VFXVeteran
Banned
This entire weekend, I spent combing through Control and Metro: Exodus with max settings looking for the holy grail of graphics tech and hence expecting a lot of "wow" comments due to the superior lighting, global illumination, area lights, and incredibly accurate AO. I came away empty handed.
Both of these games are fairly lackluster in their overall appearance compared to games like Detroit, Modern Warfare and RDR2. I went to search out why that is because using RTX should immediately make the game look superior to all others.
Here's what I came up with:
1) PBR is minuscule or non-existant. You simply can NOT trade excellent physically based materials for more accurate lighting. Both of these games came up really really short on the overall look of materials in the games. I have my specific reasons why this is but I won't go into them here.
2) Textures suffer in resolution due to limited bandwidth for sampling. Textures have to be at a minimum of 4k these days. Both of these games have much lower texture resolution especially for the terrain that I expected. The normal maps are even lower in texture resolution which blurs out the details significantly.
3) Art direction forces simple looking albedo maps (regular diffuse textures with hardly any multitexturing). Control has a LOT less detail than Metro, but Metro has a LOT less detail when you compare it to games like Modern Warfare.
Final thoughts, imo, it seems that RT is a little too early to be used in a manner that doesn't take away from where we've gotten with static light maps, SSR, and pre-baked GI. Using those crude methods have allowed games to use the bulk of their bandwidth in features that count like high res textures, physically-based materials and extremely high detailed environments. At this point, if I were working on a next-gen game, I would mainly focus on RT shadows and reflections with a possible RT ambient occlusion only. Putting the GI, and area lights in the scene pulls away too many resources from the main pipeline like PBR and high res textures. The hardware just isn't powerful enough to implement everything to it's highest degree.
Both of these games are fairly lackluster in their overall appearance compared to games like Detroit, Modern Warfare and RDR2. I went to search out why that is because using RTX should immediately make the game look superior to all others.
Here's what I came up with:
1) PBR is minuscule or non-existant. You simply can NOT trade excellent physically based materials for more accurate lighting. Both of these games came up really really short on the overall look of materials in the games. I have my specific reasons why this is but I won't go into them here.
2) Textures suffer in resolution due to limited bandwidth for sampling. Textures have to be at a minimum of 4k these days. Both of these games have much lower texture resolution especially for the terrain that I expected. The normal maps are even lower in texture resolution which blurs out the details significantly.
3) Art direction forces simple looking albedo maps (regular diffuse textures with hardly any multitexturing). Control has a LOT less detail than Metro, but Metro has a LOT less detail when you compare it to games like Modern Warfare.
Final thoughts, imo, it seems that RT is a little too early to be used in a manner that doesn't take away from where we've gotten with static light maps, SSR, and pre-baked GI. Using those crude methods have allowed games to use the bulk of their bandwidth in features that count like high res textures, physically-based materials and extremely high detailed environments. At this point, if I were working on a next-gen game, I would mainly focus on RT shadows and reflections with a possible RT ambient occlusion only. Putting the GI, and area lights in the scene pulls away too many resources from the main pipeline like PBR and high res textures. The hardware just isn't powerful enough to implement everything to it's highest degree.