Not impressed with modern graphics

Not even that. The problem is that they are focusing on "technologically advanced graphics" but don't have the technology to actually advance graphics, because of consoles. So they are sacrificing good art style for realism without actually pushing realism in any way or form.

 

poetic codex sounds like you need to force temporal anti-aliasing. That removes or reduces a lot of the shimmering and pixel crawl.

 

God dammit this forum is such a fucking graphics whore shrine.

I love console graphics, they are perfectly fine, I love that consoles have stagnated the technological curve.

What, people chasing ever more expensive pretty graphics in a techno race is supposed to impress me?

The longer consoles stagnate the curve, the more focus is put towards art style.

 

Yes, the results are most evident.

 

I think Arkham City allows FXAA and that works pretty well. You can also try a SMAA injector.

 

But....it really isn't.

 

That's mostly consequence of (ab)use of specular combined with low-res bumpmaps. Pretty widespread, alas.

I've never had any problem with it, at least not since doom engine games and pixel art - back in those times there were many gorgeous stylized sprites and backgrounds.
If anything I have problems with stylistics based on abuse of cinematic effects - DoF, bloom, lensflares.
I do have problem with lack of good art direction, though, and stylization, like in DX:HR can work sometimes.

I don't see anything wrong with AO. It's merely poor-man's self shadowing that can be applicable to ambient lighting.

Bloom is shit unless used only for extreme lighting, HDR can be shit if abused, DoF is almost invariably shit (Skyrim seems to be p. monocled in this regard as it only applies DoF in menus, underwater and during cinefaggic takedowns, no excessive bloom either - it is pretty plastic, though, although it looks much better if I apply my monitor's postprocessing in the form of saturation and sharpening filter to it).

This. No need to use texture packs, TBH, for example Morrowind's textures are already comparatively hi-res.

Apart from lighting it also used some texturing tricks - for example recursively applying scaled down detail textures to surfaces to introduce feeling of detail and avoid smeary look.

Nope, sorry. Looked like shit since day 1.

 

Go die in a fire.

Console graphics = graphics for extremely low memory systems = shit texture resolution = everything blurry, plastic looking + reliance on shitty, eye-raping gimmicks to hide that.

 

Fun fact: Crysis 2 is the first and only game I've played where the "amazing" graphics actually made it more difficult for me to enjoy the game. There was so much blur/bloom/etc. and enemies were so indistinct from the environments that I literally had to turn down the graphics effects just to be able to acquire targets. The fact that they also included a red highlight around enemies when aiming at them suggests the developers were aware of this problem yet weren't willing to tone down their bloom or improve their art style to solve it.

This is called "detail textures" and I think is one of the best ways to add a layer of realism to textures which would start to look blurry up close. Sadly I think only a couple of engines support it... Unreal still does, Serious Engine 2 did it because it was in the original Serious Sam (I think), but not many others. I guess it boils down to the fact that needing more textures loaded in memory is not something consoles can currently manage, and it makes more sense to just have higher-res textures to begin with.

 

The problem IMO with (modern) 3D graphics is that they all look the same, there are no distinct style to them, they all look artificial and no matter how hard they might try, they can't get things to look right. I'd compare 3D graphics with CGI effects for films, in vast majority of the CGI effects they just doesn't look real enough and they all have that plastic look, with some few exceptions, and when you compare CGI effects to the traditional pracitcal effects, the well done traditional effects looks better than even the best CGI.

Similar with 2D vs. 3D in games, 2D doesn't look "realistic" but they can have much more varied art style, can set up mood much better and it doesn't have uncanny valley effect.

 

PS:T with widescreen mod is way more pleasant to look at than any modern game.

 

Only thing that effectively removed aliasing in UE3 games for me was Sparse Grid Supersampling, available only to Nvidia cards via Nvidia Inspector and costly as fuck. I suppose TXAA might be good, but the problem with it is only a handful of games support it and you need to have newest cards for it too. The main reason why FXAA reduces shimmering is because it blurs the whole image. SMAA isn't effective for temporal aliasing, except SMAA T2X, which isn't available with injectors.

 

Blur and Bloom are not amazing graphics, when most people mean amazing graphics. Or at least that is what they ought not to mean. Amazing graphics is detailed textures and the ability to render them in real time.

The rest is about how an engine and the developer puts such 'amazing graphics' to use. We have a failure in the first side because of consoles that sport old hardware. The second is an orthogonal issue which exists due to incompetent developers.

Witcher for example takes a mediocre graphic engine like Aurora, modifies it and produces some noticeably good looking backgrounds.

There are two things to note here:

1) The engine could render (dynamically) a world with passing textures
2) The CDPR devs managed to translate that into good looking backgrounds.

 

Yeah, this is the top offender for me... why we can't have more of this:





EDIT: But I do think that Skyrim looks gorgeous with the right mods...

 

You should be, 'cause that's where the industry is putting most of its money.

 

Well, maybe I didn't express myself quite right, it's not really a necessity to install a Hi-Res texture mod, but normally on texture pack is enough to make a game look good.

Yes, bad example. I was thinking about games like Alice, Fakk2, ST elite force 2, and forgot they were Quake 3.

 

Actually, this is one of the ultra rare number of games that used UE3 correctly. TBH, most of UE3 games look like shit.
Art style is actually a good thing. Because of it, original Quake looks pretty good even today. Or some of the PS1 games.

 

yeah, EF2 is such a great example of graphics gone right. gotta love those plastic npc models with primitive facial animation, unmoving eyes, poor anatomy and huge tits

 

It looks and plays much better without the widescreen mod.

 

The models at that time didn't look plastic.

 

I think people are too concerned with textures. Most games don't even have the foundation right, but they're fussing over minutia, and rather unsubtley at that. The whole, the 'big look' is more important than the parts, in any visual art (which Mirror's Edge gets right, as a matter of fact). Maybe if their games were more interesting or the whole looked more interesting, people wouldn't spend time looking at individual rocks or wall grout.

 

i was referring more to their stature. they all just stood around like action figures.

 

Action: Read the thread.
Initial objective: Enjoy the majestic graphicwhoring, drama, and a lot of butthurt, also Uncle Skyway's expert opinions on 3D technology and textures.
Result: Disappointed.


Joke aside, I pretty much agree about artstyle is much more important than graphix.
I mean, just look at these beautiful ancient graphix shit!

Show Spoiler Hide Spoiler

They're more beautiful than your typical generic soulless Xbox artstyle yes?
But will the creator finish the game under 10 years of development is an entirely different matter...