Just to put the final nail in that coffin that AC4 is even close visually, there's this comparison video that shows off the generational gap between Rogue, a game with the same engine as 4, and Unity.It's crazy how people can say "Black Flag looked better"
For some reason the French Revolution is usually portrayed as foggy.Again, why is the game so foggy? It's doing it a bit too much.
Again, why is the game so foggy? It's doing it a bit too much.
That's the power of the PC, with enough gpu power you can enable all effects and features to ultra, downsample from 4k and post screens at 5-10fps and call it the best looking game. It doesn't work that way, I'm sure if shadowfall was running at 10fps it would look much more impressive. If you can't get playable framerates what's the point of calling a game the best looking.It's crazy how people can say "Black Flag looked better".
This room is amazing and i get 10fps with a 770gtx ^^
Lol I'm sorry but that's just a truck load of bull.Actually those NPCs are a big part of what makes the world feel alive. If you pay close attention to them, they all have their own distinct lives. The pop-in is broken. I'll give people that. But to take massive amounts of the crowds away would probably make the world feel less impressive. People complained a lot about Shadow of Mordor being an "empty and barren world".
You can hold down R3 (or whatever you have right stick button bound to) to hide the HUD for better screenshots.
the detail is just incredible
That's the power of the PC, with enough gpu power you can enable all effects and features to ultra, downsample from 4k and post screens at 5-10fps and call it the best looking game. It doesn't work that way, I'm sure if shadowfall was running at 10fps it would look much more impressive. If you can't get playable framerates what's the point of calling a game the best looking.
That's the power of the PC, with enough gpu power you can enable all effects and features to ultra, downsample from 4k and post screens at 5-10fps and call it the best looking game. It doesn't work that way, I'm sure if shadowfall was running at 10fps it would look much more impressive. If you can't get playable framerates what's the point of calling a game the best looking.
Just to put the final nail in that coffin that AC4 is even close visually, there's this comparison video that shows off the generational gap between Rogue, a game with the same engine as 4, and Unity.
Do not watch if you don't want to see a spoiler from Rogue.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qszDHrnmy6I
Also it's the ps4 version of Unity.
For some reason the French Revolution is usually portrayed as foggy.
Saw this good little joke about it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__d2FMCtgi4#t=145
It needs more fog if you ask me. Anything to hide the LOD on buildings farther than 20 meters. Ubisoft open world game's just can't handle a long draw distance without it looking like garbage.
Don't know if this goes for all version, I do assume that it does, but on the Xbox One it's menu -> options -> HUD options -> enjoyis there any way to disable parts of the HUD so you can play the game without it fucking up the prettiness? this was my main complaint for every AC game. Id love to playthrough with no hud... or at least very little hud (like JUST HP bar, or JUST minimap)
Thank you for writing this all out and explaining it.loooonnnggg post, read it !
Well here is how the tricks go. I will try to explain as much simple as I can. I will need to bring some examples from UE4 that I did and I will use UE4 examples to explain this once and for all. In fact Lightmaps and shadowmaps have been used for a long time now in many engines to mimic the effects of global illumination. Here is how they do it. They use a static source of light which gives as result lit surfaces with indirect lights and lit ones with indirect lights and the resulting shadows. This light and shadow data can be stored in UV textures called lightmaps and shadowmaps and can be applied on surfaces and meshes' textures to give the impression of being lit. This has been done in almost every game from that last generation with old engines to make it run on low end machines (this has bene done even in Cryengine 2 with Crysis 2 and many UE3 games and so). Since the GI is basically textures, they have to be stored in the game files and disk and will eat more space just like regular textures. I take now the example of UE4 whihc has a a new and advanced ligthing tech compared to old gen. In fact UE4 uses what is called Lightmass. This tech is like a dynamic source of Light but instead it is either static or stationary (for example turning on and off but stayin in teh same position). This method creates indirect lighting from the direct light creating lightmaps and shadowmaps in real time on surfaces and meshes without creating UV lightmaps and shadowmaps that are stored as regular textures that are blended with surfaces and mshes UV textures to give the impression of being lit but instead the light data stays stored in static volumes instead of turning into textures files which saves much space. So let is say that is a semi automatic GI, it is still static but it doesn't involve the artists to store light data within textures. The benefit of such tech :storing the light data in volume instead of textures is that it can make movable meshes like charcters interact with it and get the diffused lights like here in Unity where Arno socks and shirt get lit by red light diffused from the red carpet, so if they were just simple lightmaps and shadowmaps, Arno wouldn't get such detail. Unity must be using sth similar to lightmass. The benefit of such tech is that it takes time to get built and rendred but the result is so accurate and without artefacts or flaws since the source of light is static. sadly this method has one disadvantage when it comes to surfaces and areas that are difficult to reach by light which gets special type of shades (no defined shadow shapes) which is caleld ambient occlusion that defines the edges of most things, that is why an extra effor or tool or program or option ahs to be added to put them in emphasis like here the HBAO+ which just gives approximative results by trying to guess the surfaces which are difficult to reach by the light without having a direct connection to the static light source, that is why it is just an approxiamtion.
