Games are moving towards technology breakthroughs in graphics at a snails pace. Whitepapers on new techniques that have been written years ago are just now seeing the light of day. I propose that the overall hardware design is holding games back. The 2D screen-space computations have several disadvantages and it's glaringly obvious that game companies are just trying to brute-force their way into more passes instead of discussing architecture that is optimized for true 3D computations with the hardware vendors.
Today's comments of "this is the most beautiful game so far" has become a purely subjective comment with no real basis for "why" it is. Almost every game that comes out (exclusive or multiplatform) have the same technology that fails to push graphics quality higher. Here is a following list of things that are problematic with games today:
SSR (scree-space reflections) - never match the quality of texture maps and disappears when camera isn't viewing the shiny object, or attenuated out of the material based on distance.
Hair - this is just at a standstill today. No real triangle tessellation of hair primitives which automatically makes the shader look bad.
Global Illumination - heavy use of light probes break the 'physically-based shader' marketing hype word. You see assets that "glow" in shadow when they shouldn't even be lit at all (i.e. AC, W3, HZD, UC4, etc..). Hellblade (UE4)/Wolf 2 (iDTech6) addresses this with precomputed accurate GI light mapping.
Ambient Occlusion - nearly every game out uses a 2D hack that breaks down when viewed under different lighting conditions or too expensive to raycast (i.e. Uncharted's capsule technique).
FX - still a big problem for highly detailed textured transparent cards. Water has made tremendous strides but this is only seen in very few games (i.e. Assassin's Creed)
Volumes - still look like a 2D post-effect.
Skin - only done properly in cutscenes. Literally every other game uses a crude approximation that makes parts of the skin glow or they turn it off completely.
Shadows - this is a big one! Ignoring that the shadows themselves have really low resolution, there aren't enough lights casting them at all. This destroys the scene and breaks energy conserving materials that should receive attenuated light or no light at all due to the geometry blocking the light source. Wolf 2 is the only game I know of that addresses this with at least limiting the area of influence with lights and making sure that the system isn't overloaded with multiply shadow-casters. Assassin's Creed: Origins (all the time) and The Order 1886 (in one scene only) also address this with allowing 2 shadow-casting light sources in any given frame.
LOD systems - not enough VRAM on graphics boards breaks this severely. I have only seen a handful of games that mask this problem (i.e. UC4).
Displacement mapping - this is needed to break the low-polygon count assets within a game but it seems like the bandwidth (even on a 1080Ti) is still several generations away from materializing.
Normal mapping - We are just now getting textures that are high-res enough to appreciate, but the normal maps that determine the "bumps" on surfaces remains orders of magnitude smaller than their texture equivalents. This is due to bandwidth limitations again as you really need to compute full 32-bit float values for lighting to be accurate. A lot of textures just look "muddied" because of this when viewing up close.
Deferred Rendering - this tech needs to die IMO. It only allows masking the problem and brute forcing multiple passes into 2D framebuffers that promote continued use of old 2D lighting/shading pipeline. All the while breaking transparency objects in the process and while allowing multiple light sources on the screen, none of them ever cast shadows, so it doesn't fix the problem.
In conclusion: I would like to see more movement to address the limited 2D compute paradigm. Hellblade (using UE4 and Enlighten), Wolfenstein 2 (iDTech 6) and AC:O (latest Unity Engine) addresses some of the more important issues with light and shadow but we have a long way to go before we see any hardware truly looking 'next-gen'.
Thread posted on behalf of VFX_Veteran from the adopt a user thread.
Today's comments of "this is the most beautiful game so far" has become a purely subjective comment with no real basis for "why" it is. Almost every game that comes out (exclusive or multiplatform) have the same technology that fails to push graphics quality higher. Here is a following list of things that are problematic with games today:
SSR (scree-space reflections) - never match the quality of texture maps and disappears when camera isn't viewing the shiny object, or attenuated out of the material based on distance.
Hair - this is just at a standstill today. No real triangle tessellation of hair primitives which automatically makes the shader look bad.
Global Illumination - heavy use of light probes break the 'physically-based shader' marketing hype word. You see assets that "glow" in shadow when they shouldn't even be lit at all (i.e. AC, W3, HZD, UC4, etc..). Hellblade (UE4)/Wolf 2 (iDTech6) addresses this with precomputed accurate GI light mapping.
Ambient Occlusion - nearly every game out uses a 2D hack that breaks down when viewed under different lighting conditions or too expensive to raycast (i.e. Uncharted's capsule technique).
FX - still a big problem for highly detailed textured transparent cards. Water has made tremendous strides but this is only seen in very few games (i.e. Assassin's Creed)
Volumes - still look like a 2D post-effect.
Skin - only done properly in cutscenes. Literally every other game uses a crude approximation that makes parts of the skin glow or they turn it off completely.
Shadows - this is a big one! Ignoring that the shadows themselves have really low resolution, there aren't enough lights casting them at all. This destroys the scene and breaks energy conserving materials that should receive attenuated light or no light at all due to the geometry blocking the light source. Wolf 2 is the only game I know of that addresses this with at least limiting the area of influence with lights and making sure that the system isn't overloaded with multiply shadow-casters. Assassin's Creed: Origins (all the time) and The Order 1886 (in one scene only) also address this with allowing 2 shadow-casting light sources in any given frame.
LOD systems - not enough VRAM on graphics boards breaks this severely. I have only seen a handful of games that mask this problem (i.e. UC4).
Displacement mapping - this is needed to break the low-polygon count assets within a game but it seems like the bandwidth (even on a 1080Ti) is still several generations away from materializing.
Normal mapping - We are just now getting textures that are high-res enough to appreciate, but the normal maps that determine the "bumps" on surfaces remains orders of magnitude smaller than their texture equivalents. This is due to bandwidth limitations again as you really need to compute full 32-bit float values for lighting to be accurate. A lot of textures just look "muddied" because of this when viewing up close.
Deferred Rendering - this tech needs to die IMO. It only allows masking the problem and brute forcing multiple passes into 2D framebuffers that promote continued use of old 2D lighting/shading pipeline. All the while breaking transparency objects in the process and while allowing multiple light sources on the screen, none of them ever cast shadows, so it doesn't fix the problem.
In conclusion: I would like to see more movement to address the limited 2D compute paradigm. Hellblade (using UE4 and Enlighten), Wolfenstein 2 (iDTech 6) and AC:O (latest Unity Engine) addresses some of the more important issues with light and shadow but we have a long way to go before we see any hardware truly looking 'next-gen'.
Thread posted on behalf of VFX_Veteran from the adopt a user thread.
