More pixels or prettier pixels?

[Picao84]

Disagree. The future is AR.

I disagree. How are you going to immerse people in a different world while they are still seeing their own? AR might be good for casual gaming but it has no place in games like RPG, First Person Shooters that are not simple shooting galleries. You loose a lot of context with AR.

 

[Picao84]

AR in the context of gaming looks even less fleshed out than VR...and that's saying something.

I think of one big secrets of why video games have been successful is it's a form of interactive entertain minus physical exertion. It's basically hits of dopamine requiring almost no physical effort. When I look at some of more involved motion controls and in some cases where you are literally walking around... I just think "well good luck trying to popularise this"...at least in terms of gaming.

I disagree. I refuse to play most VR games with the DS4 controller. It pretty much ruins immersion for me. Played The Persistence demo and while the game is OK, shooting at zombies in VR with DS4 feels clumsy. Also picking up items by looking at them and clicking a button feels ridiculous and it's much harder to do sometimes versus just pointing a hand at them, which is much more intuitive. Do you get more tired? Yes of course. But you get way more out of the games.

Plus whenever I show VR or play it with the friends, the most popular game is Headmaster, which is quite physical.

 

[BRiT]

I disagree. How are you going to immerse people in a different world while they are still seeing their own? AR might be good for casual gaming but it has no place in games like RPG, First Person Shooters that are not simple shooting galleries. You loose a lot of context with AR.

AR is the perfect tech for mass majority of people. It will end up larger than anything else. It will be deployed for sex. The number one application will be "Beer Goggles" which enables sex for ugly people throughout the world!

 

[fehu]

Curvier pixels!

 

[AlNom]

Sometimes higher resolutions are counter-productive. You get to see EVERYTHING and of course that includes all the little defects that can ruin immersion. Sort of like being able to see the wires in action scenes in HD versions of films... or skin imperfections in other kinds of films...

Same reason why magazine scans and off-screen pictures sometimes look "better" than direct-feed footage. As the saying goes: "out of sight, out of mind".

On the other hand, some developers seem pretty intent on destroying the image with fancy amazing things like defocused trichromatic phased pulsed optical division effects.

 

[ultragpu]

It needs a good balance, I say 1440p CBR to 4k with top notch AA then spend the rest of the gpu grunt on crazy fluid dynamic fire, water, particles etc, advanced lighting, models and shaders, such a game designed with 10 tf of raw power should look batshit insane and vastly outstrip a native 4k game on the same console. But anything less than a 1080p buffer is too blurry for me now, I watched a dvd live movie on my 4k TV a few days ago and to say that experience should never be repeated again is an understatement.

 

[mpg1]

I disagree. I refuse to play most VR games with the DS4 controller. It pretty much ruins immersion for me. Played The Persistence demo and while the game is OK, shooting at zombies in VR with DS4 feels clumsy. Also picking up items by looking at them and clicking a button feels ridiculous and it's much harder to do sometimes versus just pointing a hand at them, which is much more intuitive. Do you get more tired? Yes of course. But you get way more out of the games.

Plus whenever I show VR or play it with the friends, the most popular game is Headmaster, which is quite physical.

I mean...Wii sports was also popular...can't really say it mainstreamed motion controls though.

 

[Johnglen]

Sometimes higher resolutions are counter-productive. You get to see EVERYTHING and of course that includes all the little defects that can ruin immersion. Sort of like being able to see the wires in action scenes in HD versions of films... or skin imperfections in other kinds of films...

Same reason why magazine scans and off-screen pictures sometimes look "better" than direct-feed footage. As the saying goes: "out of sight, out of mind".

Not true. X enhanced xbox360 games look jaw dropping.

 

[Picao84]

I mean...Wii sports was also popular...can't really say it mainstreamed motion controls though.

It's really not the same thing without the VR component. On Wii Sports you are not inside the stadium/venue. You were pointing at a flat screen that was your only context versus a 360 degree reality around you. Have you played VR games much mpg1?

 

[Allandor]

Not true. X enhanced xbox360 games look jaw dropping.

OCASM has a point here. Already seen some not so great effects on the x that were better on the xb360 just because of the lower resolution. Here and there you can see some "glitches" (I would call them). But for the most part the current enhanced xb360 games look awesome. E.g. some original xbox games that are now presented in 4k look a bit strange sometimes, because you have those clean and sharp presentation on the one side, but low-res textures on the other. A softer looking game from the old times looks now razor sharp. Or if something is blurred while moving it is now absolutely blurred, like the eagle vision in the good old Assassins Creed.
But altogether the good old games look and play much better.

I would really like an option in the emulator to render the games without all those optimizations.

Btw, the original xbox games have also the problem that I see some of them the first time on an LCD screen ^^.

 

[Johnglen]

Bottom line is that even ancient games, like og Xbox games, look better with more pixels.

 

[Pixel]

Bottom line is that even ancient games, like og Xbox games, look better with more pixels.

But take uncharted 4 and run it at 640p and it will look better than Uncharted 2 or 3.
Run Forza Horizon 3 at 720p and it will look better than Forza Horizon on X360.

So its not just quality, and its not just quantity. Its both.