yes UE4 dropped SVOGI because it is the most technically advanced algorithm of dynamic GI and it eats a lot of ressources even on highest end PCs. Thye secertly replaced with LPV (light propagation volumes) a very rudimentary way to get dynamic GI.
This technic stores moving light data in that propgates in to those big volumes and tries to diffuse them dynamically. Well you get dynamic GI but the results aren't that accurate. I will show how it goes (using examples I made using UE4). Here is the dynamic GI LPV enabled but the light source (the sun ) is not moving, you get awesome GI results with even blending colours: http://imgur.com/a/VGQnS
When you make the sun move thus making it a dynamic source of GI, you get colours changing and shadows too (here no lightmaps or shadowmaps stored at all), following the sun postion and day/night cycle you get the same wall getting different colour combination from orange to purple in real time which is very awesome and impressive. You can even get lit characters in real timeby lights switching colours accoridng to the sun position and time: here being lit eitehr by red wall thhen yellow wall and standing in the same position but in different time of the day (different sun position): http://imgur.com/a/I3spm
So techwise it is very impressive. Sadly this tech is not that accurate when it hits advanced meshes even static ones and you get archaic results not as accurate like in Unity here for example which has static GI: http://i.imgur.com/qiC6YMe.jpg
And it also only works with sunlight, directional dynamic light aren't supported in UE4, they only cast direct lights: http://i.imgur.com/6troVKM.png
A dynamic method of GI doesn't need extra work to mimic the results of ambient Occlusion since the light source is dynamic so it creates dark occlued (hardly reachable by light) surfaces. With LPV, occlued surfaces is horrendous they are very blocky and pixalated and huge and not subtle eventhough they are real time.
I come back to the method Epic dropped aka SVOGI, but let me begin with the method Nvidia are devloping aka VXGI which is Voxel Global Illumation. This method is just like LPV but wayyyy more precise , it almost can reach the accuracy of the static lightmass. While LPV uses big volumes and stores big chunks of diffused lights in one direction per big volume, VXGI stores light information per voxel (cubic piwel) which is very tiny and can propagte light in different directions, now sum all the data colelcted in those tiny voxels and you will get avery accurate approximation of diffused lights IN REAL TIME. So this can be applied to everything going from moving light sources to emissive materials or textures. You can read about it here and watch videos : https://developer.nvidia.com/gi-works and here : http://www.geforce.com/hardware/technology/vxgi/technology and you can download the recently released VXGI UE4 Apollo 11 demo here: http://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2014/11/11/maxwell-apollo-demo/
Enlighten is also developing an effective dynamic GI for UE4 with multiple dynamic sources and emissive materails that can interact with static and mocing meshes : https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?50658-Geomerics-Enlighten-Finally-supports-UE4
The SVOGI (Sparse Voxel Octree Global Illumination) is even more impressive tech since it uses a sparse voxel octree which can collect light data from voxels from different shapes in an area accessible to the user's eyesight and it can even collect data and render from light sources invsible light sources and display their diffused lights in the field of view of the user. Both VXGI and SVOGI have also dynamic reflections created by dynamic GI sources. Sadly both techs require too much ressources: The Apollo 11 VXGI demo needs at least a GTX 970 card to just render a very simple scene with just 3 meshes and no complex surronding environments. Not only that but both can only have just one bounce per dynamic light source and light only get diffused in few directions per voxel making deeper areas dark and that still needs an external intervention of a method of Ambient Occlusion. Here is an exmaple fo someone who tried to enable two bounces per dynamic GI light in cryengine. (you can download the demo in the description if you have a hefty PC) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PCnkJBvIrY
As you can notice dynamic reflections created by dynamic GI sources are not accurate and are blocky : https://forums.unrealengine.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=16047&d=1414981939 and the same blocky real time reflections are noticable on the helmets of the cosmonauts' helmets https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNt5znFLv9Y
And both demos don't uses PBR materials and simple scenes otherwise it would be an overkill.
