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Witcher 3 downgrade arguments in here and nowhere else

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1b938e6e5b38281eef7bc1be1fd1a277c7baa4e81a7ea0088f354075a1d7464e.jpg


done with this thread
 

viveks86

Member
watched gamersyde videos. looks as expected. anytime grass is being hit by sunlight it looks like it doesnt belong in the environment as there is no occlusion applied to it. reminds me of the grass in bf4 if you dont use hbao. whatever they are doing for AA pretty much looks like fxaa

It is post processing AA after all… It seems to work well only at high resolutions, just like FXAA. Lower resolution seems to ruin the foliage, especially those pine leaves.
 
It is post processing AA after all… It seems to work well only at high resolutions, just like FXAA. Lower resolution seems to ruin the foliage, especially those pine leaves.

you say that as if post process AA cant offer amazing IQ. ryse, FC4 ps4, evolve txaa are all near free post process AA implementations that make this look like the garbage it is.
 

viveks86

Member
you say that as if post process AA cant offer amazing IQ. ryse, FC4 ps4, evolve txaa are all near free post process AA implementations that make this look like the garbage it is.

Hmmm… good point. I've just never been a fan of any post process AA when gaming below 4K.
 
Hmmm… good point. I've just never been a fan of any post process AA when gaming below 4K.

I love post process aa when it looks like the above three examples. Those 3 titles offer better iq than any hardware implementation outside of working txaa in the last 10 years.

Edit : and whatever the order is doing.
 
you say that as if post process AA cant offer amazing IQ. ryse, FC4 ps4, evolve txaa are all near free post process AA implementations that make this look like the garbage it is.

I think FC4 HRAA is rather horrible. Every frame hast massive ghosting in it.

But on the whole I agree, this TAA could be better given what SMAAt1x in ryse has shown us. (BTW, they only just added the final form of SMAAt1x to the CryEngine EaaS build, that means evolve didn't launch witht he latest version, hence why it was so much worse than the ryse version).
 
I think FC4 HRAA is rather horrible. Every frame hast massive ghosting in it.

But on the whole I agree, this TAA could be better given what SMAAt1x in ryse has shown us. (BTW, they only just added the final form of SMAAt1x to the CryEngine EaaS build, that means evolve didn't launch witht he latest version, hence why it was so much worse than the ryse version).

Evolve has a postprocess only version of txaa for nvidia users. The standard smaa 1tx is awful and ripped right from c3

FC4 in motion on ps4 looks great. The ghosting isnt very noticeable at all
 

AlStrong

Member
The order does 4XMSAA and there were talks of adding temporal AA on top of it. It probably made it to the final build as a lot of the shimmering seen in the earlier footage was almost entirely gone.

You may be able to see some temporal artefacting if you see something move quickly in front of an alpha textured surface.
 

viveks86

Member
Managed to improve foliage quality a little more by increasing resolution to 1620p. Still getting 70-80 fps. CDPR needs to add in an ultra+ preset so that it isn't this painful to setup. Crazy that so much untapped potential is just sitting there. Even if they didn't make severe cutbacks to the engine (they probably did on some aspects), they sure made severe cutbacks to the marketing after SoD.

witcher32015-05-1913-34-27-60.png


Posted a bunch on the OT if anyone wants to look at more.

Still haven't made any progress on the story. I think it's time I stop tinkering and start playing so that we can start getting some 1:1 comparisons soon. Novigrad, here I come!
 

tuxfool

Banned
Indoor looks pretty sad in this game. These are taken at daytime if you couldn't tell.



Just for fun, here's what AC:U's indoor looks like.

People have to stop comparing these two. One does not have TOD and uses completely prebaked lighting.

At least compare to other Open world games with TOD.
 

OCD Guy

Member
Forgetting the "downgrades" for a moment, the worst thing about the game is the frame rate on the ps4, the cut scenes are choppy and at certain points in the game in bigger battles the game turns into a slideshow with almost single fps.

Absolutely shocking that games nowadays are released in this condition. There's no way the consoles could have coped with having all the effects from the initial reveal, it's struggling with the frame rate as it is.

This game belongs on PCs that can do it justice...
 

tuxfool

Banned
I think FC4 HRAA is rather horrible. Every frame hast massive ghosting in it.

But on the whole I agree, this TAA could be better given what SMAAt1x in ryse has shown us. (BTW, they only just added the final form of SMAAt1x to the CryEngine EaaS build, that means evolve didn't launch witht he latest version, hence why it was so much worse than the ryse version).

