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So was Watch Dogs when people noticed the downgrade.
Was it addressed? NOPE.
Would you stop comparing Ubisoft to CDPR? Ubisoft literally said they don't care about PC optimization or PC, their ports are the worst and are the most unoptimized,
Witcher 3 just seems like a game of great ambition, they added so much detail and features dynamic open world features they have problems running it with the best possible graphics. And graphics should take a dive for features like that to exist. Stop dragging gaming down. What you saw is fucking PC footage. It was a PC first game that they now have to downscale and make playable on consoles and it's gonna be tough to do that.
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Why do they need to address it? It was obvious the game didn't look as good. If you still chose to buy the game then that's your fault.
this is such a non-issue
here's why:
if the graphics at release don't match the hype, then the Enhanced Edition will fix it.
that's simply CDPR's policy. they'll do us right, because they care! and two games' worth of prior experience confirms this.
here's why:
if the graphics at release don't match the hype, then the Enhanced Edition will fix it.
that's simply CDPR's policy. they'll do us right, because they care! and two games' worth of prior experience confirms this.
So why should PC gamers get worse graphics because of that? I have a high end PC. I should have those effects.
It's not going to, that's my fucking point.The game was running on a titan. This is the best the game could look like on a high end PC when they were making the E3 build, that was probably May. So it's going to look better, but they're gonna have to do a lot of shortcuts for it to run 30fps on consoles. The special effects artist explained it, they're not removing anything from the PC version.
Gamers with a high end rig are maybe 1% of the players. They have to make the game playable even for low end rigs. Thats how it works. They want sales and so they have to reach as many gamers as possible and you only can scale a games graphics ( low-ultra ) to a certain amount.
I dont know how good the mod support for the TW series is, but if it is good, there will be mods to enhance the graphics for sure.
SFX guy said in the interview that the game will be scaleable to really high end rigs.This guys is probably not going to be happy though...
Some of the posts over the last hour or so have crossed the boundary from "discussion" to "flamebait".
Please be warned that we are not going to keep on locking threads on this topic once people start breaking rules only to see another one start up, nor are we going to keep on making warnings in-thread if these are going to be ignored.
We will simply stop those forum members concerned from posting further.
Please be warned that we are not going to keep on locking threads on this topic once people start breaking rules only to see another one start up, nor are we going to keep on making warnings in-thread if these are going to be ignored.
We will simply stop those forum members concerned from posting further.
It's obviously not based on the sword of destiny trailer. Now CDPR has stated that the final game will look much better, and I am inclined to believe that but I see no reason to trust them blindly.
No company or organization of any description should be trusted. That's why we have watch dog companies for businesses and governments, why they are so thoroughly scrutinized.
It's a wrong assumption to make that games can't have scalability in them. Witcher 2 did and it still is one of the best looking games out there, Crysis series this and Crysis 3 is the best looking game ever made, Battlefield 3 and 4 did.
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Yes and TW3 already looks wayy ahead of The Witcher 2. You're talking about graphics not aesthetics or visuals in general therefore technology which isn't all that much subjective. Witcher 3 is using physically based rendering that alone makes it infinitely superior to The Witcher 2 because now everything is 'physically correct'.
I don't know what made people assume "next-gen" meant suddenly we'll have Crysis 3 level of visuals in an open world because that is most definitely not happening any time soon.
I don't know what made people assume "next-gen" meant suddenly we'll have Crysis 3 level of visuals in an open world because that is most definitely not happening any time soon.
It does look better, as it should obviously, but the point of this thread and the concerns laid down here is that CDPR can do better based on the Sword of Destiny trailer and other trailers.
They themselves claim that the game when it launches will look much better, but people shouldn't be told to STFU considering that song and dance has already been played out and consumers paid the price when it turned out certain companies were lying. Watch Dogs is an example but it's from being the only one.
On top of Witcher 3 uses Umbra technology which given the way it works means that the game is rendering everything at once in the cells, but rather only what you can see in front of your camera as well as some parts nearby that you can't see.
This I know from a graphics artist. At first I was amazed that they could achieve this kind of level of graphical quality in an open world game but when I found out the truth it wasn't so amazing.
Trailer footage is still gob smacking though.
They themselves claim that the game when it launches will look much better, but people shouldn't be told to STFU considering that song and dance has already been played out and consumers paid the price when it turned out certain companies were lying. Watch Dogs is an example but it's from being the only one.
