PLEASE READ FOR UPDATES & RESPONSES: 1. Watch this video in 4K (as in streaming settings) as any lower compression will hide the visual details discussed. 2. Some clarification regarding the statement made at 8:30, it's a real phenomenon *outside of camera footage.* Film grain is a "real phenomenon" as well, but that doesn't usually enhance graphics. 3. We apologize for the text mistake at 9:47 where "50ms" is written instead of ".50ms". We actually re-rendered the entire video to fix that but we obviously uploaded the wrong file. We would re-upload if that didn't mean wiping current support and promotions on other sites. 4. We would really appreciate it if viewers could share on giant game related subreddits. These prevent self promotion but *these can really push our channel's success by the thousands. 5: We would like to ask users to excuse the incorrect total timing stated in the video(9.4ms). After reviewing our data later, we realized we had missed some numbers and the total frame time was 12.4ms which in our opinion is still impressing for only using 51% of the stated hardware. Here is a more accurate (but still estimating)timing: 1.20ms Drawing Geometry 0.058ms Drawing Geometric Decals 0.77ms Drawing HBAO 2.01ms Drawing 24 512x512 Shadow Maps 0.83ms Drawing SSR 2.18ms Drawing & Updating Lighting/Culling, Diffuse & Specular, Shadow Map Projection 0.96ms Drawing Translucents and Effect Sprites 0.078ms Drawing Rain and Raindrops 0.32ms Calculating Mesh Deformation and Motion Blur 0.51ms Post Processing Chains like Color Grading, Bloom and Frame Mipmapping. 0.15ms Drawing UI 0.28ms Dispatch calls throughout pipeline But some of these timing are off because some will be slower &/or faster depending what what is drawn together in real-time. They don't add up to 9.34. In combination and being drawn together gives some of the heavier shading operations more context=larger timings. This is just how intel GPA works and you can even try to find what selections affect another. But we just wanted to give that warning. * RESPONSE TO COMMUNITY QUESTIONS: 1. The issue with parallax cubemaps: This is why Kevin said "most common scenario" where environments are complex, irregularly shaped, dynamic lighting is present, memory management issues, baking times, plausibility issues, and most importantly constructed by *real people with limited patience.* When we say "Nanite is cutting companies time and money", that is not the issue. The issue is that it's at the expense of both massive performance loss *and visual problems.* We don't expect every AAA funded studio to optimize their meshes manually. We would rather compromise and promote a mesh algorithm that does optimization better automatically to cater to the permanent (flawed) mindset of modern devs. Raytraced specular representation has had many breakthroughs for performance and visual quality, if the game is optimized modern hardware *will handle it and can produce way better visual results than what is offered in most games.* We will speak about this again in a more dedicated video. 2. The motion blur statement has been repeatedly misinterpreted: The motion blur tip we suggested would not affect a portion of the screen and highly enhance motion on BFI. The final frame is absolutely representative of the anti-motion distortion seen during gameplay . We do not believe in re-creating motion blur produced from cameras. We reference stable coherent vision from the human eye during high speed traversal where animated objects and camera traversal induced velocity within the specified distance (via depth buffer). We suggest anyone who can run, drive a car, or bike to test for themselves.
hey im just watching the video and i would like to say its interesting but i would love for u to provide more details as i have hard time keeping up when u start talking about SSR
Good art direction can do wonders for the game visuals, not matter the tech. However no amount of tech will salvage bad art direction. See how Skyrim (2011) looks and compare it to, say, Dishonored (2012). Dishonored looks great to this day and Skyrim looks like ass.
@@ivanalantiev2397 Lol, no, they both look great, and both had great art direction. You picked the wrong games to compare, I don't know why you chose Skyrim when it had one of the most iconic looks of any game made in that decade.
@KvltKommando Skyrim is a phenomenal game in some aspects. I would even conceded to your point that some aspects of art direction, like main character design, are great and memorable. But it doesn't go beyond that. Skyrim graphics didn't age well and there's a reason for it. I urge you to replay the opening of both games side by side to refresh you memory.
It's probably one of the few examples of excessive water puddles on the roads actually looking amazing. That stuff could easily look extremely distracting or plain ugly. But NFS15 pulled it off blissfully.
NFS Heat at night is just as good, the only reason it's behind is because the city of NFS 2015 is way more interesting than the city in NFS Heat (you get more downtown in NFS 2015 while you get more suburbs and industrial in NFS Heat).
@@strider029 Heat looked alot worse then 2015, especially due to the completely overdone post processing effects, like chromatic abberration. I had a 4k monitor at the time and Heat looked like it ran at 1080p...
@@strider029while it looks photorealistic, no doubt about it, it looks really bleak and washed out. I would much rather prefer higher contrast and saturation instead, along the lines of how NFSU2 looked now some odd 20 years ago.
@@xXYannuschXx Heat used a clarity filter and a sharpening filter with lanczos image scaling that caused some issues(Unbound got rid of these and uses a better image scaler), it also used new global illumination tech that did improve some things but also looked bad in most places (you can watch 'Hustle by Day, Risk it all by Night' by Kleber Garcia for more information, it's a very cool talk)
@@egorkhristov2467 yeah it looks quite boring. Looking "realistic" doesn't help all that much here, especially as that "realistic" here means a video shot with go pro. The game lacks color and looks washed out for sure. Don't get me wrong though, I don't think it looks that bad, just personally not a fan. I think need for speed underground 2 pulled off this dark night look way better, as it actually manages to look interesting, while having a similar feel.
The chromatic aberration only being visible in the corners is also how actual camera lenses work in the real life. I think that's what makes it so realistic and a great amount of attention to detail.
It's being applied globally, unless they have a layer mask. It's just more subtle and not way out of control like most games do, which sucks. It's especially awful if you play on an ultrawide.
I’m sorry but that’s incorrect. I’m professional photographer and chromatic aberrations appear throughout the entire frame. Maybe you’re thinking of vignette which appear only in corners.
@@trinidad111yeah but chromatic aberration is more apparent on the edges of some lenses. Personally I dislike them in video game especially first person games because your eyes don't act like a lens and it's "unrealistic" to have them.
@@trinidad111 Meh, im a pro photographer too, and i can just guess that youre not, since you see the chromatic aberration everywhere, what are you using, a 5 dollar lens? lmao
This goes way above my level of comprehension, but what I did understand was very interesting. Most NFS fans know 2015 was probably the best the franchise ever looked. As a big NFS fan, I remember when the sequel to this game, Payback, was revealed to have a full day/night cycle and people were hyped, but then disappointed by how the end result looked when the game released. My question therefore is: how much does the fact 2015 is permanently night affect the final result, and would it be realistically possible to implement a similar look in a game with a full day/night cycle?
well I’ve used cinematic tools to make a sunset before, that looks nice, but daytime is a little strange. Does look better if you use Unite mod, which removed baked lighting
Crazy how after so many years a lot of the games from that era look visually superior than most titles released today. NFS 2015 is still the best looking NFS ever made imo.
I'm so happy this game is finally getting covered graphics wise. Nearly 10 years later and it's still the most photorealistic game I've seen. Modern Warfare could pass as realistic from some angles, but NFS 2015 feels like a playable live action movie.
one other thing the game did well with the realism is that the color grading uses a lot of green witch makes it look more realistic since green is the most common in real life
I disagree on the point about motion blur-the blur happening to the background is pretty subtle, so it’s not really obstructing any important information. It’s what you’d expect from a real camera (the background is moving relative to the camera, therefore it’s blurred), and sells the smoothness and continuity of the camera motion. As an additional bonus it helps hide aliasing. When you removed the motion blur, the aliased edges instantly revealed themselves and made the city look a lot less real.
I agree that is correct from the camera's perspective, but I prefer motion from how an eye works IRL, in which especially while driving you would lock on and track scenery as it rotates around the car; keeping it sharp and clear. In this case per-object or positional motion blur maybe permissible, ideally eye tracking is used to naturally calculate motion blur depending on movement relative to your eye, and even more ideal would be perceptually infinite fps.
There was no Anti-Aliasing on the captured frame. SMAA and plenty of other methods would have fixed that. Only the *gameplay* footage had SMAA applied. The captured buffers didn't because the capture software does not include third party injections. We do not appreciate replicating camera effects that harm gameplay motion (clarity). The majority of the scene the player needs clarity on was beyond a certain threshold of depth which means we could have had a compromise. Motion blur should not sell smoothness. Thats what 60fps+ is for. Motion blur should convey important velocity.
@@ThreatInteractive I really don't get why so many people call a clump of jagged pixels "clarity". I feel that an extremely zoomed in frame still looks better with motion blur than without.
Unfortunely modern developers just want to flood their game's graphics with 400+ different effects and filters, while giving zero f*cks about optimization and thinking that it looks and runs great because we have frame generation and upscalling nowdays. For me, that's what is ruining modern gaming. They just don't want to work anymore. Optimization is dead.
The Switch, the Steam Deck, mobile games and even the PS4, are forcing developers to not be too ambiguous. If you want, see Inmortals of Aveum (Staff layoff), Forspoken (studio shut down) and Alan Wake II (forced to scale back the requirements, cause their game flopped on sales).
@@lumirairazbyte9697 I don't think that's it at all, as the things described in the video would make the games run and look BETTER on those limited platforms. The problem is nobody wants to write efficient game engines any more, instead relying on a one size fits all engine that effectively ends up being a one size fits nothing engine.
Devs want to work its the management that wants everything fast and in agile way that gets in the way of optimization and code refactoring because these things take time and time is management's enemy.
Here's something I learned from doing art: Real life has no obligation nor guarantee to give you good design. It doesn't matter if it's "realistic" if it looks bad. It doesn't matter if the ray-tracing and textures and face hair hair are accurate if it looks weird. You cannot rely on the computer to gives you good design. That's one big reasons why a lot of CGI looks bad too, because 1) lack of time 2) the over-reliance and trust in simulation. How many studios actually do anything to their motion blur other than tick a box? Do they even know how the effect is achieved?
@@redblue5140 Bulldogs, angler fish, molerats, several highly knotted trees, spiders, several different colored neon lights in a dim bar, someone missing teeth or have crooked teeth, yellow teeth, horse teeth, cross-eyes, huge round noses, no eyebrows, obesity, festering wounds, feces... Just look at everything artists are NOT drawing and you'll find out real quick how realism != aesthetic. And I didn't even mention composition. If you have every tried photography, you know how difficult it is. Why? Because real world rarely gives good composition. Things are just threwn about and not everything makes for a good picture.
