I fail to see why a "bullshot" is not a valid way to compare character models. After all, you're looking at just the character model, not AA quality, DOF quality, or screen resolution.

You fail to see why an offline render/Super Sampled screen shot should not be used to compare what hardware/engines can actually put out currently?

Have you considered the other material shown in 2004? - the actual footage of the larger creature stomping around That's clearly run on hardware, and so was the GDC 2011 demo. They've certainly surpassed this in Gears of War 2 (end of the winter vehicle level in the caves), what with the larger environments and not just a single model. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m7T5ay_8DI#t=5m13s

You ought to be comparing bullshot to bullshot really, and running demo to running material.

You also seemed to skip over the Unreal Tournament III screenshot...

Well, you've proven that 2005 hardware can't compete with 2004 bullshots or that a game scenario with a lit environment and other characters to render is nothing compared to a portrait shot... :s

That tech demo looks really cool.

The comparison was between two character models. Unless the texture resolution and poly count have been improved in the Gears 3 shots beyond what is visible in-game, I'd say it's an apt comparison.

The comparison was between demo quality vs. actual games. TBH bullshots shouldn't be considered at all in this, except that Epic released high quality character images around the unveiling of UE3 which set the bar pretty high.

I know man, it's like the engine developer version of a diss track. How long until we see Crytek respond with Prophet curb-stomping Marcus Fenix?

I shouldnt be comparing something thats not accurate with something else thats also not accurate.
So if company X decides to throw in a little raytracer in the engine (seconds per frame) its OK for them to show screenshots from that + say thats the pictures the engine produces.
ME - OK as long as you have a disclaimer

(from other thread)
but we have history repeating itself here. If they're not held accountable they will continue to deceive. Personally (like with politicians etc) I would like to hear/see the truth. Some companies manage to do it, so why shouldnt we hold everyone up to this standard (surely its not too much to ask)

thanks for agreeing, OK but doesnt that make you have doubts of the actual validity of the premise "Epic Says This Is What Next-Gen Should Look Like"

Funny, when you look at the Cryengine demos, they are a lot more impressive to me. Epic does robots, armoured goons, cars, dark rainy streets with neon lights, etc. Crytek does forests, trees, deserts, heat haze, girls with skirts that blow in the wind, water flow, daytime simulation, helicopter down blast, butterflies etc. It's a heck of a lot more impressive to me that Crytek can simulate realistic and natural looking things, than Epic with their usual stocky soldiers and big square guns.

Personally, I don't think Epic should be poking fun at Crytek when they've yet to show anything that looks as good or as realistic as the Cryengine demos.

Yeah same here. Epic's video looks nice, but I can't help but think that's its just basically current Unreal engine brute forced to new levels with an absurd about of gpu hardware behind it, whereas Crytek and Frostbite look more real to me in that they can run on todays hardware. So while it looks cool, I'm just not all that excited about it. Frostbite actually looks to be the best of the bunch so far to me, but they need to get their tools in line to what Crytek has shown for theirs. Good times either way though as Frostbite and Cryengine will really be forcing everyones hand to keep pace and compete.

"Should" isn't a promise or a guarantee.

This is seriously a boring discussion for a tech thread. :| Aren't we supposed to be smart enough on this forum to understand a few things about PR and bullshots by now? We've had years of silly discussions that cover the same crap over and over again. And now you're just bringing that back up. Give it a rest? Don't have anything worthwhile to contribute to the tech discussion? How about discussing the tech inside the demo and what's feasible or not feasible?

Tech demos are rarely indicative of final game quality due to resolution or memory and such or other changes in scope. I mean yay, awesome. Just confirmed that bullshot quality isn't possible in a game. Quite frankly, the continued trolling about PR bullshots is getting quite tiresome. But hey, let's ignore the value of scalable settings for recorded videos, marketing material or expanding interest beyond just the games industry. Bullshotting is old news since marketing began!

*sigh* :(

Yes it is, because they're not going to take any notice of this forum, and the whole world of marketing is based on stretching the truth, and it's tiresome and pointless, so give it a rest.

For the purposes of our discussions, we know the difference between a publicity shot and the in-game experience, and we have the sense to be able to change an opinion if a premature expectation of a lighting or shader system presented in a PR shot doesn't appear in the game.

Ok, so we think this was run on 3 580s. What was the rest of the hardware? i think that's fairly important to discuss when we could realistically see a *console* run this at a decently steady 30 fps.

I mean there's no AI in a tech demo, but what kind of a processor is feeding these 580s to keep them happy? How much RAM is necessary, even with streaming? What device is streaming (HDD, SSD, Optical)?

