Whatever RTGI they are using isn't working very well. The RT lighting in Avatar is fairly underwhelming TBH.
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Assassins Creed Shadows
- Thread starter cheapchips
- Start date
cheapchips
Veteran
Frenetic Pony
Veteran
Ubisoft's own Star Wars Outlaws looks better, as does Stalker 2, actually Forbidden West looks better at times, heck so does Hogwarts Legacy at times. This doesn't looks amazing in a technical sense, but it's fine enough.
Yasuke's gameplay just looks like a copy/paste of Ghost of Tsushima, they may as well have copy/pasted the sprites they use to telegraph unblockable type attacks, actually they might've literally copied it by eye from a screenshot they're so close, but this time the health bars are way bigger so it's just button mashy.
At least the ninja character looks interesting, Ghost's "stealth" plays like ass and this looks like it might be the first AC game with, I dunno, stealth beyond the old "social stealth" stuff from like 2.
cheapchips
Veteran
I don't disagree on looks, but I would say that none of those games have same scope as Shadows (as far as I can tell). There's a production/art cost to that, as well as an on screen technical cost. I feel that's underappreciated and not discussed beyond 'it looks ok but x looks better'.
For instance, why does it's GI feel lacking in the gameplay demo they did?
Why does it feel less geometrically complex than Outlaws, when their's really a shed load going on, especially when looking over the game's forests?
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I think it looks pretty good. It's not mind-blowing, but in no world does this look last gen or even cross gen or anything. The more natural and wide open scenery was extremely good. More up close in the village area, there's definitely more blemishes. Ambient occlusion doesn't seem to be doing a great job in some areas, and the lighting in general while a good step up from before, still has room for improvement. Animations in combat look quite jerky, but I think the camera jolting is exacerbating this feeling of jerkiness. Shadows also show some trailing issues in areas, though not sure if this is a reconstruction issue.
I did notice how much of the world seems more physicalized now though, which is cool.
Fake edit: I was just looking at some Valhalla footage for comparison, and it really is a big step up almost everywhere.
I did notice how much of the world seems more physicalized now though, which is cool.
Fake edit: I was just looking at some Valhalla footage for comparison, and it really is a big step up almost everywhere.
Frenetic Pony
Veteran
Outlaws runs on Ubisoft's Snowdrop, Shadows runs on Anvil which is it's own thing. The "Scale" you're seeing is also from Anvil, the behind the scenes dev tech is just as important as any display tech, moreso arguably. Anvil has a giant suite of tools built up over years to quickly build out much larger more detailed AC worlds than Snowdrop has.
But AC Shadow's up close LODs are relatively low in polycount even as the density is high into the distance. They appear to be using a diffuse concentrated probe based GI system rather than Snowdrop's skinned mesh support and mixed diffuse/reflection tracing/probes, this makes a kind of sense with their large crowds and masses of animated foliage. But they could've skipped building the bvh for most skinned objects and hoped screenspace would be enough for that like UE5 can do.
I do suspect this could run on Switch 2 at low enough settings though, and it is like Ubisoft to throw support behind a wide variety of platforms.
cheapchips
Veteran
Anvil Technical Architect, Nicolas Lopez, mentioned that they're using they're using virtual geometry. It's not resulting in Nanite levels of detail up close on rocks/tree trunks. Wonder if it was too late in production to leverage that way?
Obviously could be giving them a huge leg up in lod management / streaming / getting rid of popin over the prior games.
Edit: Tweet deleted but it said:
Obviously could be giving them a huge leg up in lod management / streaming / getting rid of popin over the prior games.
Edit: Tweet deleted but it said:
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Reynaldo
Regular
Fixed this for you:Anvil Technical Architect, Nicolas Lopez, mentioned that they're using they're using virtual geometry. It's not resulting in Nanite levels of detail up close on rocks/tree trunks. Wonder if it was too late in production to leverage that way?
Obviously could be giving them a huge leg up in lod management / streaming / getting rid of popin over the prior games.
x.com
x.com
GI is Raytraced:
cheapchips
Veteran
Curious that he delete /changed it.
Reynaldo
Regular
Weird, it was up half and hour ago.
cheapchips
Veteran
Might just be due to Twitter enshitification
Virtual Geometry is one of the ingredients of nanite, but not the whole stew. Nanite-like micro geometry is only made viable in UE5 with software-rasterization into a visibility buffer. Any other game has to implement the aame or find some other way to make micro-poly rasterization efficient enough, irrespective of if they can handle all the verts.
Compared to conventional GI there is a qualitative generational difference. Without RT GI games mostly look static and old-fashioned. With advanced and dynamic GI more objects blend homogeneously into the envoronment. The same applies to Lumen.
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