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There is nothing complicated about ENBs and they aren't really that great either.
Don't get me wrong, I don't want to bash Boris, he is an amazing person for providing us with this tool, but in the end it's all just post-processing effects and shader overlays that are injected into the game after the frame is already rendered. This means you have little control over how the game eventually will look like. I've played countless of hours of Skyrim with different ENBs and what I discovered is that every single ENB has its flaws because of the limited nature of ENBs. There are situations where Skyrim with an ENB just doesn't look that great, no matter which ENB preset you're using. Either dungeons are too dark, or broad daylight looks too bright and washed-out, or shadows are too dark, etc.
Not to mention that ENBs cause a huge performance hit if you want to add anything more than just a few filters or color corrections to your game. Considering that top GPUs already have trouble running The Witcher 3 at a steady 60FPS, I'm not sure if any GPU right now would be able to handle The Witcher 3 with an ENB or something similar.
That said, The Witcher 3 already has post-processing effects implemented in the game. It basically already has its own ENB so to speak. Tinkering with the post-processing effects of TW3 isn't gonna yield much results. It will never make The Witcher 3 look like the E3 2013 trailers. There is only so much you can do with post-processing. Improving the graphics of TW3 is gonna be more complicated than tinkering with the post-processing shaders.
Honestly, I do hope CDPR will try to give us a visual upgrade for the PC version of The Witcher 3 and I do think it's possible, but if they do I hope they'll do it in such a way that most of us will be able to run it and enjoy it. Considering the game as it is already puts the GTX 970 and GTX 980 to their knees, it's not going to be easy for CDPR. Which is why I'm not expecting much. I don't think we're ever going to see back those E3 2013 visuals, but I think the E3 2014 visuals are within the realm of possibilities. We'll see.
Cool thing about PC is its vast differences in specs. Some are uber. Some med range and others low level hardware. Amazing thing about Past PC games was allowing players to adjust the game settings to accommodate PC limitation they had. Back then PC games where being pushed to limits of what hardware can do. The sequels also continued to push that limitation. To say now improved graphics from earlier builds shown can't be in the final product is nonsense. All that time could have been spent on fixing and tweaking a PC version. What happened was this PC version was scrapped for a multiplatform aka Console game. Some perks remain in the PC version but its not a PC game. Sadly witcher 3 is a console port to pc. Still a great game. Alot of cool stuff even for a console game. In the old days of Games you had PC games and you had Console games. Now its cheaper for AAA game companies to just mash it all together. I hope the modders can work there magic to restore as close as possible to the old build visual graphics.
BTW, maybe is not exactly about graphics, but since we're talking about the old gameplay, I was looking for this girl:
Is she still in the game somewhere? Can't find
Is she still in the game somewhere? Can't find
As a game artist would you want to have 2 years of your work thrown out with the brief to make it look worse?
The game was , i guess, optimised for the lowest hardware capability which I don't have a problem with. In theory a £150 quid card should run this game like a console. Thats a 660 or 7870? Its not been properly optimised for PC, yet?
The graphics stepped down from 2013 to 2014. That was the reality of gaming there. Target render trailer thing to a playable build.
The second step down was unexpected and brutal.
This thread shows several types of expectation relating to graphics
2013 expecters. They are delusional, I am a heart broken graphics whore and even I knew that wasn't going to happen
Out of the sane people left you now have those that want the 2014
a)physics and particles
b)textures and foliage
c)tessellation
d)ambiance and lighting
e)all of them.
my order of preference would be D,C,A,B
oh an I personally dont mind 30fps if its rock solid and the game is gorgeous. Fidelity over FPS
60 fps is a luxury or for fast paced action.
Would you spend, as a PC gamer, an extra £5 for a game to get the extra effort put in?
I think PC games are in a negative feedback loop of piracy vs lack of respect from the industry that the witcher 3 could have broken. But that's a topic for another thread though.
(lol, i pressed quick reply)
ENB has full control over all lighting situations in the game whether it be windows, the sky, interiors, caves, the sun etc. Tthe power it has over the renderer in the games it supports is at a glance more advanced than the renderer in TW3 which doesn't even convincingly light interiors most of the time. Then you add in subsurface scattering, parallax water, sky lighting, the AO implementation, pseudo GI, bokeh dof, realistic fog, and a bunch of other advanced shaders and you're laughing at the basic renderers most games utilize. ENB IS great and it's incredibly complicated to boot, you even stated so by claiming it wouldn't work nicely in some situations when that's very wrong. You just didn't try hard enough. The ENBs I use also have a small performance hit too especially in GTAIV.