People are all forgetting the temporal AA in UE4. That implementation seems sooooo good and it doesn't have a heavy load. I've only experienced it in UT4 and the tech demos so I don't know what are the conditional limitations in regard to its use.
 

RoboPlato

I'd be in the dick
People are all forgetting the temporal AA in UE4. That implementation seems sooooo good and it doesn't have a heavy load. I've only experienced it in UT4 and the tech demos so I don't know what are the conditional limitations in regard to its use.
I expect UE4 style AA to be the industry standard within a year or two.
 
Oy. Been so annoying not being able to post here for a week :p

People have to stop comparing these two. One does not have TOD and uses completely prebaked lighting.

At least compare to other Open world games with TOD.

He wasn't comparing. He said "just for fun" =P

Regardless, The Witcher 3's indoor lighitng is nothing to write home about.

In a world with re-shade, ENB doesn't really matter anymore.

Methinks maybe you don't quite understand what Borris does with ENB... because this is so untrue it's not even funny. ReShade is a toy compared to ENB. Just because it has depth buffer access (for some games) doesn't mean it can replace a game's visuals from the inside out like ENB.

For Skyrim, he added....

Detailed soft shadows (vanilla Skyrim's shadows suuuuuuuuck)
Screen spaced reflections
Completely rehauled the game's environment, ambient, and point lighting
Subsurface scattering
Adaption
Depth of Field
SSAO + Indirect lighting
Overhauled the game's skybox rendering (gradients, stars, sun corona, moon intensity)
Window Lighting....
Fire intensity...
Water shaders...
And his trademark ENB Bloom.

ReShade has SSAO, Depth of Field, and basically SweetFX shaders.

ENB definitely does matter so long as Borris actually.... you know... makes it matter. Most of the time he's too lazy or is using this "I don't code for DX11" excuse. Shame, because I think The Witcher 3 could really use a lighting overhaul. Especially indoors.

Like clockwork. I was starting to miss that GIF.

I know you don't like that GIF, but it's probably because it looked so damn good and it got all of our hopes up :p I actually like that one way more than the Novigrad one people keep posting and comparing. Sadly, I don't think that village exists in the form of that GIF anymore. It was probably broken up and scattered about some of the locations in the very first area of the game.

watched gamersyde videos. looks as expected. anytime grass is being hit by sunlight it looks like it doesnt belong in the environment as there is no occlusion applied to it.

Their vegetation shader is funky. Someone else described it best on Flickr so I'll just quote him:

They really need a better vegetation shader. There's way too much back-view illumination on the leaves and grass and there's something seriously weird with how the gloss maps behave. You can clearly see specular highlights in shaded areas when environmental probes are supplying lighting information, but when you stand in direct sunlight you don't get any of that subtlety.

The foliage\grass is definitely the weakest aspect of the game's visuals for me. That and maybe the nuclear sunsets (seriously looks like a bomb went off and my fave is going to be melted). Also tree LOD. Maybe it's because I've been hacking the FOV, but all too often I notice trees starting to appear like JPGs way closer than they should.

All in all, I do think it's a pretty game in motion. Much prettier than screenshots can do justice. I did end up making a semi-photo mode for it after all... and I wouldn't have done that if I didn't think the game's visuals deserved it.
 

Ishida

Banned
Forgetting the "downgrades" for a moment, the worst thing about the game is the frame rate on the ps4, the cut scenes are choppy and at certain points in the game in bigger battles the game turns into a slideshow with almost single fps.

Absolutely shocking that games nowadays are released in this condition. There's no way the consoles could have coped with having all the effects from the initial reveal, it's struggling with the frame rate as it is.

This game belongs on PCs that can do it justice...

Oooh boy, here we go.
 

viveks86

Member
Went back and made a comparison of the default settings with the same screenshot posted above. Couldn't perfectly align it since I literally had to go back, play again and take screenshots with the default ini. Gives an idea of the differences in foliage clarity across resolutions as well as the lighting, LoD and foliage enhancements that the tweaks enable.

comp.gif


Might do some draw distance comparisons later. This was probably not the best comparison for draw distance since that island in front is not part of white orchard and doesn't really have more terrain detail to draw.
 
Let's be honest here. That's a bigger downgrade than the one in Watch Dogs. At least WD was in the same ball park. Holy smokes. That's not to say W3 doesn't still look good but it isn't anywhere close to what they first showed based on that comparison.
 