The only best and accurate instance of dynamic GI is used in The Tomorrow children wihic uses Cascaded Voxel Cone Ray Tracing. This method is very good and gives very gorgeus results. Ok it is not the same method as the SVOGI or VXGI, since both are 100% automatic methods meaning that anyone can throw them on the go and work and can work with anything in th scene from static to dynamic meshes. Q-Games tried SVOGI but they found out it was very slow so they ditched octree hiearchy stores data and to determine distance from the camera to scale voxels and optimize for distance, much like LoD for a new approach aka 3D textures that developers would have to generate the textures, mostly by hand, prior to importing the models or assets into the game. That is why they are using ray-traced generated volumes instead of polygonal models. The advantage of this method is that not only it frees up ressources but it also allows desv to get better results and verty realtsic ones too. Raytraced generated volumes and models are very accurate and you will never find any hard edge like in polygonal meshes that need heavy tesselation to correct the edges. They can now go for 16 diffused light directions per voxel and they can even reach 3 bounces per light direction (even for invisble light sources) which even Pixar movies didn't reach (and the dev confirmed that). Reflections are as accurate as in real life and you won't get blocky reflections. They can even apply 3 types of AA and the list goes one. Ok, their method isn't as impressive as VXGI or SVOGI, ok their GI is still dynamic but it needs extra interventions from the the devs to fill data in each 3D texture and get their own approximations so it means only Q-Games devs cna use it sinc ethey ahve to interact with it, while with VXGI and SVOGI it is automatic and anyone can integrate it on the game by just dropping it in any scene with any object without extra work. So their method is dynamic is dynamic but semi automatic while VXGI and SVOGI is dynamic and automatic, yet Q-games approach has better and more accurate results on screen than SVOGI and VXGI just like I said before that the static GI in Unity looks better than the dynamic GI available now which are more impressive and demanding techwise.
Sadly don't expect any accuarte GI method to work correctly with open world settings with rough reliefs neither from VXGI nor from SVOGI , let alone a full automatic q-games like approach in the near future: maybe for next-gen.
Sorry for making it soooooooo long , but trust me I tried to make is as simple as possible.
Surely you feel a better pc warrior after this post.No you don't need 4k and everything cranked up at a native setting is doable on something modest at 30fps (maybe not msaa), but you can think you do if that makes you feel better console warrior.
I'm a staunch Unity supporter.
Its fair to compare them. Absolutely.
Thanks for taking the time to post that, very informative.
Doesn't matter if you support Unity....you can't compare visuals between an open world game and a linear one.
I know your's weren't in particular, I could see the extreme jaggies and blurriness in your screens, I'm sorry it just does not look that hot outside of the art.Those screens are not downsampled, 1080p, Textures only "high", HBAO+, FXAA
That's the power of the PC, with enough gpu power you can enable all effects and features to ultra, downsample from 4k and post screens at 5-10fps and call it the best looking game. It doesn't work that way, I'm sure if shadowfall was running at 10fps it would look much more impressive. If you can't get playable framerates what's the point of calling a game the best looking.
This notion is kinda dumb.
