Decline I hate Digital Foundry.

[taxalot]

400hz screens, bruh.

 

[tritosine2k]

TAA/DLSS is fixer upper hackjob band aid crutch to patch up the realtime lighting garbage they barely manage to ship. And it would look splotchy moire broken if they even tried to do proper area lights.

 

[taxalot]

Graphics peaked on the PS2 era.

 

[soutaiseiriron]

classic tritosine2k crackhead AI comment once more, the GOAT for sure

realtime lighting garbage they barely manage to ship

what the fuck does lighting have to do with taa or dlss? you mean dithered/subsampled effects/shadows/hair being reconstructed via TAA being a common optimization, which is why devs often don't allow for no TAA? you can ship a game without dithered effects if you'd like or force TAA off anyway.

And it would look splotchy moire broken if they even tried to do proper area lights.

...yeah? i mean it has nothing to do with "proper area lights"(?) but yes it would still look like moire hell because geometry will still remain complex.

 

[tritosine2k]

^ that's how I imagine the further devolution of consoomer will look like, even after slopsooming there will be some full blown conveyor belt tech.

They have hysteresis (TAA) in all kinds of "realtime" lighting and you are a moron.

 

[Ash]

Graphics peaked on the PS2 era.

PS1 era actually, thanks to heavy use of pre-rendering in 2D games, or full 3D games with limited draw distance hiding how ugly full 3D almost always is still to date, as well as things like early rendering flaws which created a kind of normal mapping/depth perception effect to simple geometry faces without even trying lol. Then low resolution otherwise leaving things to the imagination instead of the ugly reality seen in 90% of modern shite.

 

[Ryzer]

PS1 3D looks like dried out turd, 90% of the time. It really peaked with the 6th Gen.

 

[Ash]

Sure, it isn't particularly aesthetic at all. However late 90s 2D - meaning pixel art as well as pre-rendering (2D image renders of 3D scenes) - remains peak. And again, if nothing else 90s era 3D hid how ugly 3D is, and mostly still is, quite well.
In the PS2 era on the other hand, almost all games transitioned to full 3D at higher resolutions and clean rendering, without draw distance limitations etc and shit was FUGLY and bland. Games all started to have the same look too as a result instead of a multitude of rendering & creation styles, not to mention the damage it did to gameplay and development practices (ballooned budgets).

What new visual style did we get in the early-mid 2000s among all the fugly to replace the peak of 2D that was the late 90s? Cel-shading is one. Okami, XIII, Borderlands, Jet Set Radio etc. Also FUGLY.

 

[Average Manatee]

Its really just a marketing scheme to sell more TVs/monitors. We have reached a sort of technological "peak" where fundamentally there is no good reason to upgrade from a 1080p screen but companies still need to sell products so they keep inventing new and progressively more impractical standards. 4K and most recently 8K are resolutions that basically give you nothing in terms of picture clarity on a TV that has less than 65 inches and to get the full benefit you would need to have a TV the size of a wall. Yet you can easily purchase monitors with 4K resolutions as small as 15 inches.

Sure there is a difference is sharpness when you take a still screenshot and compare it but fundamentally in game you will not notice it and when watching shows or movies its largely pointless.

I feel like a lot of this stuff is people afflicted by FOMO. You'd never buy a director's cut of a movie if it cost $300 in exchange for 5 mins of extended scenes, but people will pay hundreds more to get functionally imperceptible improvements to their graphics by going from high settings to very high. Otherwise they are "missing out". Ohmygawd how will I get the correct intended gameplay experience if I can't individually recognize every dimple on a character's face from 50 feet away?

 

[Bad Sector]

I realized this when they were shilling cyberpunk's raytracing as a "major improvement" to the games lightning using still shots of alleys and bars where they would point out... well basically a slightly less artificial lightning.

It is a major improvement from a technical perspective - "slightly less artificial lighting" is exactly what raytracing does and getting it right in realtime is not trivial. GPU resources used being worth the effort considering GPU availability (though raytracing GPUs at the level of RTX 2060 or better are already more than half Steam's HW survey charts and things are only going to improve) or not is something more debatable, but the technical side of this being an improvement over previous approaches is not.

This especially with a bit of hindsight makes all their older framerate analysis worthless because a good chunk of them uses DLSS 1.0 or 2.0 so the looks and performance achieved there no longer match what a current day user would get.

Unless they compare DLSS/FSR/XeSS/etc specifically, all of their GPU benchmarks have native performance. Here is an example where you can see the relative performance for all tested GPUs with various filters for the resolution and in motion.

