FF 7 remake comes extremely close though. That's the best looking UE4 game I know. It's expected that real games do not have demo levels of visual fidelity.
You are right, looking back at screenshots of these old UE3 games they don't look as good as I remembered.
However Cyberpunk (without raytracing) is not the most beautiful game I played. It has a few nice scenes, the one discussed in the article looks good, but you also have a lot of areas that are nothing special and have very bad performances.
I think the comment above was about the fact that U4 demos where also very realistic, and also real time. Still, how many U4 based games can you name that look nearly as good as those demos? I can name zero.
This is a demo. You can easily see that it's structured in a way that allows to easily mask loading of the new scenes and that there's not a lot of interaction going on - pretty much the only interactive thing they shown was dynamic illumination (which is something they were promising since early UE4 demos, and I believe that's what GP mostly meant) and particle system.
You can be sure that demos like that (especially early ones) make tons of compromises that are neatly hidden on the video but that usually wouldn't be viable in context of a regular video game - at least without severely limiting your game design choices.
You're probably being downvoted for the time of your post but I wouldn't be surprised if it's actually true. E3 demos are notorious for being pre-rendered moonshots far removed from reality once the game hits the market. Some more egregious than others. That said, if the actual game is only half has gorgeous as this video, it's still crazy good looking.
I think this comment is slightly disingenuous, I think it's more obvious that the aesthetics of any game (let alone engine) will primarily depend on the quality of the Assets. If you loaded up these quake 3-era meshes and textures into Unreal Engine 4 or something else you'd call 'modern', I guarantee you they'd look the same or similar.
The lighting isn't even that bad sans indirect illumination, which unreal only just got recently and Unity is losing due to Enlighten being shut down.
This reminds me of people comparing open source software with proprietary software on account of aesthetics - it's not the licensing model, or the game engine, it's the presence or absence of artists that makes the difference.
Are you referring to progress in rendering techniques or in the final visual result? At least in terms of the latter, games from 2011 look much cruder to me compared to games released today or even a few years ago.
Isn't the demo suggesting that the original one also looked more realistic had the content creators simply made better choices for colors and textures?
Yeah, looks pretty, I suppose. As good as it looks, though, it's still not photo-realistic by any stretch, and still falls prey to the uncanny valley much the same way most games have this past generation. All games look good these days. That's pretty much a given. If you have the budget to invest the resources into crafted a detailed world like the one presented in the demo, it's gonna look good.
So why exactly is everyone so excited about this demo? I can tell you that it's not because of the technical merits, like DX11 tessellation or support for Nvidia’s Physx, Apex and 3D Vision. Instead, it's likely the moody lighting, cinematic camera angles, and detailed textures that caught peoples' eyes, none of which say anything about games made using this engine.
Maybe I'm just a bit of a curmudgeon, but this video hardly seems like a revolution in any way. Rather, it's just more of the same of what we've seen out of Epic for the past five or six years.
I don't think it's subjective. It's moments like this: https://youtu.be/nJ_9kli9gwU?t=961 that reveal the limitations of SC's engine. Coming from playing CP2077 the lighting looks badly off.
I do agree it does some things better, but it overall still looks "current gen."
this is a demo. and i prefer graphics at engine level and let the games win or lose due to their quest/lore/immersion of storyline rather than a poor choice of graphics that looks clunky.
It's a tech demo. It's not supposed to look better than retail games, it just shows off some new experimental technology. If you check out the slide deck for the demo they compare each technique with existing solutions (i.e. SSAO vs traced AO, SS reflections vs traced reflections) and the advantages are very obvious.
If you want to see how much existing techniques suffer compared to tracing, just check out the absolutely miserable, incredibly ugly, just disgusting screen space reflections in the brand-new Crytek game Hunt: Showdown. The water is a nightmare.
See this for the original demo of UE4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dD9CPqSKjTU
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