Very interesting video, Alex! I would love to see a Tech Focus on the evolution of skybox tech like clouds. Or on on the evolution of texture filtering, normal maps, bump maps, etc.
No shit man! I've been watching each amd every video since like last 2 years. Everything amd everyone is so darn professional. They have genuinely earned my respect
Yeah I'm surprised this didn't come up. I remember STALKER: Clear Sky was a big deal for using DX10 light and fog effects, so the invisible bloodsuckers could run through fog and you'd see it get displaced, still accurately lit. I remember there was an interview with a developer where the game journalist was super excited by this prospect for gameplay, only to be shot down by the dev saying "well, most people are still probably going to be using DX9 hardware so we can't expect it for game design..."
@@monkeyrobotsinc.9875 His presentation was a bit hit or miss in the early days but that is understandable but I would say he's one of the best now on this channel, he really goes deep into explaining a lot of this tech and in a way that many can understand better.
Yesss! I've legit just gone back to actually finish RDR2 so this video comes in perfectly for me haha. This generation has really suprised me in terms of how much progress it actually made in the graphics department. I was extremely sceptical of the power of the PS4 and XO when they first launched, but it's been a really good generation IMO!
Same here, I was a pcmr guy at the end of last gen and half of this gen. Then I got a ps4 right before Uncharted 4..following year i got a ps4 pro and a 4k tv, that's when I started using my ps4 more than my pc.
Power doesn't mean anything though games will only look great if the studios have the talent and budget which is why PS4 exclusives look better than anything on PC
@@goofed86 Not really. I don't think you've actually seen many new PC games. With maxed settings, PC always will have the upper hand in view distance and LOD, actual resolution, anti aliasing and foliage density compared to exclusives (not to mention ray tracing in Control as an example). It's just mostly a limitation of CPU horsepower in consoles that no amount of optimization will overcome.
@@TexelGuy Regardless Red Dead 2 is smooth and one of the best looking console games even next to PC. Next gen consoles will tackle the CPU issues with Zen 2.
It's still sort of dreamy that Rdr2 looks so good. It just has this unique realistic look,as if they just took everything from reality and downrezzed it to fit in a video game.
SquidStone I got it late, just about a month ago after I got my XoneX. I have been playing it pretty much nonstop and I can’t help but just marvel at it over and over. It never stops impressing me. I am constantly pausing and entering photo mode and adjusting the focus and then gushing over the insane resolution. But the real impressiveness is in the more passive realism that comes from the lighting. It isn’t as obvious as “damn I can’t believe how closely I can zoom in on the engraving on this pistol and how sharp it is that close up” but more like “I just forgot that I’m not actually watching a movie again” while just walking through forest and into a clearing. The lighting is something that when done well it *doesn’t* jump out at you. But you know that the scene you’re looking at looks *damn* good.
I’m seeing this comment now & that it’s “2 years ago” & that’s so goddamn impressive that no other game has come close to it in these 2 years..kudos Rockstar! 🥳😍
After watching videos explaining volumetric lighting, it’s effect on rasterization, and understanding now what ray tracing is and what is means; I am now extremely excited for real-time ray tracing in next gen games. Like really excited. At first I just wrote it off as some tech jargon for some method of graphic rendering. Boy was I wrong! Ray tracing is the effing future!
You're such a great addition to the DF team Alex! Explanations are spot on. :) What I love about these videos is how it helps to educate gamers to better appreciate the craftsmanship behind video games. I think this is desperately needed in a climate where people are so quick on criticizing game developers, even for the tiniest of defects in their games.
Awesome stuff, I like this one as a CG creator my self, Although one tip is that I really recommend you guys learn to use Unreal Engine or maybe Blender 3D's Eevee render engine (which are both free to use) on showing some effects instead of 2D written illustrations since I find most of the time it was quite confusing to understand by showing us those 2D graphic representation...so by using maybe Blender 3D Eevee engine which has most of every game engine effects, or UE makes it better to demonstrate those technical 3D aspects effects. (what I mean is abit more effort on showing the graphic side because it is not easy to explain these by just 2D indesign stuffs)
I second giving UE4 a spin (I haven't tried Eevee personally), which uses the modern frustum-aligned volumetric fog approach in conjunction with older techniques. And one can play with its many parameters in the editor and with console commands, as well as see the frametime hit of every step in the GPU profiling tool.
Or maybe give something like after effects a try. That in combination with a good general 3D package like Blender or Cinema for motion graphic type stuff would be a huge step up. Altough I doubt Alex has time for it in addition to creating all the other content.
