The game's ambient occlusion is very minimal, even on its highest setting, which plays a big role in the shadows looking weird at times. I think the lighting engine works great for campaign, multiplayer not so much, but campaign yea, those forerunner interiors with blue reflections everywhere are beautiful.
@@d01nut3 Yea, flights were only on pc whereas the game is obviously also on old-gen consoles, that's a good point. To be fair though, the PC performance during the flights were abhorrent if you weren't rocking the latest GPU (I have a 2060 and I remember the game dropping a lot of frames).
One thing I really like about the look of Ray-Traced shadows in Halo Infinite is now they can vary in softness depending on how far away the shadow is from the source. Whereas the default shadows look uniformly way too soft.
I think the biggest difference is allowing trees to self shadow, some of the trees go from bright neon as they're unshadowed, to being dappled in their own shadows allowing the brighter colour to feel natural and not too flat
Man I just can't get over how awesome Infinite would have been if it launched as an actual finished complete product. Since they are working on a new Halo game, I hope they manage to pull it off from day 1. No more post-launch features we used to have on day 1. It should be post-launch expansion, not post-launch development.
Yeah hopefully the new teams plus Pierre Hintze and other leaders are able to pull it off successfully 💫. Until then, I'll be playing Infinite, MCC, Cyberpunk and MGSV:TPP @@pifre3051
I hope so too but I know they won’t. Halo 5, MCC and Halo infinite all felt so incomplete at launch compared to 3/reach/4. I just don’t have belief in 343 to deliver after a decade of failures. I hope I’m proven wrong though. I want an everyone is here moment like from smash. Have all the features we want at launch, make it look goddamn amazing at launch.
I think they've learned a lot over the years. Infinite was a big step in the right direction. Not quite there in some areas, but 343 definitely know that and I hope they'll be able to improve more. It's been a long journey and it shouldn't have been this long, but we can't go back in time. We can just hope they'll keep learning and applying what they learn.
Having to render RT in real time was a awful developer choice in the first place for the multiplayer maps as the lighting is static, the maps of should had high resolution prebaked lighting in first place as there is no time change unlike the single player which would have actually benefited from RT.
I just miss ultra-sharp Stencil Shadows, man, I don't care if they're not realistic, I love the look and it would be effortless for modern hardware to pull off, so you could cast as many shadows as you wanted on things.
Yeah im really sick of modern games being cripples by this rampant need for cutting edge graphics, think about how HUGE a Halo Campaign could be using Halo 3/Reach style graphics, none of this open world crap, just a full epic journey of a campaign
It's an annoying trend I see on modern titles... I find it kinda sorta dumb that we need to buy all of these hardware mainly just to run these games, like it makes sense for people who need that hardware like animators, video editors, etc., but then again I don't really care about if I could see a character's skin pores in 4k, all I want is smooth frames, graphics that shape up well (something like Titanfall 2 where even my PC without a graphics card could handle without like betraying that realistic sort of look), and good AI simulation. I wish we didn't have as big of a focus on graphics or at least have a similar big focus on optimising things or using techniques so they don't need that much resources so we could use all them resources for cool simulations instead especially AI... Man I just love AI systems.
That’s odd that baked shadows don’t react to gun fire and stuff. They could have, as they react to the flashlight and the energy sword, so it must been another optimization. Only certain dynamic lights effect the light map.
I always love these types of videos from you. Can't wait for the next impossible to see it the first time but now that you brought it up I can't ever unsee it video
Some of my maps are indoors and have the skylight disabled. They don't have that weird grey sheen. And there's a lot of areas that are completely in the dark or partially lit. It bothers me so much that I try to entirely rely on light objects instead to avoid that, which is so impractical and time consuming.
Very informative! Kind of funny looking back the the early 2000s when games had to bake details for shadows and lighting into the textures themselves, and Halo 3 was no exception! As someone who's worked on that kind of work as part of a team of devs, I loved seeing the textures from then in this video too.
One thing I can’t recommend enough is to lower that games brightness down to around -25. It really makes the colors pop out a lot more and makes it look more vibrant.
YES! Also, since I play at nighttime I always set my laptop's brightness down and then do -25 on Infinite because Gahh lee that game needs Dynamic Range. If anything, it would help Accessibility and the contrast between shadows would help, so hopefully that gets addressed in the future either in this title or the next
I think this game would be a stellar candidate for ray traced reflections, as there are so many huge shiny surfaces that make it painfully obvious how much the game leans on screen space reflections to make it work. I understand it might not run on console, but Infinite is not a super demanding game on PC and I definitely think they could integrate more ray tracing without tanking PC performance. On another note, the low performance cost was one of the main reasons I kept RTSS on at all anyway.
I don't think the lighting was ever really the problem with the visuals in Infinite, there's 2 major things that stand out to me about the way it looks. First is the way the game uses PBR materials, there's just something about the way the game handles the shading on these textures that makes them seem flat and... off looking... This is the largest contributer to how Halo 3 is better looking in many cases even with its lower fidelity, every shader and texture in Halo 3 was fine tuned to look as good as it does, there's several layers of textures and shaders that go into making the ghost have the beautiful shine with little detailed scratches in Halo 3 as an example, the PBR textures in Infinite just don't seem to have the same tweakability and end up looking far worse in the end IMHO. The second problem is the gamma and contrast, it looks like the game has its gamma set too bright by default, giving everything that nasty slightly washed out look, at least you can sort of fix that by lowering your gamma setting, but if I'm remembering correctly some dark areas suffer from the contrast being overkill at the lower gamma setting (I haven't played the game since last year however) but yeah, I'm 99.9% sure the texture system and gamma are why the game just doesn't look right.
On the mark 100%, I can handle bad shadows but halo 3's materials really help blow infinite out of the water. I don't know why 343 still hasn't fully figured out how to unplastic their metals.
technically, i see no issue with the graphics but in practice i cant see it as anything but worse than what came before with extra bells and whistles that make the game run worse
Thank you for pointing this out! While it may go under some people’s radars, to me those shadows turn Infinite from a last-gen-looking game to a current-gen one. Really interesting to learn about the lack of animations. I assume that means the ray-traced shadows are baked-in in some way, similar to Halo 3?
