Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2023]

[davis.anthony]

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:

Suspected RT reflections...

Suspected RTGI....

So please don't talk like it's factual and confirmed.

That jail clip could well be a video file for all we know.

 

[davis.anthony]

"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.

I'm just stating my observations, which seem to have upset you in some way.

Is it because you have some bizarre attachment to GTA6, and so desperately need it to be the best?

I think some people need to go back and refresh their memories of GTA5's trailer Vs the downgrades it had when it launched.

 

[Karamazov]

It's too soon to compare lighting, and a bit unfair, Overdrive is only for powerfull PCs, who know how GTA6 will end up looking on PC, most certainly better than what was shown in this trailer

they might use RTGI only for cutscenes, like matrix awakens cranks up lighting in cutscenes

 

[Deleted member 11852]

some rippling textures and simple mesh deformation not reacting to anything. GTA5 water is already more advanced than that.

I thought they fixed that in 2.0? Or was that just bullet interactions with water?

I am really looking forward to a fresh playthrough of 2077 on PC over Christmas.

 

[Karamazov]

water has no real purpose in CP77, so it does not matter much if it's great looking or not, they were right to focus on other things.

 

[Subtlesnake]

Ignore, wrong thread.

 

[Below2D]

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.
View attachment 10207

When she rotates, the lighting on the wall changes, as now less light can bounce from her shirt onto it:
View attachment 10208

Shadows become softer with distance:
View attachment 10210

You can also see real-time ray traced reflections with GI and shadows in them:
View attachment 10209

That’s a cutscene. Wait until the real thing is out.

 

[function]

Suspected RT reflections...

Suspected RTGI....

So please don't talk like it's factual and confirmed.

That jail clip could well be a video file for all we know.

I'm wondering about the reflections too.

I know DF pointed out a single frame where the Naked Running Florida Man could be seen reflected under a truck that had just moved across the screen (and mostly occluded him), but it wouldn't be impossible for SSR to use the previous frame for SSR if needed (current + projected last might help with occlusion artefacts?).

Edit: Something like FSR2 is going to bring along some of the last 2 frames anyway. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[Below2D]

@Dictator It seems you won't be playing it until the PC version comes out later. It's a shame because I do think you're the best and most knowledgeable DF members and GTA VI is poised to be one of the more impressive games once it hits the shelves. Any way you might still cover the console version or assist one of the other guys?

 

[see colon]

That’s a cutscene. Wait until the real thing is out.

The problem with this type of content, as it pertains to DF analysis, is that we know laterally nothing about how this trailer was produced. Not what hardware, not if any of it is real time, not if it only cinematics. All of the proclamations that "RT is used here" or whatnot is simply conjecture. Not only could we have another puddlegate type scenario where the engine is capable of producing a level of visual fidelity in a controlled, small scale environment, but the effect would fall apart or exceed a system's capabilities if deployed in the full game. For an example in a shipping game, if you look at a game like Arkham Knight, the opening scene in the diner is great looking. If you look at the floor, much like the Spider-man demo, it uses a carefully placed cubemap for most of the reflections on the floor, the glass over the cake, the tile under the bar... It looks really good and things line up pretty convincingly without disapearing if they are out of camera view. Dynamic objects like characters, plus seats, booths, and tables are reflected differently. They aren't screen space because they don't disappear when occluded, but they do disappear if the model tis too far out of view. I think they might be handling them like shadows because they don't have color. The point is, this level of finely tuned graphic fidelity is never achieved in the game outside of the diner. Arkham Knight looks great, of course, but if you were only looking at the diner, through the lens of video compression, and without control over the camera, you could create a scenario where all of the criteria that is convincing DF that RT reflections are being used for the naked man running are present using the feature set of the diner. We aren't going to really know until the game comes out.

I understand the economics of why DF needs to produce content like this. I also enjoyed the banter in the video, and overall found it entertaining. I just find this stuff to be the least informative of all of the content they produce. But the GTAVI video has about twice the views of a regular DF video already, so there's that.

 

[DavidGraham]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1732801558079770979

 

[DavidGraham]

DF Analysis of Avatar Pandora. Hardware RT for global illumination indoors and outdoors, shadows (with large scale shadow rendering), and reflections. Audio is ray traced as well.

 

[Seanspeed]

Yea, these are the sorts of games that genuinely tempt me to upgrade my PC. Something that truly shows off what modern hardware can do. Even without the secret max settings, it just looks gorgeous. And the 'Far Cry'-esque nature of the game doesn't bother me too much, I like Far Cry games(in moderation). A big part of that is simply wandering around these beautiful worlds, so this looks it'll absolutely nail that.