Silent Hill 2 had impressive real time dynamic shadows on both characters and environments (only interiors though) all the way back in 2001, on a console no less.
Downhil Domination for PS2 actually used God Rays when it came out in 04 , it was pretty well implemented but was over used in some areas , but it def is technically impressive :)
Man, this is a complex topic, not sure if i'm a little bit sleepy, but in the middle of explanation i had some loss of attention, i will probably rewatch it, though i think the better parts were the ones which you showed 3d "wireframes" like the last one with the example using the cubes being reduced in quantity but maintaining the size like on a fibonacci equation. Thanks for the high quality content, hope to see more of this more consistently on the channel, the Retro appeals to the heart and this appeals to the brain.
My favourite channels on YT are : Digital Foundry - Tech analysis. AI and Games - AI behaviour and how they make games better. Game Maker's Toolkit - Game design, level design, and game production. Noclip - Video game documentaries Ultimate Immersion - Graphical showcases. Love all you guys!
This is probably the most complicated DF video I've seen thus far; I'm probably gonna be studying this for years! It's kinda amazing how those fading billboarded texture godrays are still used today.
Bless Alex for making some of the best content on this channel. I'll always have time for these types of DF videos as I feel like I learn a lot more than if I watched a video comparing pixel counts and framerate analysis.
Modern volumetric lighting is one of the things that made a leap in gaming visuals, in the past few years games have been looking extremely realistic and the bar is just getting higher. I love it.
Good to see I'm not the only person who obsesses over every detail, in between actually playing the game. I've found myself spending a lot of time in Control, really enjoying it with a modest 2060 Super.
Absolutely fascinating. I work in 3D graphics - slow, offline rendered stuff - and it just blows my mind what's being achieved in real time with the techniques here. The atmosphere and realism RDR2's fogs and mists bring to the gameworld is incredible. I'd have to work hard to get render times down to a few minutes using traditional ray-marching, but these guys are producing nearly-as-good results in mere milliseconds. Nuts. Thanks for the breakdown :)
This was honestly incredibly informative an interesting, thank you very much Alex! I had always been curious about the volumetric voxel lighting, having heard that term a lot (especially here), and had an inkling that earlier games simply used geometry.
this is the stuff, I check DF channel for graphical analysis and tech-focused videos, game reviews, and other stuff are abundant and not exclusive to this channel... great job and keep'em coming
Great video! I'm definitely interested in seeing a tech focus on clouds and particles in games and such. It's amazing how much devs think about these effects to make them as realistic as possible.
This is what gets me hyped for consoles and PCs in the future companies can further develop their engines and use more efficient techniques to deliver us are more cinematic and beautiful looking games. Lighting and atmospheric effects me has always been of the biggest factors because solid lighting can make it feel so much more immersive and just better looking, can really decide whether the game looks solid or impressive. The way they can make different materials, atmospheric effects react and reflect light so differently can make it feel really dynamic.
I remember when I first saw this effect in Mario 64 in that piano room. I was floored and ever since I have bee obsessed how it's done in any game. Great video.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky's insane use of ray marching along with neat shader effects for the time was really memorable. It almost made it a sort of second Crysis for the community.
Thank you so much Alex and DF for so many amazing videos. There's a lot of effort in them and it shows, I find myself in awe the whole time, feels like I've unlocked a new sense and the beauty (both visual and technical) just comes crashing in.
I remember being impressed with the god ray effects in Forza Horizon 1, and I still think it looks pretty good. I'm not sure what effect it was using, and it definitely didn't do it first or with the highest fidelity, but it did to it back in 2012 on the 360, and is a completely dynamic effect that changes with the time of day. It was always really impressive when you drive over a hill or around a corner at just the right time of day and you get those golden rays of light suddenly hitting your view. And speaking of the FH games, those would be a good candidate to look at for the topic of skyboxes and clouds. I remember the devs talking about how FH2 had dynamic simulated weather where rainbows would appear just as a result of the engine, and weren't manually placed in the game at all. The later games did that too, and FH3 in particular has a seriously impressive skybox in general.
Wonderful video! There is just so much to cover and dive in to with CG technology. As someone who was always heavily intruded in cg (like probably most of us) , but who took a hiatus from viddygames for a while, i got back into things, inspired by the great AAA titles, and others too. Visual aesthetics, representation of scientific theory in virtual worlds is a fascinating topic and I I've had mentioned deep chats with people about optics, which leads on to discussion of film, game, TV, art styles.
Truly a shame that The Crew 2's lightning and volumetrics are never being talked about. Also that game has some pretty neat clouds so I hope you'll cover it in your future cloud-rendering video
I remember hearing about an old effect where you rendered depth only for the front and back of the lights, then used some kind of shader math to calculate density by subtracting front and back Z positions, and this was used for cheap volumetric lighting.
