Image Quality and Framebuffer Analysis for Available/release build Games *Read the first post*

So it's not just me when I absolutely don't get the praise for the image clarity in the DF article. It's full of messed up silhouette edges... The game also doesn't look too nice art wise, IMHO.
 
So it's not just me when I absolutely don't get the praise for the image clarity in the DF article. It's full of messed up silhouette edges... The game also doesn't look too nice art wise, IMHO.
I think it looks quite decent art wise, I like how you can see the valleys but yes it could have been a lot better though. It does not really look much like the Himalayan areas of India and Nepal. The African jungle setting in Farcry 2 is still unmatched in terms of atmosphere.
 
So it's not just me when I absolutely don't get the praise for the image clarity in the DF article. It's full of messed up silhouette edges... The game also doesn't look too nice art wise, IMHO.

Can't really speak about the IQ myself, but in terms of art it really doesn't have a patch on - let's say - AC Unity. It's a pretty game, but it still looks like it's firmly rooted in yesteryear's rendering tech.
 
Been playing FC4 and man the HRAA has so much temporal ghosting. It's no where near Halo Reach level but it happens everywhere on the screen since the world has so many moving objects (plus the player movement). The sharpness due to HRAA also hurts the image in my opinion. The game is pretty damn good at reducing jaggies but has an oversharpened look while having a blur due to ghosting which makes it look strange. I would still prefer Infamous' SMAA but I guess that is more expensive than HRAA.
Which version do you play?
 
Well the art isn't any thing special in FC4, but it has a decent amount of detail. I don't think they are using PBR and the grass lacks the shimmer that dew would cause in the early morning times. The Leaves on the trees have a weird look caused by the HRAA that I haven't seen in any another title I have ever played. I haven't noticed any ghosting whatsoever on the X1 version. It kinda has a last gen look to the artwork aside from texture resolution, but the amount of detail on screen with very little noticeable LOD is pretty impressive.
One thing I absolutely hated about last gen titles was grass and other objects poping in 5 feet in front of the camera. It ruins the illusion more than almost anything else.
 
Farcry 3 used physically based shading on PC, no reason to suspect why FC4 isn't using it.

In any case, I dont think I'd be wrong if I claimed that Farcry 4 has the highest draw distance (even the far off trees cast at least some sort of shadow, even if low detail), least LOD issues for objects and shadows, highest AF, densest foliage and the most atmospheric/persistent fog and smoke system in any game out there right now in either of the consoles. All this at a very stable 30FPS, 1080P (on PS4 atleast) while still looking better and having a bigger world than Farcry 3 on PC. That is a feat in itself which is only possible due to a new generation of hardware.

I disagree with the notion that it has a last gen look to it, the lighting is slightly less impressive compared to the likes of Killzone and such but this is a huge open world game with day night cycle and a GI implementation that is not pre baked like AC Unity. It is pretty apparent that it is an 8th gen game. You need only look at the last gen videos of Farcry 4 to see the difference in detail. Also you need to compare it to Farcry 3 on PS360, the difference between them is massive (and FC3 on PS360 ran at 25FPS and wasn't full 720P). I also like how alive and moving the world is with the flags, fog and vegetation/foliage.
 
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Holy moly. I tried the Guilty Gear Demo on PS4 and this is probably the best use of amime style 3D rendering I have ever seen ever.
its almost impossible to fathom that what you are seeing on screen is made out of polygons.


So well made. Its not only the visuals amazing. They took special care of the animations too. As a result the game is extremely faithful to the 2D original. Its crazy just to think that they revisited the 2D counterpart frame by frame and replicated them on the 3D models.

To make the 2D look more convincing, they are doing something with the 3D perspective to avoid angle changes on the characters while the camera pans. Its like they are rendered independently from the rest. As a result the character models give convincingly the illusion that they have no depth.

I wonder how the PS3 version fairs. I d love to see a Digital Foundry analysis on this one. Its pretty interesting
 
Looks so perfectly hand drawn that I'm wondering why they even bothered with 3d to be honest. It's an impressive feat, but ... why? For a post fight camera move that lasts half a second?
 
And the intro!! ;)
Well this one is 60fps 1080p and I think it could easier to run this game in 3D graphics in recent hardware than using sprites, especially such high quality ones? Just a feeling, I have no idea.
 