I'm just having trouble seeing that kind of power draw and heat reduced to a $350 package in the next 2 years.

Keep in mind he also suggested that with effort it could be made to run on a single card.

2 questions:

then why wasn't it?

with the same fidelity?

*BONUS*
Is anybody actually buying that statement?

time
yes
somewhat, yes

So you believe the only reason why it was run on 3 580s is because they didn't have time to...finish some magical ritual?

Your third answer contradicts your thesis.

No, I believe the amount of effort put into optimizing was not high. Rein made a comment about the size of the team that worked on the project. And 3 cards in no way suggests 3x the performance.

No it doesn't.

Have I told you how much their HQ 'Cinematic' Bokeh DOF takes pefomance wise with their latest public SDK (think I mentioned it before to someone)?

About 10x slower than without. If they kept code same then it surely will be utterly taxing and goes inline with Mark saying it would probably run well on a single GPU given some time. I mean look how realtively low perfomance impact Cryteks CE3/Crysis 2 Bokeh DOF has yet giving good results (PC, 64taps or 32taps depeding on setting and option for fullres rendering). :)

I think these types of visuals next gen should be do-able. If not then I'll be highly disappointed in the next round of consoles.

Quoted for truth. I still remember Eidos using PC screens of the original Tomb Raider on the back of PSone and saturn cases. :razz:

It looks great, but I see nothing I wouldn't expect a single 580 to handle at 30hz. They could have been doing all the post-processing at full resolution which would hardly affect the IQ but could explain the massive GPU requirement. Truth is we know almost nothing about how they did this.

Indeed. Post-FX buffer res & even tessellation factor (lol @ head wireframe) would certainly count as performance optimizations. What is rather "down-to-earth" in the demo are the objects where there are easily identifiable polygon edges (coat collar, the odd object in the background such as the garbage can). Even the background image of the building.

will agree with you, but UE3 gets a bit annoying because until the last version it has been console unfriendly.

UE1; This was unique and incredible back in the day. In fact I preferred Unreal graphics to Quake 2 graphics, because of things like the reflections that displayed in the main screen of the game --the 3D scenery was pretty cool. Unreal was also a good game, featuring alien creatures similar to Halo elites, pacific native odd inhabitants with four arms, birds in the sky.., and some fun weapons.

UE2: I only enjoyed it while playing Unreal Championship on the Xbox. It looked to me as one of the most advanced Xbox 1 games out there, graphically wise.

UE3: After Oblivion, Gears of War was the next game that oozed next gen all over it, looking and running better than a lot of games with worse graphics.

I was amazed by the sheer quality of the graphics back in 2006. Besides that, some stages like the krill's one, was pretty cool. I wondered how they rendered two many birds at the same time without stressing the machine.

Also, the rough and clumsy dialogue of the characters helps with the general appeal of the franchise. I mean that without Marcus & company the game wouldn't be as fun if they changed their approach to something like Fable 3 -gag-worthy game sometimes, btw, I'd give it a 2-.

I love that kind of cultured dialogue, but in F3 everything (is and) sounds so childish and stupid... it's not the same at all. Anyway, what I mean is that Gears have been deservedly successful because of the right use of the engine and a decent story, setting and background.

However, save a few games like Gears, most UE3 games lack the same features compared to other engines and don't run that well on consoles, aside from looking like Gears clones. That's how some people grew tired of the engine, except for those games that really make the most of the engine on consoles.

I recall Epic publicly declaring with UE2 that they wanted to beat Halo's terrain rendering ;)

And yeah, Unreal 1 was really amazing, I still have pretty clear memories of some of the levels. It is a surprisingly big and long game too, tried to play it again in HD recently and it took forever.
Funnily enough it only had vertex lighting and no lightmaps at all, but at least it allowed them to do that awesome sequence where they locked you in, turned of the lights and then unleashed a Skaarj on you...
(still, meeting the first Shambler in Quake 1 was a lot more scary, three of us have been sitting in front of the PC and we were completely shocked by it...)

mm... Indeed. It seemed like the only game to use UE2X was UC2 though. Quite a shame since it was such a huge upgrade over the first game, but then next gen hit anyway.

Gotta wonder if they're planning any more upgrades for the current round of consoles. The displacement mapping/tessellation is certainly out of the question. Hopefully they'll have the GDC material up on UnrealTechnology.com soon.