This was great. Have always been interested in the hows and whys of volumetric lighting, and I didn't realise there were so many different forms of it. Great video and hope to see more in this vein!
you are just amazing Alex, as always. It is not easy to explain seamlessly difficult topic such volumetric lightning! Bravo and I can't wait for next topic :)
Red Dead 2 really went the extra mile on graphics, would love to see it scream on a maxed out PC one day. Next game Rockstar does though needs to focus more on gameplay enhancements since gameplay wise it was only a step ahead of the original RDR.
@@turbopumped6490 what could be delayed ? Nothing has been announced at all. You know you can play rdr2 on a one x, and it will cost probably less than your last graphics card or processor...
I know of another oldschool way to do volumetric fog from early 2000s. What's the framebuffer configuration? It's usually (way back then specifically) RGBA with 8-bit per component, and 24-bit Z and 8-bit stencil. But what is A value used for? Usually it's just used as padding for memory access alignment and just sits there idle. Well the trick needs this common true colour layout, it won't work in high colour. You disable Z-writes. You render the far side of the volume (by having the volume be composed of convex pieces and selecting surfaces with normal facing away from you) and simply set the alpha to the depth of the pixel. You can then render the objects that are potentially within this shadow volume in the same manner - no colour function, just alpha writes. Then you draw the near side of the volume with subtractive alpha encoding the depth of the pixel. As a result, the desired fog density is encoded in the alpha channel of the framebuffer. Then you render a quad on the near plane of the view frustum that covers the volumetric object, blends some colour into the pixel depending on destination alpha, and clears destination alpha. You can re-run this effect multiple times for multiple volumetric objects. Since you only have 8 bits to work with, ideally you normalise the depth values represented in the Alpha channel to the actual range of depths covered by the volumetric object, and simply account for that in the final alpha blend pass. This technique is quite compatible with and quite similar to stencil shadows, since both rely on convex volumes, and both need to be capped at the near plane of the frustum, or need a similar workaround. I'm not sure if Carmack's Reversal is applicable to volumetric fog, i haven't thought this far. The technique absolutely doesn't rely on pixel shaders, and obviously vertex programs can be performed on the CPU in absence of acceleration hardware.
Very good work Alex! I believe Most Wanted (2005) used some kind of raymarched volumetrics. The way dust, or smoke casting volumetric shadows through was really nice. Only PC version of course
The same way F.E.A.R. did it, only for a few effects though. Although PS2 showed superior alpha blending (especially visible on the trees without leaves that aren't sorted correctly on PC, they later fixed it for xbox360 though).
Very interesting fact: sometimes developers didn't use fullscreen quads to apply post-processing, but one fullscreen triangle. Basically, using a single triangle instead of a quad will be faster on the GPU because of some of the architecture quirks. Nowadays all relative GCN and Nvidia GPUs benefit from this stuff, so a lot of the times devs actively use triangles instead of quads when applicable.
Drawing full-screen geometry has in some cases been rendered obsolete by compute shaders. Bypassing the rendering pipeline like that does improve performance on some hardware.
@@Silikone but then again, compute shaders weren't widespread at that time, so the triangle was fine enough. Comparing the triangle version to the compute one shows quite similar occupancies on the gpu for generic and simple effects. But yeah, compute rules, it'll be the preferred choice for such stuff nowadays.
I can tell, that you are graphics freak. I like it. A good add to df. Also-with cooperation with John you guys make the best videos. Df retro (goddamit make a video bout doom3 on xbox!) and tech focus are the best ones. Good day
This lad knows his shit and I am very much enjoying his work. Thank you for stopping the Silicone Valley talk. (ending a sentence on a high note) Very much appreciated. 👍👍🍻
I want see RD2 with either ray tracing/path tracing lol. Ya I know good luck, HZD with path tracing would be epic too :) Horizon zero dawn along with RD2 are two games imo that still look epic even on aging hardware of PS4, HZD had some good fog too and god rays if I remember correctly. Good video DF :)
But no console supports RT as of now. So we either have to wait for Rockstar to release RDR2 on PC, or we have to wait for the next iteration of consoles plus the implementation into RDR2, which is questionable that it will happen.
@@TexelGuy yeah and then everyone in the comments is gonna pretend they can run RDR2 at 60 ultra with rtx on. lol. I love ray tracing btw, it just is way too costly for now (probably why the next consoles will still go for 30 fps + ray tracing in some titles)
@@timytimeerased Well, all the RTX cards out right now can do 60 fps with ray tracing, so that's already better than 30 fps + low preset ray tracing. They're worth the cost, imo. 350$ is not a lot to get a great ray tracing experience.