To make the 2D look more convincing, they are doing something with the 3D perspective to avoid angle changes on the characters while the camera pans. Its like they are rendered independently from the rest. As a result the character models give convincingly the illusion that they have no depth.
It'd have to be. Orthographic projection for the characters and composite into 3D.
 
I'm pretty sure the consoles would have had zero problems with the handling of a bunch of full HD sprites at 60fps. Heck, even the Vita runs damn near perfect conversions of the Blazblue games at its native res and at a full 60fps despite being settled with a crummy mobile gpu.

Very much looking forward to it, though. It's basically Blazblue with a much more agreeable artstyle for me.
 
Looks so perfectly hand drawn that I'm wondering why they even bothered with 3d to be honest. It's an impressive feat, but ... why? For a post fight camera move that lasts half a second?
There are a few other elements that also use different camera angles. Pretty need. Makes the 2D fighting to appear more dynamic.

I think a probable reason was to see if they can get great results in 3D and thus in the future (or with the current game) reduce time spent by the artists. Drawing hundreds (or thousands?) HD sprites takes way too much time. I remember that in the last KOF game which aimed for high quality sprites required months for every character.

With this solution they have a nice renderer and the models are ready for the animations/moves that the artists/designers want, without redrawing sprites for every frame.

I believe it also reduces time for the high quality cut scene making. Gone are many inefficiencies of the 2D animation. They are using the same base models it seems for both cut scenes and game models.

Their work will prove most valuable for future iterations
 
Well this one is 60fps 1080p and I think it could easier to run this game in 3D graphics in recent hardware than using sprites, especially such high quality ones? Just a feeling, I have no idea.
Nah. Sprites just use the 3D hardware. Slap textures onto quads and render away. And even if they went with true 2D using bitmapped graphics, it's just a load of memory copy and blend ops. I doubt anything more than the CPUs would be needed. 30 GB/s available CPU BW would be 15 GBs read/write, 256 MB per frame at 60 fps. At 8 MBs per full 1080p frame, that's 32 complete screen loads of imagery.

Flops wise, it could be a fair bit though. 4 FMADDS per LERP for each blended pixel, I think. So 32 MFlops to blend one 1080p buffer with another. At 60 fps, 2 GFlops per frame blend per second. Okay, that's easily doable for a real-world use.

Edit: Wrong on the LERP costs. (1-p1)*p2 + p1*p3 is two FMADDs, so double my FLOPs requirements. Not that it makes any difference. Sticking a few sprites over a 1080p background is still something just the CPUs can handle!
 
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Looks so perfectly hand drawn that I'm wondering why they even bothered with 3d to be honest. It's an impressive feat, but ... why? For a post fight camera move that lasts half a second?
3d can be a major time saver, eg you decide to give a player a necklace as well or change the light from below vs from the left, with 2d you have to change all the sprites with 3d for the light change practically nothing needs to be changed and the necklace not so much
 
Holy moly. I tried the Guilty Gear Demo on PS4 and this is probably the best use of amime style 3D rendering I have ever seen ever.
its almost impossible to fathom that what you are seeing on screen is made out of polygons.


So well made. Its not only the visuals amazing. They took special care of the animations too. As a result the game is extremely faithful to the 2D original. Its crazy just to think that they revisited the 2D counterpart frame by frame and replicated them on the 3D models.

To make the 2D look more convincing, they are doing something with the 3D perspective to avoid angle changes on the characters while the camera pans. Its like they are rendered independently from the rest. As a result the character models give convincingly the illusion that they have no depth.

I wonder how the PS3 version fairs. I d love to see a Digital Foundry analysis on this one. Its pretty interesting


yeah It is a very nice looking game, it's one of the best looking games running on UE3. And if my memory serves me correctly, each characters is around 30,000 polygons.
 
The screenshot is crazily compressed, which doesn't help matters, but there are a couple edges on the bridge to indicate that at some point in the history of the engine's Render Pipe Universe, it was perhaps 1080p.

It's a wonder devs bother with 1080p while applying Chronaton Blurrovision Aberration Screen Space Tachyons of the 7th Degree. Or maybe the framebuffers went through a few civil wars, which would explain the Red, Blues, and Green Pixellite citizens dividing all of Known Screen Space into a mess of 1080proportions.
 
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