When I started learning Dev on Unreal 5 with lumen, I found that dynamic shadows on foliage tanked FPS and even more so if that foliage had animation. We are talking about going from 120fps to less than 20 with animations enabled.
I just wish halo infinite had better ray tracing options, sun shadows is great, but ray tracing lighting and reflections, etc, could take the game to the max. Games like cyberpunk show the benefits of RT, and halo infinite could definitely benefit a lot from it. Hopefully when they find a comfortable pace of development with this new team, 343 is able to go back and add stuff like this to campaign or whatever 😊
For Forge maps raytraced GI could look great, but in regular MP maps they really should have baked GI by default since it's literally the optimal scenario for baked GI. Static time of day with the vast majority of the map being static, making amazing baked lighting easy at only the cost of VRAM. Just make its accuracy a texture setting for weaker systems.
Its a shame raytracing wasn't put into campaign. Personally campaign is the only place where I'd elect to use raytracing since usually the fps tradeoff in for it in multiplayer isn't worth it for me, but i do enjoy a nice singleplayer story with awesome graphics
Point about the end. All these things are toggle-able , so 343 could 100% give the campaign RT sun shadows and allow people to pick and choose the option, regardless of the system. Consoles really need to start moving towards letting us pick and choosing graphical settings, like PC. There’s no reason not to. I bet you I could find a settings sweet spot for the Series S that would allow you to have RT sun shadows and still have a stable and enjoyable fps experience if 343 opened up the option to me.
Heavily agreed. It's the second biggest reason I moved to PC besides just being able to mod. Consoles don't usually, if ever, get support for graphical customization. It's terrible and I don't understand why not. I think Xbox would sell more consoles if they pushed for it as well.
Honestly I've always been impressed with how Warframe does it. Not a lot of settings compared to PC, but you can change a ton of stuff on console compared to other games.
Hearing you talk about the raytracing really made me hope Halo Infinite had raytracing for the campaign, and then at the end of your video you said that they didn't add the raytracing the campaign, I'm pretty sad to hear that, it could've even more beautiful 😭🙏
One technology I'm surprised infinte doesn't have yet is fsr2, that would definitely help with performance on older pcs like those with a gtx 1060 or rx 580. Hope it comes at somepoint in the future.
The trees and moving objects becoming static kinda reminds me of Elden Ring's RT. While it does not stop moving shadows, the ray-traced shadows are of a much lower resolution. This might be done to prevent performance issues.
I admit the shadows in ray tracing are great and I love them. But I think this is also why I prefer Halo 3 and similar games by the look of it. It doesn’t look realistic, but it looks just right for your eyes.
I think it also has to do with having a cohesive art direction, like having prerendered shadows with dynamoc shadows platered over the top usually looks weird unless done deliberately
It still baffles me 343 went for 24hr Day/Night cycles in multiplayer maps instead of doing one version and bake the lighting. The lack of detail makes it look so shoddy. Baked lighting has next to zero impact at runtime, and while it takes a while to generate in dev, it's a pretty common nessisary evil most are used to. Opting for a dynamic time of day in multi-player means they lose out on having those really nice detailing elements, and we have to resort to RAY TRACING to get it back. I'd so much rather have 1 day and one night version of each map. Or hell, even just one variant.
I can’t find the answer to this question anywhere online. In halo 2 and 3, are the odsts more formidable than the regular marines in battle. I never noticed a difference but wondering if they are coded differently. Thought someone on a late night gaming video could help
I think Slipspace Engine could learn a baking technique from Source 2 engine, where the map editor requiring raytracing then bakes the rendering result in the map, then again, Valve tech are leaps and bounds better than most engines out there because you can get AAA RTX like graphics for fraction of the hardware requirements other titles require
As amazing raytracing technology is, I wish GPU's will be powerful enough where every can safely turn it on without affecting performance too much. Probably not in my lifetime though but I'm hopeful
We are already getting there. Resolution upscaling tech has improved so much it’s hard to tell when it’s on and improves performance so much. Ray tracing is still new. I bet the next generation of graphics cards will be able to run full ray tracing with no problem.
I think the main problem that people have with raytracing is not understanding what it actually means and does. A buddy said it looked bad because it made the shadows “blurrier” (the shadows were softer in the screenshots he showed me because there were multiple, dim light sources from different angles), vs the otherwise sharp prebaked shadows in MW2019, the game we were playing at the time. I think some criticisms stem from the misunderstanding of how lighting actually works in real life. Take a look around your room at the soft shadows and what light sources might be causing them.
Dude, LNG, big bubba. Stop it with the informative and good videos. Go to making garbage click bait. But in all seriousness, these videos are really well put and I’d love to see more of it.
Because it's all they have lmao, reeks of shitty basic substance painter textures, whole game looks incredibly bland and boring, no hardsurface artist in 343 knows how to texture to save their lives, substance generators lookin ass.
The energy sword is low resolution in my book. Halo 3 had very sharp texture’s given its hardest target, I don’t get the same impression with any halo game there after. Sometimes it looks sharp, sometimes texture look pixilated.
It's situations like these that make me wonder why devs don't just up the resolution of shadows or add more traditional dynamic lighting. It has the same (or better) effect as these raytracing solutions WITHOUT requiring proprietary hardware that'll still struggle to run it.
the shadows help to add contrast back into the dull, washed out visuals, however the saturation and vibrance needs a boost. Modern look seems all about HDR, which gives a more grey look to it. But colors (or color filters) should be used to add emotion and feeling back into these "modern" looking visuals that still look worse than older games because they have no color tone or vibrance.
TBH ray tracing on my series s looks fine to me. Anyone else? I suppose it's subjective to an extent. (lol my phone auto correctd "ray tracing" to "day traing") 😅
I did find it funny when people couldn't tell the difference so this is a fantastic video to showcase how much this does improve infinite's visuals. I also had no idea thats how the older halo games shadows worked.