@@redblue5140- I’ve been creating visual effects for 30 years. A lot of which you’ve seen at the cinema. When you stop and look at the real world as often as I do, you’ll start to see odd looking things all the time. If we film it and show someone, they might comment on ‘how fake it looks’ yet be accepting as it’s reality. In the world of visual effects, we aren’t afforded the same grace. If it looks odd, it looks fake. So often we are adjusting the visuals we create to look how ‘people expect’, not how they actually look. I believe a lot of this is also owed to our visual memory. It’s not that accurate. How people remember things in their minds eye is different to reality. It’s therefore our job to account for that difference and create visual effects that match expectation, not always reality. Don’t get me wrong, reality is our benchmark 98 percent of the time. With all of that said, there’s a lot of poor visual effects in the world. Especially when a director wants to create something implausible in the real world. There’s a final consideration. As we work in a ‘filmed’ medium, we need to create our effects to match the response when filmed - not viewed with our eyes. Games follow these rules closely.
Regarding motion blur, I think trying to obtain as much detail as possible is going to create a more unrealistic experience; the motion blur appearing on the sides of the frame is entirely realistic to the way in which our eyes will distort reality, inadvertently making it more accurate to what we would perceive in real life.
People use that theory but it falls down for one simple reason, we don't just stare at the middle of the screen all the time. We scan the screen with our eyes looking for other vehicles, how the road bends, where the junctions are, where activities are in the game world, etc. Blurring anything we might need for reference to know where were going, hinders the ability to actually play the game, in the same way having things suddenly pop-in ahead does. The number of games, not only racing, I've felt actively uncomfortable playing because of this is insane.
Thanks for calling out TAA. Crazy how it's remained the industry standard for so long. I don't think it'll go away, but I really hope it does so we can talk about it the way we talk about the overuse of bloom in late 2000s. Same with poorly implemented SSR which clearly fade in and out as you look around. Gamers won't accept pop-in but will accept reflections that only appear if you look at it right. Crazy world. Regarding cubemaps and raytracing; Source 2's parallax corrected cubemaps are pretty amazing even if they're not perfect especially in environments with a lot of 3D detail.
Think the call out was more against poor implementations of TAA. You can have poor implementation of anything, reflections, motion blur (which is what most complain about, not actual good motion blur), light bounce, literally anything but it's especially egregious when there's a bad TAA implementation since it's the final resolve to the entire image and affects everything. But good TAA and other spatial/temporal upscalers like DLSS or TSR? It's pretty awesome. Just go back to older games rendered at the res of their day and basically everything was plagued by aliasing. Hell brute force those old games today at 4k and beyond and you'll still find shimmering. Some art styles hid it better, CRT obvs didn't have to worry about a pixel grid, but regardless it was always there and never completely solved until these modern temporal resolves and indeed spatial upscalers got good. Sure, we now have a new problem in the way of artifacting but progress has shown that getting dramatically better over time and dedicated hardware for upscaling is especially effective. If you've only used FSR then I get the hate but man try DLSS or XeSS or even TSR and it's pretty impressive. But regardless if you disagree yeah it absolutely won't go away, the industry seems to have made its choice. It's objectively a win in performance, it allows for greater fidelity, it's more efficient use of hardware, it's a tool for both high and low end hardware, and subjectively it's the best looking image treatment we've ever had in real time rendering. There's still flawed implementations out there, but there's also great ones that prove it's just the way forward and if you still prefer aliasing at all costs (which is totally fair, options should always be there) then just disable anti aliasing. But I also wish you luck in finding the perf for high enough resolutions in modern games :P
Taa is dogwater and all of these new games have some stupid fkn fog effect that makes having an oled monitor borderline pointless. I end up having to gut out Taa and removing that fog from every game just to make darkness and shadow be just that.
@@HEADSHOTPROLOL I have a 3060TI so I have the older version of DLSS. However I'll still say I actually strongly dislike it. Even on BEST SETTINGS, DLSS games will have mad trailing for me (recently tried with CP77, Dead Space Remake). I reckon the issue might be that I prefer to game at 1080p with at least 90+ fps, whereas most AAA gamers prefer 60 fps and at least 1440p. Perhaps DLSS just isn't good with high refresh rates. Older games had MSAA which was fantastic. Unfortunately it's not an option anymore with newer games due to deferred rendering. I guess I could just use DSR, but then I don't get the high fps values I want.
@@awsomebot1 deferred is the biggest meme in gaming currently, Taa is great since its basically free aa. really all the Problems People have with it stem from the deferred renderer
@@RADkate To me, the way TAA works on paper seems to imply it's pretty much always going to make the image quality suffer due to blurring/artifacts. I've yet to see TAA that I think looks good. That said, maybe you're right and TAA looks good with forward rendering. I wouldn't know because it seems pretty much all games with TAA use deferred rendering.
Love it. This reminds me of the graphics studies by Adrian Courrèges (his breakdown of Doom 2016 is one of my favorites). Looking forward to seeing more.
The game being stuck at a night cycle really allows more room for resources/optimization and I genuinely would rather have a racing game stuck at night and look this amazing rather than bothering with day/night cycles. This game still looks better than the most recent title, NFS Unbound, in my opinion. I barely understand the technical stuff but it really amazes me when developers can make something THIS good while not being so taxing on hardware. Also, would love a video going over the Hedgehog Engine. It's a fascinating engine and story on how Sonic Team and SEGA stepped up with their games. Keep up the good work, loving the channel so far!
Man, I'm expecting red circles and arrows on screenshots as you explain how and why it looks the way it does. Totally wasn't expecting you to dissect the rendering of a single frame in ways I didn't know possible. Edit: Just saw that this is the seedling of a indie gaming studio! I'm now expecting a well optimized and photo-realistic (if that's the style) product! Take my sub!
Wow, crazy indepth video, amazing. Completely agree about motionblur, it's a shame very few developers get it right, but Unreal doesn't help with it, they don't allow MB to be applied to objects only which would fix most games. BFI being mentioned at all makes me happy, very important for motion clarity and increasing the impression of fluidity especially when the bigger the TV is the blurrier games will look in motion. I think more people will understand the appeal of motionblur if sample and hold displays were less common. After all why further blur the picture in motion if you're already playing on a display that's not meant for games (which is 99.99% of displays sold today, even "gamer" monitors will never turn on BFI by default)
Not turning BFI on by default is a feature not a bug. I find any additionally imposed flicker very hard on the eyes, as well as the loss of brightness. Plus can they be sure it wont cause problems for people with epilepsy? I grep up on CRTs and always found them somewhat uncomfortable to use, I could feel the flickering. I'd always run my Windows desktop at 120Hz and its not like that fixed it entirely. It was a blessing to me when sample and hold screens became the norm, even with the additional pixel latency. On OLED now, I still find VRR flickering less distracting as it doesn't happen all the time.
Amazing video, I'd love to see you do a similar video into diving into Driveclub and how they do graphics since they don't rely on the same tricks that NFS 2015 did as it features day and night scenes on the PS4. IMO it's probably the best demonstration of photorealism even to this day. PLEASE DO A VIDEO ON DRIVECLUB!
Legitimately bro, I agree with what a lot of people are saying. You’re fighting the good fight. Keep going at it. Don’t listen to any critics keep making adjustments as needed to the video production side of things and keep getting the message out there!
Racing games always look better than other games, because you can get away with a lot more with how fast the player is moving through the map, they don't take time to look at how most background objects are near PS2 quality. That and you almost never see human characters in these games, it's almost always just environments and hard-surface cars, stuff that is not hard at all to get photo realistic looking.
That is objectively not true - rendering so many things at such speed is no easy task, especially when combined with open worlds, certain level of destruction and dynamicness and in the case of something like Forza Horizon 5, also very high quality assets
@@i_love_musique333 You can tie many things to the speed of the car to greatly degrade the textures and quality through algorithms and as the speed is reduced, increase these textures and qualities in addition to many other techniques that combine impostors with meshes and countless improvements to look good and perform at the same time, you only need skills and creativitie to do it, I bet those developers really know how to improve on everything they do
@@comguaf8093Yeah, exactly - I'm well aware of dynamic lods and how they help immensely with achieving best possible quality at the best possible performance cost I just think it's impressive nonetheless and the whole process isn't necessarily easy to pull off like the og commenter suggested
YES, I was just saying. Even in real life after a long speedy drive, when you stop you can still feel the blur rush in your eyes (which is magnified even more If you have astigmatism). So, practically it is artistically relative and a valid effect for a racing game.
@@DenkyManner Yeah, and they lack a sense of speed. You could've provided an example like Ballistics where they went out of their way to convey a sense of speed with the use of the environment. Games like Split/Second, Full Auto 2 and many others would suffer without blur. I'd rather play Fatal Inertia EX over F-Zero just because of how fast the shaking and blurring of the screen make you feel.
EA Ghost Games devs poured their soul in NFS 2015, I still don't know why that game is so underrated. It's probably one of the best looking night time environment in video game graphics
@@edu7979 I think the pursuits are just not the focus of the game. I prefer NFS2015 cops over something like Carbon or Heat where the cops are just an annoyance rather than a gameplay mechanic like in MW.
I will die on the hill that NFS 2015, if not for the god-awful handling system, would have easily been my favorite NFS to date. The graphics STILL hold up unbelievably well, the vibe of the game is still unmatched to this day by later entries and the city itself is so interesting to drive around. If only the driving part of the game didn't feel so wonky.
Not gonna lie, I am actually impressed how NFS 2015 looks this good! And because it was released in 2015, Batman: Arkham Knight was also released on the same year, and still made it look amazing and just visually beautiful! I never got the chance to play NFS 2015 due to mandatory internet connection, which is the biggest hiccup that I have. I feel bad for NFS 2015 being judged as a mediocre game, but it is actually good. Its just the devs behind this game could've fixed the infamous gameplay mechanics. Overall, NFS 2015 is definitely good! I just hope the game does not gets killed just like The Crew 1. Seriously, because it's Always-online game, there is a chance for the game to die without giving "OFFLINE patch" if this ever happens. We should not allow the publishers to kill our favorite games.
All games from this era look amazingly good. I think that time was when we found the perfect balance between graphics and optimization. For example I played Batman Arkham Knight recently and that game looks amazing
Arkham knight was running like ass at launch and took them 6+ months to fix their mess but now it runs insanely well and looks amazing way better than any of the new Superhero games like Spiderman or Suicide Squad or Arkham Knights.
BF1 looks and runs better than BF 2042. Games have regressed due to stupid microtransactions and an obsession to release them at light speed to milk out players at the expense of quality.
Every now and then a game will come along and look AMAZING! Sonic Unleashed - 2008 Assassins Creed Unity - 2014 Need for Speed - 2015 Battlefield 1 - 2016 Red Dead Redemption 2 - 2018 These are just, imho, really good looking games that blow a lot of games out of the water when it comes to graphics
thats a lot of things happening in one fraction of a second. Its crazy how well this game still holds up today. If the gameplay wasn't trash it would have been a classic
It's gameplay is better than underground 2 and most wanted 05, but you raised your standards. Like how when you were a child, you liked teletubbies, but now you won't enjoy it anymore.
