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Not impressed with modern graphics

Perkel

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Mar 28, 2014
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Because modern graphic was stomped by last gen consoles which were way to long on market.
Unfortunately for PC most of GFX progress is made currently for consoles and it proliferates to PCs in short time.
Especially physic stuff (GPGPU) goes into overdrive mode currently (ton of devs researching it)

It is start of new gen and we can already see some lookers:

Deep Down

5Xy4.gif


The Order

imu4pB3yVOMiL.gif


Driveclub

OHkvN9S.gif


As for PC i don't think there is any worthwile game in therms of graphic on horizon. Many people asume SC will be the one but considering it will be online game for most part then they will need to scale back their models.



For me biggest WOW factor was Unreal 1. Skajr ship was just completely blowing me away back then
 

APGunner

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For me biggest WOW factor was Unreal 1. Skajr ship was just completely blowing me away back then
I remember discovering real-time shadows in Blade of Darkness and spending quite some time positioning torches at different angles.
Also Morrowind's water. Dem Shaders 2.0.

I think after a certain threshold of graphical fidelity the effort and money is pretty much wasted on trying to improve visuals. For me personally the benchmark is Unreal Tournament 3, I don't need graphics looking even better than in that game.
 

Akratus

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Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
I would just want 120 fps, best LOD possible, no aliasing. All I wish for in pure technical terms.

In artistic terms most games are ugly regardless of graphics technology.
 
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Akratus

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Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Dark Souls' textures are almost all 512x512, no? The art style was good enough for me not to even notice most of the time, and not bothering me when I did.
 

Garryydde

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The best looking game ever made imo is Metal Gear Solid 2, especially the HD version. Why?

mgs22.jpg


For a PS2 game it has impressively good textures, the weather effects are sublime, the attention to detail in everything is ridiculous. The game also has better looking reflections, lighting and plants than most modern releases.
 

JarlFrank

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
The best looking game ever made imo is Metal Gear Solid 2, especially the HD version. Why?

mgs22.jpg


For a PS2 game it has impressively good textures, the weather effects are sublime, the attention to detail in everything is ridiculous. The game also has better looking reflections, lighting and plants than most modern releases.

I like older 3D graphics from the very late 90s up to the mid 2000s, they manage to look nice without being overblown with effects, they are crisp and clean and you look at a screenshot or the game in motion and you actually see what's going on. Many modern games have so many fancy technical effects, you can barely make out all the details.
 

adrix89

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If I have to resume what the problems with modern graphics are.
Clarity.

There is too much going on on the screen that it tires you.
Compare Call of Duty to CS:GO
Compare UT2004 to UT3
Pointless details(not resolution) that make the overall picture into a random mess. Especially in 'horror' or sci-fi games.
Pointless screen effects,post-processing and bloom and shit.
Horrible color contrast that results in monochrome.
Boring forms/shapes that you cannot differentiate between. You see one bulky gorilla you see them all.
The background always stands out and messes with the level geometry.

In the mid2000 things were so much cleaner.
Modern Graphics desperately needs some janitors to clean all the pointless garbage on screen.
 

Flanged

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Depth Of Field can actually be a good thing, useful for softening and minimizing long-distance LOD trashing, especially in both Skyrim and Gothic3.

All you have to do is go into the .ini and look at the DoF range that the game devs have set as standard. Then just increase it by x10. If the vanilla DoF range is 30, it should be 300. If it is 300, it should be 3000. And so on.

I used to play Skyrim with UGrids set to 11, and no DoF. It looked like shit, both near and far, with creepy-crawly shadows and universal aliasing across the entire screen. Now it looks okay. Mind you, it took me three years of .ini editing to fix it. Then i discovered that the game was boring.
 

Flanged

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Yeah, but I got more entertainment out of repeatedly editing the .ini files than I ever did from the gameplay anyway.

I tried to play through Metroid Prime on the GameCube recently. Couldn't do it. There were no .inis to mess with.

I've turned into my Dad. He always had more fun trying to fix his many undriveable second-hand cars than he ever got from driving them.
 
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Divinity: Original Sin
Yeah, but I got more entertainment out of repeatedly editing the .ini files than I ever did from the gameplay anyway.

I tried to play through Metroid Prime on the GameCube recently. Couldn't do it. There were no .inis to mess with.

I've turned into my Dad. He always had more fun trying to fix his many undriveable second-hand cars than he ever got from driving them.

I am one of those who have a lot of fun messing around with config files and testing the results until I find the best option to play a game. I remember getting multiple boot options each with different autoexec.bat and config.sys so i could optimize the momory to run world circuit and ultima 7 at maximum settings, only to do that all over again at an upgrade, even though I wouldn't actually replay them.
 

tuluse

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Yeah, but I got more entertainment out of repeatedly editing the .ini files than I ever did from the gameplay anyway.

I tried to play through Metroid Prime on the GameCube recently. Couldn't do it. There were no .inis to mess with.

I've turned into my Dad. He always had more fun trying to fix his many undriveable second-hand cars than he ever got from driving them.
Get a linux box and try to run Metroid Prime on the dolphin emulator.
 

