| trasharmdsister12 said:
This comparison is horrid. There are many factors that add to the difficulty of rendering grass (in real time might I add - no offline engine renders). Without knowing the factors that each of the games aimed to hit and the scope and context (what else is going on in each of the scenes from which those screens were captured in the OP), it's pointless to compare. Why is it pointless? Well these graphics comparisons are usually trying to compare graphics for one reason - how powerful is each piece of hardware? In reality, the end visual result isn't always a good indication of what is most powerful, Rather, the end visual result is an indication of smart design decisions and tying art and tech to present an initial creative vision in the bounds of hardware limitations. Let me dive into this a bit more by explaining a few factors that can make grass easier/harder (and we're talking a couple of magnitudes of performance cost) to render in real-time. Is the grass static/have some simple pre-baked animation or does it react to external variables? If it's static for the most part it has already become far simpler to render. If it has a pre-defined "blowing in the wind" animation set it's a slight bit more costly in performance. However, if it's trying to give each blade of grass its own sway physics as well as interacting with other objects in the world (characters walking through it), it's quite a bit more demanding despite not having much visual difference to the player. Does each foliage cast shadows or is there a blob shadow given to each pre-defined patch? This can be a big performance deterrent. There isn't a single console game to this point that allows for a ton of foliage to cast its own shadows. Heck, even most PC games don't implement this. Skyrim PC allows you to turn on tree self-shadowing and casting shadows but not for grass. My memory of Crysis 1 is fuzzy (I believe it has some level of this) and I don't recall 2 having much foliage (though the engine supported the feature - it just wasn't used much due to setting), but 3 does this in rudimentary form on individual blades of grass. However, the world casts shadows on grass (trees, buildings, characters, even volumetric fog and clouds to an extent) which makes it a ton more demanding. Note that I'm strictly talking about the PC version of Crysis 3. With that let me answer the question posed in the subject. “How does the grass in TLoU stack up against high-end PC titles?” Visually – it looks nice though I’d prefer to have the game in my own hands than use dev released shots or compressed gameplay vids as a measure. I haven't followed every gameplay vid released thus far but from what I've seen I can't recall seeing any major amount of grass in a gameplay context so I can't comment. Technically – PC titles do things with grass currently uncharted in the console space. The grass in Crysis 3 technically runs halos around the grass in console games and TLoU is a far cry away. That was meant to be confusing to read. I was going to make this post longer by breaking down what I think each of the titles from the OP aimed to do with its grass but I can't be arsed to do so right now. I need to finish Gravity Rush.
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This. It can't just be a screenshot comparison, you need to see the foalige in motion rather than comparing static screenshots. It's surprising how much immersion can be based around how dynamic the objects in a level (like the grass) actually are.