@@Godzilla_Star_Eater it isn't. I still play the old need for speed games today via emulator, and can confirm nostalgia goggles aren't in effect. It was like once the 7th generation rolled around, everyone forgot how to program cars in games. Anything that wasnt a sim had delayed, unresponsive controls that made the games feel awful. Not just need for speed. Starting to get better across the genre tho finally.
@@Godzilla_Star_Eater "you raised your standards" [car handles like shopping kart with broken wheel, sinking in quicksand made of butter, and flips at the slightest touch] lul
I find it crazy how many people complain about the handling, it's one of the best, cars feel planted, only held back by the unpredictable lockup that would happen at times though you can minimize it with a good tune, I suggest you take more time making a tune for your cars
okay but what people mean when they say art style > graphics is Strong Art Direction + Art Fundamentals > "use more hardware and code a prettier algorithm" Try hard chromatic aberration is weak sauce art direction and shows an utter lack of art fundamentals... it's a shader effect. They tried to give their game "art style" by coding a prettier algorithm, to predictably awful results. You cannot code your way to artistic talent, nor do you need advanced code or a faster computer to achieve a pleasing image. The sentiment being expressed is that if you want a pretty picture you ought to find a better _artist,_ not a better programmer. An example of really strong art direction and art fundamentals in action is Team Fortress 2. The art direction is strong in the sense that the game has a very recognizable visual identity that remains consistent throughout - because it was thoroughly planned and executed to be as such. Art decisions were made with clear intent and deep insight to achieve maximum benefit for the game's needs, rather than to achieve maximum brownie points at the follow up Siggraph talks. A solid understanding of art fundamentals let them take their clear vision and execute it successfully. To get specific now, for one, all the mercenaries have extremely clear, recognizable silhouettes. This increases visual clarity in the moment to moment gameplay, you can instantly and effortlessly tell a Heavy apart from a Medic apart from a Scout or a Demoman in the middle of a hectic firefight. Not only that, but the strong silhouettes contribute to memorable, recognizable character designs. The shape language of the sillouettes contributes to the game's visual identity, etc. A vision with clear, well thought out intentions - that's art direction. Then they stick the landing with well practiced art fundamentals, choosing good shapes and producing those silhouettes. But it continues! They make heavy intentional use of color theory, ensuring that important details like the objective and other players pop out clearly from the background. They nail their twelve fundamentals of animation and clearly telegraph important gameplay information like "oh no, the heavy is about to shoot his minigun at me", while also breathing life into the characters and giving them personality through animation. Levels are designed with an eye for framing and shot composition to aide in navigation by highlighting the important bits, and look dang good while doing it. And on and on and on. Team Fortress 2 is just as visually awesome today in 2024 as it was the day it came out in 2007. Good visual design principles do not have an expiration date. Computer hardware and rendering algorithms very thoroughly DO. Strong art direction + Art Fundamentals > Hardware and Algorithms every day of the week. As the game engine graphics programmer... don't hire me. _Hire a good artist first._
Absolutely phenomenal video. Very detailed and informative without stretching it out too long, but still not glossing anything over. I'm also glad you called out the crowd of people who spout "realistic graphics are bad" when it's clear that they only mean the bad attempts at realistic graphics, not the aesthetic as a whole. Subscribing to this channel is an easy choice. Keep on making great videos like this, but please don't degrade to resorting to clickbait and wild statements as your channel grows, I've seen it happen too many times and I'd hate to see it happen here.
I loved the comparison shots ghost games made back in 2014 to show how photorealistic the game will look like. Never hat a game after that that matched realistic colors so much
out of all of ghost's NFS games, graphically the original 2015 game looks the best. their game engine really shined at night time, and because they made the game rainy in 2015 the graphics look pretty darn good. the other two games took a deep degradation in terms of graphics - mostly because of their setting (daytime, desert setting so no rain etc)
I'm currently trying to make a marble rolling game in unreal 5.3. It's so very frustrating to only get 15 fps with a simple game like that on a mid range card from just 5 years ago, when I know it can be better. I get 80 fps on my machine but I want to give the game to my friends and they don't have a fancy graphics card. Neither do lots of people who would spend money on a game. I very much hope the industry stops focusing on fancy new features for a couple years , and instead focuses on performance. I'm loving these tips. thank you for this.
yeah when unreal 5 came out, i made a very simple school level and even with almost nothing at all in it, it was running at sub 30fps at 50% render scale on my 6700xt. that's absurd. i gave up on unreal. if i'm ever gonna make a game, it's going to be on a simpler engine, like gzdoom or godot. i don't need the fancy garbage.
I'm with Alex, Unreal has tons of optimization tools. It's just hard to learn how/when to use them because there's less and less content to learn from the more nitty gritty you get (RUclips specifically).
@@alex-qn5xp A fully optimized nearly empty project has an unacceptably low framerate on older hardware, which a lot of people still use. The engine has too much overhead.
@@maxwellbrengle7168 That's true, if you have the hardware to run it, and don't mind missing out on about 30 percent of potential customers. A nearly blank, optimized project is still far too sluggish. I've been using unreal since 4 was new. the move to 5 was painful and it just hasn't gotten much better.
As a modder and also a photographer of this game with around 1700 hours clocked in since 2016, looking at this game the same way I did when I first played it is impossible. Knowing some ins and outs of how things work, it just gets worse and worse to look at in my eyes. Trying to get the desired look for photos, is getting harder and harder with time despite how good the game can look on average. When a game goes for photorealism, spotting bad aspects of graphics is much, much easier. The biggest miss when it comes to graphics is the extremely lackluster car reflections. They're just barely there (at least it's not as bad as payback). In my opinion, having good car reflections should be a proper priority in a game that goes for photorealism. All the attention is on the puddles, which are all cool, but your car can be like a black void sometimes. It ages the look by a ton. After all this time, I appreciate the look of Rivals more, with a full day and night cycle. While not perfect, it can still look stunning with some actual car reflections (but nearly non-existent road reflections, although it's not that big of a deal there). I could also say Unbound is so much nicer to look at thanks to car reflections alone. I would also like to mention the fact that cubemap reflections used for roads are sometimes just plain wrong and awful in certain cases. I think when it comes to pure gameplay, the film grain is easily the worst part of this game. People may complain about TAA, but grain makes this game look like 720p at 1080p (on top of TAA). It's just so bad and doesn't really make the game look any better (well, it makes things so much worse).
This is an incredibly good video, and while it probably won't be very useful to me in particular, still thank you so much for making this! It's super information One thing I would like to say though is that I don't really agree that the motion blur here is a problem. I don't think it has enough of a negative effect to be worth it's removal, especially when it's mostly limited to the edge of the screen in a high speed racing game. The motion blur does a good job to emphasize the screen, and the sharpness lost isn't particularly important to gameplay especially for peripheral vision
Both Rivals and NFS did great job in Art Style aspect. NFS Unbound also did a great job, and Head had was very beautiful in night and rainy days. I don't know why they went higher polygon style graphics fidelity in Payback instead of maintaining the art style.
Dude I hope your channel explodes, I've never seen such a thorough yet comprehensive explanation of a graphics pipeline. All you need is a better camera! Subscribed
Yes please! I would love for Midnight Club 3 to be used as an example, that game definitely had the best sense of speed imo. Better than any other NFS title.
I remember when deferred rendering was all the rage. My first few years in the industry were all about g-buffers and how to render transparent objects properly.
I feel like it'd be weirder if motion blur applied to some objects and not others? especially for camera velocity-specific motion, where that blur genuinely is what a real camera would see if it was exposing the whole scene at once. it doesn't have to be as intense as a 24 fps cinema camera blur, where the frame exposure is sooo long that everything smears together, but take any specific frame of a movie (especially film movies) where the camera is moving and it is sometimes entirely blur, which itself becomes a director's choice for vibes and drama. but having some things blur out and not others would stick out. I think it'd feel uncanny subconsciously
Agree, they definitely nailed specular reflections and the road material, this is the proof that working smartly and adjusting your artstyle around hard limitations can lead to photorealistic-ish results. Also real photo references are king
Great video! Keep this quality up -- and thanks for the great graphics lesson. While I'm not a graphics programmer for games, learning to optimize scenes and rendering will definitely come in handy for me --
Commenting here just before it blows up (please, algorithm) Honestly, it's tiresome how the industry went to not care about optimization. To the hell to everybody that say my GPU is a potato. It can run good graphics and I am happy with that. What I'm not happy with is how standarized it has become for games to ask for a lot as if they were a new Half-Life or GTA entry when they are nothing in comparison. When I come off to complain people defend it with bad excuses such as "but it's a open world". I'm tired of the fact that I need to buy a better GPU not to get better graphics but rather be able to play newly developed games. It isn't even just a AAA problem anymore. You even see indies that go through this trend, being absolutely unplayable by old computer just because they envisioned "next gen graphics". This must stop. I have seen countless times how amazing games from 10 years ago look and yet, you telling me my $100 GPU can't run a cartoon game because the devs shoved every shader under the sun into it and you can't do wack to make it run? I'm looking at you, asset flip game that every streamer under the sun plays and requires a beast to run because they chose the "most graphically impressive engine" and we players have to pay the consequences. By the time I get a new GPU, I want the investment to be translated into smooth graphics for a good while, but the videogame industry isn't doing any effort to guarantee this. Haven't we all agreed programmed obsolescency is bad? I don't see any action being taken.
I think the lack of care towards optimization has a lot to do with these "drag and drop" passive optimization features. Like, take DLSS upscaling and frame generation for example, it's becoming a requirement to play any game at an acceptable frame rate. Developers see that and say "Oh we won't need to optimize the game that much because people will just use X and Y to get better frames."
This is just plain wrong. The amount of time and effort spent on optimization and adding options to broaden the consumer base, even for small indie games, is huge nowadays compared to only ten years ago. You'll find indie games that have options for color blindness, and with 4:3 resolutions, and multiple different AA solutions on the market today. Even games that are known for "poor optimization," like Cyberpunk, was better optimized than Crysis when it came out. Crysis became a meme because there wasn't a computer on the market that could run it at 60 fps for years after it was released. And then we can talk about the rate of progress. Upgrading your graphics card every 2-3 years was basically mandatory in the 2000s. You couldn't hope to play any new game in 2007 with your FX 5500 card from 2004. Meanwhile, you can play basically any new game today on a 980, which came out 9(!) years ago. Most AAA games you can play with a 1080 which came out 8 years ago (I still have one.) In the same time, we have gone from games like Halo 5 and SOMA, to Horizon Call of the Mountain and Diablo 4. I'm not saying Halo and SOMA don't look good, but there's quite a difference in fidelity and complexity between those four titles. And you think the art style of "cartoony" makes something automatically easier on the graphics card? It has very little to do with it. Of course not every game will be amazingly optimized, especially indie games. But that's kind of the price you pay for games being easier to create and publish. Besides, every game has a minimum spec requirement that you can look at, and no one is obligated to optimize their game to YOUR system, and if you think they are, I think we're better off without you as a consumer.