Sakura

Member
Do people just love hyperbole, or does everyone quickly forget what a previous console generation's graphics looked like in comparison to this one's?

I don't think he is meaning that the final version looks like an Xbox 360 game or something...
 

Coflash

Member
I love how this thread has slowed down now that the game is actually out.

What's amazing is that some people are still denying the downgrade now that the game is actually out.

Worse than that is the amount of people who still cannot comprehend that CDPR lying about it is the main problem, not the downgrade itself.

I'm quite happy with the game, but CDPR have lost a lot of respect from me. They should have addressed the issue in a manner that acknowledged the visuals were inferior compared to most demonstration videos from 2013/14, and then got on with their lives, instead of continually dismissing what people have been clearly annoyed about for weeks now.
 

XBP

Member
Managed to improve foliage quality a little more by increasing resolution to 1620p. Still getting 70-80 fps. CDPR needs to add in an ultra+ preset so that it isn't this painful to setup. Crazy that so much untapped potential is just sitting there. Even if they didn't make severe cutbacks to the engine (they probably did on some aspects), they sure made severe cutbacks to the marketing after SoD.

If they do that then people would crank their games to ultra+, get poor FPS and then blame CDPR for poor optimization.
 

elelunicy

Member
People have to stop comparing these two. One does not have TOD and uses completely prebaked lighting.

At least compare to other Open world games with TOD.

It's funny cause with TOD you'd think indoor lighting changes a whole lot throughout the day—it hardly does in this game. In indoor environments day time just barely looks different from night time, even when there's direct sunlight. In AC:U, different time presets and dynamic wheather affect indoor lighting greatly. I expected The Witcher's indoor lighting to change a lot too with the use of dynamic TOD, but in actuality it's very static in comparison.

Daytime
0yxI9nO.jpg

Nighttime
LOHnq4y.jpg

Here's the kind of lighting changes throughout the day I would expect from using TOD.
 
^^ Damn, I haven't played ACU in a while and forgot how amazing the interiors looked. They look a generation ahead of the Witcher's interiors. The Witcher still looks amazing though, but a lot of it's interiors (at least from the first few hours) are a sore spot.
 

Totobeni

An blind dancing ho
Yep this game is downgraded. I mean, just look at the ugly 2D foliage in the final version :\

It's not only the foliage, everything in the final version is way way behind the 2013 version.

I've now put almost 8 hours into the game so far, and went again to watch the 2013/vgx trailers on youtube and it's a completely different game. what we got got worse effect, worse animations, worst effects even the color when I play remind of DA:I and not the 2013 version. also the forest and swamp are way ugly (yeah I'll use ugly, they are not good looking at all) compared to what they looked in the 2013.

I can finally say that this is really worse than Watch Dog downgrade.
 

cheezcake

Member
^^ Damn, I haven't played ACU in a while and forgot how amazing the interiors looked. They look a generation ahead of the Witcher's interiors. The Witcher still looks amazing though, but a lot of it's interiors (at least from the first few hours) are a sore spot.

Yeh ACU's lighting is a generation ahead of every other open world game on the market though
 

HelloMeow

Member
Yup, it's definitely downgraded. It's still a pretty good looking game though. I wish the developers hadn't lied about it. Are they still bullshitting around?
 
The worst thing about the game is the frame rate on the ps4, the cut scenes are choppy and at certain points in the game in bigger battles the game turns into a slideshow with almost single fps.

Absolutely shocking that games nowadays are released in this condition.

Not really shocking to me, just as expected. Framedrops everywhere, ppl just post still images and say nothing about framedrops. Sounds like a common theme for most high profile console games this gen.
 

Totobeni

An blind dancing ho
Yup, it's definitely downgraded. It's still a pretty good looking game though. I wish the developers hadn't lied about it. Are they still bullshitting around?

They were saying "no downgrade" and removed videos this very week (the last 5~7 days) I'm not sure if there was anything new from them today or yesterday since the game got out. but since no site want to even cover the downgrade story (unlike how many sites and big youtube channels completely trashed and destroyed Ubi soft after Watch Dogs) I guess CDPR will think it's a-ok to do this sort of bullshit again.

and it's sad that CDPR got a free pass from the gaming media on this because Witcher 3 downgrade is worse than Watch Dog downgrade.
 

