DriveClub by Evolution Studios [PS4]

I am still not satisfied with the sound of thunder/lightning. Lightning can hit something 20m from the car and there will be zero sound, and the rumbling of the distant thunders is pretty weak.

Awesome game though, real technical achievement.
 
so, am I right in thinking the weather is only something you can have in one off races (ie not where you are getting stars?) - I don't get it, I've played about 30 races since the patch but no weather other than cloudy?
 
Elements addon, custom races, and multiplayer.

Here is my friend, barely managing to get enough poitns to win the gold trophy in the final championship of Elements addon.
 
This game really looks unbelievable good most of the time...when you are disappointed with DC, I suppose there is no driving game released that satisfies you...lol!
 
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This game really looks unbelievable good most of the time...when you are disappointed with DC, I suppose there is no driving game released that satisfies you...lol!

It's the texture details that really detract from the overall presentation. I haven't really played many racing games though but the in-game footage certainly doesn't represent the screenshots (that use photomode and cutscenes) we are seeing on websites .
 
I wrote a tech analysis of this game today. In a nutshell, I was impressed with some features but disappointed overall.
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Are you sure about the first conclusion? Your pic should not show a reflection considering the angle.
1920x-1


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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.
 
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VFX_VETERAN you should have talked about the volumetric clouds in your analysis, because that's cetainly a ressources heavy feature, and adds a lot the the graphics. Watching some timelapse videos really shows how impressive they are, with cloud shadows casting on the scenery; and sun rays passing through. They can even create fog on some tracks when racing through them.


and ye there are different LOD for cars in photo mode, like every other racing game with a photo mode.
player's car is highest LOD during gameplay in time trial though.
 
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