I wrote a
tech analysis of this game today.
Cutscene gameplay: After seeing the cutscenes in DriveClub, I realized that most of the screenshots of this game are coming from this mode. It’s a distraction from the real gameplay and I consider it non-representative of what the hardware can do when the gamer actually has control. So I’ve refrained from posting any images in cutscenes.
What cutscenes?
A lot of screenshots are photomode captures which are heavily supersampled and enjoy superb MB and bokeh DoF, but "cutscenes" isn't the word I'd use to describe that.
And the people are not reflected at all. Instead the developers opted to use rectangular cards to represent the people:
Due to how screen-space reflections work, that wouldn't really make any sense. Actually, the people use screen-space reflections just like everything else, it's just that if there's a vertical occluder above a surface, the game is a little sketchy with how it casts "rays" in certain areas below said occluder.
Here's Driveclub doing the same thing it does with people, but with a barrier:
At some level I think it's sort of surprising that you're praising the SSR for being a high-quality implementation in its own right; it's handled at decent res, but I think they took some sketchy shortcuts on account of being a racing game. For instance, rather than fade the SSR away for stuff trying to reflect off-screen stuff "above" the frame, the game simply samples the uppermost pixel in that column; this doesn't make itself evident during gameplay, but it's pretty janky in photomode's free cam.
In Photomode, the aliasing is reduced significantly, but the framerate plummets as well indicating that the game is using everything in the PS4 to maintain 30fps.
I have no idea what you're talking about. I know Karamazov has said that some things have better LOD in photomode (thus explaining why photomode does seem to occasionally drop frames), but the aliasing on fine details is exactly the same except when the game is actually going through the screenshot-rendering process, during which time there's not much of a meaningful reference for "framerate" since everything is still (and during which time it doesn't really matter because you're not looking at something which even remotely represents realtime IQ and perf anyway).
Depth of Field: They have a very good implementation of this. I’m not sure if it’s Bokeh but it’s definitely not the linear blur found in AC:Unity.
If you're talking about realtime visuals, I'm not aware of any DoF in Driveclub.
If you're talking about photomode, it's an extremely high-quality bokeh implementation. It allows you to select focal distance, aperture, and bokeh shape, and the effect is accumulated as the "bullshot" is rendered, just like the photomode's supersampling and MB.
Because it uses an accumulated sample implementation, it gives incredibly accurate results, but if you set up
extraordinarily heavy DoF, photomode can actually fail to take enough samples to eliminate the noise, resulting in a grainy appearance (despite the tremendous rendering time!).
They used a combination of normal maps for the side of the car and vertex pulling for the bumpers.
Actually, the system uses geometric displacements "everywhere", not just on the bumpers. Contrast
this shot of a beat-up car with
this shot of the same car at the start of the race.