@@hiTocopter First for all, thanks for the pretty words. Second. Technology and graphics advanced at a fast pace, of course you need a beefy PC to play the very best, I'm not complaining about that, it's just that the very best is now shared by a long decade of gaming instead of only recent titles. Back then, most indies, if not all, ran in almost every computer under the sun because they didn't rely on the backs of engines that run so badly. What I'm complaining about is that they aren't giving me a valid reason to get a better GPU, other than playing games that look worse than games I can play in my system. So go back to 2001 because that's when your argument had weight. You'd do us a favor.
@@ibisskb Again, you're just wrong. Besides the fact that "indies" barely existed in the 00s, those that did often required extremely specific components to even start, let alone run smoothly. And engines like UE, Unity, and Godot all run smoother today and with less resources than basically any commercial or public engine in 2015. You are basing your opinion on some nostalgic golden past that was never actually a thing. The "valid" reason to get a better GPU is the same as it has always been. Games today require more computing power to render than games yesterday. Except instead of having to do it every 3 years, you can now wait 9 years before having to upgrade. You're the one who's upset by the modern market and products, not me. I just find it ridiculous that all the things you're saying is the cause of your annoyance are completely wrong today, but were true 15 years ago.
@@hiTocopter You are talking to somebody that perhaps by miracle got to play loads of indie/amateur code from the mid 2000s to recent time without knowledge of the specs I had because I was a child back then. It always ran on the go because devs didn't use a engine that ran only in state of the art PCs. Your argument about indies, belongs more to the late 90s and earlier where PCs weren't exactly known for being as convenient for gaming as now. So duh, it's as saying water hydrates you. The valid reason to get a new GPU was to get into that new state of the art PC game that you knew beforehand it is worth it. When a game wanted more you could tell why it wanted more with your very own eyes. It's not nostalgia at all. Videogame graphics evolved faster, period. Just compare a videogame from the same saga from 1999 to 2004 and then one from 2014 to 2024. Of course I'd want a new graphics card, because it's offering me something than just "playing recent games". You are contributing to my point when saying that you can wait 9 years before having to upgrade. If anything, all of the time my argument is attacked as "selfish". Of course, as if everybody lived in the same economy that could get you state of the art GPUs that last you nine years. Your argument is the very reason people always say how PC gaming is so expensive while millions that weren't lucky to be born in the right place at the right time (shall I remind you how these requirements didn't drop during the chip shortage but instead increase) You'd be winning if somebody actually wanted to buy your GPU by the time you want to get a better one. Better optimization means you can do more with your new GPU, while literally being able to find a buyer for your old one because somebody can play in Low settings that look as if they were from 10 years ago. It's just morally wrong to support a tendency that contributes to GPUs that run perfectly being abandoned just to play new games that represent no obvious graphical improvement. In a ideal world we could get a PC that runs it all but state of the art games for less than what a console is sold for. But I see you are against this because you want to feel special about spending more money. There's no point debating this with you, it's like talking to a wall. You'll get it one day when your GPU is to the limit in minimum graphics just because a indie dev team wanted to do the project in UE6. You probably want to mod the game, run it in 60fps, but instead you are given that middle finger. Funny enough the projects that run the worst are done in third party engines such as UE and Unity, because that's what made lazy coders thrive, unfortunately. Back then you couldn't afford to cram your game with else if as if you were YandereDev because any misuse of the limited power you had would kick you out of the race. Nowadays it isn't the case anymore. You can do great things with a fraction of the power supplied by modern components.
Great frame analysis 🙂 Thanks for putting in the work and sharing. Notes to self; experiment with SSAO on a downsampled image and apply chromatic aberration to pixels outside the circle of focus, thanks!
What is the name of the program he is using to deconstruct the render pipeline? I am new to graphics programming and this program would be incredibly useful to me
I accidentally stumbled upon this gem of a video! What a great analysis. There were many games at the start of ps4 gen that looked really great and honestly looks better than many current gen games. But for me personally, TAA, FSR, DLAA are some of the things that completely ruined the experience. Everything either looks ghosty/ smeary or downright blurry.
i definetly wasnt expecting for such a deep dive quite incredible thing to see how the game is made if only 2015`s gameplay matched the graphics the aesthetics were on point
People always say NFS 2015 looks like real life, but I don't agree with that. I think 2015 looks more like the edited photos from speed hunters at the time than just straight realistic, which would make sense as they were a big part of the game.
I don't understand much, but I get it at the surface level. Just makes me sad thinking about what my favorite games might look like if these technologies were impremented properly.. Mechwarrior Online and War Thunder comes to mind!
Agree... although I wonder how many people don't see it.. but the photorealism is what drew me into the series .the e3 demo blew me away,like no nfs game has ever done till date .. but the handling was a disaster.. it had good story n missions n cutscenes also.. I bet if this game has the handling physics of payback,it would have been the most loved nfs till date FR
That's because SMAA isn't captured in single frame captures due to being injected. If you watch while the car is moving, the edges are much less jagged.
Can you do a similar video about Counter Strike 2? That game has a really interesting implementation of Ambient occlusion which I think is worth checking. It also has some clever use of cube maps and shaders for what is argueably the best looking water in any game ever.
@@maymayman0 The source engine has had nice water shaders in general, I'd say. Back when HL2 came out for sure for its time, but considering the work they did for L4D2 (there's a neat GDC presentation on flow maps), and continuing that work with Portal 2. CS2 continues that trend, CS2's Anubis, for example looks pretty nice. I think there are various games with open water, that have more complex water shaders (mainly showing waves, and maybe some spray) that would qualify for "best" place, in my opinion.
The ambient occlusion in CS2 is a mix of SSAO and capsule shadows, which are pretty standard in modern AAA engines. A large portion of UE4/UE5 titles use them for indoor shadows, or shadows in overcast weather. The tweaking of the capsule shadows in CS2 is really well-done for sure. Even the chickens and ceiling fans in Mirage's kitchen have them :)
This video is here to show me that even though I am game dev interested in graphics, there's still a mountain of knowledge for me to understand everything used in this 2015 game. It really takes a team of highly specialized people to produce state of the art realtime graphics.
Ended up watching the whole thing, incredibly informative and very interesting to see what happens behind the scenes when gaming. NFS 2015 is still by far the most visually impressive game in comparison to modern NFS titles.
I needed this video for the game my team is working on and for future projects. Need For Speed 2015 is perfect example the of gaining good graphics without ruining performance.
Amazing video! I'm trying to learn rendering by building one myself, and I'm having a hard time understanding how some of these effects work. Maybe, you could, along with these game-dives, do more educational-style content on what the techniques are, and how they work, with maybe an example of how it may be implemented (this last one may take a lot of time so it's okay if it is not there). That would a real help in familiarizing oneself with the what the techniques there are, and what they do. Really love these tech breakdowns. Thank you!
PLEASE READ FOR UPDATES & RESPONSES:
1. Watch this video in 4K (as in streaming settings) as any lower compression will hide the visual details discussed.
2. Some clarification regarding the statement made at 8:30, it's a real phenomenon *outside of camera footage.* Film grain is a "real phenomenon" as well, but that doesn't usually enhance graphics.
3. We apologize for the text mistake at 9:47 where "50ms" is written instead of ".50ms". We actually re-rendered the entire video to fix that but we obviously uploaded the wrong file. We would re-upload if that didn't mean wiping current support and promotions on other sites.
4. We would really appreciate it if viewers could share on giant game related subreddits. These prevent self promotion but *these can really push our channel's success by the thousands.
5: We would like to ask users to excuse the incorrect total timing stated in the video(9.4ms). After reviewing our data later, we realized we had missed some numbers and the total frame time was 12.4ms which in our opinion is still impressing for only using 51% of the stated hardware.
Here is a more accurate (but still estimating)timing:
1.20ms Drawing Geometry
0.058ms Drawing Geometric Decals
0.77ms Drawing HBAO
2.01ms Drawing 24 512x512 Shadow Maps
0.83ms Drawing SSR
2.18ms Drawing & Updating Lighting/Culling, Diffuse & Specular, Shadow Map Projection
0.96ms Drawing Translucents and Effect Sprites
0.078ms Drawing Rain and Raindrops
0.32ms Calculating Mesh Deformation and Motion Blur
0.51ms Post Processing Chains like Color Grading, Bloom and Frame Mipmapping.
0.15ms Drawing UI
0.28ms Dispatch calls throughout pipeline
But some of these timing are off because some will be slower &/or faster depending what what is drawn together in real-time. They don't add up to 9.34. In combination and being drawn together gives some of the heavier shading operations more context=larger timings. This is just how intel GPA works and you can even try to find what selections affect another. But we just wanted to give that warning.
* RESPONSE TO COMMUNITY QUESTIONS:
1. The issue with parallax cubemaps: This is why Kevin said "most common scenario" where environments are complex, irregularly shaped, dynamic lighting is present, memory management issues, baking times, plausibility issues, and most importantly constructed by *real people with limited patience.* When we say "Nanite is cutting companies time and money", that is not the issue. The issue is that it's at the expense of both massive performance loss *and visual problems.* We don't expect every AAA funded studio to optimize their meshes manually. We would rather compromise and promote a mesh algorithm that does optimization better automatically to cater to the permanent (flawed) mindset of modern devs. Raytraced specular representation has had many breakthroughs for performance and visual quality, if the game is optimized modern hardware *will handle it and can produce way better visual results than what is offered in most games.* We will speak about this again in a more dedicated video.
2. The motion blur statement has been repeatedly misinterpreted: The motion blur tip we suggested would not affect a portion of the screen and highly enhance motion on BFI. The final frame is absolutely representative of the anti-motion distortion seen during gameplay . We do not believe in re-creating motion blur produced from cameras. We reference stable coherent vision from the human eye during high speed traversal where animated objects and camera traversal induced velocity within the specified distance (via depth buffer). We suggest anyone who can run, drive a car, or bike to test for themselves.
7:20
the moon is 5x12x512
hey im just watching the video and i would like to say its interesting but i would love for u to provide more details as i have hard time keeping up when u start talking about SSR
forza horizon 3 is FAR superior and even better than FH4 and FH5
So this is just a new form of what we call post-processing?
hey what about unity 5? is it being left out?
