DriveClub by Evolution Studios [PS4]

Spent a couple of hours in photomode yesterday , here`s a couple shots I took for a Renault Sport Forum:
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I don't think it's a bubble... too much coverage beyond the vehicle scope.

Anyhow, people REALLY DO need to see this game in action... It's downright gorgeous. Some of the best geometry and shader work out there.
 
reading back the first pages of this topic, looking at the first images and videos, really shows of much it has improved since its reveal.

 
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don't remember the names of tracks, the city is from the new canada track added with weather update.
The one in the cloud is the fourth indian track i guess, the one with the barrage in reverse.
My PSN is on the previous page !

Looks almost too detailed to be just a backdrop, right ? But it`s Driveclub , everything is detailed...

well if you zoom in, the buildings look a bit simplistic because they are not supposed to be seen up close, but i think they can definitely design city based tracks.
 
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Ok, up to now, Ryse was my "best graphics on console" game...but Driveclub with weather update and photomode...surreal!

Yesterday, fired up a scotland track, night, heavy rain...lets go! First turn, I hit the photomode button: and holy shit! This is unbelievable how detailed the cars are, the lighting, the effects...I stayed their for 30min until my GF moaned so loud when wefinally start playing Diablo 3!

They should have really waited for the weather patch with the release...I guess a lot of gamers who moved on miss it now...and reviews would probably also better, as it has an impact not only visually but also on the driving physics (and it can change throughout one event).
 
I drove over the India track for about hour yesterday. With weather set to random. And in fact it was mostly raining :)
 
Canadian engineers are brilliant, they've developed a sort of paint that actually floats above the roadway.

;)

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I don't think it's a bubble... too much coverage beyond the vehicle scope.
I wanted to see how large the 'bubble' of particles around the car is and, in photomode at least, it doesn't even feel like a bubble as it covers the whole area you can look at with the camera. With heavy snow (easier to see) there must be an untold amount of particles on screen at once, no idea how many but it must be in the hundreds of thousands.
I should have said "bubble around the camera," not "car." Games that use particle-based techniques and allow free out-of-character camera motion generally use distance-based particle culling (Halo Reach is the same way, if you fly through the city in paused replay mode you'll see particles everywhere, but they only exist in a bubble around the camera, as the game's particle system tops out at a few tens of thousands of simultaneous particles.). The "radius" of particle existence is pretty substantial for this sort of system, though.

Anyway, I figured I'd investigate this a bit by checking out heavy snow in Norway.

A quick look at photomode snow tells me that although the bubble is pretty big, the snow particles definitely pop in as you move around. I tried a rough count of how many particles were in view when looking at a lit sky in photomode at minimal FoV (which I very roughly guestimated at 23.6 degrees), and it was something around 4000 (I counted a 1/8th segment and extrapolated). Now, if we imagine that the density is the same all around us and that the bubble is spherical, this implies somewhere in the vague ballpark of 600,000 particles that could (i.e. ignoring geometric obstruction) be visible if we made a full 360-degree render covering the entire possible visual sphere.

As to the particles themselves? They're fairly simply; basic trajectories, seemingly non-interactive*. I noticed that particles that have been distance-culled are remembered when you come back in range, which makes me wonder if they're not randomly generated during camera movement but procedurally determined by a time-based seed.

*One of the snowflakes in this shot is actually inside the car :D
 
600 000 seems a bit high ? Remember it has to deal with cloud particles too.
Drops are also affected by wind.
I read that cloud rendering is pretty computationnal heavy, packed with rain/snow particles and all those reflections, it's a wonder how they can still manage 1080p and locked 30fps on that $400 "underpowered" box !
 
No, that's to do with you having an long exposure. Do you remember what fraction of a second the shutter is open for? What you're seeing is the road before the car moves across it, so the light from the paint exposes the film before the light reflecting from the car does.

If you had a fast exposure that wouldn't have happened.
That's exactly what I said when I first noticed it, but then I took a closer look: even for a silly 1/30th shutter, the blended pattern was too hard, it didn't seem right.

Here's a look at a nearby spot, with 1/8000 shutter and basically zero car movement.

600 000 seems a bit high ? Remember it has to deal with cloud particles too.
Drops are also affected by wind.
But if wind is also time-seeded, the result is still dependent only on a time seed; my point is that they might not need to be under constant simulation to be "tracked". If that's the case, the game very well might not need to recognize the existence of particles behind the camera, or even outside of the FoV, or some such business. Depending on how far the game goes with that, given gameplay FoV, it could theoretically be handling <100,000 at all times during play.

Alternately:

According to Bungie, Reach's particle system can iterate 24,000 particles, both physics and rendering, in about .3ms on the 360's GPU. Given sufficient memory resources for handling particles, it's thus conceivable that Xenos could handle 600,000 Reach particles in around 8ms. And those particles have relatively sophisticated physics; there's depth-buffer-based collision detection which accounts for elasticity and surface normals on the bounce, and even has an option for changing particle type when a bounce occurs. DriveClub's rain/snow particles are fairly uninteractive by comparison, and is running on a GPU many times more powerful than Xenos. So even if it needs to iterate more than half a million particles on some frames, it's entirely possible that it accomplishes that in a fraction of a millisecond.
 
Yeah, but the longer exposure makes the game look like it has PS3 road textures, not that I'm implying in anyway that someone not that impressed with the game is doing it on purpose you understand.
 
That's exactly what I said when I first noticed it, but then I took a closer look: even for a silly 1/30th shutter, the blended pattern was too hard, it didn't seem right.

Here's a look at a nearby spot, with 1/8000 shutter and basically zero car movement.

Okay, that is odd. Do the tires have some slight reflection mapping on them?
 
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