There are varying degrees to what a game actually renders depending on its scope. It's not as if it's one or the other.
If we're going to talk about visuals, it's totally fair to compare visuals from one game to another, regardless of how "open world" it is by your definition.
Take Infamous: Second Son for example. That game doesn't have nearly the amount of stuff that AC: Unity have, but it's still considered an open world game. It treads some middle ground but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be able to compare its visuals to open world or linear games or whatever.
Again, why is the game so foggy? It's doing it a bit too much.
My point is that there's no preset definition to how much a game renders. It's not as if there are two presets and they're open world or linear.It isn't my definition. Infamous is open world. It doesn't tread a middle ground. Your put into a world and are able to go where ever you want. Skyrim...Sunset....GTA are open world games.
Uncharted...The Order...God and Gears of War are linear games.
There are some in between that are linear and offer a few open areas like Tomb Raider did.
If you don't think rendering more onscreen at once has any effect on visuals then I don't know what to tell you.
Just like when people tried to compare DC to Horizon. One is a track racer and the other is open world. There were people who argued it's not fair to compare because of what has to be shown on screen which has an impact on things.
You can't tell me like God of War would have looked exactly the same on PS3 if it were open world as opposed to what it was.
Comparing the Order to AC...in order to up The Order's visuals...doesn't mean much. Compare the Order to when Uncharted releases.
It isn't my definition. Infamous is open world. It doesn't tread a middle ground. Your put into a world and are able to go where ever you want. Skyrim...Sunset....GTA are open world games.
Uncharted...The Order...God and Gears of War are linear games.
There are some in between that are linear and offer a few open areas like Tomb Raider did.
If you don't think rendering more onscreen at once has any effect on visuals then I don't know what to tell you.
Just like when people tried to compare DC to Horizon. One is a track racer and the other is open world. There were people who argued it's not fair to compare because of what has to be shown on screen which has an impact on things.
You can't tell me like God of War would have looked exactly the same on PS3 if it were open world as opposed to what it was.
Comparing the Order to AC...in order to up The Order's visuals...doesn't mean much. Compare the Order to when Uncharted releases.
It's crazy how people can say "Black Flag looked better".
This room is amazing and i get 10fps with a 770gtx ^^
So of course you've made my point, if your pc which has a very decent card can't run this game decently at 1080p with cheap AA, I'm not sure what's so impressive, clicking on your pic and watching them at native rez shows me a really underwhelming pic at the cost of 10fps.
I guess but arent some of the screens in this thread from people maxing out settings at non playable framerates?Let me try to imagine what the PS4 version could and should have looked like.
But I guess this is why they make PC's.
My point is that there's no preset definition to how much a game renders. It's not as if there are two presets and they're open world or linear.
How much the game renders is totally dependent on the game itself. It's not something that we can just assume.
Yeap.. I agree with this.. funny thing is -- I still think AC:Unity will look better than the Order. Uncharted 4 I'm not so sure about.. We'll see..
Yeap.. I agree with this.. funny thing is -- I still think AC:Unity will look better than the Order. Uncharted 4 I'm not so sure about.. We'll see..
This thread makes me want to play AC Unity. It's a shame it's not on Steam.
Didn't they fix that?This thread makes me want to play AC Unity. It's a shame it's not on Steam.
It needs more fog if you ask me. Anything to hide the LOD on buildings farther than 20 meters. Ubisoft open world game's just can't handle a long draw distance without it looking like garbage.
Unity has the best kiss scene in any video game i've ever seen... screen shot anyone?
Maybe you should check out Far Cry 4?
The Order uses a very advanced PBR tech that relies on 1:1 almost atomical photoscanning of materials
the physics of the order was reported to be insane compared to almost non existent one in Unity (except for clothes which already look and behave better in The Order),r: http://www.el33tonline.com/post/201...ced-physics-system-revealed-at-gamescom-2013/ .
I didn't also notice any instance of sub-surface scattering in Unity (neother on characters nor on translucent objects if there are any in the game) while it is a very noticable and prominent feature in the Order.