The devs behind NFS 2015 knew how to use film grain, lens flare and the rest without making it so annoying that you would turn it off in the settings
Good art direction can do wonders for the game visuals, not matter the tech. However no amount of tech will salvage bad art direction. See how Skyrim (2011) looks and compare it to, say, Dishonored (2012). Dishonored looks great to this day and Skyrim looks like ass.
@@ivanalantiev2397 Lol, no, they both look great, and both had great art direction. You picked the wrong games to compare, I don't know why you chose Skyrim when it had one of the most iconic looks of any game made in that decade.
@KvltKommando Skyrim is a phenomenal game in some aspects. I would even conceded to your point that some aspects of art direction, like main character design, are great and memorable. But it doesn't go beyond that. Skyrim graphics didn't age well and there's a reason for it. I urge you to replay the opening of both games side by side to refresh you memory.
Iconic != good looking
It's probably one of the few examples of excessive water puddles on the roads actually looking amazing.
That stuff could easily look extremely distracting or plain ugly. But NFS15 pulled it off blissfully.
Its crazy how NFS 2015, a game now nearly 10 years old, is still the best looking NFS to date.
NFS Heat at night is just as good, the only reason it's behind is because the city of NFS 2015 is way more interesting than the city in NFS Heat (you get more downtown in NFS 2015 while you get more suburbs and industrial in NFS Heat).
@@strider029 Heat looked alot worse then 2015, especially due to the completely overdone post processing effects, like chromatic abberration. I had a 4k monitor at the time and Heat looked like it ran at 1080p...
@@strider029while it looks photorealistic, no doubt about it, it looks really bleak and washed out.
I would much rather prefer higher contrast and saturation instead, along the lines of how NFSU2 looked now some odd 20 years ago.
@@xXYannuschXx Heat used a clarity filter and a sharpening filter with lanczos image scaling that caused some issues(Unbound got rid of these and uses a better image scaler), it also used new global illumination tech that did improve some things but also looked bad in most places
(you can watch 'Hustle by Day, Risk it all by Night' by Kleber Garcia for more information, it's a very cool talk)
@@egorkhristov2467 yeah it looks quite boring. Looking "realistic" doesn't help all that much here, especially as that "realistic" here means a video shot with go pro. The game lacks color and looks washed out for sure.
Don't get me wrong though, I don't think it looks that bad, just personally not a fan.
I think need for speed underground 2 pulled off this dark night look way better, as it actually manages to look interesting, while having a similar feel.
The chromatic aberration only being visible in the corners is also how actual camera lenses work in the real life. I think that's what makes it so realistic and a great amount of attention to detail.
It's being applied globally, unless they have a layer mask. It's just more subtle and not way out of control like most games do, which sucks. It's especially awful if you play on an ultrawide.
I’m sorry but that’s incorrect.
I’m professional photographer and chromatic aberrations appear throughout the entire frame. Maybe you’re thinking of vignette which appear only in corners.
RUclips intellectuals are a different class of breed, does acting smart here help you in your job or something? 😂
@@trinidad111yeah but chromatic aberration is more apparent on the edges of some lenses. Personally I dislike them in video game especially first person games because your eyes don't act like a lens and it's "unrealistic" to have them.
@@trinidad111 Meh, im a pro photographer too, and i can just guess that youre not, since you see the chromatic aberration everywhere, what are you using, a 5 dollar lens? lmao
This goes way above my level of comprehension, but what I did understand was very interesting.
Most NFS fans know 2015 was probably the best the franchise ever looked. As a big NFS fan, I remember when the sequel to this game, Payback, was revealed to have a full day/night cycle and people were hyped, but then disappointed by how the end result looked when the game released. My question therefore is: how much does the fact 2015 is permanently night affect the final result, and would it be realistically possible to implement a similar look in a game with a full day/night cycle?
well I’ve used cinematic tools to make a sunset before, that looks nice, but daytime is a little strange. Does look better if you use Unite mod, which removed baked lighting
It's a lot easier to hide mistakes under darkness and constant reflective surfaces.
rivals arguably looks better imo
Technically you can get a glimpse of the morning in 2015 by being in the mountainous area at the north of the map.
NFS RIvals is the answer for your question.
Crazy how after so many years a lot of the games from that era look visually superior than most titles released today. NFS 2015 is still the best looking NFS ever made imo.
Same with Arkham Knight
@@n1ghtglare i was thinking the same bro
Uncharted 4 too
Unbound gets to look equal or even better, but performance and optimization are clearly a tie-breaker between these two
Yet its the worst to drive
I'm so happy this game is finally getting covered graphics wise. Nearly 10 years later and it's still the most photorealistic game I've seen. Modern Warfare could pass as realistic from some angles, but NFS 2015 feels like a playable live action movie.
TLDR; Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
This is my favorite comment
is there a grimoire to learn 3d rendering magic?
Fighting the good fight.
sorry nothing
@@zorromagico4534 huh?
one other thing the game did well with the realism is that the color grading uses a lot of green witch makes it look more realistic since green is the most common in real life
I disagree on the point about motion blur-the blur happening to the background is pretty subtle, so it’s not really obstructing any important information. It’s what you’d expect from a real camera (the background is moving relative to the camera, therefore it’s blurred), and sells the smoothness and continuity of the camera motion. As an additional bonus it helps hide aliasing. When you removed the motion blur, the aliased edges instantly revealed themselves and made the city look a lot less real.
I agree that is correct from the camera's perspective, but I prefer motion from how an eye works IRL, in which especially while driving you would lock on and track scenery as it rotates around the car; keeping it sharp and clear. In this case per-object or positional motion blur maybe permissible, ideally eye tracking is used to naturally calculate motion blur depending on movement relative to your eye, and even more ideal would be perceptually infinite fps.
Indeed
There was no Anti-Aliasing on the captured frame. SMAA and plenty of other methods would have fixed that. Only the *gameplay* footage had SMAA applied. The captured buffers didn't because the capture software does not include third party injections.
We do not appreciate replicating camera effects that harm gameplay motion (clarity). The majority of the scene the player needs clarity on was beyond a certain threshold of depth which means we could have had a compromise. Motion blur should not sell smoothness. Thats what 60fps+ is for. Motion blur should convey important velocity.
@@ThreatInteractive I really don't get why so many people call a clump of jagged pixels "clarity". I feel that an extremely zoomed in frame still looks better with motion blur than without.
human eyes create motion blur when following objects but does not when seeking. People want games to be windows to other realities. Not cctv footage
I just redownloaded Just Cause 3 (also 2015) still holds up today. I’m convinced games peaked in 2015
Give another year for Titanfall 2 and Mirror's Edge Catalyst.
a game that still looks really good and run extremely good is mgsv it was released in 2015 and is even available on the Xbox 360
Star Wars Battlefront is a 2015 title and still looking better than 90% of 2024 games.
Batman Arkham knight aswell released in 2015 and is better than the recent game from same company
IFKR
Unfortunely modern developers just want to flood their game's graphics with 400+ different effects and filters, while giving zero f*cks about optimization and thinking that it looks and runs great because we have frame generation and upscalling nowdays. For me, that's what is ruining modern gaming. They just don't want to work anymore. Optimization is dead.
The Switch, the Steam Deck, mobile games and even the PS4, are forcing developers to not be too ambiguous.
If you want, see Inmortals of Aveum (Staff layoff), Forspoken (studio shut down) and Alan Wake II (forced to scale back the requirements, cause their game flopped on sales).
@@lumirairazbyte9697 I don't think that's it at all, as the things described in the video would make the games run and look BETTER on those limited platforms.
The problem is nobody wants to write efficient game engines any more, instead relying on a one size fits all engine that effectively ends up being a one size fits nothing engine.
Devs want to work its the management that wants everything fast and in agile way that gets in the way of optimization and code refactoring because these things take time and time is management's enemy.
You don't know anything about game development.
This shows everyone a fundemental lesson in art. "Never blame the art style, blame the artist"
?
I'm sorry, but that doesn't make sense. Artists are the ones defining the art style and then executing it.
@@unfa00 Yes... that's my point.
@@unfa00 Poeple crap on realism. But fail to realise that good style can come from realism.
@@CyberLou applies to everything in life: a solid grasp of fundamentals lol
Here's something I learned from doing art: Real life has no obligation nor guarantee to give you good design.
It doesn't matter if it's "realistic" if it looks bad. It doesn't matter if the ray-tracing and textures and face hair hair are accurate if it looks weird. You cannot rely on the computer to gives you good design. That's one big reasons why a lot of CGI looks bad too, because 1) lack of time 2) the over-reliance and trust in simulation. How many studios actually do anything to their motion blur other than tick a box? Do they even know how the effect is achieved?
How could something that looks realistic look bad? It's literally what we've evolved to look at. Do you have any examples?
@@redblue5140 Fat and ugly people exist
@@redblue5140 Bulldogs, angler fish, molerats, several highly knotted trees, spiders, several different colored neon lights in a dim bar, someone missing teeth or have crooked teeth, yellow teeth, horse teeth, cross-eyes, huge round noses, no eyebrows, obesity, festering wounds, feces...
Just look at everything artists are NOT drawing and you'll find out real quick how realism != aesthetic.
And I didn't even mention composition. If you have every tried photography, you know how difficult it is. Why? Because real world rarely gives good composition. Things are just threwn about and not everything makes for a good picture.
@@jesustyronechrist2330 if I saw any of those portrayed photorealistically in a game I would be impressed I wouldn't think it looked bad
@@redblue5140- I’ve been creating visual effects for 30 years. A lot of which you’ve seen at the cinema.
When you stop and look at the real world as often as I do, you’ll start to see odd looking things all the time.
If we film it and show someone, they might comment on ‘how fake it looks’ yet be accepting as it’s reality.
In the world of visual effects, we aren’t afforded the same grace. If it looks odd, it looks fake.
So often we are adjusting the visuals we create to look how ‘people expect’, not how they actually look.
I believe a lot of this is also owed to our visual memory. It’s not that accurate. How people remember things in their minds eye is different to reality. It’s therefore our job to account for that difference and create visual effects that match expectation, not always reality. Don’t get me wrong, reality is our benchmark 98 percent of the time.
With all of that said, there’s a lot of poor visual effects in the world. Especially when a director wants to create something implausible in the real world.
There’s a final consideration. As we work in a ‘filmed’ medium, we need to create our effects to match the response when filmed - not viewed with our eyes.
Games follow these rules closely.
Its true! Developers focused so much on detailed materials and completely forgot art style, design and creativity...
Regarding motion blur, I think trying to obtain as much detail as possible is going to create a more unrealistic experience; the motion blur appearing on the sides of the frame is entirely realistic to the way in which our eyes will distort reality, inadvertently making it more accurate to what we would perceive in real life.