Of course this game won't get one but you shouldn't mislead people about tools like this, they're god sends for any game even if they have their own post-processing(which is usually a bad joke to begin with). For TW3 we have Reshade and with it you can do some advanced things like get in ambient light, tonemapping, bokeh dof, and things like that but it can't interpret where you are in the game so it will never be anything like ENB but it certainly improves the way this game looks regardless.
I suppose you're not going to answer my question from earlier, huh. If that's the case please stop bringing up arguments involving performance because it's not leading anywhere.
Thanks for answering.
That explains things. I still dont see why CDPR cant give us better graphics though if a single man can do it. They even have access to the source code, they can channge everything they want.
I would be greatful for 2014 visuals. By the way have you read CDPR will focus on witcher 3 for the next 2 years before moving on to cyperpunk2077? Maybe theres a chance for a graphic upgrade after all.
Also, Boris told me he will start working on Witcher 3 in about half a year, hes working on gta right now.
Been looking for her too, get the feeling pretty much everything from that demo has been cut.
It doens't do anything for GTA5 really. He hasn't started developing shaders for it yet.
I think we both made typos there hehe. Anyway, back to the Witcher.
Jim, I saw your post on Neogaf and I was wondering how you were able to change your stance on the downgrade so easily. When I look at your Witcher 2 shots and compare them to the third game's I feel like they're much more interesting to look at, same with your images from a lot of other games. It feels like there's something really missing from the TW3 images but I have no idea what it could be. Do you have any idea what I'm talking about? It's just lacking a sort of edge that your usual bullshots have that really smack me in the face with fidelity. The best example would be the LOTF images, those ones were really cool.
Cool thing about PC is its vast differences in specs. Some are uber. Some med range and others low level hardware. Amazing thing about Past PC games was allowing players to adjust the game settings to accommodate PC limitation they had. Back then PC games where being pushed to limits of what hardware can do. The sequels also continued to push that limitation. To say now improved graphics from earlier builds shown can't be in the final product is nonsense. All that time could have been spent on fixing and tweaking a PC version. What happened was this PC version was scrapped for a multiplatform aka Console game. Some perks remain in the PC version but its not a PC game. Sadly witcher 3 is a console port to pc. Still a great game. Alot of cool stuff even for a console game. In the old days of Games you had PC games and you had Console games. Now its cheaper for AAA game companies to just mash it all together. I hope the modders can work there magic to restore as close as possible to the old build visual graphics.
*sigh*
Okay, again; The Witcher 3 is not a console port.
We're not living in 2010 anymore. We used to get console ports because it was easier for the developers to develop for consoles first and then port it over to PC. But now the current-gen console architecture is pretty much the same as PC. There is no porting needed anymore. They can simply develop 1 build of the game and throw it on all platforms, albeit with some tweaks here and there for each platform.
And I also said for the millionth time that The Witcher 3 already pushes the current-gen PC hardware to their limits. Even the GTX 980 has to work hard to run TW3 on 'ultra' with 60FPS. Not everyone has a 2x GTX 980 SLI setup and you shouldn't expect CDPR to cater to the 0,1% of you who does have a 2x GTX 980 SLI setup.
To say that this happened in the past is absolute nonsense. Even if this were to be true, times have changed. Games have become bigger and more expensive. You really can't compare the current-gen games with games from 15 years ago from a developers perspective. Game development has grown into something much bigger and much more expensive than it was 15 years ago.
that does not compute
weak optimization is strong sign that game is console port, if it runs 1080p 30fps on PS4 which is couple times slower than single 980 it is easily to say what was their priority
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@luc0s
*sigh* indeed, every post you make is filled with incorrect information.
1. The console architecture is not at all like PC, the porting process is not much easier than it was last-gen and still costs a lot of money unless you're using UE4 or another established engine Most devs worth talking about don't do that.
2. "Ultra settings" isn't a necessary benchmark to discuss, if you lower your foliage one setting you gain a ton of frames and lose barely any quality, let alone minor .ini tweaks that also improve your frame rate a lot. You can get ultra-esque settings with Hairworks at 60fps with a single 980 but this is a bad thing, that means the game isn't future proofed if we can cap it already. What a drag.
3. Graphical settings exist for the low-end users. We've also said this to you for the millionth time, so please stop this already.
Also what about five to ten years ago? It hasn't changed in that window but developers spend more money on marketing than they did in the past. That's by far the main reason game budgets have increased. Next you should realize there are more people working on games now but they come out a lot bigger and faster as a consequence, it evens out in the end. Neither of these things are related to what any of us are talking about though yet you brought it up anyway. It doesn't enforce your statement either.
That guy is right and even CDPR agrees, the game is a multiplatform "looks great on all platforms" game aka a console port. It's not a PC game ported down like it was advertised as.