Uncharted 4 has an equivalent version of the Q-Games lighting which is by far the best and most accurate dynamic GI (Q-Games confirmed that Naughty Dog are using the equivalent of their approach In Neogaf).
So in terms of Lighting at least Uncharted 4 is unbeatable, until a more complex and a more dynamic version of VXGI comes out and a certain game uses it.
I've only seen that sentiment when discussing the IQ on the consoles. BF is sharp and clear, and of course performs great. That contrast seems to be why it gets brought up.It's crazy how people can say "Black Flag looked better".
There is SSS on the characters faces (in cutscenes) and someone posted a screen of Arno having it on his clothing.
Videos of the cutscenes on YouTube look truly ridiculous.
I honestly think that besides the hair the character models look as good as Uncharted 4.
How dare you? I hate the black crush.You are why the Xbone black crush and sharpening filter exist.
I've been playing Ryse over the past two weeks, and frankly the screenshots you posted do nothing for me. Ryse looks so much better than anything else I've played that I can't even appreciate something like Assassin's Creed Unity.
Well, we're in a thread talking about the best looking games where unity is suggested to be one of those. I'm not talking about games like battlefield 2, Ultra SF4 and Pod. If you're able to run Crysis 1 and 3, Ryse, Metro 1+2 with everything maxed out, downsampled from 4k and can hold 60fps I'd love to see those.Unity's performance ≠ all PC games
I can run a lot of games at 4k downsampling with 60 fps on my Titan (which is like a 970 performance-wise)
I think the whole game needs better optimization, people are quick to say that the consoles' cpu's are weak and they may very well be comparatively to your cpu, but here you are with an assy framerate regardless. This just goes to show that the cpu may not be the reason for poor performance as opposed to poor coding and lack of optimization. I'm sure that If this game was properly multithreaded it would have fared much better graphically and performance-wise across all platforms.That whole place needs a lot of optmization, if possible. Just standing on the building and looking at the direction of the room kills my framerate.
And i noticed that the game looks better in motion than on screenshots.
Yeap.. I agree with this.. funny thing is -- I still think AC:Unity will look better than the Order. Uncharted 4 I'm not so sure about.. We'll see..
Infamous SS has a lot of colorful particles that mask it's generic look. The animation, art direction, scale and scope of the game -- as well as lighting and materials don't even come close to AC:U..
Well ... no.
In term of "pure" visual The Order is miles ahead. Really.
(of course we will not take in consideration the fact one game is open world, another one is a corridor shooter)
Ryse looks more solid when you see the picture full-rez. I'm not sure what purpose it serves to suggest that Ryse is lower scale, especially when the thread title says "ACU, the graphics leap we've all been waiting for". I don't think we should be making excuses for it now.
Ryse looks more solid when you see the picture full-rez. I'm not sure what purpose it serves to suggest that Ryse is lower scale, especially when the thread title says "ACU, the graphics leap we've all been waiting for". I don't think we should be making excuses for it now.
The Order 1886 used to really impress the hell out of me when I saw the first few trailers, but now after playing games like Ryse and AC Unity on PC it looks more "normal". Still very impressive, don't get me wrong.
Well, it's not miles ahead really. It uses many of the same graphics techniques Ryse and AC Unity use. We'll have to see what the final results will be. I'm sure it's going to be one of the best looking games around.
Yeap.. I agree with this.. funny thing is -- I still think AC:Unity will look better than the Order. Uncharted 4 I'm not so sure about.. We'll see..
Infamous SS has a lot of colorful particles that mask it's generic look. The animation, art direction, scale and scope of the game -- as well as lighting and materials don't even come close to AC:U.
FF15 does look really good. But it's scale doesn't seem to tax it and the lighting still isn't quite up to snuff with AC:U. I need to see more with FF15 before I reserve judgement though.
I seriously can't think of another open world game which comes close to Unity at maxed settings on PC. I played Infamous and it's not on the same level at all, and tessellation will only make that more impressive (and taxing hehe).
I wholeheartedly agree.
Pretty ? Sure but I have not been blown away as I'm right now before Unity, what a marvel.