Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2023]
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GhostofWar
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aka John, Alex and Oliver pixel counting breasts, examining crouch grabs and naked man reflections
I'm just poking fun guys, when you were calling yourselves out on it, it made me chuckle.
davis.anthony
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With much CP2077 has changed with 2.0 and 2.1 patches it won't be far off GTA6 in terms of density and who knows what's going to happen to the it after 2.1.
One thing for sure is that in terms of lighting, shadows and reflections, CP2077 will still be a generation a head of GTA 6 with it's Overdrive mode on.
If you've not had the pleasure of playing CP2077 with Overdrive on, I can not explain how mind blowing it can be, still pictures don't convey how the lighting interacts, you have to play it.
One thing for sure is that in terms of lighting, shadows and reflections, CP2077 will still be a generation a head of GTA 6 with it's Overdrive mode on.
If you've not had the pleasure of playing CP2077 with Overdrive on, I can not explain how mind blowing it can be, still pictures don't convey how the lighting interacts, you have to play it.
Pictures also don't convey the horrible ghosting and smearing that was so bad that I turned it off and played with RT Ultra.
We can watch videos of it fine. It looks good, but there's still plenty of cross-gen roots about it. You can nitpick certain features, but as a whole, GTAVI looks like it's definitely a superior overall package visually. It's just consistently fantastic looking everywhere with a nearly unrivaled level of detail and variety and we know it's going to be massively more physically interactive than CP2077 as well. Just the quality of the NPC's alone here seems like it's going to elevate the visual experience heavily.
And speaking to the DF video itself, they say the shadows are nothing special here, and while that does look true if we're just talking individual shadow quality, it seems to have extensively distant shadows, which makes an enormous difference to me. I mean, this was to be expected after something like RDR2 already had this, but I'll take merely 'decent' shadow quality if it allows them to extend shadows way off.
davis.anthony
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davis.anthony
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I'll say it again as you clearly missed my point.
From a lighting, shadows and reflection point of view, GTA6 won't get anywhere close to CP2077 with Overdrive enabled.
I didn't comment on asset quality.
It's still an exaggeration as no, it wont be a 'generation' ahead. The lighting seen so far in GTAVI already looks perfectly top tier. And I'd bet the eventual PC version will get some extra goodies in terms of higher quality shadows and reflections, much like GTAV did.
But your last comment about the game being 'mind blowing' definitely sounded like you were talking about the visuals as a whole. If you weren't, ok, but that's just kind of weird to me.
davis.anthony
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You think path tracing isn't a generation a head?
And yes, walking around and seeing how the lighting, shadows and reflections interact with each other and the environment is mind blowing.
Flappy Pannus
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- Native resolution from the trailer looks to be a dynamic 1440p
- Looks to be using RTGI
- Evidence of RT reflections, with added SSR
The GTA VI trailer is very good. Graphically, I particularly like the hair, the environmental design and the character models. It will be one of the best looking games. I would have mentioned almost all the points DF mentioned. Also that CIG once said that it's much harder to make good hair in a game with lots of characters on screen.
I liked how the number of players with RTX 3080 was mentioned. It's strange when the PC playerbase is excluded while the Xbox with much smaller numbers will get the game much earlier.
It's also very commendable that they said why RDR2 still performs relatively well with raster graphics. Without ray tracing cities look much worse than desert landscapes etc. without ray tracing. You can't do a game like Cyberpunk 2077 properly without ray tracing.
Cyberpunk 2077 clearly looks better on my computer than what I saw in the GTA VI video. Cyberpunk 2077 has a more CG movie look while GTA VI is a bit more gamey.
Cyberpunk 2077 also has water physics. Not as extensive, but it does have them. Water doesn't play as big a role in Cyberpunk 2077 as it does in GTA VI.
I liked how the number of players with RTX 3080 was mentioned. It's strange when the PC playerbase is excluded while the Xbox with much smaller numbers will get the game much earlier.
It's also very commendable that they said why RDR2 still performs relatively well with raster graphics. Without ray tracing cities look much worse than desert landscapes etc. without ray tracing. You can't do a game like Cyberpunk 2077 properly without ray tracing.
Cyberpunk 2077 clearly looks better on my computer than what I saw in the GTA VI video. Cyberpunk 2077 has a more CG movie look while GTA VI is a bit more gamey.
Cyberpunk 2077 has hair physics. It depends on the hairstyle. See Judy and Songbird, for example. Sure, GTA VI's hair physics is more advanced and across more characters but Cyberpunk 2077 also has hair physics.
Cyberpunk 2077 also has water physics. Not as extensive, but it does have them. Water doesn't play as big a role in Cyberpunk 2077 as it does in GTA VI.
Yes, I always find the changing area lights particularly impressive. How it interacts with the moving objects, how the shadows are cast, etc. Pathtracing makes them look even more impressive than raytracing. No game has anything comparable.
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No, it isn't. It's still a horrible ghostly mess just not as awful as it was before.
And true that every game has IQ problems but 1. This doesn't address the issue. And 2. This one is beyond distracting. I see NPCs walking in the distance leaving a ghosting trail as they walk.
davis.anthony
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That is all subjective.
It's not than playable to me and is a lot better than a lot of other games.
Plus you can always do the DLSS DSR trick like I do.
No I dont, when the results of non-path tracing look as good as GTA VI does.
I mean, if you're talking purely on a technical level, path tracing may become a more normal thing in some future generation, but it's not because path tracing is just so much better looking, but simply because it's so much more expensive. I define 'next gen' by the overall actual end visuals and ambitions, not just technical checklists.
As GTA VI is showing, and as I've talked about many times by now, there are many aspects to graphics that still have lots of room for improvement that aren't related to ray tracing. And those things are showing to be more defining to being 'next gen' than Cyberpunk's path tracing.
davis.anthony
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The lighting, reflections and shadows in GTA6 are not impressive compared to what we've seen over the last 2-3 years in other titles.
As CP2077 has shown, it is and can be so much better looking.
And those improvements still depend on lighting, reflections and shadows in order to look right.
They'll go hand in hand.
The density of the world shown in GTA6 is super impressive, no doubt.
But when you look at the lighting, shadows and reflections, it's not pushing any boundaries and barely doing anything more than what we saw in last gen games in terms of technology.
The games 2 years away, who knows what we'll have from other studio's in that time, GTA6 might not be that next gen looking by the time it releases.
"Barely doing anything more than we saw last gen in terms of technology"
Yea, that's all I need to know you're not here to be reasonable. You dont even really believe what you're saying, but you're saying it because you have some bizarre attachment to platforming CP2077, and so desperately need to downplay GTA VI in whatever way you can.
Also, 2025 is not two years away. It's barely more than one year away.
GhostofWar
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Not really interested in picking a horse here, but until gameplay arrives comparisons to any other game should probably be none playable gameplay/cutscene vs none playable gameplay/cutscene. I don't think it's controversial to say cutscenes generally look a bit better than gameplay in general. For instance the cutscene in the car with Reed and some other cutscenes give the gta6 trailer a run for it's money.
GTA6 trailer doesn't feature reflective surfaces with lots of billboards, so technology may seem less impressive, but when you look closely it does have a lot of next-gen lighting and hard to point to anything missing compared to Cyberpunk.
Real-time multi-bounce GI from dynamic objects is a good example. Check out this spot, where light comes from outside bounces from the red shirt onto the wall on the left tinting it orange.
When she rotates, the lighting on the wall changes, as now less light can bounce from her shirt onto it:
Shadows become softer with distance:
You can also see real-time ray traced reflections with GI and shadows in them:
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