 

[Rincewind]

Its really just a marketing scheme to sell more TVs/monitors. We have reached a sort of technological "peak" where fundamentally there is no good reason to upgrade from a 1080p screen but companies still need to sell products so they keep inventing new and progressively more impractical standards. 4K and most recently 8K are resolutions that basically give you nothing in terms of picture clarity on a TV that has less than 65 inches and to get the full benefit you would need to have a TV the size of a wall.

100% agree. It seems that I'm immune to most marketing bullshit, unlikely apparently most people. It just makes me wonder—why aren't they immune to it as well? I don't think I'm special, and I have the sight and hearing like any average human. If I can't perceive any difference, or only marginal, then what's the point? I highly doubt all those people happily buying the 4k/8k screens have superhuman eyesight.

 

[Rincewind]

It is a major improvement from a technical perspective - "slightly less artificial lighting" is exactly what raytracing does and getting it right in realtime is not trivial.

Well yeah, but who cares. I mean, if you want to replicate the look of real-world footage, sure, it's important.

But lemme stop everybody right there—why is that important for a game? A stylised look which is not physically realistic can in fact look better.

I've been dabbling with 3D rendering a bit, and quite often people need to do a lot of fakery to *deviate* from what is 100% physically correct. That includes fake lightsources, and of course touching up the final images in Photoshop.

So I don't really see the point *for games*, or at least don't see it as a "holy grail" or something. Non-physically accurate rendering might be not even fine, but highly preferable, from an artistic viewpoint. Even in real movies and TV shows there's tons of grading and image manipulation going on, so why not go straight to the "manipulated look". When using real cameras you don't have that freedom, but in games it's 100% CGI, so you can bend the rules of physical rendering.

 

[soutaiseiriron]

So I don't really see the point *for games*, or at least don't see it as a "holy grail" or something.

RT does these things automagically, dynamically (with interiors and exteriors) and perfectly instead of needing a million baked lightmaps and some things like ambient occlusion simply cannot be replicated well enough without it. it simplifies the development process while simultaneously having a much better result. even for unrealistic games there's benefits. look at wind waker on gamecube and wii u, just lighting improvements alone uplift the image a lot vs the flatness of the original.

 

[Rincewind]

So I don't really see the point *for games*, or at least don't see it as a "holy grail" or something.

RT does these things automagically, dynamically (with interiors and exteriors) and perfectly instead of needing a million baked lightmaps and some things like ambient occlusion simply cannot be replicated well enough without it. it simplifies the development process while simultaneously having a much better result. even for unrealistic games there's benefits. look at wind waker on gamecube and wii u, just lighting improvements alone uplift the image a lot vs the flatness of the original.

See, I just don't believe that.

It's a bit like saying "look, ray-tracing has killed painting!" Sure, ray-tracing is cool, but painters were just fine without it.

 

[Odoryuk]

just lighting improvements alone uplift the image a lot vs the flatness of the original

In 10 years people will unironically claim that Demon's Souls Remake improves on the original shake my damn head smdh

 

[Bad Sector]

Well yeah, but who cares. I mean, if you want to replicate the look of real-world footage, sure, it's important.

Some people do though and DF's technical reviews caters to them - this is their niche. There are tons of other channels for game reviews anyway.

But when it comes to games themselves, if anything the main DF members (aside from Rich) do tend to prefer older and non-AAA games (hell, almost every other DF Direct he is in, John tends to have some rant against AAA games :-P despite all the flashy technical stuff they mention being mainly available in AAA games).

But lemme stop everybody right there—why is that important for a game? A stylised look which is not physically realistic can in fact look better.

This depends on what the game tries to do. For some types of games a stylized approach would take out of the game's experience.

I've been dabbling with 3D rendering a bit, and quite often people need to do a lot of fakery to *deviate* from what is 100% physically correct. That includes fake lightsources, and of course touching up the final images in Photoshop.

Yes, but with pathtracing (not just raytracing) you can get incredibly close to a realistic result if what you want is to achieve realism and if what you want is some sort of "exaggerated realism" (like many games do), it is much easier to start from that than do things manually.

Non-physically accurate rendering might be not even fine, but highly preferable, from an artistic viewpoint. Even in real movies and TV shows there's tons of grading and image manipulation going on, so why not go straight to the "manipulated look". When using real cameras you don't have that freedom, but in games it's 100% CGI, so you can bend the rules of physical rendering.

You can bend the rules of physical rendering just fine with raytracing and pathtracing, if anything those give you more options to do that because you can use them combined with any existing form of stylized rendering. You could even do ink-like sketch rendering (something completely at odds with realism) and use raytracing for shadows to get perfect shadows for your characters/objects so you get shadows even for small objects and avoid shadowmap aliasing artifacts that would show (and even get exaggerated) despite the stylization. You could also use raytracing for realtime ambient occlusion with crosshatching to give a dirty look that doesn't get affected by disocclusion at screen edges and objects when the camera looks around (as opposed to something done in screen space).