Oh wow, I didn't realize the ray tracing in infinite was that complex. I thought it just made shadows sharper. That being said, as someone who enjoys their games looking "hashtag cinematic", I was hoping infinite's raytracing would be more akin to the kind in fortnite, as I find that one really makes the colours pop. Now that I've played it that way, turning off RTX makes it feel like I applied a grayscale filter
@sanchobama It does so by spreading/bleeding light bounced from one to another surface with the dev's set bounce limit accordingly, more bounce = more realism. It does not just make "colors pop" like saturation does, just saying
It's not the graphics that makes a great game it's it's story line and how immersive the gameplay to players is . We still love all old halo ce ,2,3 and odst cause they got some good storyline to keep the players engaged
halo used stencil shadows for all of the dynamic props (halo 2 and 3 and ODST and Reach) Halo 1 used a different shadow system that was far simpler ... it would have been nice if Halo Infinite used RT for diffuse light bounces and reflections and kept the raster shadows they were using before the RT update
Could you do a video on the evolution of Jackals Late Night Gaming? You’ve already done a video on the Elites, Grunts, and Hunters and I’d like to learn more about the Jackals history through your content, maybe even include the skirmishers in the same video as they are the same species. Whether you do or do or don’t include the Skirmishers in video if you do, keep up with the amazing content.
Unsurprisingly, yes - raytracing looks better than anything prebaked could achieve while also being dynamic. I don’t know why so many people fight against it - it’s been around for decades in the animation industry, it’s not a gimmick.
Lighting is a very large part of anything to look good. so is temperature designs. and bump maps or material types on textures. I make maps in source, for gmod. and i have found a way to compile the lighting of my maps using my GPU (usually its a CPU thing), and this helped me to better atmospheres and designs.
People saying they dont notice a difference between raytraced shadows and PCSS are out of their minds. Id argue that raytraced shadows as well as GI for more dynamic games are THE gamechangers in therms of graphics fidelity.
Gamers waste so much time on caring about ray tracing and changing the graphics setting Xbox and Playstation games looks great for 500 dollars consoles Stop spending 3000 dollars on GPUs and just play the games
Ray tracing does come with a performance penalty for "skinned meshes". Even Cyberpunk 2077 on RT Overdrive does freeze some vegetation (but only in the BVH if I remember correctly). Other games like let's say Avatar Frontiers of Pandora may not have humans or Navi show up in the BVH, only in screen space. To be fair that game pushes ray tracing hard with no fallback solution. As such something had to give. In that case it was the BVH.
The likely reason why the objects stand still is because the BVH for the RT doesn't use skinned meshes and thus does not have them moving in that model. This is likely why this happens and it kinds sucks. I think they should add in an option for RTGI and RT Reflections as well as Halo has a ton of very shiny objects and RTGI can help with ambient shading as well as color bounce. It would also help forge maps look much better as well because all that lighting data needed is captured in real time
hot take: people complain how this game's raytracing is simple, but in reality it's a benefit since the developers should aim for a unified art direction instead of going the boring "realistic" route a lot of them take that's why raytraced shadows are my preferred way of playing infinite, it's simple yet super effective at making the game look pretty
The reason that shadow casting objects like trees become static is likely due to the temporal cost of calculating real time ray traced shadows. For complex objects like trees, it probably takes a couple seconds to fully calculate the entire shadow which means that the shadows can't dynamically respond to short time scale swaying/moving. This probably means that truly dynamic objects like crates and whatnot have shadows calculated slightly differently which makes sense because these objects are much simpler. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if truly dynamic objects don't use ray tracing at all.
I feel like they just tuned up the shadow resolution instead of adding ray traced shadows because I can still see some edges not connecting with its shadow on things like windows and wall equipment. Contact shadows with a high resolution smacked on the default lighting.
id imagine that level geometry still uses a different shadow system from actors and i guess its just too hard for them to dynamically generate the shadows for moving objects using that system more proof that infinite should of been made right from the get go
I remember when I first played breath of the wild the graphics was not outstanding, but what stick to me was how alive everything felt. Trees and grass flowing with the wind, that truly immersed you more in the environment. I’d take moving trees over pretty shadow everyday, if you need to make such compromises it’s not worth it imho
Thanks for the Series S part at the end, I wondered if I'm crazy, but i noticed it just dropped the frames and looked nothing different when I activated it on mine.
As much as people might say that 343 should go the Halo 3 route for lighting levels, you would be foolish for them to do so for the workflow that is required today for the content output we expect, the reason why we got so few maps back then compared to now is because everything had to be done manually back then and takes forever to come out with more content (plus baking the lighting in Halo 3's engine takes hours I guess in the Tools in MCC I heard), today its more automatic for generating the lighting in game because developers do not have the time (nor should they spend the time) baking in every lighting scene manually because its a waste of time now considering the AI tech we have now to do it automatically, its an old technique that does look great in Halo 3 but Infinite and technology had to push the lighting engine forward to do this more automated now. Raytracing currently with graphics cards is still very demanding technology, its getting better with the 40 series of NVIDIA but were not there yet where every GPU can do it well because we don't have the power and VRAM required yet to comfortably do it well. I am guessing the reason why Campaign didn't get Raytracing is that having it enabled for most GPUs would tank the FPS massively with having to load in such a large space compared to the multiplayer maps which are smaller, so GPUs in general are just not there yet to comfortably play in Infinite's engine with Raytracing on everywhere.
I'm reminded that Halo 4's Forge on 360 had a "baking lighting" load that put static shadows on things relatively quickly. On MCC, that load all but disappeared, and that was before the baking was made optional. As for Infinite's Forge, there is a lighting bake in the bake menu, but I have been unable to confirm 100% what exactly it does.
