays used these shitty over exagerated lighitng that makes everyting look fake

Because Epic is mostly in the business of making engines and not games

Problem is the market is currently openly fucking raping itself stupid because current gen consoles were so shit the needed an upgrade to make them even feasible of running Unreal Engine 4.0 which is why engines like Vulkan seem like a godsend to current devs stuck using Unity with DX11

I mean shit, they're not even making DX12 games for consoles other than I think 2 or 3 because game companies are worried that if they make a DX12 only version they'll alienate a huge swath of PC gamers who haven't upgraded to a DX12 GPU yet despite the tech being over 3 years old now

Dory finds her parents

The end

Entirely utterly fucking useless movie

That's a lie, dory dies
.
.
.
she drowns

But they need a poster boy title for their Engine which is exactly what UT3 was. That game really served no purpose other than to be an example to show people how to work in UE3 by starting with modifying it and making maps/scripts/etc so that they learn the engine well. Plus it showed off their fancy gwafix. UT4 has no reason to be anything but the same thing.

It's not just that, many people aren't bothering with Win10, which is arbitrarily required for DX12.

There is a nominal difference between PS3 and PS4 Graphics

Because PCs could do already significantly better graphics, but since almost all AAA games come for consoles too, the graphics for the pc version are held back by console limitations. Devs just port the console version with slightly improved graphics.

As long as the console industry exists there will not be any amazing improvements. Consoles are holding gaming back.

I wonder who could be behind this post.

Dying light has had pretty impressive graphics. That's the only game that I can think of right now that's actually made progress from all this stalling

some screenshots I took. Obviously the aliasing, especially with regards to foliage/vegetation would be less severe on better than 1080 resolutions, sadly it didn't work playing fullhd+ resolutions on my 1080p monitor so I just used the default 1080p resolution

There will never be another game using fox engine.

they used it to render all of the cinematics for the MGS3 pachinko machine, which features entirely redone assets that look at least on par with MGSV

god I fucking hate konami and the only people I hate more are the retarded japs that actually play pachinko "games"

We would have seen a larger increase in graphics if the additional power wasn't spent catching up with ever increasing rendering resolutions. 4K is very close to us, and so is VR that requires both higher framerates and rendering definitions. A few more years of 1080p as the standard would have probably resulted in better graphics than jumping to higher definitions to almost artificially increase crispiness.

Besides, there was a noticeable boost when we left last gen consoles. Slightly better textures and a huge boost in the lightning engines.

...

Even if nearly the majority of the PC gaming crowd has a PC capable of running DX12 games, that's too big of a risk for publishers so we're getting a few more years of arbitrarily downgraded games.

It's the XP/DX9 vs 7/DX11 situation all over again.

PC software is at a cap. thats why.

the hardware gets better, but the software is still mostly designed for single core 32bit applications.

I keep seeing Havok physics engine used in games today. It makes me wonder if we'll ever see a serious engine advancement in general.

It helps if one compares the genres where cutting-edge graphics are considered a feature, instead of just made to look cutting-edge through marketing. The sim racing genre is one of those, if only because there's only so many ways one can tweak the formula for "drive from A to B in a realistic fashion"

They'll have to pull some jewel out of their ass for me to install Win10, that's for sure.

microsoft can lick my unwashed ass, seriously. Watching let's play on youtube will do the trick, thank you very much.

How about we fix the more important parts of games before we worry about how pretty they are?

not if we stay on 32bit. its seriously half the speed. a fucking 2.8ghz pentium 4 running 64bit will out perform the newest hottest i7 running the same application in 32.

then we wonder why our shit isnt improving much? hard drives have given us a bottleneck with load times, but load times arent important in all honesty. an SSD will boot fast as fuck but have the same performance, but most people get hung up on SSDs.

its the software. its always been the software. and its fucking windows. windows is absolute shit. and while im at it, fuck steam.

agreed, but the graphics are an easier thing to fix.
the gameplay is bad because a deeper problem.

its like someone is fat and depressed. its easier to get him to lose weight than it is for them to escape the reality that their life is a complete waste of time and any enjoyment they ever will feel is superficial and fleeting.

everyone likes a nice tip in the jar, even if you're selling millions less than you would on consoles. low effort ports for a bit of extra cash, after all the real work is done, is a nice thing.


this is what someone who owns neither would say