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Old games with "photorealistic" graphics

jackal27

Banned
IMG_3848.gif


Aged well....?
Yeah this is the one that always stuck out in my mind. What's crazy is that the game is definitely stylized, but something about it feels very real.
 
No most of them just don't have a photo real look even back then

Half the pictures have stylized deformed characters how is that photo real and neither riddick or doom 3 are photo real look both are heavily stylized with their palette and especially riddick in its post processing

Vietcong

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A lot of these games actually do still look pretty realistic if compared to a postage stamp sized photo. If I squint or view the images on my phone at arms length they could look pretty real. So I guess we weren't completely wrong back in the day, we just failed to imagine the drastic increases possible in resolution and detail work. RE:Make did look almost as good as you could on a CRT TV - but in 4K it would probably look pretty bad. And that blurry video of GT3 still looks darn good.

I've received a little flak for my praise of Far Cry 5. I'm a little out of the loop on the latest and greatest that has been achieved in graphics, but I think current gen graphics are pretty breathtaking in general. Far Cry 5 was just the first game I looked at and thought "holy turdpotatoes, this looks like it could be filmed in my backyard". I think the setting makes a difference here.
 
Star Wars Rogue Squadron
Project Gotham Racing 2
Gran Turismo 3

Been a long time since i played Tony Hawk's pro skater 3 but i remember it looked pretty good back then.
 
Two games I thought was photorealistic back in the day:

Killer Instinct - SNES
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Carmageddon - PC
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Edit: I need to add:

Splinter Cell - XBOX
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Halo -XBOX
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W5Xm6qV.jpg
 
Need for Speed 2
They even bragged about how photorealistic it was on the back of the box, at least they did on the EA 3 pack I got my copy in.
I can't decide if I like the software renderer, or the Glide one.
AVX0do.png
 

lazygecko

Member
I wish there was a pixel perfect CRT filter for photoshop or something so we could morph the emulated screenshots into how they really looked at the time. Examples like the one above me in which "They looked better at the time" would be better understood.

Scanlines both horizontal and vertical/dotted are easy enough to do using the half-tone filter (which also lets you set contrast/glow). First scale up the image a lot, process it with half-tone on a duplicate grayscale layer, then use a blend of choice. Hell, you can even use some perspective correction if you feel like it, and adjust the lens curve and perspective to fake an off-cam TV photo.


Simulating the actual phosphor patterns is the real issue. I'm kind of surprised there isn't any plugin out there which does this.
 

FyreWulff

Member
Simulating the actual phosphor patterns is the real issue. I'm kind of surprised there isn't any plugin out there which does this.

it requires a more beefy power for real time because you need to both emulate the effect and do it to a display that's higher res than 4K.
 

heyf00L

Member
I was a huge N64 fanboy and couldn't stand PS1's texture problems (no filtering and incorrect perspective).

I wanted to carry this over to GCN/PS2, but GT3 (and MGS2) made it impossible. Nothing came close to looking as good as GT3.
 
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James Sunderland looking at himself in the mirror at the beginning of Silent Hill 2 always blew me away.

Yes. The PS2 version in particular.. I seem to remember all of the other versions somehow not quite looking just right. IIRC the PS2 version runs this cinema scene at 60fps and it's absolutely mind blowing for the time.
 

missile

Member
I meant as a Photoshop/Gimp/Paint.net filter, not as a real time shader.
How much are you willing to pay? ;)

I did a phosphor glow sim last year. The scattering of the phosphors' light is
actually computed in full 3d and mixes with other light nearby.

l41Yy8lAc2gCNNND2.gif

normal

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overbright

Well, I had to postpone the project, it's not finished. I need some more time
to finish it. But yeah, resampling a picture into thousands of these dots
and lighting them up will produce the effect.
 

Hesh

Member
Yes. The PS2 version in particular.. I seem to remember all of the other versions somehow not quite looking just right. IIRC the PS2 version runs this cinema scene at 60fps and it's absolutely mind blowing for the time.

Yeah, the fluidity of motion in the scene is what I think really makes it pop. I'm not really sure of what other PS2 games I had played at the time that ran in 60 FPS so I wasn't used to it.
 
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