Infinites rasterised shadows are already much lower resolution than most of its peers. If they could be made higher res, the game would have benefited much more from RTGI. I still insist the biggest graphical upgrade this game could get is simply the ability to disable TAA or use DLAA. I have to supersample to an insane degree to still get a soft image, at that point I'd be better off without anti aliasing at all and just rely on SSAA
The trees and stuff freeze probably because those animations are done in the vertex shader and ray traced stuff doesn't have those. It'd all have to be converted to a compute prepass to generate the animated meshes and they likely decided they weren't worth the effort at the time.
What could really make Halo Infinite pop visually if they used more shiny metallic surfaces, especially on the covenant vehicles which are now all dull metal.
Honestly I think ray traced lighting isn't really worth the cost. It's worth saying that I only have a 2080ti though. Ray traced reflections on the other hand make a huge difference other other methods. I hate screen space reflections.
Hey LNG, question about the battle passes, is the Winter Update available today at any point? Just that i really want my CQC helmet in Infinite. I bought Heroes of Reach so I can settle for Recon or MK7 but it's just not the same. Do i need to buy Lone Wolves too or should I just wait and see? Thanks.
One of the factors that kinda ruin the details of the graphics in this game is its implementation of TAA. Makes everything have a "painted" effect and smeary in motion, ESPECIALLY at low resolutions. Even at 4K the details can get a bit muddled.
so that means ray tracing is at odds with the networking code, since the networking is why things like elevators and zanzibars wheel werent moving but now are if you are on the network test versions while the trade off is worse hit detection and bugs galore, infinite needs some heavy behind the scenes work on the code
What I disliked the most about Halo 5's graphics (not art style) was that there was no self-cast shadows or ambient occlusion ("fake" shadows where objects meets, which Infinite also lacks even though it's been an industry standard for over a decade). It's the big thing that made H5's character models look so "plastic" and almost as if they were super-imposed to the screen and not at all in the level. Ray traced shadows in particular generally looks "worse" or unnoticable because the environmental artists have done such a good job with the rasterization. The real benefit of ray traced shadows, global illumination, etc. is that it severely reduces the work load for artists, at the expense of limiting the lighting to be _realistic_ (which may or may not look "worse" than artistic choices/mistakes), and also making it run worse until the hardware gets good enough.
An alternative to ray tracing would just be to use less dynamic shadows in general, to rely on the artistry of cast shadows. I realize it's more work for the artists but there's so much opportunity to create stylized or eye catching shadows and highlights, to draw the eye to specific details by letting artists create the art in its entirety. And yeah it might occasionally be noticeably a bit static, but it also has the potential to look even better than ray tracing
Now if only Halo Infinite could update the washed out colors to something a bit more saturated. I think that would be the thing that helps me view the game as less ugly. Because I hadn't played since season 2, so I hadn't seen the ray tracing. The lighting and washed out colors always killed me, especially because the texture work and models in this game are so crazy good.
The weird thing is, the engine can clearly handle static shadows since you can bake them separately in Forge maps. So why don't MP maps have much higher res static shadows attached to the texture settings?
i havent noticed if it looks better or worse, but the first few weeks i had raytracing on, i almost shot at shadows thst werent there before coz i thought there was an enemy 😅
Game worlds should be like movies. They don't need an algorithm to make them 100% realistic. They need an artist's or director's eye to make them visually appealing to the viewer. If you have that, it shouldn't make a difference whether or not shadows are pre-baked. In fact, they'll probably look better with intentional design.
Honestly I didn't realize how much the shadows actually helped the game look better, this video really brought light to that, and I appreciate it.
Pun intended?
I didn't even realize I made that pun, good catch 😅
raytraced shadows are much more impactful than stuff like reflections, but it just isn't as flashy so it doesn't get much love.
@@stormhunterv2Without a shadow of doubt that pun was intended.
Who is Ray and what is he tracing?
Good question.
Your mum 😏
Trying to come up with maps plus it helps pass the time
I think he used to be a challenge finder..
Your ip address
The game's ambient occlusion is very minimal, even on its highest setting, which plays a big role in the shadows looking weird at times. I think the lighting engine works great for campaign, multiplayer not so much, but campaign yea, those forerunner interiors with blue reflections everywhere are beautiful.
It was real good in the beta, I guess they turned it down for performance? I dunno.
@@d01nut3 Yea, flights were only on pc whereas the game is obviously also on old-gen consoles, that's a good point. To be fair though, the PC performance during the flights were abhorrent if you weren't rocking the latest GPU (I have a 2060 and I remember the game dropping a lot of frames).
I think the weak ambient occlusion is a large part of why Infinite's lighting looks kinda flat compared to other games' rasterized lighting.
@@Chicky_Lumps 100% yea, it sucks pc and current gen players are held back by old gen
One thing I really like about the look of Ray-Traced shadows in Halo Infinite is now they can vary in softness depending on how far away the shadow is from the source. Whereas the default shadows look uniformly way too soft.
I think the biggest difference is allowing trees to self shadow, some of the trees go from bright neon as they're unshadowed, to being dappled in their own shadows allowing the brighter colour to feel natural and not too flat
yeah contact hardening is fucking beautiful
And they also aren't limited by shadow resolution like normal rasterized shadows, so you can get super soft tree leaf shadows.
Man I just can't get over how awesome Infinite would have been if it launched as an actual finished complete product. Since they are working on a new Halo game, I hope they manage to pull it off from day 1. No more post-launch features we used to have on day 1. It should be post-launch expansion, not post-launch development.
I hope this isn't just hope, but a thing that's happening
Yeah hopefully the new teams plus Pierre Hintze and other leaders are able to pull it off successfully 💫. Until then, I'll be playing Infinite, MCC, Cyberpunk and MGSV:TPP @@pifre3051
I hope so too but I know they won’t. Halo 5, MCC and Halo infinite all felt so incomplete at launch compared to 3/reach/4. I just don’t have belief in 343 to deliver after a decade of failures. I hope I’m proven wrong though. I want an everyone is here moment like from smash. Have all the features we want at launch, make it look goddamn amazing at launch.
