The lack of Next-Gen demos and what to expect from the future

[lefantome]

Every generational leap has been introduced with technical demos, both first and third party.

In 2011, 2 years before the beginning of the current gen (Sorry Nintendo), Epic released the Samaritan demo showcasing several "next-gen" techniques and Unreal Engine 3/4.

In 2012, 1 year before we had Square Enix Agni's Philosophy

In 2020 next-gen consoles will be released and both of them have already been officially announced.

What about next-gen games tech though?

We have not seen much.

As far as I know there is only one game showcased that will be released on next-gen: Halo Infinite but it's cross-gen.

Yes, both consoles will support ray-tracing but it doesn't mean much without the "how".
Just reflections? Indirect lighting?

We don't know. It's use in commercial game is extremely limited and the first commercial game using it in a sensible way is not next gen but old-old-old-old-gen: Quake 2.

We already have a thread about the impact of ray tracing, so what else?

Actually we had a demo and it was amazing but it was only about loading times.

What about the rest?
What can we expect?

Is it going to be a gen of transition between fully rasterized and intensively raytraced games?

We are also making one of the biggest leaps ever in terms of resolution 4X from the standard 1080p of PS4.

It was about 2.25x last time.

 

[iroboto]

Yes, both consoles will support ray-tracing but it doesn't mean much without the "how".
Just reflections? Indirect lighting?

Keep a keen eye on:

• indirect lighting and GI
• shadows (penumbra)
• I don't have any real evidence of reflections yet, but I listed some curious reflections in the halo infinite thread
• to my amateur eyes; lighting in the pelican was very good imo; the lighting appeared mainly controlled by all the light sources visible in the pelican. But I'm sure a lighting artist will tell you differently.

 

[Ike Turner]

The more we go forward the less impact full the transition from one console "generation" to an other will be. Especially this time when all games will have to be cross compatible with the current "generation" for years to come. I'm frankly glad the the age of console manufacturers tech demos are gone. We already have Nvidia pumping those out by paying Epic at least twice a year now & Unity has one every year. But tech demos are nothing more than animated bullshots.
90% of the games coming out in the next 2/3 years still won't come close to this:

Sit back an enjoy what some developers are achieving with such "shitty" HW

Spoiler

The sequence starting at 1:44 is dedicated to iroboto. Look at this nice GI solution (in a gigantic open world game running on toasters) that has yet to be matched by anybody else

 

[lefantome]

Keep a keen eye on:

• indirect lighting and GI
• shadows (penumbra)
• I don't have any real evidence of reflections yet, but I listed some curious reflections in the halo infinite thread
• to my amateur eyes; lighting in the pelican was very good imo; the lighting appeared mainly controlled by all the light sources visible in the pelican. But I'm sure a lighting artist will tell you differently.

I was not impressed by Halo Infinite, I mean it looks good for a cross generation game but that's it.
I haven't paid any attention to those details but that's the whole point, a generation leap should be visible at first glance.

The more we go forward the less impact full the transition from one console "generation" to an other will be. Especially this time when all games will have to be cross compatible with the current "generation" for years to come. I'm frankly glad the the age of console manufacturers tech demos are gone. We already have Nvidia pumping those out by paying Epic at least twice a year now & Unity has one every year. But tech demos are nothing more than animated bullshots.
90% of the games coming out in the next 2/3 years still won't come close to this:

Sit back an enjoy what some developers are achieving with such "shitty" HW

Spoiler

The sequence starting at 1:44 is dedicated to iroboto. Look at this nice GI solution (in a gigantic open world game running on toasters) that has yet to be matched by anybody else

I know about diminishing returns (but that would start to be a problem only after we will have good real time raytracing).

RDR2 is like GTA V at its time, a game so good looking it was almost next gen.
But real next gen hit the shelves few months later with Infamous Second Son and it was breathtaking[cit.] nonetheless.

I think as long as we have some sensible new tech to show, tech demo make sense.

What we are getting now, especially from Unity, are mostly art demos where everything the engine has is put together to make a super cool cutscene to use for marketing purposes regardless of the performance.

If those are the only tech demo we are going to see it means that there is nothing else new coming soon other than some implementation of ray tracing that may not be that groundbreaking.

One gen ago among other things we had pbr materials, particles and other stuff to demo. What about this time? Only RTX?

 

[Ike Turner]

I was not impressed by Halo Infinite, I mean it looks good for a cross generation game but that's it.
I haven't paid any attention to those details but that's the whole point, a generation leap should be visible at first glance.



I know about diminishing returns (but that would start to be a problem only after we will have good real time raytracing).

RDR2 is like GTA V at its time, a game so good looking it was almost next gen.
But real next gen hit the shelves few months later with Infamous Second Son and it was breathtaking[cit.] nonetheless.

I think as long as we have some sensible new tech to show, tech demo make sense.

What we are getting now, especially from Unity, are mostly art demos where everything the engine has is put together to make a super cool cutscene to use for marketing purposes regardless of the performance.

If those are the only tech demo we are going to see it means that there is nothing else new coming soon other than some implementation of ray tracing that may not be that groundbreaking.

One gen ago among other things we had pbr materials, particles and other stuff to demo. What about this time? Only RTX?

