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Next-gen Racing Graphics Face-off | (Next-gen means current-gen)

Noobcraft

Member
Better looking environments and materials? I know it's opinions and all but imo they're not even in the same league.
Environments is definitely debatable. Driveclub has some excellent detail in foliage particularly, but lots of the textures look unnatural to me, like they're oversaturated.
 

Javin98

Banned
I don't know. I personally think NFS has better looking car models (the materials look a lot more natural), better looking environments, and better IQ despite all the filters. The reflection quality on the vehicles isn't as good as Driveclub, and it's not doing volumetric clouds or anything, but comparing gameplay to gameplay I think NFS has the potential to create more photorealistic looking shots than Driveclub.

Screenshot-Original.png
Goddamn, that film grain is beyond excessive. NFS does look amazing overall, but it is also too blurry for my taste. To be honest, it reminds me of The Order, hopefully you can turn down the post processing in this too. As for materials looking more natural, I'm gonna have to disagree with you there.
 

DeepEnigma

Gold Member
It is rendering 1 million trees in a single frame? Or the amp is dotted with 1 milion trees? are these hand placed or something? Instanced? Generated via some automatic function?

Are they all always polygons?

http://www.videogamer.com/ps4/driveclub/news/new_1080p_driveclub_footage_shows_off_canada_track.html

Do not know the details. But I never seen trees look so dense and more natural than fake 2D or flat looking sprites in a game before... especially a racer. Whatever they do, it sure looks impressive.
 

Gestault

Member
http://www.videogamer.com/ps4/driveclub/news/new_1080p_driveclub_footage_shows_off_canada_track.html

Do not know the details. But I never seen trees look so dense and more natural than fake 2D or flat looking sprites in a game before... especially a racer. Whatever they do, it sure looks impressive.

Driveclube has a few downright poor-looking hillsides, with flat, hard-edged trees that stand out as much because they look slightly out of phase seasonally with the rest of the foliage (meaning too yellow compared to surrounding greenery). That game can look jaw-dropping, but the descriptions I see come up are straight-up lies of omission if people have had more than a few hours of time with the game. I notice it more because of the color contrast as much as the shortcomings of the technical shortcut. Other places use the same technique for the mid-to-distant trees, but it doesn't stand out because it's better handled.
 

DeepEnigma

Gold Member
Driveclube has a few downright poor-looking hillsides, with flat, hard-edged trees that stand out as much because they look slightly out of phase seasonally with the rest of the foliage (meaning too yellow compared to surrounding greenery). That game can look jaw-dropping, but the descriptions I see come up are straight-up lies of omission if people have had more than a few hours of time with the game. I notice it more because of the color contrast as much as the shortcomings of the technical shortcut. Other places use the same technique for the mid-to-distant trees, but it doesn't stand out because it's better handled.

I know what you mean about artistic choices with the placement of some of the foliage... however that Canada map, those evergreens looks amazing, and virtually no (not that I can tell) LOD issues.
 

Jamesways

Member
How is the game? I played the first few WRC games but fell off after the instalments not really doing anything worth while. I spose after Dirt Rally this game will fall pretty short?

It's ok. Budget game for sure, and more on the arcade side. Graphics can be rough and there's some inconsistent framerate and tearing sometimes. Patch for consoles is still coming.

But the actual gameplay is really fun. I haven't played it, but the general consensus is Dirt Rally is in another league.
 

GHG

Gold Member
I don't know. I personally think NFS has better looking car models (the materials look a lot more natural), better looking environments, and better IQ despite all the filters. The reflection quality on the vehicles isn't as good as Driveclub, and it's not doing volumetric clouds or anything, but comparing gameplay to gameplay I think NFS has the potential to create more photorealistic looking shots than Driveclub.

Screenshot-Original.png

Am I the only one who finds all screenshots of this game to be blurry as fuck?

Hope that can be remedied in the upcoming PC release.
 

Noobcraft

Member
Am I the only one who finds all screenshots of this game to be blurry as fuck?

Hope that can be remedied in the upcoming PC release.
900p with noise filter and tons of post processing. The Xbox version is super blurry but it's somewhat fitting for their cheap camera at night aesthetic.
 
I can't believe people are saying this even stands up to DriveClub.

The comparison is there.... but it's not even close....

Even with so much baked lighting and no day/night cycles in NFS.... which should make NFS look well beyond DriveClub (at least if it were really Apples to Apples, which it is not, since DC is only for PS4)....

The lighting engine in DriveClub still is far beyond this even in night scenarios.

DriveClub has like 12 individual real-time light sources in the night races just from the cars on track alone..... and that's besides the screen-space reflections casting cars into the bodies of other cars lol.

It's not even close IMO.
 

Coroner

Banned
It's ok. Budget game for sure, and more on the arcade side. Graphics can be rough and there's some inconsistent framerate and tearing sometimes. Patch for consoles is still coming.

But the actual gameplay is really fun. I haven't played it, but the general consensus is Dirt Rally is in another league.

Sweet, are you picking up Sebastien Loeb rally?


