Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora [PS5, XBSX|S, PC, Stadia]

Ray Traced Foliage
can't wait to see it.

 

This, Forza 5 and snippets in Plague Tale Requiem make me quite excited for next gen foliage. I didn't really have an idea what to expect.

(Not so much HFW, as that's like an amped up version of HZD flora. Not to say it doesn't look nice)

 

So what's their fallback path for Stadia which has no RT?

 

What is ray traced foliage?

 

it's not like someone cared about stadia, right ?

 

The same as a lot of PC which have no RT?

 

yeah lol? Are they talking about lighting and subsurface scattering for foliage using RT or what.

 

Accurately simulated photosynthesis.

 

That’s what I was wondering? Maybe all the leaves have RT reflections applied? Or shadows?

 

Usually the problem is alpha test and any hit shaders needed to intersect foliage to get shadows / reflections from it, while putting reflections / shadows on their surface is not the problem.
Maybe they do no alpha test at all. Polygons seem pretty detailed, capturing the shapes well enough.

 

I think the point was to showcase the absurdity of people calling this a real next gen game for one reason and one reason only. There is no previous gen version. They are certainly correct that this is a real next gen game. But not because it can't run on previous gen consoles, which it could if the developer decided to port it to previous gen consoles.

And that somehow makes the graphics better than if there existed a previous gen version. When we can see that the game is perfectly capable of running on last gen systems as it's on Stadia and PC (and likely will scale down to hardware similar to last gen systems).

IE - it'll take advantage of RT and modern console IO, using current gen consoles as the development target, but is fully capable of scaling to non-RT hardware and HDD based systems.

Basically, "real" next gen games are fully capable of running on last gen hardware if the developer wants to take the time to do it ... without sacrificing one bit of next gen quality on next gen systems. Previous gen consoles will obviously not look as good and possibly look quite bad in comparison, of course.

Regards,
SB

 

Most likely rendering the actual geometry using ray tracing.
Remember that ray tracing or ray casting is intersection/occlusion test method just like rasterization.

RT can be very efficient on very large geometry counts, texturing and shading can be done in different pass. (The generation of acceleration structure for the moving forest must be magic though. )

This would be my guess.
Although I'm quite sure that they had couple of alpha tested grass puffs near camera in some scenes cases. (Most likely rasterized?)

 

Pretty sure that's the newest version of the Snow Drop engine since it support RT. It's also possibly a real time cinematic "cutscene" and not gameplay for obvious reasons. I've played with the Snow Drop engine's real time photomode and it's quite powerful even on X1X. You could freely move the camera while everything in the scene runs as usual in real time with zero slow down. The only limitation is the camera distance but everything else is significantly upped in quality. That being said, Series X shouldn't have any problem rendering that cutscene in real time at 30fps.

 

This is just the English talking heads bit included in the above video:

 

This is an impressive looking game. Hopefully the downgrades aren't too aggressive.

 

Called it. Quite an easy guess, seeing the graphics that where on display.

 

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/...-cLAhTdaqYMC8BeFKuvimVFl-NesV32cWxVWyW4X2pCKs

Next gen starts with this one.