Sykar

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Turn right after Alpha Centauri
Yeah, but I got more entertainment out of repeatedly editing the .ini files than I ever did from the gameplay anyway.

I tried to play through Metroid Prime on the GameCube recently. Couldn't do it. There were no .inis to mess with.

I've turned into my Dad. He always had more fun trying to fix his many undriveable second-hand cars than he ever got from driving them.

I had fun with this already when I was 10 optimizing my autoexec.bat and config.sys to play games like Wing Commander, Sensible Soccer or the original X COM.

:yeah:
 

Maschtervoz

Learned
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Feb 5, 2015
Messages
106
#2 exactly.

I wish more games had vision like Alice: MR.

And fvvvvkk reviewers that bashed it for realism.
I wish we'd get completely realistic graphics already. I'm thinking that way the industry would have nowhere left to go but towards stylization in order to make games stand out visually. Fvvvvkk this photorealism shit.
 

Machocruz

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Photorealism is a problem. It's a problem because the idea of creating a convincing 3D space is at odds with the photographic image. Photos flatten space, distort light and proportion, even at the best of times. Society needs to get away from the notion that photorealism = as realistic as possible. It's not true, since our visual reality is determined by what healthy human eyes see. There are color and lighting nuances that are captured differently. If we were eagles or dogs, our visual reality would be different. But anyway, DoF the way it is commonly used does not replicate atmospheric perspective, which is caused by the interaction between light and matter. Blurring of the kind wee see in digital DoF is a photographic effect, not a natural one. Also, the camera isn't as selective as the human artist, which is where style and function comes in. In a game, clarity should come before adherence to reality

In painting, there is a broad spectrum of styles and approaches that are considered realistic. Rembrandt is realistic, as is Michelangelo, as is Goya, as is Rubens, as is John Singer Sargent. There is a sub category called Photorealism which has to do with recreating, in paint, characteristics unique to photography. There is also Hyper-realism which is involves rendering more than the eye or camera can see at one time; it's actually artifice, because it involves exaggeration and meta knowledge.

I think it would be an interesting experiment to compare the game worlds of developers who conduct field research/hire landscape artists and those who use photographic reference. I bet we would see consistent differences in light and color between the two camps.

tl;dr "photoreal" is one of the most abused and misunderstood terms in modern times.
 

DraQ

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If I have to resume what the problems with modern graphics are.
Clarity.

There is too much going on on the screen that it tires you.
Compare Call of Duty to CS:GO
Compare UT2004 to UT3
Pointless details(not resolution) that make the overall picture into a random mess. Especially in 'horror' or sci-fi games.
Pointless screen effects,post-processing and bloom and shit.
Horrible color contrast that results in monochrome.
Boring forms/shapes that you cannot differentiate between. You see one bulky gorilla you see them all.
The background always stands out and messes with the level geometry.

In the mid2000 things were so much cleaner.
Modern Graphics desperately needs some janitors to clean all the pointless garbage on screen.
:salute:
I agree, but with two Concessions:
Additional detail may be worth it if it comes in the form of believable clutter. The problem is "we need something to show our next-gen" pointless embellishments when there is no meaningful detail to be added.
That said UT3, despite some awful postprocessing effects and tons of needless detailing still looks better than UT2k4 which is just sort of bland, slightly blurry and plastic-looking in a Quake 3 way. A more apt comparison would be between UT3 and the original UT with maxed out details, preferably running some modern, detailed maps.

Depth Of Field can actually be a good thing, useful for softening and minimizing long-distance LOD trashing, especially in both Skyrim and Gothic3.
Skyrim doesn't benefit from DoF in this way because it doesn't use DoF as DoF most of the time.

And yeah, long-distance LOD isn't particularly kind to that game but I didn't mind this sort of detail in TN:SFC so I can handle it now, OTOH high UGrids makes the game plain fucking unstable, especially in the expansion.
As for boring - get Requiem.

Photorealism is a problem. It's a problem because the idea of creating a convincing 3D space is at odds with the photographic image. Photos flatten space, distort light and proportion, even at the best of times. Society needs to get away from the notion that photorealism = as realistic as possible. It's not true, since our visual reality is determined by what healthy human eyes see.
:salute:
Would :bro: thrice.

But anyway, DoF the way it is commonly used does not replicate atmospheric perspective, which is caused by the interaction between light and matter. Blurring of the kind wee see in digital DoF is a photographic effect, not a natural one.
This, although atmospheric perspective can't be fully simulated with just some alpha blended fog either, so non-standard use of DoF to help simulate fog may work (although it won't look like ordinary DoF dumbfuckery).
 

