Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2020]

[Jupiter]

It is also impressive to see changing time and weather in the same area in realtime and in every other area of the game. In one moment you have clear weather and then you slowly see it becoming a heavy thunderstorm. There is a special feeling and atmosphere in those moments which cannot be achived with simple static lighting.

Therefore, it does not make sense to compare static levels with open world games that have changing weather and times of day.

 

[DavidGraham]

Best looking and most technical is different tho. You can have all the techs but what if you sacrifice on density, asset quality, character models and the full blown result of a baked GI image where no dynamic lighting can dream of achieve without hardcore ray tracing? The overall visual impact and density is far greater in Tlou2 despite not using dynamic GI.

RDR 2 on PC is something else, everything is cranked up to 11, character and animal densities are increased, number of dynamic lights, reflections and shadows too, with massive draw distances. The world of Last of Us 2 is mostly static, in RDR2 everything changes and remains beautiful while doing so. RDR 2 combines both technical achievements with solid art direction.

 

[Karamazov]

one thing that always impressed me in RDR2 is foliage LOD, it is so so hard to notice where the grass in being drawn in the distance, something that even in TLOU2 is noticeable, though density is higher than in RDR2.

 

[JoeJ]

TLOU2 Looks great. Makes me a bit envious i'm no console gamer.
I really like correct baked lighting. We do not see this that often recently, and it's still the only way to give me an overall 'looks good' impression. RDR2 can't compete this and often looks even bad to me, like most games do.

 

[chris1515]

EDIT:
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/...-digital-edition-deliver-a-discounted-console

The written article

 

[Deleted member 11852]

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/...-digital-edition-deliver-a-discounted-console

Glad to see that've covered the digital-only economics that some of us have been discussing in various threads.

 

[Ike Turner]

TLOU2 Looks great. Makes me a bit envious i'm no console gamer.
I really like correct baked lighting. We do not see this that often recently, and it's still the only way to give me an overall 'looks good' impression. RDR2 can't compete this and often looks even bad to me, like most games do.

Baked lighting done right is still the way to go if the game doesn't require any form of dynamic lighting (which is not where the industry is going though...). But TLOU2 is far from being a good example of it. On the contrary. Its lighting is embarrassingly bad in many cases and far worst that RDR2 (who is fully dynamic to boot..)..

Stop at any random point in the DF video & marvel at the amazing lighting...

Great example of the superbe GI according to the DF bloke ...what ?? this looks atrocious:

Grass barely has any AO (well everything seems to lack AO in the game essentially and looks utterly flat) Uncharted 4 & Lost Legacy are way more consistant..

Let's not talk about how the E3 2018 "gameplay demo" compares to the final product in terms of lighting, animation & shading...

Character lighting is all wrong/flat in the retail game. Control, Horizon, Spiderman, Death Stranding, RDR2 etc are way more consistant and better looking. TLOU2 has the best facial animation bar none though.

 

[eloic]

Great example of the superbe GI according to the DF bloke ...what ?? this looks atrocious:

I agree with most parts of your message, but in this case (besides the lo-res shadows) I don't see where's the atrocity. I think it looks nice and realistic.

 

[AlNom]

There's a stark disconnect in lighting on the stairs and the walls.

The wall & railing cast the main shadow, but then there's no self-shadow of the steps.

 

[eloic]

There's a stark disconnect in lighting on the stairs and the walls.

The wall & railing cast the main shadow, but then there's no self-shadow of the steps.

It may look weird but I thought that was because of the angle of the light...

 

[London Geezer]

Going through the youtube video and finding frames that don't look amazing is hardly a fair assessment. Play the game. It looks overwhelmingly and consistently good. Sure we can all find little places here and there that don't hold up, in every game. Remember this is running on a 1.8TF GPU and the shittiest CPU ever made, people!

 

[BRiT]

This is why hyperboles and over-hyping takes away from the actual final product. Saying something is next-gen opens it up to all the criticism its receiving, rightfully so.

 

[London Geezer]

This is why hyperboles and over-hyping takes away from the actual final product. Saying something is next-gen opens it up to all the criticism its receiving, rightfully so.