10:55 swat 4 was released a few months before fear and it also had those, I remember me and my friends stopped to admire those light & dust particles coming off the windows in some maps and it was soo impressive back then :P
Stalker: Clear Sky, damn it. Yes, game might have been crap, but it was one of the first, widescale uses of that technique, with god rays so long, I quite frankly, haven't seen longer used pretty much anywhere, with maybe an exception of Call of Prypiat. (Stalker Clear Sky DX10 trailer shows it off really well)
You talk about billboard particles, when showing Crysis but I could swear Crysis actually had volumetric fog. It was even showcased in a Tech demo before the game was released...
@@Mattev2309 His voice seems undefined, this causes me headache, and takes awawy my attention from teh content hE TaLks LiKe ThAt with sssssssssss an d st rang e pAUs esssszzzz.
![[4K] Red Dead Redemption 2: The Digital Foundry Tech Analysis!](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Dnzuh6I8gnM/mqdefault.jpg)
Very interesting video, Alex! I would love to see a Tech Focus on the evolution of skybox tech like clouds. Or on on the evolution of texture filtering, normal maps, bump maps, etc.
MunkeyChips 🙌
Spyro the Dragon had 10,000 polygons for all their clouds bsck in 1998 lol.
I AGREE WITH THIS DUDE
GOD DANG IT, this is the best channel on RUclips for me. Love these kind of videos, keep up the amazing work you're doing!
No shit man! I've been watching each amd every video since like last 2 years. Everything amd everyone is so darn professional. They have genuinely earned my respect
This channel is the bee's knees! Also, Alex is a qtie. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
💯 I love the in-depth tech analysis & explanation. I still see SlideShare tech presentations but these videos take the 🍰 cake.
X-Ray Engine for STALKER had amazing godrays, especially during storms while inside buildings
Yep but only after Fear. Stalker released at 2007.
That game still has pretty nice lighting and atmospherics.
Yeah I'm surprised this didn't come up. I remember STALKER: Clear Sky was a big deal for using DX10 light and fog effects, so the invisible bloodsuckers could run through fog and you'd see it get displaced, still accurately lit. I remember there was an interview with a developer where the game journalist was super excited by this prospect for gameplay, only to be shot down by the dev saying "well, most people are still probably going to be using DX9 hardware so we can't expect it for game design..."
Yup, my first hour playing Clear Sky I couldn't believe how cool it looked, and I had a Radeon 4890 which did it really well.
X-Ray Engine is also known for being one of the few engine that has a mind of its own, it love to break out of random...
Alex has got much better at explaining these things in a way a noob can (kind of) understand. Great work, DF!
DID HE????
@@monkeyrobotsinc.9875 His presentation was a bit hit or miss in the early days but that is understandable but I would say he's one of the best now on this channel, he really goes deep into explaining a lot of this tech and in a way that many can understand better.
Eh, I'm still mostly in the dark. It's too fast
Yesss! I've legit just gone back to actually finish RDR2 so this video comes in perfectly for me haha. This generation has really suprised me in terms of how much progress it actually made in the graphics department. I was extremely sceptical of the power of the PS4 and XO when they first launched, but it's been a really good generation IMO!
We saw the power at launch with Killzone on PS4 and Ryse on Xbox
Same here, I was a pcmr guy at the end of last gen and half of this gen. Then I got a ps4 right before Uncharted 4..following year i got a ps4 pro and a 4k tv, that's when I started using my ps4 more than my pc.
Power doesn't mean anything though games will only look great if the studios have the talent and budget which is why PS4 exclusives look better than anything on PC
@@goofed86 Not really. I don't think you've actually seen many new PC games. With maxed settings, PC always will have the upper hand in view distance and LOD, actual resolution, anti aliasing and foliage density compared to exclusives (not to mention ray tracing in Control as an example). It's just mostly a limitation of CPU horsepower in consoles that no amount of optimization will overcome.
@@TexelGuy Regardless Red Dead 2 is smooth and one of the best looking console games even next to PC. Next gen consoles will tackle the CPU issues with Zen 2.
Nerds seeing realistic volumetrical light on monitor: "Ooooh!"
Seeing real light from their window: "Ugh!" (pulls down the window blinds)
@Davide Panarella hahhah so offended over a joke
Lol, that’s the goddamn truth!
Hell yeah!!! I love everything about volumetric effects, especially in RDR 2 and now Alex himself have made a whole video about it. Nice!