 

[Jupiter]

Pretty big jump in what I was and I am able to experience renderingwise this year. Cyberpunk 2077 Path Tracing, Phantom Liberty, Alan Wake 2 and now Avatar.

This already looks very impressive and I'm excited to experience it myself on the computer. Unfortunately, I despise the movies and the scenario.

 

[Scott_Arm]

It's funny. I was watching the avatar vid and wondering why I thought the game looked amazing in some clips and terrible in others, and then I realized I thought it looked bad whenever there were a lot of bio-luminescent plants. Basically I think the lighting in the scenes with the bio-luminescence ends up looking flat because there's just more light everywhere removing a lot of the subtle shadows. Goes from looking like a cutting edge game to an older video game with flat lighting. Even though what they're doing is probably physically accurate my brain is not convinced because you never see that in real life.

The scale of the game is impressive, the density of the geometry is impressive and the lighting is impressive.

My main complaints from vids I've seen:

• LOD changes, at least while flying, are very aggressive and distracting
• I hate the Avatar aesthetic
• lighting in those glowy plant areas actually makes the game look old. I also think the night scenes with the purple fog achieve the same thing, lowering contrast and diminishing those smooth subtle shadows. The whole scene ironically looks to bright at night.

Edit:
Oh, and the audio is actually the best part. I wish more games would invest into audio. It's incredibly underrated.

Edit:
I'll also add that I have not seen the game in HDR, and it's very possible that my comments about the lighting are exclusive to the SDR presentation.

 

[Andrew Lauritzen]

Gave Avatar a look today as well as it's one of the games my son has been waiting for for a long while (he's a big Avatar fan). I admit up front that while the game looks good overall I wasn't as blown away as others seem to be. Granted, I have been playing a lot of Ark Survival Ascended lately with my wife and that will admittedly move the comparison bar a bit (more on that later).

Looked a bit at the shadows (because of course I did ), but there doesn't seem to be anything special going on there. Even at max settings on PC it's pretty average-resolution cascaded shadow maps with screen space shadows on top. They are likely playing some additional games with projected textures (as alluded to in the settings menu) as there are some weird inconsistencies, for instance:

It's clear that the majority of the sharper shadows are just screen space contact shadows, but there's some strange effects in the animation that make me wonder how they are being combined, or whether the tree canopy shadows are being special-cased.

The local light shadows have additional weirdness on top of this, with quite a few cases where it seems like there's just some precomputed light function (or possibly even just strong normal maps to fake it), as they do not animate consistently, for instance:

The resolution of the local light shadows is also often pretty poor, and there does not appear to be any soft shadow approximations in either the local or directional light shadows.


In terms of the lighting and GI, I need to play more but so far I haven't seen much evidence of dynamic GI. Maybe it's there and subtle, but even basic stuff like skylight occlusion or indoor ambient occlusion is clearly not present:


In general while the daylight lighting can be pretty decent, the indirect/overcast lighting can get pretty flat, and the geometric quality of the rocks and such is honestly not very high. Most of the detail is in the textures:



As for the night lighting, I think a good amount of that might be faked to be honest. I need to test more once I play with my son and we can put dynamic objects in more positions, but for instance picking plants doesn't affect the lighting environment around them at all. Similarly in a few cases you can clearly see there are analytic lights/specular placed to create fake bounce/GI for the nighttime stuff, ex:
This may not be the case for the more open world segments, but I need to play more to see. Is there a true time of day system in the game? So far I haven't noticed the light position moving at all and the TOD transitions have all been effectively static. That said I assume once the gameplay opens up a bit more (again I've only played a few hours) it will have to become a real time of day thing, right? Some of these questions would be more obviously answered if we can see the twilight transition from day to night lighting more clearly.

I'm picking on it a bit because again I admit it didn't blow me personally away in the same way as it seems to have for others. I do think most folks would agree that Ark SA on max settings - despite some rough edges and a lack of AAA polish - does look a clear step above this from a technical perspective, and in a truly dynamic (with lots of player building) environment as well.