People use that theory but it falls down for one simple reason, we don't just stare at the middle of the screen all the time. We scan the screen with our eyes looking for other vehicles, how the road bends, where the junctions are, where activities are in the game world, etc. Blurring anything we might need for reference to know where were going, hinders the ability to actually play the game, in the same way having things suddenly pop-in ahead does.
The number of games, not only racing, I've felt actively uncomfortable playing because of this is insane.
Thanks for calling out TAA. Crazy how it's remained the industry standard for so long. I don't think it'll go away, but I really hope it does so we can talk about it the way we talk about the overuse of bloom in late 2000s.
Same with poorly implemented SSR which clearly fade in and out as you look around. Gamers won't accept pop-in but will accept reflections that only appear if you look at it right. Crazy world.
Regarding cubemaps and raytracing; Source 2's parallax corrected cubemaps are pretty amazing even if they're not perfect especially in environments with a lot of 3D detail.
Think the call out was more against poor implementations of TAA. You can have poor implementation of anything, reflections, motion blur (which is what most complain about, not actual good motion blur), light bounce, literally anything but it's especially egregious when there's a bad TAA implementation since it's the final resolve to the entire image and affects everything.
But good TAA and other spatial/temporal upscalers like DLSS or TSR? It's pretty awesome. Just go back to older games rendered at the res of their day and basically everything was plagued by aliasing. Hell brute force those old games today at 4k and beyond and you'll still find shimmering. Some art styles hid it better, CRT obvs didn't have to worry about a pixel grid, but regardless it was always there and never completely solved until these modern temporal resolves and indeed spatial upscalers got good. Sure, we now have a new problem in the way of artifacting but progress has shown that getting dramatically better over time and dedicated hardware for upscaling is especially effective. If you've only used FSR then I get the hate but man try DLSS or XeSS or even TSR and it's pretty impressive.
But regardless if you disagree yeah it absolutely won't go away, the industry seems to have made its choice. It's objectively a win in performance, it allows for greater fidelity, it's more efficient use of hardware, it's a tool for both high and low end hardware, and subjectively it's the best looking image treatment we've ever had in real time rendering. There's still flawed implementations out there, but there's also great ones that prove it's just the way forward and if you still prefer aliasing at all costs (which is totally fair, options should always be there) then just disable anti aliasing. But I also wish you luck in finding the perf for high enough resolutions in modern games :P
Taa is dogwater and all of these new games have some stupid fkn fog effect that makes having an oled monitor borderline pointless. I end up having to gut out Taa and removing that fog from every game just to make darkness and shadow be just that.
@@HEADSHOTPROLOL I have a 3060TI so I have the older version of DLSS. However I'll still say I actually strongly dislike it. Even on BEST SETTINGS, DLSS games will have mad trailing for me (recently tried with CP77, Dead Space Remake).
I reckon the issue might be that I prefer to game at 1080p with at least 90+ fps, whereas most AAA gamers prefer 60 fps and at least 1440p. Perhaps DLSS just isn't good with high refresh rates.
Older games had MSAA which was fantastic. Unfortunately it's not an option anymore with newer games due to deferred rendering. I guess I could just use DSR, but then I don't get the high fps values I want.
@@awsomebot1 deferred is the biggest meme in gaming currently, Taa is great since its basically free aa. really all the Problems People have with it stem from the deferred renderer
@@RADkate To me, the way TAA works on paper seems to imply it's pretty much always going to make the image quality suffer due to blurring/artifacts. I've yet to see TAA that I think looks good.
That said, maybe you're right and TAA looks good with forward rendering. I wouldn't know because it seems pretty much all games with TAA use deferred rendering.
Love it. This reminds me of the graphics studies by Adrian
Courrèges (his breakdown of Doom 2016 is one of my favorites). Looking forward to seeing more.
The game being stuck at a night cycle really allows more room for resources/optimization and I genuinely would rather have a racing game stuck at night and look this amazing rather than bothering with day/night cycles. This game still looks better than the most recent title, NFS Unbound, in my opinion.
I barely understand the technical stuff but it really amazes me when developers can make something THIS good while not being so taxing on hardware.
Also, would love a video going over the Hedgehog Engine. It's a fascinating engine and story on how Sonic Team and SEGA stepped up with their games. Keep up the good work, loving the channel so far!
Man, I'm expecting red circles and arrows on screenshots as you explain how and why it looks the way it does. Totally wasn't expecting you to dissect the rendering of a single frame in ways I didn't know possible.
Edit: Just saw that this is the seedling of a indie gaming studio! I'm now expecting a well optimized and photo-realistic (if that's the style) product! Take my sub!
Wow, crazy indepth video, amazing.
Completely agree about motionblur, it's a shame very few developers get it right, but Unreal doesn't help with it, they don't allow MB to be applied to objects only which would fix most games.
BFI being mentioned at all makes me happy, very important for motion clarity and increasing the impression of fluidity especially when the bigger the TV is the blurrier games will look in motion. I think more people will understand the appeal of motionblur if sample and hold displays were less common. After all why further blur the picture in motion if you're already playing on a display that's not meant for games (which is 99.99% of displays sold today, even "gamer" monitors will never turn on BFI by default)
Not turning BFI on by default is a feature not a bug. I find any additionally imposed flicker very hard on the eyes, as well as the loss of brightness. Plus can they be sure it wont cause problems for people with epilepsy?
I grep up on CRTs and always found them somewhat uncomfortable to use, I could feel the flickering. I'd always run my Windows desktop at 120Hz and its not like that fixed it entirely. It was a blessing to me when sample and hold screens became the norm, even with the additional pixel latency. On OLED now, I still find VRR flickering less distracting as it doesn't happen all the time.
Amazing video, I'd love to see you do a similar video into diving into Driveclub and how they do graphics since they don't rely on the same tricks that NFS 2015 did as it features day and night scenes on the PS4. IMO it's probably the best demonstration of photorealism even to this day. PLEASE DO A VIDEO ON DRIVECLUB!
Legitimately bro, I agree with what a lot of people are saying. You’re fighting the good fight. Keep going at it. Don’t listen to any critics keep making adjustments as needed to the video production side of things and keep getting the message out there!
great thumbnail change, i had this recommended a few times, not realising the type of video it was, instant click after the change, great video
Bro is nerding out and I'm here for it! Keep broadcasting this information because AAA devs need this information 😮
Now i know how games visuals are made. I had no idea there was so much processing and stuff.
Sharing this with my friends.
Racing games always look better than other games, because you can get away with a lot more with how fast the player is moving through the map, they don't take time to look at how most background objects are near PS2 quality.
That and you almost never see human characters in these games, it's almost always just environments and hard-surface cars, stuff that is not hard at all to get photo realistic looking.
do u still hate void interactive
That is objectively not true - rendering so many things at such speed is no easy task, especially when combined with open worlds, certain level of destruction and dynamicness and in the case of something like Forza Horizon 5, also very high quality assets
@@i_love_musique333 You can tie many things to the speed of the car to greatly degrade the textures and quality through algorithms and as the speed is reduced, increase these textures and qualities in addition to many other techniques that combine impostors with meshes and countless improvements to look good and perform at the same time, you only need skills and creativitie to do it, I bet those developers really know how to improve on everything they do
@@comguaf8093Yeah, exactly - I'm well aware of dynamic lods and how they help immensely with achieving best possible quality at the best possible performance cost
I just think it's impressive nonetheless and the whole process isn't necessarily easy to pull off like the og commenter suggested
In that case, have a look at EA Star Wars Battlefront of the same year. Still an amazing looking game
This is a racing game, heavy motion blur is required for sense of speed and most racing game fans want it in
YES, I was just saying. Even in real life after a long speedy drive, when you stop you can still feel the blur rush in your eyes (which is magnified even more If you have astigmatism). So, practically it is artistically relative and a valid effect for a racing game.
Racing games with an amazing sense of speed existed long before motion blur was possible in games. Ridge Racer, Daytona, F Zero GX don't have any.
@@DenkyManner Yeah, and they lack a sense of speed. You could've provided an example like Ballistics where they went out of their way to convey a sense of speed with the use of the environment. Games like Split/Second, Full Auto 2 and many others would suffer without blur. I'd rather play Fatal Inertia EX over F-Zero just because of how fast the shaking and blurring of the screen make you feel.
EA Ghost Games devs poured their soul in NFS 2015, I still don't know why that game is so underrated. It's probably one of the best looking night time environment in video game graphics
it looks good but the car handling is shit the pursuits suck and the map is too small
it isnt underrated
Cos graphics ain't everything
@@edu7979 I think the pursuits are just not the focus of the game. I prefer NFS2015 cops over something like Carbon or Heat where the cops are just an annoyance rather than a gameplay mechanic like in MW.
@@AlphaGarg dude the cops in 2015 are just braindead and the copa in the okd games r fun as hell
@@talal26 yeah its dogshit at gameplay
I will die on the hill that NFS 2015, if not for the god-awful handling system, would have easily been my favorite NFS to date.
The graphics STILL hold up unbelievably well, the vibe of the game is still unmatched to this day by later entries and the city itself is so interesting to drive around. If only the driving part of the game didn't feel so wonky.
blud explaining GFX so dramatically I was expecting Moses to come out and start writing the new 10 commandments
Shits funny.
It's the music 😭
i still remember seeing the photos the devs uploaded of the real life vs game comparison to test out colors 🎉 i was blown away ❤
Not gonna lie, I am actually impressed how NFS 2015 looks this good!
And because it was released in 2015, Batman: Arkham Knight was also released on the same year, and still made it look amazing and just visually beautiful!
I never got the chance to play NFS 2015 due to mandatory internet connection, which is the biggest hiccup that I have.
I feel bad for NFS 2015 being judged as a mediocre game, but it is actually good. Its just the devs behind this game could've fixed the infamous gameplay mechanics.
Overall, NFS 2015 is definitely good! I just hope the game does not gets killed just like The Crew 1.
Seriously, because it's Always-online game, there is a chance for the game to die without giving "OFFLINE patch" if this ever happens.
We should not allow the publishers to kill our favorite games.
All games from this era look amazingly good. I think that time was when we found the perfect balance between graphics and optimization. For example I played Batman Arkham Knight recently and that game looks amazing
Arkham knight was running like ass at launch and took them 6+ months to fix their mess but now it runs insanely well and looks amazing way better than any of the new Superhero games like Spiderman or Suicide Squad or Arkham Knights.
BF1 looks and runs better than BF 2042. Games have regressed due to stupid microtransactions and an obsession to release them at light speed to milk out players at the expense of quality.
Imagine playing NFS 2015 and wondering "Wow I wonder how games will look 10 years later".
Every now and then a game will come along and look AMAZING!