I don't know why people assume that because a game is open world you can't have graphics on the level of Crysis 3. There are no technical limitations on being able to achieve that. Crysis 3 had some pretty big zones in it with a huge draw distance and was the best looking game ever made. For an open world game nothing changes since the way rendering works is that you render the game world in cells. The cell your character is in and the cells nearby, as you move from cell to cell other cells will stop being rendered and new ones will be rendered instead.
On top of Witcher 3 uses Umbra technology which given the way it works means that the game is rendering everything at once in the cells, but rather only what you can see in front of your camera as well as some parts nearby that you can't see.
This I know from a graphics artist. At first I was amazed that they could achieve this kind of level of graphical quality in an open world game but when I found out the truth it wasn't so amazing.
Trailer footage is still gob smacking though.
i dont understand the point of the discussion, there is a water mark of "work in progress" in the top of video, that should be enough for people to understand that the quality of the DEMO won´t be the same as in the final game, to me the important is that the game has a fantastic everything, even when i´m a little bit dissapointed for the collectors edition thing, i'll be buying as soon as i get a new pc
There are multiple limitations. It's real-time rendering not CGI. The first is obviously having hardware powerful enough to do so but let's skip that for now, let's move onto technical limitations.
1. Draw calls - Rendering objects on screen equates to draw calls, the more the draw calls the more taxing it becomes. A draw call is a # of triangles sent to the GPU and that depends on the CPU not GPU. Umbra 3 obviously helps here without that it would just be impossible to have so many things on screen at good quality, you'd be CPU limited instantly since it would be busy sending batches and batches of triangles to the GPU. Since CPUs evolve much more slowly than GPUs this is a big problem.
Here is an old picture I have from quite some time ago, this was for DX9 but applies just as much to DX11:
2. Budget - Every game has a 'budget' they can allocate to things in the game - polygons/triangles for models, texture budget. The very first thing that happens is models and textures are created at very high quality and then "downgraded" to fit in the game with decent enough quality. You can't put a 2 million poly character into the game, that right there is the entire budget of the game gone, further a character model visible at all times is also polycount which doesn't apply to Crysis. For Reference Geralt in Witcher 2 was ~30k polygons. The guy in Ryse is 85k polygons.
3. Physics enabled elements - Crysis 3 has few like that bendable grass, there was a rope(which ate 30 fps when moved) which I remember but those are also strictly location based. TW3 has a lot now with bendable grass, bending trees, dangling objects, hair/fur(HairWorks is only gonna make it more demanding) most of which are there for a huge part of the game.
4. NPCs - AI elements and things you can interact with in the environment matter too. Crysis 3 isn't an NPC heavy game therefore it's not a worry for them. But here we have locations that are full of NPCs that will be doing whatever they're programmed to do, their daily schedule. Combined with a dynamic weather system and day & night cycle which affects their schedules. Just imagine the workload of having say 50 NPCs on screen going about their business and then an event(rain) affects all their behaviours. These little things add up.
Let's not forget that in a given area the more running scripts it has the more taxing it will be. Last but not the least, all of the balancing and budgeting is an APPROXIMATION it depends entirely on on the API how it handles these requests. This is also the reason why newer APIs(Mantle/DX12) are being pushed for because they offer a lower level of access therefore more control over things like this.
I don't think personally that the game is being downgraded, not because of trust but more becaue of how game development works and some things I've been noticing with this engine, which might not be finished at all yet.
In your first comparison the swamps dont seem to be the same ones at all, and if they are they have a massive change, not in graphics, but in how they let lightning render them.
Look at the swamps from the 37 minute demo, they are being shown at a day time when the sun shines very nicely with a lot of color, yet they are extremely washed out and grey in comparison to the Downwarren village for example, and when Geralt goes to the harpie's nest, you can see that the grey and blue fog covers all the swamp land below totally changing the looks of the place, this is not regular light-block from the swamps having many trees or being low height lands, this look is intended, and the fog and colors are as well.
Additionally, the shot from the VGX trailer, happens at dusk, according to the color of the sunlight, and to the sky above high which is dark already transitioning into night, this changes the scene dramatically, sun light colours things much more as night is arriving, hence when during noon things that have the sun shinning on them glow white, and when they have the sun shinning on them at dusk they can be orange or even red. This time of the day also darkens shadows a lot, since its close to night, and it creates very strong contrasts.
Finally, I don't know why, but your screenshot from the 37 minute demo is especially washed out and grey, compared to when I look the video in my PC, your versions of the VGX trailer are consistent with how it looks for me though. Here my demo footage looks much closer in contrast and depth to the VGX trailer.