TheGreatOne

Arcane
Joined
Feb 15, 2014
Messages
1,214
I just watched some gameplay footage of CS:GO the other day and I seriously can't tell any difference between it and Source, apart from the fact that guns look ugly as hell because of retarded Cowwadooty weapon customization. Now compare CS 1.6 with Source and the difference is like night and day. And the best part is that there's 5 years between the release of 1.6 and Source and 8 between Source and GO. Though to be fair the Source engine is a beast and it's a lot easier to improve 1.6 level graphics than it is to improve Source level graphics. And when you think how sufficient graphics already were at that point in 2004 (Source Engine, Morrowind with mods, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 etc), it just makes me mad. Think about the billions of dollars wasted at graphical arms race at the expense of gameplay. More shallow and dumbed down games that are more expensive to produce and still end up looking worse than earlier games? Mainstream games industry needs to commit seppuku.
The best looking game ever made imo is Metal Gear Solid 2, especially the HD version. Why?

For a PS2 game it has impressively good textures, the weather effects are sublime, the attention to detail in everything is ridiculous. The game also has better looking reflections, lighting and plants than most modern releases.
If you're going to pick a non cell shaded console game from the 6th console generation, why Metal Gear Solid when there's Silent Hill 3 on the same console?
OtherworldWalk.gif

tumblr_n0hmhkXE3M1tozvp8o1_500.gif

Looks kind of shitty here but the textures in Silent Hill 3 were really nice. Actually some PS2/Gamecube games (which were less powerful than the original Xbox, which was less powerful than PC) like Resident Evil Remake and Silent Hill 2/3 still have better looking character models and textures than some of the Xbox 360/PS3 ports of 2014/2015 games like Dragon Age Inquistion and Shadows of Mordor, which goes back to my point of modern game industry needing to commit seppuku.
 

adrix89

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Why are there so many of my country here?
:salute:
I agree, but with two Concessions:
Additional detail may be worth it if it comes in the form of believable clutter. The problem is "we need something to show our next-gen" pointless embellishments when there is no meaningful detail to be added.
That said UT3, despite some awful postprocessing effects and tons of needless detailing still looks better than UT2k4 which is just sort of bland, slightly blurry and plastic-looking in a Quake 3 way. A more apt comparison would be between UT3 and the original UT with maxed out details, preferably running some modern, detailed maps.
Nope. UT3 isn't good at all. I find that Quake3 had the best aesthetic for characters and level design and UT2k4 had followed in its footsteps. Sure the textures are dated and lighting and materials not that fancy but that would just translate to some polish.
The problem is UT3 looks really good in close shots but once a character moves characters just become blobs and the scenery noise. In Quake or UT2k4 you always knew what character you were fighting and in motion the levels looked superb with its architecture and the right materials to make them pop in contrast.

I find CS:GO pretty good in having the right amount of detail that is actual a pretty big improvement compared to Source while still having the levels feel like levels for the purpose of gameplay, best of both worlds.
 

Perkel

Arcane
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Mar 28, 2014
Messages
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:salute:
I agree, but with two Concessions:
Additional detail may be worth it if it comes in the form of believable clutter. The problem is "we need something to show our next-gen" pointless embellishments when there is no meaningful detail to be added.
That said UT3, despite some awful postprocessing effects and tons of needless detailing still looks better than UT2k4 which is just sort of bland, slightly blurry and plastic-looking in a Quake 3 way. A more apt comparison would be between UT3 and the original UT with maxed out details, preferably running some modern, detailed maps.
Nope. UT3 isn't good at all. I find that Quake3 had the best aesthetic for characters and level design and UT2k4 had followed in its footsteps. Sure the textures are dated and lighting and materials not that fancy but that would just translate to some polish.
The problem is UT3 looks really good in close shots but once a character moves characters just become blobs and the scenery noise. In Quake or UT2k4 you always knew what character you were fighting and in motion the levels looked superb with its architecture and the right materials to make them pop in contrast.

I find CS:GO pretty good in having the right amount of detail that is actual a pretty big improvement compared to Source while still having the levels feel like levels for the purpose of gameplay, best of both worlds.

uh there is only one champion and its name is UT99'
best maps, best gameplay, best AI, best weapons, best modes.

UT2003 and newer ones are poss.

UT99 still is absolutely pinacle
 

BlackAdderBG

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It is start of new gen and we can already see some lookers:

Deep Down

5Xy4.gif


The Order

imu4pB3yVOMiL.gif


Driveclub

OHkvN9S.gif


As for PC i don't think there is any worthwile game in therms of graphic on horizon. Many people asume SC will be the one but considering it will be online game for most part then they will need to scale back their models.

This is joke right?First one is tech demo with UI slapped on top,second is pre-rendered cutsceene and last is 30fps driving game.:lol:

And all of them are couple of interactable objects moving thru corridors.
 
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Perkel

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This is joke right?First one is tech demo with UI slapped on top,second is per-rendered cutsceene and last is 30fps driving game.:lol:

And all of them are couple of interactable objects moving thru corridors.

Fist one is alpha of deep down played by actual people.
Second is The Order in which all cutscenes are rendered on game engine (which means what you see in cutscenes is what console needs to render)
Last one is really really really really good loking 30fps driving game that you can play today

Like it or not those are the best looking games that came out or be coming out closely in few months and there doesn't seem to be anything on horizon that can match them.

TW3 seems to look good but will be uneven like most of open world games
 

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