Sonic Unleashed - 2008
Assassins Creed Unity - 2014
Need for Speed - 2015
Battlefield 1 - 2016
Red Dead Redemption 2 - 2018
These are just, imho, really good looking games that blow a lot of games out of the water when it comes to graphics
Hey look! It's me! 0:14
Lol
Lol x2
Lol x3
Lol :3
thats a lot of things happening in one fraction of a second. Its crazy how well this game still holds up today. If the gameplay wasn't trash it would have been a classic
It's gameplay is better than underground 2 and most wanted 05, but you raised your standards. Like how when you were a child, you liked teletubbies, but now you won't enjoy it anymore.
@@Godzilla_Star_Eater it isn't. I still play the old need for speed games today via emulator, and can confirm nostalgia goggles aren't in effect. It was like once the 7th generation rolled around, everyone forgot how to program cars in games. Anything that wasnt a sim had delayed, unresponsive controls that made the games feel awful. Not just need for speed. Starting to get better across the genre tho finally.
the project unite mod made this game so much more enjoyable and fixed many of the gameplay issues i had. it appears to have died though sadly
@@Godzilla_Star_Eater "you raised your standards"
[car handles like shopping kart with broken wheel, sinking in quicksand made of butter, and flips at the slightest touch] lul
I find it crazy how many people complain about the handling, it's one of the best, cars feel planted, only held back by the unpredictable lockup that would happen at times though you can minimize it with a good tune, I suggest you take more time making a tune for your cars
Every game developer needs to watch this video
okay but what people mean when they say art style > graphics is
Strong Art Direction + Art Fundamentals > "use more hardware and code a prettier algorithm"
Try hard chromatic aberration is weak sauce art direction and shows an utter lack of art fundamentals... it's a shader effect. They tried to give their game "art style" by coding a prettier algorithm, to predictably awful results. You cannot code your way to artistic talent, nor do you need advanced code or a faster computer to achieve a pleasing image.
The sentiment being expressed is that if you want a pretty picture you ought to find a better _artist,_ not a better programmer.
An example of really strong art direction and art fundamentals in action is Team Fortress 2. The art direction is strong in the sense that the game has a very recognizable visual identity that remains consistent throughout - because it was thoroughly planned and executed to be as such. Art decisions were made with clear intent and deep insight to achieve maximum benefit for the game's needs, rather than to achieve maximum brownie points at the follow up Siggraph talks. A solid understanding of art fundamentals let them take their clear vision and execute it successfully.
To get specific now, for one, all the mercenaries have extremely clear, recognizable silhouettes. This increases visual clarity in the moment to moment gameplay, you can instantly and effortlessly tell a Heavy apart from a Medic apart from a Scout or a Demoman in the middle of a hectic firefight. Not only that, but the strong silhouettes contribute to memorable, recognizable character designs. The shape language of the sillouettes contributes to the game's visual identity, etc. A vision with clear, well thought out intentions - that's art direction. Then they stick the landing with well practiced art fundamentals, choosing good shapes and producing those silhouettes.
But it continues! They make heavy intentional use of color theory, ensuring that important details like the objective and other players pop out clearly from the background. They nail their twelve fundamentals of animation and clearly telegraph important gameplay information like "oh no, the heavy is about to shoot his minigun at me", while also breathing life into the characters and giving them personality through animation. Levels are designed with an eye for framing and shot composition to aide in navigation by highlighting the important bits, and look dang good while doing it. And on and on and on.
Team Fortress 2 is just as visually awesome today in 2024 as it was the day it came out in 2007. Good visual design principles do not have an expiration date. Computer hardware and rendering algorithms very thoroughly DO. Strong art direction + Art Fundamentals > Hardware and Algorithms every day of the week.
As the game engine graphics programmer... don't hire me. _Hire a good artist first._
Absolutely phenomenal video. Very detailed and informative without stretching it out too long, but still not glossing anything over. I'm also glad you called out the crowd of people who spout "realistic graphics are bad" when it's clear that they only mean the bad attempts at realistic graphics, not the aesthetic as a whole.
Subscribing to this channel is an easy choice. Keep on making great videos like this, but please don't degrade to resorting to clickbait and wild statements as your channel grows, I've seen it happen too many times and I'd hate to see it happen here.
I loved the comparison shots ghost games made back in 2014 to show how photorealistic the game will look like. Never hat a game after that that matched realistic colors so much
out of all of ghost's NFS games, graphically the original 2015 game looks the best.
their game engine really shined at night time, and because they made the game rainy in 2015 the graphics look pretty darn good.
the other two games took a deep degradation in terms of graphics - mostly because of their setting (daytime, desert setting so no rain etc)
I'm currently trying to make a marble rolling game in unreal 5.3. It's so very frustrating to only get 15 fps with a simple game like that on a mid range card from just 5 years ago, when I know it can be better. I get 80 fps on my machine but I want to give the game to my friends and they don't have a fancy graphics card. Neither do lots of people who would spend money on a game. I very much hope the industry stops focusing on fancy new features for a couple years , and instead focuses on performance. I'm loving these tips. thank you for this.
yeah when unreal 5 came out, i made a very simple school level and even with almost nothing at all in it, it was running at sub 30fps at 50% render scale on my 6700xt. that's absurd. i gave up on unreal. if i'm ever gonna make a game, it's going to be on a simpler engine, like gzdoom or godot. i don't need the fancy garbage.
That's a you problem, not an engine problem. Lower your draw calls.
I'm with Alex, Unreal has tons of optimization tools. It's just hard to learn how/when to use them because there's less and less content to learn from the more nitty gritty you get (RUclips specifically).
@@alex-qn5xp A fully optimized nearly empty project has an unacceptably low framerate on older hardware, which a lot of people still use. The engine has too much overhead.
@@maxwellbrengle7168 That's true, if you have the hardware to run it, and don't mind missing out on about 30 percent of potential customers. A nearly blank, optimized project is still far too sluggish. I've been using unreal since 4 was new. the move to 5 was painful and it just hasn't gotten much better.
As a modder and also a photographer of this game with around 1700 hours clocked in since 2016, looking at this game the same way I did when I first played it is impossible. Knowing some ins and outs of how things work, it just gets worse and worse to look at in my eyes. Trying to get the desired look for photos, is getting harder and harder with time despite how good the game can look on average. When a game goes for photorealism, spotting bad aspects of graphics is much, much easier.
The biggest miss when it comes to graphics is the extremely lackluster car reflections. They're just barely there (at least it's not as bad as payback). In my opinion, having good car reflections should be a proper priority in a game that goes for photorealism. All the attention is on the puddles, which are all cool, but your car can be like a black void sometimes. It ages the look by a ton.
After all this time, I appreciate the look of Rivals more, with a full day and night cycle. While not perfect, it can still look stunning with some actual car reflections (but nearly non-existent road reflections, although it's not that big of a deal there). I could also say Unbound is so much nicer to look at thanks to car reflections alone. I would also like to mention the fact that cubemap reflections used for roads are sometimes just plain wrong and awful in certain cases.
I think when it comes to pure gameplay, the film grain is easily the worst part of this game. People may complain about TAA, but grain makes this game look like 720p at 1080p (on top of TAA). It's just so bad and doesn't really make the game look any better (well, it makes things so much worse).
Damn, didn't expect such a well-done detailed breakdown when I clicked on this. Amazing work
This is an incredibly good video, and while it probably won't be very useful to me in particular, still thank you so much for making this! It's super information
One thing I would like to say though is that I don't really agree that the motion blur here is a problem. I don't think it has enough of a negative effect to be worth it's removal, especially when it's mostly limited to the edge of the screen in a high speed racing game. The motion blur does a good job to emphasize the screen, and the sharpness lost isn't particularly important to gameplay especially for peripheral vision
didn't know render pipelines were that long
You went into every detail that us advocates of this game - want to explain to the NFS community. Instant sub!
Both Rivals and NFS did great job in Art Style aspect. NFS Unbound also did a great job, and Head had was very beautiful in night and rainy days. I don't know why they went higher polygon style graphics fidelity in Payback instead of maintaining the art style.
Dude I hope your channel explodes, I've never seen such a thorough yet comprehensive explanation of a graphics pipeline. All you need is a better camera! Subscribed
Please make a video analysing how a sense of speed is created in other racing videogames!
Yes please! I would love for Midnight Club 3 to be used as an example, that game definitely had the best sense of speed imo. Better than any other NFS title.
I remember when deferred rendering was all the rage. My first few years in the industry were all about g-buffers and how to render transparent objects properly.
Dude it's awesome content.
Subscribed!
Which frame analyser do you use?
great video, just your body is taking so much space of the screen and became point of interest instead
AND the guy appreciates motion blur, we've got a winner.
this is fascinating, never before i saw any videos breaking down rendering down to individual steps like this. really interesting
I would never imagine this quality of analysis and video on RUclips.
Good video, but do your face cam really need to take 1/4 of the screen space?
This is hands down one of the (best) and most detailed analysis I've watched about video games.
NFS 2015 is peak game rendering. We really don't need better visuals than this.
The point is we CAN have better visuals than this, if they were doing it as efficiently.
@@alexatkin But we don't need better visuals. This looks very good and natural. No flaws.
You gained 400 subs in 5 hours that is very impressive, nice, wish you all the best
I feel like it'd be weirder if motion blur applied to some objects and not others? especially for camera velocity-specific motion, where that blur genuinely is what a real camera would see if it was exposing the whole scene at once. it doesn't have to be as intense as a 24 fps cinema camera blur, where the frame exposure is sooo long that everything smears together, but take any specific frame of a movie (especially film movies) where the camera is moving and it is sometimes entirely blur, which itself becomes a director's choice for vibes and drama.
but having some things blur out and not others would stick out. I think it'd feel uncanny subconsciously
Subbed, most of this is gibberish for me, but I need more of it. (XD)
80k with 6k likes is crazy
The game has such a good atmosphere it captures that underground late night LA racing feel and look. The best looking and immersive need for speed.
Holy shit, this has to be most comprehensive analysis i've yet seen. You have to have a lot of knowledge to follow up with this.
i didn't expect such an indepth video
Now I know how my grandparents feel when I'm trying to explain how to check email.
i was amazed when i saw 2015, its beyond comparable to other titles in graphics
Agree, they definitely nailed specular reflections and the road material, this is the proof that working smartly and adjusting your artstyle around hard limitations can lead to photorealistic-ish results. Also real photo references are king
I'm waiting for the second episode where you implement everything you said in ue5 and show us how to do it
really underrated youtuber, you definitely deserve more recognition
Great video! Keep this quality up -- and thanks for the great graphics lesson.