Actually..yes there isn't much other than DXR/VulkanRT or whatever an RTRT solution is going to be called.

Spoiler

RTX is an NVDIA trademark (encompassing Ray Tracing, DLSS, & what ever else they feel like putting in there for the sake of confusion)

That's why both Sony & MS are pushing the super fast SSD narative for PS5 & Scarlett. There isn't much on the graphics side of things besides fully utilizing all the techniques currently available. But you can also expect more physics simulation & procedural goodies soon. Thanks to the jump from shitty Jaguards to ZEN2 CPUs.

 

[orangpelupa]

Probably sony will have tons of ducks in water body to show how strong the ps5 cpu?

But the "riiiiiiidge racer" boss is no longer there. And the bigwigs of Playstation doesn't look like someone to show-off specs rather than games.

Also it looks like ps5 and Xbox two probably will be more similar than x1 x ps4. At least according to the stuff that each companies has said (e.g. the superfast ssd and ram thingy)

 

[turkey]

There was the Harry potter leak? Many folks said next gen when they saw it

 

[Ike Turner]

BTW I think that people are wrongly underestimating what can already be done right now in games and on HW available today and as usual always get cought in the hype of fancy new features..
Forza Horizon 4 is IMO the second best game after RDR2 in terms of GI implementation even if it is deliberately stylized (and seriously really good PBR assets. Just look at the Lego bricks up close..). Shit tons of destructible bricks everywhere:

Car details:

 

[AlNom]

Days Gone is no slouch either. :V

 

[ultragpu]

I know these are still current gen titles but they've impressed me more than Halo Infinite graphically.

Spoiler

But for next gen proper I would say it's either about Raytracing to hell and back till your res drops to peasant 1080p or throwing in a ridiculous amount of gpu particles, effects, fluid sims, crazy level density and advanced destruction/interactivity with high quality VXOGI at 4k cbr 30fps.

 

[Sigfried1977]

Judging by 2 of the 4 gifs you posted, we have almost all the gpu particles we'd ever need already. We've been edging ever closer to the point of diminishing returns for a couple of years now. Next gen we're gonna crash into it hard.

 

[ultragpu]

Judging by 2 of the 4 gifs you posted, we have almost all the gpu particles we'd ever need already. We've been edging ever closer to the point of diminishing returns for a couple of years now. Next gen we're gonna crash into it hard.

Be optimistic man, we've still got a long way to go to reach modern day CG and those talent devs would always find a way to wow us with the new power they've acquired .

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Judging by 2 of the 4 gifs you posted, we have almost all the gpu particles we'd ever need already. We've been edging ever closer to the point of diminishing returns for a couple of years now. Next gen we're gonna crash into it hard.

What it will mean is that GPU resources will be so abundant it won't just be AAA developers who are able to deliver draw dropping visuals, it'll be a lot easier for AA debs and maybe even indies to do that without an insane amount of time/effort/money.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

Judging by 2 of the 4 gifs you posted, we have almost all the gpu particles we'd ever need already. We've been edging ever closer to the point of diminishing returns for a couple of years now. Next gen we're gonna crash into it hard.

Not if we go VR / AR.
Then we'll need another 5-6 years to get the current 1080p/1440p 30FPS render targets into ~2*4K 90 FPS.
And this is only for rasterization, without even considering real time ray tracing, of course.

 

[Ike Turner]

BTW I think that people are wrongly underestimating what can already be done right now in games and on HW available today and as usual always get cought in the hype of fancy new features..
Forza Horizon 4 is IMO the second best game after RDR2 in terms of GI implementation even if it is deliberately stylized (and seriously really good PBR assets. Just look at the Lego bricks up close..). Shit tons of destructible bricks everywhere:

Car details:

Spoiler

RTX OFF

 

[cheapchips]

On the giant bomb interview they talked about modelling manufacturing imperfections that the bricks have. Lego hadn't seen that in a game before and were impressed. There's also greasy fingerprints which are either life sized or gigantic, depending on your point of view.

 

[Pixel]

Both rendered in realtime on an unspecified AMD GPU
Keep in mind it requires rendering at 1080p which is fine by me. I don't cares about true 4K res.

 

[Ike Turner]

Sherman is pre-rendered, unlike The Heretic which runs in real-time.

 

[Pixel]

Sherman is pre-rendered, unlike The Heretic which runs running in real-time.

I'm pretty sure it said its a realtime animation in the making of video.

 

[Ike Turner]

I'm pretty sure it said its a realtime animation in the making of video.

It's pre-rendered. Creation (look dev/shading/ligthing, compositing, tone mapping...) is done in real-time in engine but final output is pre-rendered:



https://blogs.unity3d.com/2019/06/11/introducing-sherman-part-2/

Recorder
Working on projects like Sherman is different than a typical Unity project. The end result is sequenced frames that are output from the editor that we make up the final animation. For this, we used Unity’s Recorder package to render the final images out of the editor. The Filmic Motion blur feature described above hooks into the Recorder’s Timeline integration to allow us to converge the fur, and create the super-sampled motion blur for the final frames.

Similar to this one. But unlike Epic/Quixel, Unity didn't lie for months claiming that it was running in real-time...