*sigh* indeed, every post you make is filled with incorrect information.
1. The console architecture is not at all like PC, the porting process is not much easier than it was last-gen and still costs a lot of money unless you're using UE4 or another established engine Most devs worth talking about don't do that.
2. "Ultra settings" isn't a necessary benchmark to discuss, if you lower your foliage one setting you gain a ton of frames and lose barely any quality, let alone minor .ini tweaks that also improve your frame rate a lot. You can get ultra-esque settings with Hairworks at 60fps with a single 980 but this is a bad thing, that means the game isn't future proofed if we can cap it already. What a drag.
3. Graphical settings exist for the low-end users. We've also said this to you for the millionth time, so please stop this already.
Also what about five to ten years ago? It hasn't changed in that window but developers spend more money on marketing than they did in the past. That's by far the main reason game budgets have increased. Next you should realize there are more people working on games now but they come out a lot bigger and faster as a consequence, it evens out in the end. Neither of these things are related to what any of us are talking about though yet you brought it up anyway. It doesn't enforce your statement either.
That guy is right and even CDPR agrees, the game is a multiplatform "looks great on all platforms" game aka a console port. It's not a PC game ported down like it was advertised as.
But in the case of TW3 their is nothing thrown away. Many of the art you saw in the trailers and demos were specifically made for the trailers and demos. It probably sucks for the artists that their work never made it into the final game, but that's life. At least everyone got to see their hard work at the E3.
The current-gen consoles run on overclocked GTX 750 cards and they run The Witcher 3 on medium/high settings at 30FPS. My cousin has a GTX 750 in his computer and he confirmed that he can run The Witcher 3 with most settings on 'high' with 30FPS. So The Witcher 3 definitely isn't poorly optimized for PC. It runs just as well on PC as it does on consoles, better even.
I agree. The 2014 demos definitely looked better. But I can't complain. The game still looks amazing and my rig probably wouldn't have been able to run the 2014 demo graphics anyway (I play on a single overclocked GTX 970 4GB).
But I think "restoring" the graphics to the 2014 demo's quality is well within the realm of possibilities that CDPR might consider doing in the foreseeable future. CDPR is awesome like that. They have done A LOT to keep their fans happy and I trust they'll continue being awesome.
As I stated above, I agree.
I don't think it has anything to do with piracy or lack of respect from the industry. CDPR is an independent company so they don't have big brother EA/Activision/Ubisoft watching over them, which gives them the freedom to do what they believe is right. Most people who work at CDPR are avid PC gamers themselves so I fully believe they tried their hardest to make the PC version of TW3 as good as possible.
What I think keeps CDPR back is their budget. Don't forget that CDPR is a Polish company with only 3 games under their belt so far. And until recently their team wasn't bigger than maybe 30 men or so. CDPR admitted that they had to develop TW3 as a multi-platform title because of budget constraints. The Witcher 3 wouldn't have been as big as it is without the decision to go multi-platform.
What would you rather have? A true PC (exclusive) title with the 2014 graphics and only 100 hours of gameplay (or less)? Or the current graphics we have right now with 200+ hours of gameplay (what we currently have)?
I take bigger worlds with more quests and more gameplay over better graphics anytime any day of the week. If that means CDPR had to cut down the graphics due to budget and/or time constraints than so be it.
And who knows, maybe we'll get a patch, mod or Enhanced Edition in the future that will bring back some of the former graphical glory of The Witcher 3. With The Witcher 3 selling so well it probably gives CDPR the options to invest more time and money in The Witcher 3 to make the already amazing game even better.
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And I got educated in game design and work in the videogame industry. Just because you don't like what I have to say about game development and why things are the way they are doesn't mean what I say is irrational.
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"made for the trails and demos"
AKA The Witcher 3, the game that was downgraded because they didn't give us the assets they made for the game's demo. It was advertised to be in and cut out from the final release, what you said was a fallacy.
I apologize for excerpting your post, but I wanted to reinforce this one point.
It's not even a matter of a choice between a less ambitious game and the one we actually got. The CDPR interviews made that very clear. The choice was between getting the game as it was developed or no game at all.
CDPR is not a hobby shop or a nonprofit. They do not have the luxury of making a game for a market that cannot pay for it; the only manner of game they can make is one that will sell at a price and volume that will earn them a profit.
They were very clear that a PC only title was a nonstarter, and that the only way they could deliver this game at all was to use a common code base and resource base, in an architecture that supported greater performance on the PC. Claims that this is somehow false or misled the actual customers for the game are so baseless as to be not worth the bits to answer.
you realize producing game cost them 13 million and marketing it, 21 million dollars + 25 million from publishers,Microsoft and Sony?
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