I think they've learned a lot over the years. Infinite was a big step in the right direction. Not quite there in some areas, but 343 definitely know that and I hope they'll be able to improve more. It's been a long journey and it shouldn't have been this long, but we can't go back in time. We can just hope they'll keep learning and applying what they learn.
Having to render RT in real time was a awful developer choice in the first place for the multiplayer maps as the lighting is static, the maps of should had high resolution prebaked lighting in first place as there is no time change unlike the single player which would have actually benefited from RT.
Sucks it's multiplayer only but I do love the shakeup. Definitely helps at times that when I'm playing I feel the environments look "off" or muddy
That’s the problem with 343(incompetent) and their focus on mp. They are mostly ignoring sp and it’s fans.
I just miss ultra-sharp Stencil Shadows, man, I don't care if they're not realistic, I love the look and it would be effortless for modern hardware to pull off, so you could cast as many shadows as you wanted on things.
Yeah im really sick of modern games being cripples by this rampant need for cutting edge graphics, think about how HUGE a Halo Campaign could be using Halo 3/Reach style graphics, none of this open world crap, just a full epic journey of a campaign
It's an annoying trend I see on modern titles... I find it kinda sorta dumb that we need to buy all of these hardware mainly just to run these games, like it makes sense for people who need that hardware like animators, video editors, etc., but then again I don't really care about if I could see a character's skin pores in 4k, all I want is smooth frames, graphics that shape up well (something like Titanfall 2 where even my PC without a graphics card could handle without like betraying that realistic sort of look), and good AI simulation. I wish we didn't have as big of a focus on graphics or at least have a similar big focus on optimising things or using techniques so they don't need that much resources so we could use all them resources for cool simulations instead especially AI... Man I just love AI systems.
@@thehypest6118 with even more massive AI battles...
@@thehypest6118 A lot of people including me think that stencil shadows look bad on top of baked lighting
@@You-tube-two I don't think I care, I'm so tired of our cultures obsession with things that 'look good' but are functionally useless beneath
Game worlds becoming EVEN MORE static was the last thing we needed.
That’s odd that baked shadows don’t react to gun fire and stuff. They could have, as they react to the flashlight and the energy sword, so it must been another optimization. Only certain dynamic lights effect the light map.
Its more that dynamic shadows dont shift or change position due to new lightsources like a sword. They just "fade away" and then come back
I always love these types of videos from you.
Can't wait for the next impossible to see it the first time but now that you brought it up I can't ever unsee it video
More to come!😂
Some of my maps are indoors and have the skylight disabled. They don't have that weird grey sheen. And there's a lot of areas that are completely in the dark or partially lit.
It bothers me so much that I try to entirely rely on light objects instead to avoid that, which is so impractical and time consuming.
Very informative! Kind of funny looking back the the early 2000s when games had to bake details for shadows and lighting into the textures themselves, and Halo 3 was no exception! As someone who's worked on that kind of work as part of a team of devs, I loved seeing the textures from then in this video too.
Glad you enjoyed it!
One thing I can’t recommend enough is to lower that games brightness down to around -25. It really makes the colors pop out a lot more and makes it look more vibrant.
YES! Also, since I play at nighttime I always set my laptop's brightness down and then do -25 on Infinite because Gahh lee that game needs Dynamic Range. If anything, it would help Accessibility and the contrast between shadows would help, so hopefully that gets addressed in the future either in this title or the next
I usually adjust my display contrast for this exact reason
I think this game would be a stellar candidate for ray traced reflections, as there are so many huge shiny surfaces that make it painfully obvious how much the game leans on screen space reflections to make it work. I understand it might not run on console, but Infinite is not a super demanding game on PC and I definitely think they could integrate more ray tracing without tanking PC performance. On another note, the low performance cost was one of the main reasons I kept RTSS on at all anyway.
That would be pretty cool. It would likely require a 3070 or stronger to get decent 60+ fps with that on
I don't think the lighting was ever really the problem with the visuals in Infinite, there's 2 major things that stand out to me about the way it looks. First is the way the game uses PBR materials, there's just something about the way the game handles the shading on these textures that makes them seem flat and... off looking... This is the largest contributer to how Halo 3 is better looking in many cases even with its lower fidelity, every shader and texture in Halo 3 was fine tuned to look as good as it does, there's several layers of textures and shaders that go into making the ghost have the beautiful shine with little detailed scratches in Halo 3 as an example, the PBR textures in Infinite just don't seem to have the same tweakability and end up looking far worse in the end IMHO.
The second problem is the gamma and contrast, it looks like the game has its gamma set too bright by default, giving everything that nasty slightly washed out look, at least you can sort of fix that by lowering your gamma setting, but if I'm remembering correctly some dark areas suffer from the contrast being overkill at the lower gamma setting (I haven't played the game since last year however) but yeah, I'm 99.9% sure the texture system and gamma are why the game just doesn't look right.
On the mark 100%, I can handle bad shadows but halo 3's materials really help blow infinite out of the water. I don't know why 343 still hasn't fully figured out how to unplastic their metals.
technically, i see no issue with the graphics but in practice i cant see it as anything but worse than what came before with extra bells and whistles that make the game run worse
PBR materials are fantastic when applied correctly so it seems more of an issue either with the engine or 343
also Halo Infinite uses Screen space contact shadows which will result in some odd looking shadows when used in tandem with the RT sun shadows
Thank you for pointing this out! While it may go under some people’s radars, to me those shadows turn Infinite from a last-gen-looking game to a current-gen one.
Really interesting to learn about the lack of animations. I assume that means the ray-traced shadows are baked-in in some way, similar to Halo 3?
When I started learning Dev on Unreal 5 with lumen, I found that dynamic shadows on foliage tanked FPS and even more so if that foliage had animation. We are talking about going from 120fps to less than 20 with animations enabled.
I just wish halo infinite had better ray tracing options, sun shadows is great, but ray tracing lighting and reflections, etc, could take the game to the max. Games like cyberpunk show the benefits of RT, and halo infinite could definitely benefit a lot from it. Hopefully when they find a comfortable pace of development with this new team, 343 is able to go back and add stuff like this to campaign or whatever 😊
For Forge maps raytraced GI could look great, but in regular MP maps they really should have baked GI by default since it's literally the optimal scenario for baked GI. Static time of day with the vast majority of the map being static, making amazing baked lighting easy at only the cost of VRAM. Just make its accuracy a texture setting for weaker systems.