This made me chuckle.

IKR, everyone knows it's RaceRoom Racing Experience

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvD5veoN-5E
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lewoAANzV_Q
 

thelastword

Banned
I don't know. I personally think NFS has better looking car models (the materials look a lot more natural), better looking environments, and better IQ despite all the filters. The reflection quality on the vehicles isn't as good as Driveclub, and it's not doing volumetric clouds or anything, but comparing gameplay to gameplay I think NFS has the potential to create more photorealistic looking shots than Driveclub.

Screenshot-Original.png
Is your definition of realistic, blurry with filmgrain, even for a night-only racer this is way too much, and you can see why they opted for all this masking. Look at the octagonal edges of the curb to the right of the car. Of course, all the low res textures that are being masked by the blur and filmgrain from what I played. The lamps on the cars are some of the most static I've seen (in motion obviously).
 

DD

Member
I think NFS looks great for an open world game. I'll never buy it because of this crap of always online DRM, and the game doesn't look so interesting because of it's gameplay mechanics. But the pop-ups aside, I think it looks great.
 

HTupolev

Member
It is rendering 1 million trees in a single frame? Or the map is dotted with 1 milion trees (most of which are out of view)? are these hand placed or something? Instanced? Generated via some automatic function?

Are they all always polygonal/real geometry?

IMO, its hard to see what is technically impressive about a given frame of rendering by encapsulating it in marketting terms like "beautiful" or "1 million".
It means the map is dotted with 1 million trees of varying quality, with very high-quality trees placed along the edge of the track in the spots where they'll be most noticed, backed by low-quality 3D trees, falling away to the dense forest of flat trees.

(Sorry for the twitter jpg quality)

B5C4WoKIMAA6Kzv.jpg:orig


It actually works really well in dim lighting, and still looks reasonably cool in stark daylight even though it's becomes pretty obvious that the trees on the distant hills are repeated images.

The main reason it's "impressive" is that it's dense enough to achieve the vibe of travelling along a pass through evergreen-covered mountains, and other racers typically back off on the overdraw before getting to that point.
 
But even beyond comparisons, hearing the cars in real life (not through average camera-mic equipment) sounds nothing like DC. i've heard V10 R8s, a 458 and a V12 Vantage in real life and they don't even compare to the game.

I find arguing about sound to be strange, because unlike realistic visuals, realistic sound doesn't seem practical. When I play an F1 game, I don't want to have to wear earplugs.

We've read about the techniques and technology used to record the sound in DC. But, just as important is the equipment reproducing the sound in your living room. I wouldn't be surprised if the range of audio equipment being used by different posters here was similar to black and white SD to top-of-the-line 4K displays.

I personnally have a surround sound system with subwoofer, but I'll often play with $20 earphones so I can have it loud at night. Obviously, there's a substantial difference, but I don't blame the game designers when my cheap earphones sound a bit tinny.
 

Synth

Member
I find arguing about sound to be strange, because unlike realistic visuals, realistic sound doesn't seem practical. When I play an F1 game, I don't want to have to wear earplugs.

We've read about the techniques and technology used to record the sound in DC. But, just as important is the equipment reproducing the sound in your living room. I wouldn't be surprised if the range of audio equipment being used by different posters here was similar to black and white SD to top-of-the-line 4K displays.

I personnally have a surround sound system with subwoofer, but I'll often play with $20 earphones so I can have it loud at night. Obviously, there's a substantial difference, but I don't blame the game designers when my cheap earphones sound a bit tinny.

This is why you can alter the volume... having an accurate representation of the sound doesn't require it to have an accurate volume level. The same can be said for brightness/color settings visually.

Also, when someone complains about the sound, they're usually making the comparison with other games that they've likely heard on the same setups. Again this is a bit like arguing screen quality for visuals. Yes, it affects the ultimate output, but it's also affecting the output of whatever it's being compared with similarly. Some will be harmed more or less based on certain details (using a plasma TV for example makes 900p less of an issue for me, than it would be if I had a similarly sized LCD screen), but it'll pretty much never cause comparisons to switch positions.
 

Synth

Member
It's much closer to Driveclub than Forza 6 but it's still not as good. Why has it got that monochromatic wash over everything?

It's a stylistic choice, and not one new to the series (it's also a large reason why its graphics are being viewed favourably). I don't get what it is about the racing game genre specifically that causes people to act like every game should have the same visual identity.
 

Jamesways

Member

Synth

Member
Well, Driveclub is a very impressive game, from a visual point of view at least, which makes me wonder why that specific picture was chosen.

Because 1 million trees. Which is fine and all, but I do find the reaction to the pic strange, considering they're almost entirely rather low quality 2d sprites at that distance.
 

Tripolygon

Banned
Because 1 million trees. Which is fine and all, but I do find the reaction to the pic strange, considering they're almost entirely rather low quality 2d sprites at that distance.
No, it's because there is a shit ton of the 2d sprites being illuminated by the lightning, at night, in the rain with a large draw distance which then makes it look impressive.

