By Playstation 3 2005 gfx, I mean the nonsense Sony pulled off with their third party “actual gameplay footage!” trailers:
After seeing the latest Unreal Engine 4 tech demo, I started wondering: are we getting to the point where in two or three years games will resemble the theoretical target renders of 2005?
Then again, maybe that Infiltrator tech demo is another example of moving bullshot. They claim it’s running on a core i7 and a single gtx680. That’s a pretty common configuration, why is Epic shy about releasing an executable download?
Ironically I think we’re about there visually if one went SLI with top-end graphics cards, but where we aren’t there is computationally. In the Motorstorm video there is a lot of physics going on.
wat? What game has raytraced liquid pouring out of a bottle and splashing accurately in a clear glass?
The models in both the killzone 2 and stranglehold videos look like original meshes used for normal map baking in low poly game assets. The polygon count looks obscene for anything realtime.
The dust storm emanating form the vehicles in Motorstorm is probably not possible for another few years.
I’m thinking that some clever new techniques could make the glass and car deformation possible now. Not sure how the dust and mud could be implemented with the same quality in real-time, but then again impressive approximations might be possible if someone brilliant enough took on the challenge. Makes me wish Carmack was still interested in games, the last time he was we got normal mapping.
Your comment about sli being there reminded me of this annoying trend of companies/indie teams releasing videos and labelling them “tech demos”. The infiltrator demo was one example, here’s another one:
You know… if one went tri-SLI and dedicated one full graphics card to physics alone… maybe that would bring it close.
In the Killzone clip, it almost looks to me like that’s running at or above 60 fps as the animation is just off the charts compared to what we have right now. That’s a heck of a lot of data.
The liquid pouring in a glass looked really fake to me. And the rest of the scene in Stranglehold didn’t look all that impressive to me. The Killzone 2 demo: I don’t see anything in there that hasn’t been done and done repeatedly since Call of Duty 4. I’m not talking about technical details like polygon count, but just how it looks to my naked eye. And it looks about the same as what we’ve been seeing over and over this generation in terms of the helping each other animations and the explosions and the falling down dead enemies animations, etc.
But again, the Motorstorm demo is something else. There’s been nothing like that in this generation.
The difference is really clear to me. The style of presentation (lots of pyrotechnics, camera jiggling, death animations) is similar but the 2005 video showed a level of detail that is an order of magnitude higher than what was possible on PC or console 5 years ago (it’s still pretty hard to imagine UE4 matching it):