Now the second comparison, the SOD trailer is likely newer footage than the demo, because its easy to capture a trailer with snippets of footage from a modern build, also it has scenes cherry-picked, and it probably is altered to represent release quality more closely, also, its just a different scene. It might also be running at higher graphics settings than the demo, maybe in Ultra as opposed to high, being that its likely newer. Jose already said the game looks better now, than how the 37m demo looks.
One thing I've seen from all footage is that the lightning and whole situation changes how graphics "seem" to be a lot, even in footage supposedly from the same build or released at the same time, this happens in the SOD trailer, VGX trailer, and Debut trailer. Because of this I find it VERY difficult to judge graphics fairly. You could just put a screen of the scene with Yen in the SOD trailer, together with one of the part with Triss using her magic also in the same trailer, and it looks way worse.
Once again, your version of the 37m demo looks way worse than how I can see it in my video player, and here its indeed closer to the SOD trailer
The reality is that whether the graphics are significantly changed or not, its all speculation if its an actual downgrade, especially when you look at footage that is from a moment when optimization hadn't started yet. Demo builds are the ones that look the worse, and they are always several months behind everything else, tweaked to work rather than to showcase graphics, and the engine CDP are working on isn't fully ready. Add to this what has been said already by others, that this is not Ultra, that the game will look better than not only this but also than the trailers, and it just seems likely to me that its definitely possible.
All that's left is to trust or not despite what I said before, and given the context, its extremely logical the demo looks worse than the trailers, now combine that with the studio's previous game released and how it evolved, I think talking of a downgrade like its almost sure is exaggerated.
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None of the limitations you mention are related to the open world nature of the game since as I mentioned the amount of stuff that is rendered in game at the same time is not higher then a more closed off game like Crisis 3 given that the game will render the world in cells, and not all at once.
The draw call point is the same limitation as in Crysis 3 and Crysis 3 does not feature Umbra Software, which the Witcher series does so if anything Witcher 3 should be capable of a lot more then Crysis 3 as a result.
That's mostly a memory thing when talking about texture quality. Funny thing about that Witcher 2 was a 32 bit game that was limited by it memory wise, and yet it managed to achieve a level of texture quality that is almost second to none to this day.
Ryse, Crysis 3 were 64 bit games that were not limited by such things. Witcher 3 won't be limited by 32 bit either.
Most areas in Crysis 3 feature a great deal of plant life and the grass in Crysis 3 is simulated unlike the one in Witcher 2 and from what I've seen Witcher 3. Crysis 3 also has it's own in-engine cloth simulation physx.
Of course they add up, but I think you exaggerate on that impact.
While Crysis 3 may not have a huge amount of NPCs at same time there are other games that have hundreds with dynamic scripts. Assassin's Creed Unity is one such game, and while it's not as good looking as Witcher 3 it still looks pretty good and runs quite well.
I don't think that applies to DX11 Sid. DX9 is limited to serial rendering, but DX11 is not. DX11 can do parallel rendering with deferred contexts or manual threading, and so the draw call limit is much, much higher than it is for DX9.. Also the level of API overhead is substantially less with DX11..Here is an old picture I have from quite some time ago, this was for DX9 but applies just as much to DX11:
Civ 5 which used deferred contexts (only NVidia supports this DX11 feature) could issue more than 15,000 draw calls a frame, and that was on early drivers. It's probably a lot more now that the drivers have matured... We don't know what kind of rendering pipeline RedEngine 3 has, but it assuredly does use multiple rendering threads. No game this big could be limited to a single renderer and achieve more than 30 FPS..
The rope issue in Crysis 3 was a bug, and it was eventually patched out. Witcher 3 will use PhysX 3.x which is much better than the physics engine in the CryEngine at any rate..
So I think I agree with DuranA overall. There's no real technical barrier at this point to having stunning graphics in an open world setting. The barrier if anything is political. Game developers want to reach as many consumers as possible, which means the engine and assets have to be able to be scaled down appropriately for lower spec machines..
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While I definetelly agree with everything that u said about the technical side of the game, I have to disagree with one thing. AC Unity stomps Witcher 3 when it comes to graphics. Even early WIP demos of Unity look way better than what we got in latest W3 demos. And im not talking just about visual quality - things like fluid animations and framerate, cloath physics, realistic colours, climbing/navigation, high level texturing - all are beyond Witcher 3.
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FYI Crysis 3 was a 32 bit game. It was perhaps the most splendidly optimized PC game to ever be developed though considering it's very high visual fidelity..
I agree AC Unity is extremely impressive, and is in many ways, even more impressive than the Witcher 3.. Whether it runs well remains to be seen though, as Watch Dogs ran absolutely HORRIBLE..
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