This is because in an actual interactive game that has to deal with multiple A.I., check list features, resolution and frame rate decisions not even mentioning art direction of going for realism or sci-fi as is the case with the UT3 demonstration it does not make sense to expect those things.

Any game programmer and artist team can slap together a impressive realism oriented tech demo even with old hardware like Nv40 that is not the same as a playable game.

To be honest, this is more inline with what I hope next gen looks like:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eia-v1JUfEg&hd=1

Combined with the best realtime HDR I've seen:

http://www.daionet.gr.jp/~masa/rthdribl/Image/19.jpg
http://www.daionet.gr.jp/~masa/rthdribl/Image/07.jpg

http://www.daionet.gr.jp/~masa/rthdribl/

So, this tech is for next gen consoles ! Hmm....we already have realtime radiosity on the current gen consoles ! I was expecting more for next gen. This tech demo looks as "static" as current UE3 games. We want more dynamic stuff there Epic. Not just more polys and higher res textures.

No, they are all old gen console engines with boosted LOD and easily downgradeable shaders ... the next gen bit is just marketing, they are still being sold to develop games on the old ones.

Any true next gen engine would NOT be cross platform at the moment, it would be portable ... but it would be single platform, because there is only a single next gen platform.

Well, judging from how capable said HW is i'm not sure i could really call it "next-gen", probably not even current gen ;-)

Well frankly no, look at examples in this+other threads of posters with over 1000 posts claiming a bullshot as 'ingame', You may think that b3d has a 'better class' ;) of poster (perhaps they do, since this is the only nongame-dev forum I goto) but lots here cant tell the difference
I will continue to expose any company that 'misleads'.
I agree with what some others have posted, Next gen I hope to see more dynamic environments. Rendering quality has improved by orders of magnitude in the last 20 years, but interaction hasnt changed that much. I was playing games 27 years ago where you could drag a chair around stand on it etc. OK this is a very difficult problem but still we've made bugger all improvements.

Back then I didn't know anyone who preferred Quake 2 to Unreal graphically. The MP in Unreal 1 was kind of meh, but the tech and campaign were great IMO.

It looked good, but had frame rate problems IIRC.

While reading your post about memories in Unreal 1, this sequence popped in my mind instantly. Loved this moment and nearly shat myself when I played it for the first time.

I honestly question how much further they can go with the current round of consoles.

derp HD capture available, but it is still off-screen footage...






edit:

Direct feed?
http://www.ign.com/videos/2011/03/08...ames-in-action

This is what I think will be important for the next generation. IK/physics based animation for everything and all visible objects actually being objects rather than everything being glued together.

Also tools to actually make it possible to build complex scenes without spending an eternity. Auto-generators, diverse object libraries etc.

You should be able to press a button and get a generic randomized house, with book cases with individual models for each book in it with realistic covers (pulled from a database with thousands of covers). Clothing closets filled with random sets of clothing (pulled from a database with hundreds of period appropriate pieces of clothing). Kitchen drawers filled with cutlery and a fridge/pantry with random food items etc. etc. As long as modeling has as much manual labour as last gen, next gen will never be able to fulfil it's promise.

Generator creation will be more important than modeling IMO.

Borderline CGi,seems like "snatching" Martin Mittring payed off :lol:

Although somewhat cool, this demo really lacks the wow factor I felt back in the original UE3 reveals...

Not a good setting perhaps with all the dark.

But seems like it could make a really cool next gen game though. Hopefully maybe it's the next gen game they have in preproduction.

Direct Feed in HD.:shock:



I wish they made this into a game.

HQ 1080p video here ;]
http://www.gamersyde.com/news_unreal...-10714_en.html

Interesting 3 page Mark Rein interview about this demo at 1up, a few days old but it hasn't been posted here.

http://www.1up.com/features/intervie...pager.offset=0

http://ca.kotaku.com/5789088/world-e...-unreal-engine

New Unreal Engine 3 trailer featuring some bits of Gears 3 and shows off its motion blur.Didn't know where to put it so if you guys think there is more suited place for this just edit it.

Probably here ought to be good for the general "next-gen" engine speak.

Does the trailer have a specific title? I can't view kotaku at work but I wouldn't mind checking the video out on Youtube. Thanks.

Seems to be kotaku exclusive for the moment. Guess we'll have to wait a bit for the youtube version.

------------

It's a little funny to see cascade shadowmaps being pimped in there alongside the rest of the features. :p

SMH

A new buzzword for the fanboys xD

I liked the Apex Clothing and the tesselated smoke.