Its a shame raytracing wasn't put into campaign. Personally campaign is the only place where I'd elect to use raytracing since usually the fps tradeoff in for it in multiplayer isn't worth it for me, but i do enjoy a nice singleplayer story with awesome graphics
Point about the end. All these things are toggle-able , so 343 could 100% give the campaign RT sun shadows and allow people to pick and choose the option, regardless of the system. Consoles really need to start moving towards letting us pick and choosing graphical settings, like PC. There’s no reason not to. I bet you I could find a settings sweet spot for the Series S that would allow you to have RT sun shadows and still have a stable and enjoyable fps experience if 343 opened up the option to me.
Heavily agreed. It's the second biggest reason I moved to PC besides just being able to mod. Consoles don't usually, if ever, get support for graphical customization. It's terrible and I don't understand why not. I think Xbox would sell more consoles if they pushed for it as well.
Honestly I've always been impressed with how Warframe does it. Not a lot of settings compared to PC, but you can change a ton of stuff on console compared to other games.
Hearing you talk about the raytracing really made me hope Halo Infinite had raytracing for the campaign, and then at the end of your video you said that they didn't add the raytracing the campaign, I'm pretty sad to hear that, it could've even more beautiful 😭🙏
One technology I'm surprised infinte doesn't have yet is fsr2, that would definitely help with performance on older pcs like those with a gtx 1060 or rx 580. Hope it comes at somepoint in the future.
They could just go with FSR3 already
The trees and moving objects becoming static kinda reminds me of Elden Ring's RT. While it does not stop moving shadows, the ray-traced shadows are of a much lower resolution. This might be done to prevent performance issues.
100%
So strange for animated objects to freeze? So basically we are back to baked lightmaps they just come at a 1000x performance cost
I admit the shadows in ray tracing are great and I love them.
But I think this is also why I prefer Halo 3 and similar games by the look of it. It doesn’t look realistic, but it looks just right for your eyes.
And all this even in PC with small specs.
I think it also has to do with having a cohesive art direction, like having prerendered shadows with dynamoc shadows platered over the top usually looks weird unless done deliberately
also also
i wish they would enable the option for animated objects with RT on PC exclusively
It still baffles me 343 went for 24hr Day/Night cycles in multiplayer maps instead of doing one version and bake the lighting. The lack of detail makes it look so shoddy.
Baked lighting has next to zero impact at runtime, and while it takes a while to generate in dev, it's a pretty common nessisary evil most are used to.
Opting for a dynamic time of day in multi-player means they lose out on having those really nice detailing elements, and we have to resort to RAY TRACING to get it back.
I'd so much rather have 1 day and one night version of each map. Or hell, even just one variant.
"But I noticed them"
*Zooms in on a normal, unremarkable brute armpit*
I can’t find the answer to this question anywhere online. In halo 2 and 3, are the odsts more formidable than the regular marines in battle. I never noticed a difference but wondering if they are coded differently. Thought someone on a late night gaming video could help
I think Slipspace Engine could learn a baking technique from Source 2 engine, where the map editor requiring raytracing then bakes the rendering result in the map, then again, Valve tech are leaps and bounds better than most engines out there because you can get AAA RTX like graphics for fraction of the hardware requirements other titles require
As amazing raytracing technology is, I wish GPU's will be powerful enough where every can safely turn it on without affecting performance too much. Probably not in my lifetime though but I'm hopeful
We are already getting there. Resolution upscaling tech has improved so much it’s hard to tell when it’s on and improves performance so much. Ray tracing is still new. I bet the next generation of graphics cards will be able to run full ray tracing with no problem.
I think the main problem that people have with raytracing is not understanding what it actually means and does. A buddy said it looked bad because it made the shadows “blurrier” (the shadows were softer in the screenshots he showed me because there were multiple, dim light sources from different angles), vs the otherwise sharp prebaked shadows in MW2019, the game we were playing at the time. I think some criticisms stem from the misunderstanding of how lighting actually works in real life. Take a look around your room at the soft shadows and what light sources might be causing them.
Dude, LNG, big bubba. Stop it with the informative and good videos. Go to making garbage click bait.
But in all seriousness, these videos are really well put and I’d love to see more of it.
Love ya, man
One aspect of Infinites graphical presentation I love is how high resolution textures are. Rarely ever do they break down from close viewing
Because it's all they have lmao, reeks of shitty basic substance painter textures, whole game looks incredibly bland and boring, no hardsurface artist in 343 knows how to texture to save their lives, substance generators lookin ass.
The energy sword is low resolution in my book. Halo 3 had very sharp texture’s given its hardest target, I don’t get the same impression with any halo game there after. Sometimes it looks sharp, sometimes texture look pixilated.
I’ve been watching you so long I get nostalgic at your video format now
this is an amazing video.
It's situations like these that make me wonder why devs don't just up the resolution of shadows or add more traditional dynamic lighting.
It has the same (or better) effect as these raytracing solutions WITHOUT requiring proprietary hardware that'll still struggle to run it.
Sweet Baby Rays Tracing
Now a seasoning for Jackal Jerky
Moa Bucket combo for a limited time! Get it now before you Get Glassed ;) 💫@@DeathTempler
the shadows help to add contrast back into the dull, washed out visuals, however the saturation and vibrance needs a boost. Modern look seems all about HDR, which gives a more grey look to it. But colors (or color filters) should be used to add emotion and feeling back into these "modern" looking visuals that still look worse than older games because they have no color tone or vibrance.
TBH ray tracing on my series s looks fine to me. Anyone else? I suppose it's subjective to an extent.
(lol my phone auto correctd "ray tracing" to "day traing") 😅
I did find it funny when people couldn't tell the difference so this is a fantastic video to showcase how much this does improve infinite's visuals. I also had no idea thats how the older halo games shadows worked.