 

[djskribbles]

There's a point where both quality and quantity see diminishing returns IMO. We're nearing that point for quantity in my books, and quality is not too far behind.

Good art is also needed, I think Polyphony Digital is a good example of this; they have always had good artists and made their games look amazing with limited hardware. They do a convincing job of making materials look as they should.

 

[Mobius1aic]

Been playing Twilight Princess HD lately, and it looks insanely clean, especially since it has such heavily upgraded textures. Funny enough, it reminds me of Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath HD with both games from the same generation, some similar art ideas and very similar methods for rendering. It's unfortunate Twilight Princess didn't get the same level of geometry upgrades that Stranger's Wrath did,
but Stranger's Wrath, with it's much larger collective environments probably had lower geometry budgets for in game characters and objects.

 

[Scott_Arm]

I think at this point art > tech. Good artists can do a lot with very little. There's enough programmability in graphics and content pipelines that good artists can make a game look great on any platform. Increases in computing power and tech are really needed for chasing photo-realism. I think diminishing returns on resolution are very real. I'd rather play a game at a lower resolution and higher refresh rate than game at 30Hz at 4k. Chasing native 4k is almost always a bad choice.

Looking at a studio like Guerrilla Games, they've done something pretty fantastic with HZD. The real eye-opener was seeing their workflow, and how similar it is to UE4. They obviously have tremendously talented technical programmers, but they were smart in investing huge energy into the tools they provide their level designers and artists. You get an engine that is highly optimized (where UE isn't), but also get tremendously powerful and simple tools that make creating content easy, so people can focus on gameplay and art instead of technical mud. The result is amazing.

Also, still on HZD, I'd say that game at 1080p on a base PS4 from a visual standpoint outshines almost any high-end PC game I can think of. My next console, I'm going to care very little about relative GPU power. I just want a CPU that can deliver 60fps in the next-gen Assassin's Creed or GTA.

 

[Jupiter]

Many but not all. Especially not Wildlands or The Division. On a high clocked GTX 1080Ti The Dividsn even runs in native UHD and 60fps with the highest image sharpness one can imagine. Wildlands would not even be possible the Xbox One X itself would have problems playing even in FullHD and 30fps in the best settings which give a massive visual advantage.

Two years later I'm still amazed in The Division because it looks so awesome. Next to Wildlands and The Division there is nothing nearby among the video games. AC: Origins may look good but I would not put that close to these titles. There are impressive places in AC: Origins but in The Division almost every moment seems first class as long as there is not that weird red tint in the dusk. Even after 550+ hours I am still amzed at different environments. One hour in The Division has more wow moments than 50 hours of AC: Origins.

Where I find The Division also very cinematic is the level of detail. There are a lot of polygons and details where even such a game as BATTLEFRONT 2015 can not keep up. The foresight and density are extreme. No games push more objects/polygons per frame than Wildlands and The Division and a 8700K still manages > 60fps in Wildands.

In my opinion The Division is so far the most expensive published game by far. No Open Word Games comes close in environmental strory telling. In the northernmost part of the Dark Zone there are even tens of thousands of dead bodies in bags and the atmosphere was very dense I had to think of the gloomy mood of many films such as 28 Days or Weeks Later. Besides that below these two "new" Dark Zone areas there are also huge underground facilities and a network of tunnels, etc.. At night the lighting is awesome with a lot of light sources which are going on and out, blinking etc. There is a lot of movement in the Picture and almost everything reacts credibly when the Player or enemies shoots at it.

 

[Recop]

Unless you spend most of your resources on non visual things, pretty graphics and good tech are indissociable in my opinion.

You can't have extremely detailed assets without a good tech :

Art alone can be sufficient only if you aim for a very specific type of rendering but it won't work in more realistic games.

 

[Jupiter]

One of the best things to get an extreme amount of detail into assets is editing the vertex normals of an object to fake bevels. In this process there are no normal maps involved. The main advantage is that since that does not bake any normal maps for those assets in terms of texture memory they are way cheaper for a greater level of fidelity. One can have an 8m object or even a 500m object with very little in the way of bespoke normal maps to support the mesh.
There are definitely cases where such a pipeline is not viable. For instance organic assets like trees and cloth which cannot be modelled fully because it would be too many polygons. So one has to convert that modelled detail into a texture map (a normal map).

For example Star Citizen uses this vertex custom normal meshes which are a bit heavier in terms of triangle count but they are way cheaper in terms of their texture memory usage. The more traditional high poly to low poly pipeline is great but it is simply not viable for all props to have unique normal maps and they definitely would not be a very good texture resolution if they were.

 

[Recop]

Here's why pixel quality matters far more than resolution. And if i have the choice, i prefer 1080p/60fps vs 4k/30fps (assuming graphical settings are identical).

 

[phoenix_chipset]

I wouldn't mind if 1440p was the standard resolution next gen, or 1600p with a very high quality TAA like seen in ratchet and clank or the shadow of the colossus remake. The temporal injection really looks great, unlike checkerboarding. Or, simply native 4k with dynamic resolution would be ok too. I think native 4k is going to be an absolute waste next gen for a good chunk of game types.

Racers, fighters, anime style games and 2d stuff could be native 4k though.