Some of the cut-scenes sure make me wonder how they will be able to top it in the next gen and provide that 'next gen jump' that we are expecting. But this looks decidedly like a PS4 game, with all the limitations we can expect from that.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Stop at any random point in the DF video & marvel at the amazing lighting...

Okay. I guess you were trying to be sarcastic but here's three random captures and it ain't looking as bad as you're wanting it to. For my sampling I just clicked on the timeline four times. One was a developer image of a character close-up and not gameplay so I didn't include it.

Great example of the superbe GI according to the DF bloke ...what ?? this looks atrocious:

Actually, he was talking about the effective colour bounce. The real problem with that scene is the lack of shadows cast by the steps.

 

[JoeJ]

Looks like they forgot to update the walls after adding the stairs

I wonder how the workflow is here. It's not possible to rebake the whole game after doing some edits. I would assume an automatic system rebakes some area around changes and uses some falloff at the boundary to blend with previous results?
So either it's a bug in that system, or they do this indeed manually and forgot something.

Its lighting is embarrassingly bad in many cases and far worst that RDR2 (who is fully dynamic to boot..)..

RDR2 looks good to me only rarely. For most it looks terrible. Though i don't wanna be picky against open world games.

It's interesting to see how different opinions people have, comparing those games. Expectations are different, perception, sense and tolerance to different kinds of errors... all very subjective.
Did we had this before? Or is it because we are at the sole of uncanny valley at the moment?

 

[Globalisateur]

So am I the only one to be really bothered by the awful image quality ? you all really can see through this mud and admire what's left of the textures and effects ?

I am talking about TLOU2.

 

[Dictator]

Just as a Personal opinion: baked lighting does not too much to excite me. My mind always sees the raw disconnect in visual style and look between dynamic and static objects (almost like Cartoons of old that use matte background with cells over them). It also invariably has disconnect and leaks and what not in it's own right, and misaligned specular.

That and I do not find it a technically interesting solution to "lighting a game". I like dynamic things.

Just my two Cents.

 

[JoeJ]

Technically, baking is still an interesting and challenging problem. Just because innovation moves to the offline side of things it's still innovation.

I often thought about baked lighting like in The Order, but making lobe directions adaptive and optimize it so it can capture HF specular.
This paper does this, and results are really good: http://web.student.chalmers.se/groups/gfx-web/Spherical Gaussian Light-field Textures for Fast Precomputed Global Illumination.pdf

But when using this, the terrible rim lighting effect from fresnel and specular probes for dynamic objects would appear even more terrible i guess.
So we could use RT now, but only on dynamic objects to fix this and add some bounce lighting. And also for the static scene to add some occlusion from dynamic objects - maybe capsules would do.
I'd like to see that in a game. Total eye candy eventually

 

[iroboto]

Some of the cut-scenes sure make me wonder how they will be able to top it in the next gen and provide that 'next gen jump' that we are expecting. But this looks decidedly like a PS4 game, with all the limitations we can expect from that.

lighting and shadows. Everything else is already there in great quantities.

 

[Goodtwin]

A very solid conversion of the game to Switch. I have been playing it since the release on Friday, and have really enjoyed it. VG Tech had previously stated that the game used dynamic resolution, but after watching the DF video, it seems like its more complicated than that. Apparently some parts of the image will reduce rendering resolution while leaving other parts at the 900p docked or 720p portable. Framerate holds tight to 60fps 99% of the time, but there are a few areas that can cause dips into the mid 50's. I have experienced some brief dips during races that werent really specific to a certain area of the map, but all in all, this game meets its target of 60fps the majority of the time. This isnt a Platinum game where 60fps is the target, and it dips into the low 40's often. Graphic settings appear to be closer to the PS4/X1 Remastered version than the original 360/PS3 build. Textures, lighting, shadows, partical effects and draw distance all surpass the last gen version and at a higher resolution. As a Switch gamer, this is another example of how well suited Switch is to getting superior versions of last generation games.

Unfortunately for this otherwise solid port, EA doomed it on arrival by pricing it at $50. Switch gamers understand that these late arrival ports to Switch arent going to see the bargain bin price the PS4/X1 versions currently have, but when the PS4/X1 version of Burnout Paradise Remastered launched at $40 on PS4/X1 two years ago, it will be a tough pill to swallow for many Switch gamers to shell out $50 for it on Switch.