Oh wow, I didn't realize the ray tracing in infinite was that complex. I thought it just made shadows sharper.
That being said, as someone who enjoys their games looking "hashtag cinematic", I was hoping infinite's raytracing would be more akin to the kind in fortnite, as I find that one really makes the colours pop. Now that I've played it that way, turning off RTX makes it feel like I applied a grayscale filter
Is it like the saturation thing?
That one shot of a shipping container on that one btb launch map looked like it had the same effect, just seems less noticeable
@@CommissarChaoticmaybe they are talking about inderect lighting? It does make bright colors pop
@sanchobama It does so by spreading/bleeding light bounced from one to another surface with the dev's set bounce limit accordingly, more bounce = more realism. It does not just make "colors pop" like saturation does, just saying
It's not the graphics that makes a great game it's it's story line and how immersive the gameplay to players is . We still love all old halo ce ,2,3 and odst cause they got some good storyline to keep the players engaged
halo used stencil shadows for all of the dynamic props (halo 2 and 3 and ODST and Reach)
Halo 1 used a different shadow system that was far simpler ...
it would have been nice if Halo Infinite used RT for diffuse light bounces and reflections and kept the raster shadows they were using before the RT update
“My name is Rey.”
“Rey who?”
“Rey Tray Sing.”
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This is actually great content, I have not seen many talk about ray tracing implementation in Halo Infinite. Finally!
Could you do a video on the evolution of Jackals Late Night Gaming? You’ve already done a video on the Elites, Grunts, and Hunters and I’d like to learn more about the Jackals history through your content, maybe even include the skirmishers in the same video as they are the same species. Whether you do or do or don’t include the Skirmishers in video if you do, keep up with the amazing content.
Nice video explaining RT Shadows in Halo Infinite. I would've loved them to let us PC players to opt having animated objects when RT ON.
Whoa hang on, I didn't even know Halo Infinite added Ray Tracing Support. Those shadows look superb too!
Definitely gonna give it a try now!
Unsurprisingly, yes - raytracing looks better than anything prebaked could achieve while also being dynamic. I don’t know why so many people fight against it - it’s been around for decades in the animation industry, it’s not a gimmick.
Lighting is a very large part of anything to look good. so is temperature designs. and bump maps or material types on textures.
I make maps in source, for gmod. and i have found a way to compile the lighting of my maps using my GPU (usually its a CPU thing), and this helped me to better atmospheres and designs.
Couldn’t tell in the twitter picture comparisons. But I could absolutely tell in the video. Well done👍🏼
Glad to hear it!
This and RT reflections would make the campaign looks so good
I dont know how I got here, but this a was very cool video to watch
Welcome 😂
I don't know why they make the foliage trade-off on pc, a very high end graphics card could definitely handle the moving foliage in raytracing.
People saying they dont notice a difference between raytraced shadows and PCSS are out of their minds. Id argue that raytraced shadows as well as GI for more dynamic games are THE gamechangers in therms of graphics fidelity.
Gamers waste so much time on caring about ray tracing and changing the graphics setting
Xbox and Playstation games looks great for 500 dollars consoles
Stop spending 3000 dollars on GPUs and just play the games
ive been wondering why my game looks a little more flat compared to some videos i see apparently it's because i forgot i had RTX shadows off
When i first turned on RT i didn't see a difference, but when you point out exactly whats happening now i can see an improvement.
Ray tracing does come with a performance penalty for "skinned meshes". Even Cyberpunk 2077 on RT Overdrive does freeze some vegetation (but only in the BVH if I remember correctly).
Other games like let's say Avatar Frontiers of Pandora may not have humans or Navi show up in the BVH, only in screen space. To be fair that game pushes ray tracing hard with no fallback solution. As such something had to give. In that case it was the BVH.
The likely reason why the objects stand still is because the BVH for the RT doesn't use skinned meshes and thus does not have them moving in that model. This is likely why this happens and it kinds sucks. I think they should add in an option for RTGI and RT Reflections as well as Halo has a ton of very shiny objects and RTGI can help with ambient shading as well as color bounce. It would also help forge maps look much better as well because all that lighting data needed is captured in real time
Where are the two clips at 0:53 from?
hot take: people complain how this game's raytracing is simple, but in reality it's a benefit since the developers should aim for a unified art direction instead of going the boring "realistic" route a lot of them take
that's why raytraced shadows are my preferred way of playing infinite, it's simple yet super effective at making the game look pretty
The reason that shadow casting objects like trees become static is likely due to the temporal cost of calculating real time ray traced shadows. For complex objects like trees, it probably takes a couple seconds to fully calculate the entire shadow which means that the shadows can't dynamically respond to short time scale swaying/moving.
This probably means that truly dynamic objects like crates and whatnot have shadows calculated slightly differently which makes sense because these objects are much simpler. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if truly dynamic objects don't use ray tracing at all.
1:01 "But I noticed them". 😊
i would like to see rt reflections and global illumination come to infinite later down the line
forerunner metal would be super reflective
I feel like they just tuned up the shadow resolution instead of adding ray traced shadows because I can still see some edges not connecting with its shadow on things like windows and wall equipment. Contact shadows with a high resolution smacked on the default lighting.
id imagine that level geometry still uses a different shadow system from actors
and i guess its just too hard for them to dynamically generate the shadows for moving objects using that system
more proof that infinite should of been made right from the get go
I remember when I first played breath of the wild the graphics was not outstanding, but what stick to me was how alive everything felt. Trees and grass flowing with the wind, that truly immersed you more in the environment. I’d take moving trees over pretty shadow everyday, if you need to make such compromises it’s not worth it imho
Thanks for the Series S part at the end, I wondered if I'm crazy, but i noticed it just dropped the frames and looked nothing different when I activated it on mine.