It's still sort of dreamy that Rdr2 looks so good. It just has this unique realistic look,as if they just took everything from reality and downrezzed it to fit in a video game.
SquidStone I got it late, just about a month ago after I got my XoneX. I have been playing it pretty much nonstop and I can’t help but just marvel at it over and over. It never stops impressing me. I am constantly pausing and entering photo mode and adjusting the focus and then gushing over the insane resolution. But the real impressiveness is in the more passive realism that comes from the lighting. It isn’t as obvious as “damn I can’t believe how closely I can zoom in on the engraving on this pistol and how sharp it is that close up” but more like “I just forgot that I’m not actually watching a movie again” while just walking through forest and into a clearing. The lighting is something that when done well it *doesn’t* jump out at you. But you know that the scene you’re looking at looks *damn* good.
I’m seeing this comment now & that it’s “2 years ago” & that’s so goddamn impressive that no other game has come close to it in these 2 years..kudos Rockstar! 🥳😍
Alex, you're an amazing addition to the team!
After watching videos explaining volumetric lighting, it’s effect on rasterization, and understanding now what ray tracing is and what is means; I am now extremely excited for real-time ray tracing in next gen games. Like really excited. At first I just wrote it off as some tech jargon for some method of graphic rendering. Boy was I wrong! Ray tracing is the effing future!
You're such a great addition to the DF team Alex! Explanations are spot on. :) What I love about these videos is how it helps to educate gamers to better appreciate the craftsmanship behind video games. I think this is desperately needed in a climate where people are so quick on criticizing game developers, even for the tiniest of defects in their games.
Awesome stuff, I like this one as a CG creator my self, Although one tip is that I really recommend you guys learn to use Unreal Engine or maybe Blender 3D's Eevee render engine (which are both free to use) on showing some effects instead of 2D written illustrations since I find most of the time it was quite confusing to understand by showing us those 2D graphic representation...so by using maybe Blender 3D Eevee engine which has most of every game engine effects, or UE makes it better to demonstrate those technical 3D aspects effects. (what I mean is abit more effort on showing the graphic side because it is not easy to explain these by just 2D indesign stuffs)
I second giving UE4 a spin (I haven't tried Eevee personally), which uses the modern frustum-aligned volumetric fog approach in conjunction with older techniques. And one can play with its many parameters in the editor and with console commands, as well as see the frametime hit of every step in the GPU profiling tool.
Or maybe give something like after effects a try. That in combination with a good general 3D package like Blender or Cinema for motion graphic type stuff would be a huge step up. Altough I doubt Alex has time for it in addition to creating all the other content.
Silent Hill 2 had impressive real time dynamic shadows on both characters and environments (only interiors though) all the way back in 2001, on a console no less.
Arguably, developing games for several sets of consoles was easier than PC back then.
Meanwhile, Jet Set Radio on Dreamcast had dynamic shadow volumes casting from characters, vehicles and environments in outdoor levels in 2000.
Incredible work, Alex. The amount of work that must have went into this...damn.
I love these videos that explain what all these computer graphics jargon actually mean.
I love it that, when I open the video, I'm immediately greeted with Eve Online music. Thanks! :)
Downhil Domination for PS2 actually used God Rays when it came out in 04 , it was pretty well implemented but was over used in some areas , but it def is technically impressive :)
Man, this is a complex topic, not sure if i'm a little bit sleepy, but in the middle of explanation i had some loss of attention, i will probably rewatch it, though i think the better parts were the ones which you showed 3d "wireframes" like the last one with the example using the cubes being reduced in quantity but maintaining the size like on a fibonacci equation.
Thanks for the high quality content, hope to see more of this more consistently on the channel, the Retro appeals to the heart and this appeals to the brain.
My favourite channels on YT are :
Digital Foundry - Tech analysis.
AI and Games - AI behaviour and how they make games better.
Game Maker's Toolkit - Game design, level design, and game production.
Noclip - Video game documentaries
Ultimate Immersion - Graphical showcases.
Love all you guys!
This is probably the most complicated DF video I've seen thus far; I'm probably gonna be studying this for years! It's kinda amazing how those fading billboarded texture godrays are still used today.
I'll wait for PARTICLE! realtime particle is what I live for !
a great explanation as always.
Bless Alex for making some of the best content on this channel. I'll always have time for these types of DF videos as I feel like I learn a lot more than if I watched a video comparing pixel counts and framerate analysis.
Yes!
This series is invaluable to the industry.
More Tech Focus videos please! You're doing an awesome job!
