I found this video and thought I'd share it with anyone interested. Red Dead Redemption 2 is made by RockStar games, the makers of Grand Theft Auto, and has just made it onto PC with a bit of a rocky launch. RockStar will fix the worst bugs I'm sure, but I'd recommend waiting at least a few months to buy this one. Their games have never interested me, but there games are tailored to their video game engines, and as their video game engines have evolved so have their games. Basically, all the money they made off games like Grand Theft Auto has been poured right back into their next games, and this particular game highlights how far they have come. There are only maybe half a dozen or so video game engines that compete for the best graphics lighting that are popular, and this will likely be among the most popular ray traced games once they adapt it for ray tracing. The graphics in this game are off the hook, and look great even on a console, with the real advantage on PC being that you can get better frame rates for smoother action and more of a first person perspective. However, as this video illustrates, the ability to add ray traced lighting as well would push the PC graphics over the top. While seeing real time ray tracing being done in a game like Metro is great, that's a corridor shooter engine and this is an open world engine famous for dividing their lighting into what is up close and far away, making for sweeping panoramic views that RPG fans can only envy. That they can render ray tracing in this game at all bodes well for the future of ray tracing. For anyone interested, not to be left out, Crytek has released their real time ray tracing demo that can be run on video cards that don't even have dedicated ray tracing hardware. It will likely be another three years at least before all the developers figure out most of the basic ways to optimize ray tracing for PC games, but this early effort shows that it most certainly can be done on almost any video game and should start to become commonplace after the next gen consoles come out. Another interesting thing to contemplate when watching this video is that everything in it is rendered according to the traditional methods of artists having to put it all together manually. However, the technique for photographing landscapes and injecting even more detailed realism and textures into VR is coming down in price and our computers are increasing in power enough to run them. Even without ray traced lighting, this particular game would look absolutely stunning using photogramacy, and I can't wait to see who does it first in a popular video game.
I dunno, after all these years of graphics updates, I've yet to see one game where the faces actually look realistic. They're still horrible, every time and I honestly thought the graphics would be better in RDR2 in the movie cut scenes.
Photogramacy and motion capture technologies are used in expensive movies, and the video gaming industry has been waiting for the price to come down on them. Next generation video games should have roughly the quality of Avatar the movie, with a rare few focusing on photorealism by emphasising artistically presenting the subjects. For example, video game characters still tend to wear fingerless gloves, helmets, and hats because its a cheap way to make them look a little less like bad cartoons. Artistically done, they could make a few video games that are difficult to distinguish from reality at first glance. Just to prove the point, they made another video of this same video, but animating the actors own face to compare with the real video of him. You can definitely tell its an animation, but its fucking flawless. All anyone could ask for. Half-Life 3 is the most famous video game that has been waiting for the cost to come down, for over a decade, but it most definitely is about to plunge with modern AI. Deep fakes are deeper than you think.
Many gamers would disagree. Graphics are not everything. It takes a long time to code and a lot of memory. I like games that make my TV look good but I'd rather the game be fun first. Red Dead 2 was one of the best games I've played.
Deep fakes are making enormous progress, and with modern consumer graphics cards it is perfectly feasible to make them yourself. Like physics, complex animations have often waited for the price of the technology to come down. There are similar fakes that can be done to make bots act more human as well, and move more like people in general, but the dedicated hardware for accelerating such applications has failed to make it onto the general market, until now. Between hardware improvements and the next generation cloud internet they are building, the sky is the limit. Ray tracing is not just about light, but AI applications that can "see" what you are doing. A gooey interface that can track your eyes and guess what you will do next.
i don't think your statements necessarily disagree with each other. i definitely think graphics are one of the least important aspects of a good game. gameplay is number one of course. followed by soundtrack and storyline. then maybe graphics (as long as you can see what the hell's going on at least; i suppose there is a minimum required graphical threshold). i remember years ago, mostly around the time 3d games were becoming a thing, all the game studios seemed to focus entirely on graphics over gameplay, and i was at the point of not wanting to play video games anymore for a while there. thankfully now for the most part that issue seems to have gone away. all that said, i don't think i've seen a video game face that doesn't look kind of weird. it doesn't hurt the game, but it's still the case.
The original Doom wasn't the first fully 3D game, but its artwork as well as its 3D effects were phenomenal for the time. Without some kind of art, its no longer a video game, and game engine designers customize them for different things. Some are fast making them good for racing cars, while others incorporate more eye candy but, without any eye candy, ya got nothing. Thankfully, AI and ray tracing will make it easier than ever to add not only more eye candy, but more fun to the games as well.
Yeah, but its even more of a fake of 3D than Doom. Quake was the first 3D engine virtually all games were designed after for about a decade. How to plaster all the pixels on your screen as fast as possible is the real issue, while Doom 2016 was tweaked by maybe 20 experts and showed id still has what it takes to splash more textures on the screen faster than anyone. Intel's motto is "Good Enough" and their stated goal is to produce roughly the equivalent of a Star Trek holodeck on a 7 watt chip you run with AA batteries, while their long term goal is all the AI applications that you can run on such chips. Lightfield technology is at least a decade away, but that's when virtual reality can become indistinguishable from reality TV!
One expert has speculated within three years anybody will be able to make videos like this on a home computer.