That said, there are certainly a lot of good points for Avatar in comparison as well:
1) Performance is good. I get 100-120fps or so in Avatar with a 4090 and DLSS Quality, max settings (but not using the command line thing yet). Ark is more like 60-80 with the same resolution/DLSS.
2) Avatar looks much more similar at lower quality settings, including presumably 60fps console settings. Ark SA can scale down somewhat but the quality falls apart quickly, and there is no 60fps console mode.
3) As noted Avatar has fewer rough edges in the presentation that Ark, which has quite a few. Avatar is certainly not artifact free (DLSS in particular has more aliasing in motion than I am used to... not sure if that's tuning to keep ghosting down or some issue with motion vectors but I'll have to try the other options too), but it has clearly received a fair amount of care at least in the first portion of the game.

tldr: Avatar almost certainly looks better on lower end machines and consoles, but Ark SA is clearly a step up on the very highest end PCs.

In any case I'm looking forward to playing more and particularly getting to the flying parts so I can see how the larger scale stuff holds up. So far though I admit it feels a bit closer to games we've already seen and current-gen rendering techniques with some tricks and settings increased a bit than something really pushing the technical bar. Ultimately it holds up well enough and it's fun so far so that's really what matters.

 

[Seanspeed]

I do think most folks would agree that Ark SA on max settings - despite some rough edges and a lack of AAA polish - does look a clear step above this from a technical perspective, and in a truly dynamic (with lots of player building) environment as well.

That AAA refinement makes a big difference, though. ARK SA looks like some user-made UE5 environment just put together and then throwing in some janky survival game on top of it(not saying it cant be fun, I'm no hater of jank gameplay).

Avatar combines artistic beauty with some really fantastic and relatively performant tech. The end result is genuinely just stunning and unique, not just technically impressive. Which makes it look better in the end. As a cohesive whole, the difference is obvious. And for me shows how tech doesn't define your game's visuals, it's just a tool in the end.

Not slagging UE5 at all, I'm betting it wont be too long before we get UE5 games that are more overall impressive than Avatar as well.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

In general while the daylight lighting can be pretty decent, the indirect/overcast lighting can get pretty flat, and the geometric quality of the rocks and such is honestly not very high. Most of the detail is in the textures:

This one immediately hit me when looking at the game. It also doesn't help that texture quality is fairly inconsistent leading to areas where it looks almost good (its ability to mask the low geometric quality of some objects) side by side with areas that look absolutely not good. And then even the good areas can seriously break down if you just move a bit and are now looking at them from a non-optimal angle.

But that's always been the problem with using textures to attempt to give the illusion that objects have more geometric complexity than they actually have.

Regards,
SB

 

[Andrew Lauritzen]

That AAA refinement makes a big difference, though. ARK SA looks like some user-made UE5 environment just put together and then throwing in some janky survival game on top of it(not saying it cant be fun, I'm no hater of jank gameplay).

Agreed on the polish being important, although I would disagree that Ark SA visually looks janky. Ark SE was 100% in the "followed some UE4 tutorials" space, but Ark SA art and graphics are actually quite good on average. The lack of polish in Ark SA is more in the edge cases... there are certain times of day where you get boiling from indirect lighting, there's flicker in certain shadows, and the animations are kind of inconsistent. And there's obviously still jank gameplay but that's as much a feature for Ark players than a detriment (although I have no idea why anyone plays Ark PVP).

Avatar combines artistic beauty with some really fantastic and relatively performant tech. The end result is genuinely just stunning and unique, not just technically impressive. Which makes it look better in the end. As a cohesive whole, the difference is obvious. And for me shows how tech doesn't define your game's visuals, it's just a tool in the end.

Have you played both on max settings PC or just watched videos curiously? I'm surprised folks who had tried both would say that to be honest as the difference is fairly obvious even to a non-enthusiast (ex. my wife). That's not to take anything away from Avatar in particular, they are just aiming at a different target on the quality/performance curve. And indeed as I noted Avatar scales down quite a bit better; I haven't looked up console comparisons but I'm sure it looks better than Ark SA console which is merely "ok".

Subjective quality aside though, I'm just not entirely sure what new and exciting stuff is happening on the tech side in Avatar at first glance. Guess it will be interesting to hear about it at future GDC's, etc.

And similarly I wouldn't say Ark SA is necessarily some great demo of what AAA folks will come up with UE5, but performance aside I do think it is a pretty impressive game visually.

 

[DavidGraham]

The resolution of the local light shadows is also often pretty poor, and there does not appear to be any soft shadow approximations in either the local or directional light shadows.

Sadly, RT shadows are only applied to the shadows from the sun.

I do think most folks would agree that Ark SA on max settings - despite some rough edges and a lack of AAA polish - does look a clear step above this from a technical perspective, and in a truly dynamic (with lots of player building) environment as well

There is no question about, Ark SA is a significant step up above Avatar.