As much as people might say that 343 should go the Halo 3 route for lighting levels, you would be foolish for them to do so for the workflow that is required today for the content output we expect, the reason why we got so few maps back then compared to now is because everything had to be done manually back then and takes forever to come out with more content (plus baking the lighting in Halo 3's engine takes hours I guess in the Tools in MCC I heard), today its more automatic for generating the lighting in game because developers do not have the time (nor should they spend the time) baking in every lighting scene manually because its a waste of time now considering the AI tech we have now to do it automatically, its an old technique that does look great in Halo 3 but Infinite and technology had to push the lighting engine forward to do this more automated now. Raytracing currently with graphics cards is still very demanding technology, its getting better with the 40 series of NVIDIA but were not there yet where every GPU can do it well because we don't have the power and VRAM required yet to comfortably do it well. I am guessing the reason why Campaign didn't get Raytracing is that having it enabled for most GPUs would tank the FPS massively with having to load in such a large space compared to the multiplayer maps which are smaller, so GPUs in general are just not there yet to comfortably play in Infinite's engine with Raytracing on everywhere.
I'm reminded that Halo 4's Forge on 360 had a "baking lighting" load that put static shadows on things relatively quickly.
On MCC, that load all but disappeared, and that was before the baking was made optional.
As for Infinite's Forge, there is a lighting bake in the bake menu, but I have been unable to confirm 100% what exactly it does.
New fear unlocked: shadow hearing
Nice video dude. Seriously, this was decent.
Glad you liked it!
Infinites rasterised shadows are already much lower resolution than most of its peers. If they could be made higher res, the game would have benefited much more from RTGI.
I still insist the biggest graphical upgrade this game could get is simply the ability to disable TAA or use DLAA. I have to supersample to an insane degree to still get a soft image, at that point I'd be better off without anti aliasing at all and just rely on SSAA
Damn, I really want to see this in the open world now.
The trees and stuff freeze probably because those animations are done in the vertex shader and ray traced stuff doesn't have those. It'd all have to be converted to a compute prepass to generate the animated meshes and they likely decided they weren't worth the effort at the time.
What could really make Halo Infinite pop visually if they used more shiny metallic surfaces, especially on the covenant vehicles which are now all dull metal.
Honestly I think ray traced lighting isn't really worth the cost. It's worth saying that I only have a 2080ti though. Ray traced reflections on the other hand make a huge difference other other methods. I hate screen space reflections.
Also foliage physics freezing is really common place in games to save performance, go lock skyrim to 29fps and you'll notice trees stop moving
3:46 WTH on/off??
Hey LNG, question about the battle passes, is the Winter Update available today at any point? Just that i really want my CQC helmet in Infinite. I bought Heroes of Reach so I can settle for Recon or MK7 but it's just not the same. Do i need to buy Lone Wolves too or should I just wait and see? Thanks.
I do enjoy the shadows but I'm not gonna kill the atmosphere that the animations bring by slapping RT over it
One of the factors that kinda ruin the details of the graphics in this game is its implementation of TAA. Makes everything have a "painted" effect and smeary in motion, ESPECIALLY at low resolutions. Even at 4K the details can get a bit muddled.
yeah, halo infinite has TAA forced on, no option to disable it and trying to mess with the config doesn't do anything, might be hardcoded
@@ImNotSimon_totally praying 343 add FSR3 native AA (copium)
so that means ray tracing is at odds with the networking code, since the networking is why things like elevators and zanzibars wheel werent moving but now are if you are on the network test versions while the trade off is worse hit detection and bugs galore, infinite needs some heavy behind the scenes work on the code
I actually forgot the Xbox One could run this at all.
What I disliked the most about Halo 5's graphics (not art style) was that there was no self-cast shadows or ambient occlusion ("fake" shadows where objects meets, which Infinite also lacks even though it's been an industry standard for over a decade). It's the big thing that made H5's character models look so "plastic" and almost as if they were super-imposed to the screen and not at all in the level.
Ray traced shadows in particular generally looks "worse" or unnoticable because the environmental artists have done such a good job with the rasterization.
The real benefit of ray traced shadows, global illumination, etc. is that it severely reduces the work load for artists, at the expense of limiting the lighting to be _realistic_ (which may or may not look "worse" than artistic choices/mistakes), and also making it run worse until the hardware gets good enough.
Shadows Now: "I'm doing My part"
Shadows Then: "I didn't do Fucking Shit"
I especially like the way raytracing enhances self shadows on character models and the way it enhances foliage and plant life, in all games it's in
An alternative to ray tracing would just be to use less dynamic shadows in general, to rely on the artistry of cast shadows. I realize it's more work for the artists but there's so much opportunity to create stylized or eye catching shadows and highlights, to draw the eye to specific details by letting artists create the art in its entirety. And yeah it might occasionally be noticeably a bit static, but it also has the potential to look even better than ray tracing
Reminds me of how Digital Foundry did a tech analysis(?) of MW2019 and they said how RT Shadows made it look WORSE.
Last time I came this early, she was very surprised
Now if only Halo Infinite could update the washed out colors to something a bit more saturated. I think that would be the thing that helps me view the game as less ugly. Because I hadn't played since season 2, so I hadn't seen the ray tracing. The lighting and washed out colors always killed me, especially because the texture work and models in this game are so crazy good.
The weird thing is, the engine can clearly handle static shadows since you can bake them separately in Forge maps. So why don't MP maps have much higher res static shadows attached to the texture settings?
bro when i clicked the audio reminded me of vsauce Hey does RTX make halo worse?
Amazing how Halo 3's lighting engine aged like a fine wine.
i havent noticed if it looks better or worse, but the first few weeks i had raytracing on, i almost shot at shadows thst werent there before coz i thought there was an enemy 😅
Game worlds should be like movies. They don't need an algorithm to make them 100% realistic. They need an artist's or director's eye to make them visually appealing to the viewer. If you have that, it shouldn't make a difference whether or not shadows are pre-baked. In fact, they'll probably look better with intentional design.
are animated objects freezing up a halo RT problem or just an RT problem? Can other games RT animated foliage?
You should do a graphics stress test between the series X and S. Compared to max settings on PC