You mean, like ' IBL ' ? ;)

They should use this awesome generator i saw on Realtime rendering blog a time ago.:lol:

http://www.ywing.net/graphicspaper.php

Indeed, lol.

That's great. I wonder how many people we could fool using that xD

Arghh.... "Arbitrary Culling of Shadow Maps using Non-linear Compression" was going to be my next paper!


:lol:

Here's the YT: (OP updated as well)



I suppose it's hard to say if they'll actually use their motion blur skinning for the retail game (there's some neat info about the cost towards the bottom of the page). I'll have to look over the available footage, but it'd be pretty hard to find a fast moving object in Gears of War in the first place. :p

The characters move pretty fast, I can imagine how slick it'd look while monkeying and sliding around in the multiplayer.

Well, maybe the player character will be moving fast enough on-screen (relative pixel speed), but nothing else really moves fast in the Gears universe aside from the Berserker. What I mean by fast is the relative on-screen speed, like the berserker zooming past your view and a player can't actually focus on it as a target for shooting.

edit9000:

Besides, motion blur would only really make sense in a small area around the camera. At a certain distance, an object can be moving at the speed of sound and not need blur because it's in focus. It's not the object's absolute velocity, but the pixel velocity that matters...

Well roadie running is just one instance where you character moves fast, but there are faster movements that the character (both yours and other characters on screen..atleast while playing competitive modes) do, tricks like wall bouncing, wall side cancel make the characters do really fast movements. Infact it probably makes much more sense to use motion blur here in this case than say something like Uncharted ,which happens have even slower moving characters and objects for the most part.

We don't need no sense in games where aliens/monsters come from holes instead of sky. :p

And the kicker whenever discussing realism in most any shooter, one can get shot multiple times and recover in seconds :razz:

They tweeted screen of their new foliage rendering implementation
http://images.eurogamer.net/assets/a...761771.jpg.jpg

File about Samaritan video.

http://www.nvidia.com/content/PDF/GDC2011/Epic.pdf

Maybe with Nvidia GTX 580 levels its possible show real time at 720P 60fps or 1080P 30fps.

I think Crysis 2 on DX11 has already reached this level if not surpassed it in some way. But more importantly it only takes one 580gtx to max crysis 2 on dx11, this could bring hope to the nextgen consoles.
http://i53.tinypic.com/2psfzlu.jpg

Still Samaritan demo showed awesome tessellated smoke and blood, full body deformation and awesome reflections, but Crysis 2 is close as never any game was. C2 sometimes looks like CG, especially during cut-scenes.

Some of the stuff in C2 is better, some not. It's mostly about the content and Epic has some better looking stuff to show off their engine. I don't see the reason in comparing them like this.

*sigh*... the closer we get to realism... the more boring things start to look :-(

I've just been viewing vids on Deviant Art, and someone posted some footage from a Cosplay convention. Seeing the manga/anime style in real life, it just doesn't work as well. So a photorealistic renderer isn't the best solution for every game, by far! That said, once you can do phororealism, which you do want for racers and sports games, then you'll have the grunt to do every other style perfectly. It's a benchmark and so that's why it's showed in tech demos, but we shouldn't think that the future is just photorealism - only, if you want to get people's attention with graphics, showing some anime-style or avant garde paticles isn't going to get as much attention as showing something people can't differentiate from a photo.

I dunno, there are many movies that make a lot of strange stuff work. Some recent superhero stuff, LOTR on the fantasy front, Avatar... And nowadays game devs are regularly employing designers and artists from the same talent pool.

Granted, no movie is fully photorealistic, there's a lot of stylization in every one of them (except maybe the dogma stuff) but it's still built upon reality.

Yeah I want things to look interesting like they did back in Halo 1. Lol

If a game doesn't look interesting it's not because the tech is too good.

Fair point. I guess it's the situation of the cosplay persons as much as anything. The same designs in a proper Hollywood movie in proper surrounds would (does) work. Still, Final Fantasy X as a live action move still doesn't sit well with me!

Live action Hollywood films are actually photo unreal even though they look photoreal. The reason is simple, you still need to artificially place lights into the scene to get a certain look for the camera.

I really enjoyed the more stylised stuff in Hollywood these days actually. Stuff like Sin City, 300, and TV shows like Spartacus where the scenes are often completely computer generated with actors superimposed in the scenes.

