D
Deleted member 13
Guest
All:
Welcome to the first head-to-head graphics analysis (this is an old thing I did awhile ago and thought I'd start it here) where I delve into comparing two different games picked for comparison in the graphics tech arena. These two games both use UE4 graphics engine to display their technical prowess, however they both implement something special using the engine. We'll go over each category that I judge and will offer a little bit of education for some of the various techniques used in these games. I do not compare performance of these games. Resolution is also not compared unless it hampers the visuals in a negative way (I'll address this in Returnal). So without further ado, let's get started:
TEXTURING:
Returnal:
A little lesson on texturing and rasterization. The below image shows how texturing works. Imagine you have a really nice texture map at a size of 2048 x 2048 (i.e. 2k image). You want to map those texels to the triangle so it would map like below:
However, the devs of Returnal was starved of bandwidth for the PS5 because their target FPS was 60FPS. The compromise is reducing the main bandwidth hog - resolution of the framebuffers (i.e. the 2D grid of pixels that we see on the screen). So what happens when you have a high res texture on a small triangle and you are trying to rasterize that triangle on a very low resolution grid framebuffer (i.e. 1080p). You get pixels that are extremely large and covering a large area of the triangle. This destroys the details in the game. It doesn't matter what you do with that 1080p image for upsampling, reconstruction, etc.. The detail is already lost and can't be recovered. Here is a picture so you can imagine big pixels trying to render a small triangle.
Here is an example of "muddy" textures:
Here I try to get a closer look at the suit texture to show the graininess of the textures and normal maps:
The Medium:
These developers went with high res texture maps and more of a 1:1 texel to screen pixel. Basically the old fashioned way. This shows a significant advantage in image quality throughout the entire game. Viewing the objects in close up renders shows a very high texture resolution. Since there is no DLSS or upsampling algorithm, the native 4k framebuffer will display very high quality pixels at the cost of FPS.
NOTE: This is NOT the case with the XSX however. I believe it's internal resolution is very low as well.
LIGHTING:
When I judge lighting, I take a look at several different things in the lighting pipeline. 1) Are there any shadow casting lights? This is one of the main drawbacks of realtime rendering. All GPUs simply don't have enough bandwidth to go through a huge list of lights testing for shadows. The real world is all about shadows however, so it's absolutely required for good lighting. 2) Global Illumination with Ambient occlusion. This is also a main sticking point with games. Many use the light probe approximation with not enough GPU power to implement a good ambient occlusion term to normalize the ambient lighting. Both Returnal and The Medium fail in this regard unfortunately.
Returnal:
Here is a view of local FX lighting. The approximation looks crude however it's still better than no lighting at all.
The god rays in this game capture the mood very well in this game. Using the moon as a global shadow casting light source does give the game a great atmosphere for being on the planet.
The Medium:
This game goes a step further with shadows/light than Returnal by introducing at least a constant local shadow casting light source at all times added to the global light source. It's mood is therefore more realized than Returnal.
Like Returnal, The Medium does use a light source for it's special FX. These don't need to cast shadows but they need to be convincing. Here the glow from the ground looks more refined than Returnal's FX light sources.
SHADERS:
Shaders are the bread and butter of a game looking the best it can be. We've seen time and time again with last-gen how impactful physically-based shaders coupled with a talented artist team can make graphics look amazing. I won't go into too many details on how shaders work in this review, but I will encourage people to read my thread on PBR.
Returnal:
The team completely abandoned PBR in this game and it's a shame. While it's there in cinematics, it's nowhere to be found in the game. Stone and bone give the same energy response. The suit of the main character is a mixed bag. I couldn't tell whether it was made of rubber or just a specular plastic suit. I explored a lot during a level to try and see if I could find any glimpse of it. That was very telling.