They are low quality 2d sprites doesn't make the screenshot any less impressive than finding out that the leafs on the trees closer by the side of the road are just 2d sprites that rotate to face the player. They still look impressive.
 
Because 1 million trees. Which is fine and all, but I do find the reaction to the pic strange, considering they're almost entirely rather low quality 2d sprites at that distance.

I think there are much better examples that that particular screenshot.
 

Synth

Member
No, it's because there is a shit ton of the 2d sprites being illuminated by the lightning, at night, in the rain with a large draw distance which then makes it look impressive.

They are low quality 2d sprites doesn't make the screenshot any less impressive than finding out that the leafs on the trees closer by the side of the road are just 2d sprites that rotate to face the player. They still look impressive.

No, I get that the effect looks impressive. But it's comparable to other games doing something similar to achieve a similar effect (say FH2 during a cross country race). It looking impressive is one thing, but "wha, speechless" and "they look so much better than trees in other games" seems a bit much for what they are.. a bunch of low quality instanced sprites.

I think there are much better examples that that particular screenshot.

Yea, of course. I'd imagine most of those better examples would be a lower number of trees rendered closer to the camera though. This pic was chosen to substantiate "1 miilion trees" as an impressive metric.

Doesn't matter. The further out you go, the lower the quality of objects and level of detail. It would be stupid for all those trees to be fully modeled high poly trees.

Yes, but that's why Dictator83 questioned the 1 million trees metric. It's quite a pointless number without context. How many trees do you think there probably is in games like FH2, or The Crew? If there's a million fully 3d trees being drawn to the screen at once, then sure.. shout about it. But the response he got said that they didn't actually know, but it was better than other games with their flat 2d sprites... and then this is followed by a picture of Driveclub showcasing a bunch of flat 2d sprites for trees. Those sprites are every bit as 2d looking as most other racers you'd compare with, and as Gestault said, in many cases they're significantly more noticeable due to them looking nothing like the 3d trees being rendered in front of them.
 

AndyD

aka andydumi
No, I get that the effect looks impressive. But it's comparable to other games doing something similar to achieve a similar effect (say FH2 during a cross country race). It looking impressive is one thing, but "wha, speechless" and "they look so much better than trees in other games" seems a bit much for what they are.. a bunch of low quality instanced sprites.

The shot was in response to a long conversation about the LOD cutting off trees and there being barren distant lansdcape. This showed that the landscape stays covered and the density makes them look good even though it's sprites. In a way you see the forest as a whole, not the individual trees. And that's what makes the hyperbolic 1 million number impressive, because somewhere between 1 and a million you reach a "sufficient" number than makes it look full rather than sparse.

Honestly I would rather have this approach of large volume low quality distant tree sprites than an agressive lod that makes them pop up when i get closer, even if the popup ones are higher quality. There's a certain level of consistency to the landscape this way that is lost with agressive lods.

And no one said this is unique to DC, only that it is an impressive effect.
 

DD

Member
Lots of trees in the distance. The first one is in real time. The other four are from the photomode:

eaDRIVECLUB20150912132.jpg


10cDRIVECLUB20150906173.jpg


DRIVECLUB20150411125.jpg


DRIVECLUB20150401203.jpg


1e7DRIVECLUB20150410221.jpg
 

Synth

Member
The shot was in response to a long conversation about the LOD cutting off trees and there being barren distant lansdcape. This showed that the landscape stays covered and the density makes them look good even though it's sprites. In a way you see the forest as a whole, not the individual trees. And that's what makes the hyperbolic 1 million number impressive, because somewhere between 1 and a million you reach a "sufficient" number than makes it look full rather than sparse.

Honestly I would rather have this approach of large volume low quality distant tree sprites than an agressive lod that makes them pop up when i get closer, even if the popup ones are higher quality. There's a certain level of consistency to the landscape this way that is lost with agressive lods.

Sorry, which post (or conversation) specifically was the shot supposed to be in response to? I'm seeing it in response to a post that links to a video of "Over 1 million trees featured in impressive-looking DriveClub gameplay", which in turn was a response to Dictator83's post asking for clarification on that value.

I think we'd all prefer this approach to whatever would come out of an attempt to replicate such a scene with pure geometry, but it's hardly a unique approach tbh, and very unlikely to even qualify as a unique achievement when you consider the size and density of some of the open world games.
 

Coroner

Banned
Yes, although being a long time Milestone diehard, I'm not expecting it to look much better than WRC 5...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPBFUMm8jIA

Man, I wish I had a PC to play R3E. And Dirt Rally. Going to be a long wait for the console release.
That's looking pretty good.

And yea they are seriously great games, Dirt Rally might just be the best rally game ever made, unless you are into more arcade type racers. R3E runs on a pretty old engine, I'm sure you'd run it on a low end PC, my friends 8800GT from 2007 runs it fine. You will need a wheel though, not much controller support on PC sims hehe.


Welcome to Driveclub™ PS4.

Is it not a problem for the Xbox one too? AF in Forza Horizon 2 seemed pretty low when I played it, while the AA solution was very good.
 
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