Re global illumination, well its certainly considered. Without global illumination, any in game object that did not have an uninterrupted line of sight to a light source (candles torches braziers) would be completely black. You have direct light sources or global illumination, there is no other way to "see" in computer graphics.
The method in which global illumination is implemented however is varies greatly depending on the rendering. In the super expensive photorealistic ray tracing, its expensive and each pixel on an object takes many many projections to determine the color. If your program doesn't care about -simulating- correct light however, this is often done with a constant value for "how much", and a possible color value to add to the objects color.
Re the witchers global illumination.. i'm not sure what they're doing, but while testing sweetfx settings its completely inconsistent. I have a feeling its a fixed scale of how bright and color addition that moves with time of day.. which is fine but whatever they've chosen is completely mental. The lights under clouds and in the rain are all over the shop.. the shadows are too dark, and indoors its completely off its rocker.. npc's are lit by light sources, but also by some random unseen hole based on the outside light also.. its really weird you have naturally lit wood but npcs looking like fluro lamps relative to everything else.. the lighting is just odd. When i've observed it a bit more i'm tempted to make a suggestion they totally rework it.. as its mental to create sweetfx profiles.. because its inconsistent you can't get it right easily.. fix one scene and another is completely busted.
They've made the game to look good as a world of warcraft parody instead of something more accurate.. of course this is cdpr's choice but.. well.. i'll get over it.
---------- Updated at 03:02 AM ----------
http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/the-witcher-3-gtx-780ti-could-push-35-45-fps-at-max.html
Umm. Not sure I caught this when it was first published.
I googled for like 2 minutes and gametech is a Russian site with just a lot of people quoting it,
Is there validity to that 780ti claim?
Graphics implications...
hope
Stuff like this makes me mad. Here's a console and the door.
The problem with alot of these sites is they don't care about getting a good setting, they just mash high/ultra without a second thought. That's console peasant behavior honestly. If you change the settings you can get great fps. on my 780ti i'm playing at 2560x1600..
---------- Updated at 03:06 AM ----------
@jonwd7
As someone who has played the game I do agree with him that it is underwhelming. A lot of the time the game looks outright bad to me, specifically during the rain or at night/dusk running through woods. Grass in those conditions(as well as some others) looks no different than it looks in games that are very old and that, to me and probably others, really detracts from the visuals of the otherwise amazingly crafted world.
Careful if you're using sweetfx. While making mine, i've come across combinations of settings for the the brightness/darkness and sharpening which completely screws up the grass in particular.. while tweaking a few times.. i got to settings were i like the colors, but it screwed up the textures and i had to lose the battle to world of warcraft witcher. I couldn't use them because looking at the ground was like day 1 ps3.
The inverse of this is sweetfx can hide this also. Vanilla did this via the watercolors.. so yeah.
---------- Updated at 03:12 AM ----------
The developers truly did craft the game to look a specific way and I feel that now more than ever if you change it too much the whole intended look falls apart. The game will now simply look like it has an overlay on it -- a sepia as an example, one adjustment people make is to increase the contrast and that drives me up the wall since it seems to smear texture detail on bright surfaces and make the darks get too dark.
Nice ideals.. but personally.. the reason why i'm even hanging around this thread would have made me completely ragequit and not get very in the game at all.
I do appreciate everyone has an artistic vision, i do with my preset absolutely.. but the vanilla one was.. theres probably some art theory that explains this.. but with the witcher 2.. i didn't bother looking up sweetfx. It worked. Witcher 3 the overall graphics package was appalling, or at least.. bad enough something needed to be done.
---------- Updated at 03:14 AM ----------
Does the light of the sun at the zenith looks orange where you live?
Its winter in the southern hemisphere at the moment, and from trying to use the sun as a compass.. its not exactly overhead.. it feels like a winter sun (though my sweetfx may be doing that also..)
---------- Updated at 03:18 AM ----------
Let's just be honest here.
The Witcher 2 was a masterpiece for its time, graphically.
Was.... still is. Load it up and compare it to the witcher 3.
Sure one is an open world and another is very small maps, but if we're just talking graphics here.... I don't want to say it.
---------- Updated at 03:23 AM ----------
Maybe the ones you play. Most of the games I've played in the past few years only support "AA on/off" FXAA, TXAA, supersampling, or nothing at all. MSAA has been deprecated by many devs since it costs so much to use in modern engines. TW2 and 3 for instance doesn't support it.
Lol, maybe i'm old now.. but it reminds me of a few cute phases in hardware accelleration... the first one was where SHADOWS was a supported feature, but in practice too slow on current hardware. Then came antialiasing.. also for years to expensive vs running a game at the native res of your monitor. Seems AA has popped into possible also.. given what it is and my background.. screw the expensive ones.. i just go for the edge bases techniques.. FXAA on nvidia and i think theres a new one, MFAA or something?