Modern volumetric lighting is one of the things that made a leap in gaming visuals, in the past few years games have been looking extremely realistic and the bar is just getting higher. I love it.
Videos like this is why I enable bell icon for this channel
Digital Foundry is what makes me thankful for RUclips to exist.
Good to see I'm not the only person who obsesses over every detail, in between actually playing the game. I've found myself spending a lot of time in Control, really enjoying it with a modest 2060 Super.
LOVED Assassin's Creed Syndicate and Unity for their volumetrics!
I can't wait for a Tech Focus video about all kinds of global illumination!
More of this is much appreciated
Thank you DF! This is the kind of video content I’ve been wanting! Nice work Alex
Can you recommend any other channels who make similar content? Like not the fps analysis hut the knowledge part
I resonate with Alex's extreme levels of nerdiness. Keep these up!
Absolutely fascinating. I work in 3D graphics - slow, offline rendered stuff - and it just blows my mind what's being achieved in real time with the techniques here. The atmosphere and realism RDR2's fogs and mists bring to the gameworld is incredible. I'd have to work hard to get render times down to a few minutes using traditional ray-marching, but these guys are producing nearly-as-good results in mere milliseconds. Nuts. Thanks for the breakdown :)
Stencil Shadows and no mention of Splinter Cell? Sam Fisher is coming for you XD
John Carmack called...
Splinter Cell uses shadow mapping.
Digital foundry back again with the heat 🤙 we love you guys , thanks for educating us
Oh my gosh, I've been asking for an explainer series, so I was psyched to see this in my feed. Thank you, and please keep them coming!
This was honestly incredibly informative an interesting, thank you very much Alex! I had always been curious about the volumetric voxel lighting, having heard that term a lot (especially here), and had an inkling that earlier games simply used geometry.
Really enjoyed watching this. Still have absolutely no idea how game lighting works...
this is the stuff, I check DF channel for graphical analysis and tech-focused videos, game reviews, and other stuff are abundant and not exclusive to this channel... great job and keep'em coming
One of the most things I noticed in rdr2 was the relastic particles , and volumetric clouds . can't wait to see the analytical video keep it up
Great video! I'm definitely interested in seeing a tech focus on clouds and particles in games and such. It's amazing how much devs think about these effects to make them as realistic as possible.
This is what gets me hyped for consoles and PCs in the future companies can further develop their engines and use more efficient techniques to deliver us are more cinematic and beautiful looking games.
Lighting and atmospheric effects me has always been of the biggest factors because solid lighting can make it feel so much more immersive and just better looking, can really decide whether the game looks solid or impressive. The way they can make different materials, atmospheric effects react and reflect light so differently can make it feel really dynamic.
Man, all that Unreal music in background :D What a (absolutely right) tribute!
Alex was a good hire choice 👌
I remember when I first saw this effect in Mario 64 in that piano room. I was floored and ever since I have bee obsessed how it's done in any game. Great video.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky's insane use of ray marching along with neat shader effects for the time was really memorable. It almost made it a sort of second Crysis for the community.
Thank you so much Alex and DF for so many amazing videos. There's a lot of effort in them and it shows, I find myself in awe the whole time, feels like I've unlocked a new sense and the beauty (both visual and technical) just comes crashing in.
Haven't got a clue whats going on but love these kind of videos. So much more going on in a game that we take for granted
STUNNING work yet again Alex, Pro level. Dont you ever leave DF sir ! hdheheh this is a masterclass
I remember being impressed with the god ray effects in Forza Horizon 1, and I still think it looks pretty good. I'm not sure what effect it was using, and it definitely didn't do it first or with the highest fidelity, but it did to it back in 2012 on the 360, and is a completely dynamic effect that changes with the time of day. It was always really impressive when you drive over a hill or around a corner at just the right time of day and you get those golden rays of light suddenly hitting your view.
And speaking of the FH games, those would be a good candidate to look at for the topic of skyboxes and clouds. I remember the devs talking about how FH2 had dynamic simulated weather where rainbows would appear just as a result of the engine, and weren't manually placed in the game at all. The later games did that too, and FH3 in particular has a seriously impressive skybox in general.
I love these videos, they're so informative and entertain the obsession I've had with rendering since I was a child.
I’m playing this on the Xbox X on a OLED tv and I can confirm this game looks absolutely stunning! They did a fantastic job with this one. Red Dead 2.
Wonderful video! There is just so much to cover and dive in to with CG technology. As someone who was always heavily intruded in cg (like probably most of us) , but who took a hiatus from viddygames for a while, i got back into things, inspired by the great AAA titles, and others too.