While I'm not a graphics programmer for games, learning to optimize scenes and rendering will definitely come in handy for me --
Commenting here just before it blows up (please, algorithm)
Honestly, it's tiresome how the industry went to not care about optimization. To the hell to everybody that say my GPU is a potato. It can run good graphics and I am happy with that. What I'm not happy with is how standarized it has become for games to ask for a lot as if they were a new Half-Life or GTA entry when they are nothing in comparison. When I come off to complain people defend it with bad excuses such as "but it's a open world". I'm tired of the fact that I need to buy a better GPU not to get better graphics but rather be able to play newly developed games. It isn't even just a AAA problem anymore. You even see indies that go through this trend, being absolutely unplayable by old computer just because they envisioned "next gen graphics". This must stop. I have seen countless times how amazing games from 10 years ago look and yet, you telling me my $100 GPU can't run a cartoon game because the devs shoved every shader under the sun into it and you can't do wack to make it run? I'm looking at you, asset flip game that every streamer under the sun plays and requires a beast to run because they chose the "most graphically impressive engine" and we players have to pay the consequences.
By the time I get a new GPU, I want the investment to be translated into smooth graphics for a good while, but the videogame industry isn't doing any effort to guarantee this. Haven't we all agreed programmed obsolescency is bad? I don't see any action being taken.
I think the lack of care towards optimization has a lot to do with these "drag and drop" passive optimization features. Like, take DLSS upscaling and frame generation for example, it's becoming a requirement to play any game at an acceptable frame rate. Developers see that and say "Oh we won't need to optimize the game that much because people will just use X and Y to get better frames."
This is just plain wrong. The amount of time and effort spent on optimization and adding options to broaden the consumer base, even for small indie games, is huge nowadays compared to only ten years ago. You'll find indie games that have options for color blindness, and with 4:3 resolutions, and multiple different AA solutions on the market today. Even games that are known for "poor optimization," like Cyberpunk, was better optimized than Crysis when it came out. Crysis became a meme because there wasn't a computer on the market that could run it at 60 fps for years after it was released.
And then we can talk about the rate of progress. Upgrading your graphics card every 2-3 years was basically mandatory in the 2000s. You couldn't hope to play any new game in 2007 with your FX 5500 card from 2004. Meanwhile, you can play basically any new game today on a 980, which came out 9(!) years ago. Most AAA games you can play with a 1080 which came out 8 years ago (I still have one.) In the same time, we have gone from games like Halo 5 and SOMA, to Horizon Call of the Mountain and Diablo 4. I'm not saying Halo and SOMA don't look good, but there's quite a difference in fidelity and complexity between those four titles.
And you think the art style of "cartoony" makes something automatically easier on the graphics card? It has very little to do with it. Of course not every game will be amazingly optimized, especially indie games. But that's kind of the price you pay for games being easier to create and publish. Besides, every game has a minimum spec requirement that you can look at, and no one is obligated to optimize their game to YOUR system, and if you think they are, I think we're better off without you as a consumer.
@@hiTocopter
First for all, thanks for the pretty words.
Second. Technology and graphics advanced at a fast pace, of course you need a beefy PC to play the very best, I'm not complaining about that, it's just that the very best is now shared by a long decade of gaming instead of only recent titles. Back then, most indies, if not all, ran in almost every computer under the sun because they didn't rely on the backs of engines that run so badly.
What I'm complaining about is that they aren't giving me a valid reason to get a better GPU, other than playing games that look worse than games I can play in my system.
So go back to 2001 because that's when your argument had weight. You'd do us a favor.
@@ibisskb Again, you're just wrong. Besides the fact that "indies" barely existed in the 00s, those that did often required extremely specific components to even start, let alone run smoothly. And engines like UE, Unity, and Godot all run smoother today and with less resources than basically any commercial or public engine in 2015. You are basing your opinion on some nostalgic golden past that was never actually a thing.
The "valid" reason to get a better GPU is the same as it has always been. Games today require more computing power to render than games yesterday. Except instead of having to do it every 3 years, you can now wait 9 years before having to upgrade.
You're the one who's upset by the modern market and products, not me. I just find it ridiculous that all the things you're saying is the cause of your annoyance are completely wrong today, but were true 15 years ago.
@@hiTocopter You are talking to somebody that perhaps by miracle got to play loads of indie/amateur code from the mid 2000s to recent time without knowledge of the specs I had because I was a child back then. It always ran on the go because devs didn't use a engine that ran only in state of the art PCs. Your argument about indies, belongs more to the late 90s and earlier where PCs weren't exactly known for being as convenient for gaming as now. So duh, it's as saying water hydrates you.
The valid reason to get a new GPU was to get into that new state of the art PC game that you knew beforehand it is worth it. When a game wanted more you could tell why it wanted more with your very own eyes. It's not nostalgia at all. Videogame graphics evolved faster, period. Just compare a videogame from the same saga from 1999 to 2004 and then one from 2014 to 2024. Of course I'd want a new graphics card, because it's offering me something than just "playing recent games".
You are contributing to my point when saying that you can wait 9 years before having to upgrade.
If anything, all of the time my argument is attacked as "selfish". Of course, as if everybody lived in the same economy that could get you state of the art GPUs that last you nine years.
Your argument is the very reason people always say how PC gaming is so expensive while millions that weren't lucky to be born in the right place at the right time (shall I remind you how these requirements didn't drop during the chip shortage but instead increase)
You'd be winning if somebody actually wanted to buy your GPU by the time you want to get a better one. Better optimization means you can do more with your new GPU, while literally being able to find a buyer for your old one because somebody can play in Low settings that look as if they were from 10 years ago.
It's just morally wrong to support a tendency that contributes to GPUs that run perfectly being abandoned just to play new games that represent no obvious graphical improvement.
In a ideal world we could get a PC that runs it all but state of the art games for less than what a console is sold for. But I see you are against this because you want to feel special about spending more money. There's no point debating this with you, it's like talking to a wall.
You'll get it one day when your GPU is to the limit in minimum graphics just because a indie dev team wanted to do the project in UE6. You probably want to mod the game, run it in 60fps, but instead you are given that middle finger. Funny enough the projects that run the worst are done in third party engines such as UE and Unity, because that's what made lazy coders thrive, unfortunately.
Back then you couldn't afford to cram your game with else if as if you were YandereDev because any misuse of the limited power you had would kick you out of the race. Nowadays it isn't the case anymore. You can do great things with a fraction of the power supplied by modern components.
Great frame analysis 🙂 Thanks for putting in the work and sharing. Notes to self; experiment with SSAO on a downsampled image and apply chromatic aberration to pixels outside the circle of focus, thanks!
What is the name of the program he is using to deconstruct the render pipeline? I am new to graphics programming and this program would be incredibly useful to me
Found it. It's Intel GPA if anyone wonders
@@iamcasted Intel GPA, Renderdoc, Pix, Nsight, radeon gpu profiler, ApiTrace, Xcode GPU, GPUView
I accidentally stumbled upon this gem of a video! What a great analysis.
There were many games at the start of ps4 gen that looked really great and honestly looks better than many current gen games. But for me personally, TAA, FSR, DLAA are some of the things that completely ruined the experience. Everything either looks ghosty/ smeary or downright blurry.
I would love to see your take on Arkham Knight, even that has pretty good photorealism on budget hardware
Man i hope you reach a million subs before this year ends.
5:37 - Those aren't streaking artifacts. That's just a 2-pass gaussian blur. Vertical first, horizontal second.
i definetly wasnt expecting for such a deep dive
quite incredible thing to see how the game is made
if only 2015`s gameplay matched the graphics the aesthetics were on point
People always say NFS 2015 looks like real life, but I don't agree with that. I think 2015 looks more like the edited photos from speed hunters at the time than just straight realistic, which would make sense as they were a big part of the game.
Pretty cool video man, I was wondering if you could do a video on Modern warfare 2019 rendering and how it builds up a frame?
Don't understand half the terms mentioned but great video, hope your work has a big impact on the industry!
I don't understand much, but I get it at the surface level. Just makes me sad thinking about what my favorite games might look like if these technologies were impremented properly.. Mechwarrior Online and War Thunder comes to mind!
Holy shii, from a junior 3D Artist this was incredibly enlightening. Gr8 job 👏
The atmosphere on this game was immense. Still enjoyed it, even over it's flaws.
This video was extremely interesting, very in depth analysis
Agree... although I wonder how many people don't see it.. but the photorealism is what drew me into the series .the e3 demo blew me away,like no nfs game has ever done till date .. but the handling was a disaster.. it had good story n missions n cutscenes also.. I bet if this game has the handling physics of payback,it would have been the most loved nfs till date FR
Even with all the post effects modded off that game looks insane
Love the CROWNED video as a reference.
The jagged edges really ruin the "photorealism" effect, I couldn't take my eyes off them
That's because SMAA isn't captured in single frame captures due to being injected. If you watch while the car is moving, the edges are much less jagged.
you feel the same way as me about the same effects. you are educated very well and not pompous. great critique.
Can you do a similar video about Counter Strike 2? That game has a really interesting implementation of Ambient occlusion which I think is worth checking. It also has some clever use of cube maps and shaders for what is argueably the best looking water in any game ever.
Did u just say cs2 has the best water ever
@@maymayman0 The source engine has had nice water shaders in general, I'd say. Back when HL2 came out for sure for its time, but considering the work they did for L4D2 (there's a neat GDC presentation on flow maps), and continuing that work with Portal 2. CS2 continues that trend, CS2's Anubis, for example looks pretty nice. I think there are various games with open water, that have more complex water shaders (mainly showing waves, and maybe some spray) that would qualify for "best" place, in my opinion.
The ambient occlusion in CS2 is a mix of SSAO and capsule shadows, which are pretty standard in modern AAA engines. A large portion of UE4/UE5 titles use them for indoor shadows, or shadows in overcast weather.
The tweaking of the capsule shadows in CS2 is really well-done for sure. Even the chickens and ceiling fans in Mirage's kitchen have them :)
This video is here to show me that even though I am game dev interested in graphics, there's still a mountain of knowledge for me to understand everything used in this 2015 game. It really takes a team of highly specialized people to produce state of the art realtime graphics.
Ended up watching the whole thing, incredibly informative and very interesting to see what happens behind the scenes when gaming. NFS 2015 is still by far the most visually impressive game in comparison to modern NFS titles.
I needed this video for the game my team is working on and for future projects. Need For Speed 2015 is perfect example the of gaining good graphics without ruining performance.
We are very glad to hear we helped!
Amazing video!
I'm trying to learn rendering by building one myself, and I'm having a hard time understanding how some of these effects work. Maybe, you could, along with these game-dives, do more educational-style content on what the techniques are, and how they work, with maybe an example of how it may be implemented (this last one may take a lot of time so it's okay if it is not there).
That would a real help in familiarizing oneself with the what the techniques there are, and what they do.
Really love these tech breakdowns. Thank you!