Yoda

Member
Whats a bit more troubling in my opinion is how poorly optimized the game is for PC given its visual fidelity. I'd argue maxed out GTA:V not only looks better but has more going on in its environments. GTA:V runs on considerably lower hardware than W3. Now compare each game's console version to the minimum hardware you need to achieve "console settings" and you find gapping discrepancy. An aged gaming laptop say GTX765M ish can easily best the console version of GTA:V. A 765M would most likely barely manage all low on W3 @ a respectable framerate + resolution. The months and months of delays were purely for the console variants of the game and they are still spinning bullshit about a sharpening filter and getting disoriented?? I suspect the PC version could have been launched back in February and it'd be identical to what we have today.

They were saying "no downgrade" and removed videos this very week (the last 5~7 days) I'm not sure if there was anything new from them today or yesterday since the game got out. but since no site want to even cover the downgrade story (unlike how many sites and big youtube channels completely trashed and destroyed Ubi soft after Watch Dogs) I guess CDPR will think it's a-ok to do this sort bullshit again.

and it's sad that CDPR got a free pass from the gaming media on this because Witcher 3 downgrade is worse then Watch Dog downgrade.

This can't be stressed enough. Where were the all of devil's advocates for Watch_Dogs? Witcher 3 footage (which was labelled as INGAME, we even saw them gameplay footage where the person playing could be seen) is a far different from what was launched in comparison to Watch_Dogs E3 -> Watch_Dogs launch.
 
^^ Damn, I haven't played ACU in a while and forgot how amazing the interiors looked. They look a generation ahead of the Witcher's interiors. The Witcher still looks amazing though, but a lot of it's interiors (at least from the first few hours) are a sore spot.
Yup. But CDPR is getting a easy free pass.

I won't be buying the game. At least not until it's under $5.
 
Whats a bit more troubling in my opinion is how poorly optimized the game is for PC given its visual fidelity. I'd argue maxed out GTA:V not only looks better but has more going on in its environments. GTA:V runs on considerably lower hardware than W3.

Does that surprise anyone though? I mean Rockstar has a much larger budget for their games. Not only that, but they spent ages on the PC port in order to perfect it. And perfect it they did. I just don't think CDPR has the same resources.
 
Does that surprise anyone though? I mean Rockstar has a much larger budget for their games. Not only that, but they spent ages on the PC port in order to perfect it. And perfect it they did. I just don't think CDPR has the same resources.

Hairworks aside, the perf impact of the meager visual improvement over the ps4 version is pretty much a disaster
 
Doesn't it have horrible frame rates on PS4?

Not horrible like ac unity. On the nvidia side, every gpu thats not maxwell 2 is just awful. Have you seen the benchmarks? Even a 970 only gets 45 fps at 1080p ultra without any of the gameworks features. Thats laughable tbh
 

Faith

Member
Managed to improve foliage quality a little more by increasing resolution to 1620p. Still getting 70-80 fps. CDPR needs to add in an ultra+ preset so that it isn't this painful to setup. Crazy that so much untapped potential is just sitting there. Even if they didn't make severe cutbacks to the engine (they probably did on some aspects), they sure made severe cutbacks to the marketing after SoD.
I maxed out everything (playing in 2560x1080) and tweaked the ini-file and I'm getting 30-50fps with my 970 SLI setup.

How do you get this framerate?
 

23qwerty

Member
I maxed out everything (playing in 2560x1080) and tweaked the ini-file and I'm getting 30-50fps with my 970 SLI setup.

How do you get this framerate?

He's got Titan X SLI ;)

Not horrible like ac unity. On the nvidia side, every gpu thats not maxwell 2 is just awful. Have you seen the benchmarks? Even a 970 only gets 45 fps at 1080p ultra without any of the gameworks features. Thats laughable tbh

Hmm? I get 60fps most of the time at 1080p with everything maxed except hairworks on my 970.
It's also a little odd that you think that max settings shouldn't push cards.
 

dark10x

Digital Foundry pixel pusher
Fox Engine destroys this game in lighting, and it's real time 60 FPS. Plus the PBR actually looks correct.
FOX Engine is impressive as the team makes all of the right compromises to create a beautiful game while still allowing for 60fps on consoles AND offering scalability options for the PC. It's a beautifully made engine.
 
There was one moment I was playing where the time of the day was just right, the weather effects were just right, the location was just right and it almost looked like game from the original reveal. But, the frame rate was pretty much dead so I can see why they downgraded.
 
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