Visual aesthetics, representation of scientific theory in virtual worlds is a fascinating topic and I
I've had mentioned deep chats with people about optics, which leads on to discussion of film, game, TV, art styles.
Truly a shame that The Crew 2's lightning and volumetrics are never being talked about. Also that game has some pretty neat clouds so I hope you'll cover it in your future cloud-rendering video
Absolutely loved that video! Gave me a great base on how volumetric lighting is actually done nowadays!
I love your Tech Focus episodes Alex. Keep at it!
I hope they release rdr2 on pc soon
Yup 2020
With raytracing
No
Wish in one hand, shit in the other.
I think my 1050ti will be obsolete soon xd
The way the grass lights only from certain angles always gets me
I remember hearing about an old effect where you rendered depth only for the front and back of the lights, then used some kind of shader math to calculate density by subtracting front and back Z positions, and this was used for cheap volumetric lighting.
This was great. Have always been interested in the hows and whys of volumetric lighting, and I didn't realise there were so many different forms of it. Great video and hope to see more in this vein!
this is one of the most informative videos i've ever seen on youtube. thanks for the great work!
Thanks for introducing that view space frustum aligned spatial splitted volume rending thingy! will try to find out more on it.
I love original Unreal music in the background. Great video Alex!
Looking forward to the Particles video, also FEAR was such a great example
you are just amazing Alex, as always. It is not easy to explain seamlessly difficult topic such volumetric lightning! Bravo and I can't wait for next topic :)
I was half expecting a DF Retro with John today. I guess that’s the opposite of Tech Focus with Alex.
Lord’s of the Fallen is criminally under appreciated
13:12 I can feel Crowbcat absolutely seething with anger
Red Dead 2 really went the extra mile on graphics, would love to see it scream on a maxed out PC one day. Next game Rockstar does though needs to focus more on gameplay enhancements since gameplay wise it was only a step ahead of the original RDR.
Lets hope they dont delay the port as long as red dead 1.
@@turbopumped6490 Mean forever?)
@@turbopumped6490 what could be delayed ? Nothing has been announced at all. You know you can play rdr2 on a one x, and it will cost probably less than your last graphics card or processor...
@@timytimeerased yeah....at 30 fps
guys we don't have to explain the entirety of rdr2 every time it's brought up. This vid is about graphics and rdr2 is almost an year old at this point
Excellent video Alex! VOXELs for the first series finale maybe? (hoping this becomes a series)
Hope to see more Tech Focus for: particle effects, textures, animation and physics.
I know of another oldschool way to do volumetric fog from early 2000s. What's the framebuffer configuration? It's usually (way back then specifically) RGBA with 8-bit per component, and 24-bit Z and 8-bit stencil. But what is A value used for? Usually it's just used as padding for memory access alignment and just sits there idle. Well the trick needs this common true colour layout, it won't work in high colour.
You disable Z-writes. You render the far side of the volume (by having the volume be composed of convex pieces and selecting surfaces with normal facing away from you) and simply set the alpha to the depth of the pixel. You can then render the objects that are potentially within this shadow volume in the same manner - no colour function, just alpha writes. Then you draw the near side of the volume with subtractive alpha encoding the depth of the pixel. As a result, the desired fog density is encoded in the alpha channel of the framebuffer. Then you render a quad on the near plane of the view frustum that covers the volumetric object, blends some colour into the pixel depending on destination alpha, and clears destination alpha. You can re-run this effect multiple times for multiple volumetric objects. Since you only have 8 bits to work with, ideally you normalise the depth values represented in the Alpha channel to the actual range of depths covered by the volumetric object, and simply account for that in the final alpha blend pass.
This technique is quite compatible with and quite similar to stencil shadows, since both rely on convex volumes, and both need to be capped at the near plane of the frustum, or need a similar workaround. I'm not sure if Carmack's Reversal is applicable to volumetric fog, i haven't thought this far. The technique absolutely doesn't rely on pixel shaders, and obviously vertex programs can be performed on the CPU in absence of acceleration hardware.
These tech focus videos are my favorites.
Even though I understood very little here, I'd love to watch more videos like this from you guys.
Very good work Alex!
I believe Most Wanted (2005) used some kind of raymarched volumetrics. The way dust, or smoke casting volumetric shadows through was really nice. Only PC version of course
The same way F.E.A.R. did it, only for a few effects though. Although PS2 showed superior alpha blending (especially visible on the trees without leaves that aren't sorted correctly on PC, they later fixed it for xbox360 though).
DF keeps pumping out the quality content.
I love these technical breakdown videos
Fantastic video, need to watch it a few times as it is just so packed with detail! Thanks for making these!
