By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
Norion on 08 September 2023
Edit Thread
Soundwave said:
Norion said:

This isn't fully true. Heavily improved lighting from path tracing is gonna make a big difference to visuals when that becomes standard. Diminishing returns are setting in but there's still a long way to go from PS4 tier graphics.

To be honest not really. You can cheat a lot with baked lighting to make it look similar. 

If you want "way bettererer graphics" than PS4 era, the budget restrictions become restrictive. Movies cost $200 million for maybe like 45 minutes worth of effects shots/CGI ... a video game needs to be like 30 hours long and have 5x times as many environments in many cases, no artist is just magically going to work on this stuff for free. You have to pay people to do that and even as a huge studio, what happens if you spend $150 million on a game (before marketing) and it doesn't do as well as you hoped? Now bravo, your entire studio is bankrupt. 

You have to massively expand your staff to get games to look far better than the PS4 because really a PS4 can already create fairly realistic looking visuals. Like what is the top shit next-gen game right now? Starfield? Starfield doesn't look that much better than God of War Ragnarok which runs fine on the PS4. 

Also no console can really ever do full blown ray tracing. For movie effects the light bounces in a scene take hours to render a single frame and a few seconds of footage can take days of massive computers to render at top quality. 

It's fools gold IMO. You're better off just going with baked lighting and letting a talented visual artist tweak the look area by area IMO because the performance cost is absurd. 

Even a PS2 game could cripple a PS5 if you really crank the light bounces to be accurate, to me it's not worth it. Random kid in Nebraska playing your game isn't really going to appreciate or give a crap what those light rays are doing. 

If you haven't watched the Digital Foundry coverage on the Cyberpunk path tracing update you should, it really does make a big difference to the visuals. What you're missing here is that improved lighting from ray tracing and later on path tracing is going to make game development easier. Look at how much better Mario 64 looks with improved lighting. You don't need a big budget to take advantage of this large boost to visual fidelity so even indie developers making games with simple visuals are gonna benefit from it. The performance cost is massive now but the PS6 and next Xbox will be able to do path tracing so it's just a matter of time.