Remember when a certain someone said a thing or two about real-time vellus hairs?

Someone on Arcade Projects posted "Capcom made the rookie mistake of stretching a 4:3 game on a 16:9 display" along with this image:

Eh, living in the wilderness like she does, it makes more sense. 'sides, whether overdone or not, it's what you didn't see before. That's really what counts.

@SvennoJ 

This reminds me of what I posted in 2018 (Macy character model). I said skin detail and deformation, particularly on legs and feet, would see a significant upgrade this gen. Here's the start of that.

I took some detail shots in resolution mode last night, so much detail


The detail in the hands and fingers surprised me most, very natural how characters hold items

Nice highlights in the rain on rocks, kinda need HDR to see the full effect




Uncanny ankles, yet so well mapped onto the terrain

The facial hair is abit over done,  haven't seen anyone with that much fine white hairs on their face

Game looks great. The question is would it look even better with RTX or the cutbacks would make it a worse graphical show in the end?

It would, but not in movement. Performance mode has lots of issues already due to checkerboard rendering. Any RT inclusions would have to drop the resolution as well. This is pretty much the max the ps5 can deliver at 4K30. The game uses 12 pre-baked light maps for the day night cycle, no real time global illumination either.

Some more delicious shots from lat night (after the patch)

Seems like it matches what I expected, the sacrifices for RTX on the current build wouldn`t be worth it even if on resolution mode.

Ray traced illumination wouldn't be able to match the pre-baked light maps with that level of detail. The day night transition would be a little bit less jarring (although you only notice it in timelapse mode) and it would be a big sacrifice just to get some more natural looking shadows. Like in the last picture the shadow should be getting less strong with less sharply defined edges as the shadow stretches across the rock wall.

We'll see with GT7 how the lighting changes with real time lighting vs baked in lighting. Since not all tracks will have dynamic lighting, some with still have the ray traced light maps from GT Sport. GT7 only does some ray tracing in replay mode though, during races it's all old techniques.

RT is simply too expensive for the level of detail AAA games want to achieve on console. Maybe some smaller more stylistic games will start making full use of RT. However in AAA games it will remain a gimmick, an little enhancement here and there. The thought that RT would make it easier on developers (not having to pre-bake light / shadow / reflection maps anymore) is only true while making the game on powerful hardware. Instant preview when editing the world. It's going to take at least another gen before RT can become the standard way to render games.

For now we're stuck with screen space reflections and all the side effects that brings. Horizon FW does a decent job with reflections in water yet you always see it 'missing' / changing along the edges where the data isn't there. Shadows getting softer the further they extend can be faked without RT, yet pre-baking all reflections for dynamic day/night cycles would be far too much data.