I dunno, i just think i really like the more fantasy stuff in movies, TV and games and i get affraid when i see the most talented game devs with the best tech wasting it to make games look as real as boring reality. I'm not saying the games are boring, just that when i look at an engine like UE3, CE3 or Frostbite 2 i just think "what would it look like if they took a more surreal or stylised aesthetic and rendered it using all this fancy tech"... I'd personally feel that the result would be far more impressive than just making something look like real life, even though the latter would likely be technically more impressive. If say they rendered Mirror's Edge 2 with the new UE3 updates with the quality of the Samaritan demo, that for me would be incredibly more impressive than the Samaritan demo itself.

So i do agree with Shifty in the sense that "realism" is a great bench mark for showing what an engine can do. I just don't wanna play realism. I'd much rather be able to actaully play a game with the visual quality of a Square Enix CGI for example. That's the kind of thing that would make me swoon :-D

I do wonder though, how far would we be from that kinda thing?

I wonder wether one of the reasons why many A-tier devs avoid those totally unreal settings (pun not intended) is sales potential. With heavily stylised games you're running the risk of alienating a large segment of the market beacuse people won't "get" your vision. Everybody gets reality. Maybe with video games at this stage it is harder to achieve a really distinct look that won't automaticaly get you a "niche" label? Some games might be lucky enough to escape that and become a success (like Halo* mentioned above) but aren't they exceptions?

*and even then we see people criticise it for being too colorful, too "purple" having weird/funny alien characters etc.

I wouldn't call Halo an exception at all. Gear of War is also a game that isn't even remotely realistic. In fact it's far more stylised in it's artistic direction than most games, and is very successful. Fallout 3/NV, Oblivion, even GTA games pre-IV have all been more stylised than realistic.

In fact i think that if you remove modern era military FPS games (which wouldn't work as anything other than realistic), the majority of the most successful games out there are stylised in some fashion or form. Stylised doesn't always = cartoon or anime too. I consider mass effect a more stylised game. The Uncharted series has a far more stylised aesthetic than say Call of Duty, even though it's set in the real world.

So i certainly wouldn't consider anything that's not realistic as automatically "niche". I think that's a false premise. Overall in gaming it actually seems more like the realistic games are more niche in terms of overall sales success across all games.

In terms of rendering quality, the next gen shouldn't be too far off from that. Assuming the nextbox will have something comparable to a GTX560Ti. But I don't think we'll have animation in realtime being comparable to CGI any time soon. It seems hardly any studios are even trying.

A few of them do and i really respect them.

I love games with great animation, and i oftentimes think that animation is way more important to me than graphics in creating living, breathing and believeable game worlds. I look at stuff like the Last Guardian, and even though it looks nice graphically it isn't amazing, yet the attention to detail and subtlty of the animations just bring everything to life.

It's why i love stuff like Studio Ghibli's work :-D

Which is why I said they're stylized. There's also make-up on the actors, the kind of film stock they use matters, and they grade the final film, nowadays digitally but they've used to do it before with other methods (Se7en for example used a complex chemical process).

But they still film real stuff and that makes it grounded in reality.

The Witcher 2 is a great example of a beautiful game whose look is largely ruined by some of the most horrible animation this side of the original Xbox. They couldn't even include something so simple as a "walking up/down stairs" animation; instead Geralt just continues to run as normal and floats up or down the staircase.

Naughty Dog should license out their animation tech. They seem to have something figured out that nobody else knows.

That's the thing though, I don't think those games are really pushing it when it comes to "artistically crazy" things with the tech. They're more or less trying to replicate a realistic setting or an easily recognizable fantastic one - they play it fairly safe. Stylized, yes. Trying to create something original, unrealistic (maybe even bordering on bizarre) - no.

Check out Eternal Sonata if you want crazy beautiful and creative.

Thing is, people will accept stylised, very unrealistic stuff because they accept it as a cartoon (eg Roger Rabbit, any Anime, etc). As soon as you start heading towards realism, you give people something that alerts all their visual cues, which makes anything that's not perfect stand out a mile. Look at Dancing Baby or the Final Fantasy movie. They create something that looks close enough to reality for all the flaws to be instinctively picked up on.

We accept Jessica Rabbit as a character because she's a cartoon. We don't accept Dancing Baby because it looks creepily close to a baby that we all know and understand should look and act a particular way, but it doesn't.

There's a point where "close enough" to reality is worse that being totally unrealistic. You either have to be all the way to full realism, or every thing wrong on a "mostly real" image stands out disproportionately. And it gets more pronounced when you include movement that we automatically expect to see.

So I guess we go back to what Shifty Geezer mentioned earlier. Most developers trying to show off new engines/tech will focus on the holy grail of realism (as it is harder to get right) and any adventurous experimentation with more original look/settings will (hopefully) come further down the line.