 

[Stavrophore]

DF at least pionereed proper benchmarking of the games on youtube and proper settings guides. They also educated millions of average goyslop enjoyers on fundamental information like "stutter" is not low FPS but often an issue with frametime jumps while your FPS could be theoretically high, they raised awareness of ssd/hdd loading architecture between consoles and PC and ensuing load stutters that plagued pc/port games, same with unreal asset streaming. Of course as everything that becomes mainsteam and is long enough on the market it becomes shit, so does DF that is being more and more advertiser/companies friendly, selling themselves.

 

[soutaiseiriron]

It's a bit like saying "look, ray-tracing has killed painting!" Sure, ray-tracing is cool, but painters were just fine without it.

painting is extremely expressive and has a lot to do with individual skill so no it's nothing like that
developers to use whatever tools they have in a given moment that's still accessible on the release platforms it targets. technology has improved, RT is viable, so they're going to use those tools.
even for stuff like mapping it's a big efficiency enhancement since you can see the final result immediately instead of having to bake the lightmap, even if the game itself won't use RT.
and again, things like reflections just can't be done cheaply and broadly across the entire scene without RT. same goes for ambient occlusion (ssao/hbao exists, but it's not great)

In 10 years people will unironically claim that Demon's Souls Remake improves on the original shake my damn head smdh

i'm ignoring stylistic elements but yes it does look better because WW GC is kind of desaturated, flat and lacks contrast. some argue that was the vision and that WW HD looks 'too 3D', but i'm not sure about that and I think technical limitations were a more likely factor, as WWHD has many of the same people credited as the original.
ds remake is just a different game by a different studio without anything resembling the original style or visuals

 

[tritosine2k]

This is the the level of (...) they want you to put up with for realtime lighting (obliterated by hysteresis)

Scroll back 10sec for even more splotchy moire brokenness
Hysteresis:

And obviously it still needs SSAO/SSDO for fine scale detail
...

 

[Average Manatee]

Because the real problem with games is that developers need to work too hard to make them.

 

[soutaiseiriron]

This is the the level of (...) they want you to put up with for realtime lighting (obliterated by hysteresis)

this is just fancy SVOGI. it's a good way to fake it and it can look pretty good, but it's not going to compare to real RT for quality.

 

[tritosine2k]

This is the the level of (...) they want you to put up with for realtime lighting (obliterated by hysteresis)

this is just fancy SVOGI. it's a good way to fake it and it can look pretty good, but it's not going to compare to real RT for quality.

There's no magic bullet, RT doesn't even have LOD, CP77 lags like hell, nv adjacent ray tracing gems book orders you to use static shadows for foliage (bc. as soon as youd have real dynamic scene hysteresis clogs ).

 

[soutaiseiriron]

i'd say hardware RT is a magic bullet for just about anything, just that it needs a little extra time (my guess is by 2027-ish in line with next gen consoles and when 3 nm gpus have been out for a while, and 2 nm ones around the corner), and for that time there will be a compromise in the form of approximated software RT/GI like lumen. i presume software RT will still stick around for mobile devices though.
doesn't CP2077 mainly lag cause of asset streaming while driving around? haven't gotten around to playing it yet and i'm definitely not smart enough to use profilers or renderdoc so idk

 

[abija]

A page before you were arguing good enough mainstream hardware has been here for years, now it's 2027.

RT is a scam from nVidia and because amd was too weak to capitalize during first generation, now everyone takes it up the ass and pays the RT tax. (including AMD users)

 

[soutaiseiriron]

nothing i've said is contradictory. 2yo midrange stuff like the rx 6700 xt and rtx 3060, even a770 can handle RT quite well, but there's still compromises like render resolution, FPS, # of rays/rt quality or settings. by 2027-2028 almost everything will probably be RT first and those compromises will be a lot more limited.
a lot of early implementations sucked also, a few like CP2077, bfv and metro exodus did not, only now things are starting to suck a lot less because they're are moving toward RT-first workflows like lumen.

RT is a scam from nVidia and because amd was too weak to capitalize during first generation

yeah, fuck nvidia for pushing technology forward. let's just all take it up the ass from amd instead where they refuse to implement any new features unless nvidia goes first and they scramble to get something out of the door to have parity.
also, amd couldn't compete because rdna1 was a shit buggy unfinished architecture and also had no RT hardware built in to begin with. amd's problem was that they didn't just follow directx or vulkan development to see what nvidia was up to.