For now guys. Gamers seem to have short memory. Compare any of the first demos of UE3 with the last gears games. Those engines only get better with time.
Effects that add natural limits of optics I can understand and appreciate, even going so far to recreate contemporary styles of certain eras (eg. 1970s camera for a Driver game set in the 70s). But when was the last time you watched a Hollywood movie or TV series or even home video where no-one bothered to clean the lens?! It'd only make sense artistically if that effect was applied to a 'live cam' view, like a head-mounted camera or camcorder.There's a lot of chromatic aberration-type effects too, making the image slightly blurred and out of focus.
"-High-quality temporal anti-aliasing, eliminating jagged edges and temporal aliasing"
Sounds like TXAA, thats why its blurry and means that it can be easily scaled down, because TXAA is expensive.
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No, thats why demo is quite downgraded.
It'd only make sense artistically if that effect was applied to a 'live cam' view, like a head-mounted camera or camcorder.
However, in consoles since the efficiency is higher
Again, it works very well for our stuff, but where're using it as a much more subtle effect.
This demo is to sell the new engine, so it makes some sense that they push everything to 200%.
May I ask why? In PC games if one game runs at 30 fps with GTX 680, than with PS4 GPU the game should only run at less than 20 fps. However, in consoles since the efficiency is higher, can't we achieve higher frame rate? Thx.
Weird differences. At the very beggining, the pilars seem to show a very strong reflection of the hanging cloth, which is a dynamic object, but it is so strong it makes me think it's something elese, like a lit candle, but I see no lightsource there. First demo didn't have that, but reversely, there was strong reflection of the blue light coming from that cave on the nearby wall, this one is now missing on ps4. All that could be consequences of the different sun position on both demos.
The other funny difference is the opening door sequence. Both demos had wrong lighting in that sequence, in the first showing, that part was really dark, and kept so even after the door opened, wich should have brightened up the inside environment. On ps4, that whole section is lit by the outside, but even when the door is closed! That is the kind of out of place lighting that always jumps at me on evey Gears of War game, but it's somewhat uderstandable with UE3's very stactic lighting model. With UE4's big push for dynamic lighting and no baking, this is somewhat odd. The ps4 version suffers the most as this artifacts causes the door to have all sorts of out of place specular reflections on the borders of its geometric details, the kind of thing I can't believe most artists didn't notice, and I don't understand why they would neglect that, but they did. The ss specular occlusion proposed by Tri-Ace would be perfect for that particular scene, but the engine does not support that apparently.
Lava scene still displays the whole body of lava casting light into the scene. Evidence of Voxel Lighting? Maybe, but they could have found another way to do that... At around 1:10 there was very strong parallax on the streaming lava on the first showing, but this is either missing or much more suttle on ps4.
The latter shot is the one where the omission of cloud shadows is the most obvious, the most clear and non-subjective compromise of the ps4 conversion. You can't just say this was an artistic choice, the clouds are not dimmer, they are completely absent.
This last lava close up has vey different lighting on both versions too: the ps4 seems to have a rather obvious point light atatched to the tip of the lava stream (watch its specular highlight) which disapears after the lava goes under the pillar (did it go inside with the lava? haha) That was handled completely differently on the first demo.
The outside mountains are completely different too. Aside from the the whole cracks openingn and ice monster awakening thing that simply didn't exist last year, they have other rock formations and somewhat cartoony looking pine trees now.
Overall I'd say this latter demonstration looks less organic and "CGey" than the before. The general look of lighting is sharper and less smooth now, which creates better contrast, but seems more artificial. This is the kind of demo I use to hate. As it shows a good end result, but what I wanna do is be able to point at very speciffic things and say "this is tessellation" "this is sprite based depth of field" "this shadows use variance shadow mapping rather than pcf filtering" and so on, but it is clearly designed to not do that. The focus is on the overall look and feel of stuff. But on something this "directed" the general look and feel is meaningless, and not very representative of what real gameplay could produce.
The key differentiating factor between last year's demo and this newer iteration is that the Sparse Voxel Octree Global Illumination (SVOGI) lighting system hasn't made the cut. Instead, Epic is aiming for very high quality static global illumination with indirect GI sampling for all moving objects, including characters.
"[SVOGI] was our prototype GI system that we used for Elemental last year. And our targets, given that we've had announced hardware from Sony, that's where we're going to be using Lightmass as our global illumination solution instead of SVOGI," senior technical artist and level designer Alan Willard told Eurogamer,
shacknews.com said:Unreal Engine 4 Playstation 4 Elemental demo GDC 2013
http://www.shacknews.com/file/34808/unreal-engine-4-playstation-4-elemental-demo-gdc-2013
MediaInfo said:File size: 286 MiB
Duration: 2mn 50s
Bit rate: 13.9 Mbps
Width: 1920 pixels
Height: 1080 pixels
Frame rate: 30.000 fps
Scan type: Progressive
Yep, i remember, they all had dynamic lighting which lacked in UE till version 3.5.
It does apear in some games. Not very comonly, and it is used quite sparsely, but it is not completely absent. Both Gears 3 and Judgment have it in some levels if you want precise examples.And parallax occlusion mapping that wasnt used in any UE game i've played or remember
How much benefit can we achieve with "low-level optimization", "higher efficiency" on PS4? For example, can we say that a PS4 which has better effieiency may have performance equivalent to a PC with i3 & GTX 670 (or some spec like this)?You take a fact that is unproven as an axiom (no people claiming it is so in interviews and slideware, does not count). That is a rather risky stance to take.
Looks very expensive for just tech demo though.
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Because GPU in PS4 is like 50% slower than 680 and ps4 cpu is much slower than i7.
They can achieve Infiltrator demo on PS4 sure, but not without severe compromises like in Elemental Demo.
Making game with such fidelity is other issue.
"-High-quality temporal anti-aliasing, eliminating jagged edges and temporal aliasing"
Sounds like TXAA, thats why its blurry and means that it can be easily scaled down, because TXAA is expensive.
There's a lot of chromatic aberration-type effects too, making the image slightly blurred and out of focus.