Dammit , i was never so completely lost and confused and yet absolutely hypnotized. Good God this video was sweet!
Great video! Though could've used mention of atmospheric scattering used circa Halo 3 for example
Very interesting fact: sometimes developers didn't use fullscreen quads to apply post-processing, but one fullscreen triangle. Basically, using a single triangle instead of a quad will be faster on the GPU because of some of the architecture quirks. Nowadays all relative GCN and Nvidia GPUs benefit from this stuff, so a lot of the times devs actively use triangles instead of quads when applicable.
Drawing full-screen geometry has in some cases been rendered obsolete by compute shaders. Bypassing the rendering pipeline like that does improve performance on some hardware.
@@Silikone but then again, compute shaders weren't widespread at that time, so the triangle was fine enough. Comparing the triangle version to the compute one shows quite similar occupancies on the gpu for generic and simple effects. But yeah, compute rules, it'll be the preferred choice for such stuff nowadays.
I don't know about lighting, but Unreal soundtrack is still sooooo GOOOOD!
It's so good....it's Unreal.
now these are the types of videos i want to see from you guys. not those boring demonstrations of a games graphics. theres thousands of those videos
This is a first-rate explanation and history. Massively informative. Bravo!
RDR 2 has some beautiful settings I believe Doom 2016 an RDR 2 are games to show off PS4 pro...can't wait for the new games to hit.
I can tell, that you are graphics freak. I like it. A good add to df. Also-with cooperation with John you guys make the best videos. Df retro (goddamit make a video bout doom3 on xbox!) and tech focus are the best ones.
Good day
This lad knows his shit and I am very much enjoying his work. Thank you for stopping the Silicone Valley talk. (ending a sentence on a high note) Very much appreciated. 👍👍🍻
The fog in Fallout 4 was stellar, too. Particularly in the Far Harbor DLC, which seems to have been built around the fog.
Did not expect the video to start out with EVE Online music. Nice choice!
The lights in the subway in WoW are another good example of that Mario 64 style sunshafts.
It’s one thing to see it in a game, it’s another to see it irl, it was so breathtaking I thought the army laced our MRE’s
I want see RD2 with either ray tracing/path tracing lol. Ya I know good luck, HZD with path tracing would be epic too :)
Horizon zero dawn along with RD2 are two games imo that still look epic even on aging hardware of PS4, HZD had some good fog too and god rays if I remember correctly. Good video DF :)
It might happen. Many triple A titles are adopting RTX. If the game is in the works for PC, maybe Nvidia got in touch with them.
But no console supports RT as of now. So we either have to wait for Rockstar to release RDR2 on PC, or we have to wait for the next iteration of consoles plus the implementation into RDR2, which is questionable that it will happen.
@@TexelGuy yeah and then everyone in the comments is gonna pretend they can run RDR2 at 60 ultra with rtx on. lol. I love ray tracing btw, it just is way too costly for now (probably why the next consoles will still go for 30 fps + ray tracing in some titles)
@@timytimeerased Well, all the RTX cards out right now can do 60 fps with ray tracing, so that's already better than 30 fps + low preset ray tracing. They're worth the cost, imo. 350$ is not a lot to get a great ray tracing experience.
@Transistor Jump Not Every GPU. Only RTX cards.
Please do more Tech Focus episodes. Maybe on voxel cone tracing.
10:55 swat 4 was released a few months before fear and it also had those, I remember me and my friends stopped to admire those light & dust particles coming off the windows in some maps and it was soo impressive back then :P
btw I think it actually looked better than fear's, it was moving not just static like shown here
Great video Alex.
Always pleasure to watch your videos.
THATs the stuff why I love Digital Foundry.
Great work.
Grüße aus Bayern.
Stalker: Clear Sky, damn it. Yes, game might have been crap, but it was one of the first, widescale uses of that technique, with god rays so long, I quite frankly, haven't seen longer used pretty much anywhere, with maybe an exception of Call of Prypiat. (Stalker Clear Sky DX10 trailer shows it off really well)
I love these type of video’s. please do more of those! ;)
You talk about billboard particles, when showing Crysis but I could swear Crysis actually had volumetric fog. It was even showcased in a Tech demo before the game was released...
Alex personality adds so much to the DF team good job man 👍
More is less in my opinion.
How do you mean?
@@Mattev2309 Too much personality on a serious tech focused channel is contradictory.
@@MarceloTezza I get ya.. but hes not OTT.
@@Mattev2309 His voice seems undefined, this causes me headache, and takes awawy my attention from teh content hE TaLks LiKe ThAt with sssssssssss an d st rang e pAUs esssszzzz.