Here's a show of stone and what appears to be marble but looks like a plastic gem. The vines are also not very convincing with specular thrown on top of a lambertian-like texture color for the wood.
youtu.be
Here we see stone steps and moss grass. There is literally no perceivable difference between them when it should be. Also the stone statue on the right has the same light response as the stone stairs.
youtu.be
The Medium:
This game has one of the best PBR implementations of games to date. I don't know whether the team used the built-in UE4 shaders or implemented their own. The specular response is outstanding and they even use RT reflections on every material that is shiny and not just the mirrors. Here is a video of the shaders being used for all kind of variety of objects. You can see the RT reflections not only on the mirror but the floors. The windows are using RT refractions (which is very expensive).
youtu.be
Here the mirror reflection isn't anywhere near as low level as most other games using RT reflections. A testiment to the team wanting to brute force their implementation without much sacrifice.
youtu.be
Here is a vid of some of the PBR materials in the game. Because of the higher resolution, the materials don't appear "muddied" and show excellent specular response. It reminds me of The Order's materials. Give a really great PBR system to a talented artist and that's the recipe for film-like rendering quality.
youtu.be
Just for giggles, I did a capture of a cinematic that displays probably the best skin shader I've ever seen in a game. Sorry for the morbid video but I just had to capture this material response to light. The last I've seen skin shading like this was in a realtime demo.
youtu.be
FX:
When I look at FX, I look for excellent use of transparency sprites, physical motion with fluid dynamics and response to lighting from the environment. Most studios don't concentrate on physics-based FX due to their expensive cost as well as requiring a talented team that understands physical motion. With that said let's delve into the FX of Returnal.
Returnal:
Returnal shines in the FX department. It's literally one of the best FX implementation (if not the) in a game. The team is very talented at portraying very good physics and captured a lot of fluid dynamics in their textures.
youtu.be
Take a look at the smooth fluid flow smoke dynamics and spark particle system. It's very appealing and add so much dynamic movement to the scene. It looks natural and your eye is drawn to it.
youtu.be
This game really shows off it's excellent FX during combat sequences. Here is a vid with beautiful explosions, particles and overall movement of the enemies:
youtu.be
The Medium:
There literally isn't any standout feature in FX for this game and so it's automatically loses by default. This game is a slow adventure with puzzle-solving so it makes sense that the team concentrated on other aspects in rendering like lighting/shading.
ANIMATION:
Animation is judged by several things. The main character needs to represent movement in the most realistic way possible. The king of animation in games today is the folks at Naughty Dog. They emphasize motion of literally every aspect of a game. Different kinds of poses, keyframes, motion-capture, lip-sync, NPC animation, etc.. It's all very important to portray a character in motion. With that said, let's take a look:
Returnal:
The game has a very solid animation structure thoughout the game. The movement of the enemies are smooth and fluid. With their superior FX, Returnal portrays very realistic animated particles, explosions and the character has a solid base of keyframe animation. The walking, dashing, and running animations are very fluid and the character feels alive. Here is a vid of me showing several of the animation cycles for the character.
youtu.be
The Medium:
The Medium falls very short in the animation department. The character is stiff in literally all of her actions. Walking is probably the best element of all the animations in the game. Her running is horrible and she "glides" across the scenes. There is very little follow-through with her actions and there is a delay in response when moving from one action to the next. The team should have spent a little more time working on the animation of the character. She is stiff and floats across the ground:
youtu.be
WORLD COMPLEXITY:
World complexity is a very deep topic and as such it's really hard to define it when reviewing games. I consider world complexity to mean "how many varying assets do you have on screen in one given frame?" or how "busy" the scene is during gameplay. I do NOT consider a highly complex world to be a spam of 1 asset multiple times taking up almost the entire frame. Those kind of instances use cheap tactics to save on memory footprint. It also reduces the shader cost for the frame as the same shader can be cached in memory. An example of a really high complex world would be a game (sim) like FS2020. Although the assets are static and not in motion, the amount of *unique* assets matter and obviously take a big toll on the rendering pipeline.
Returnal:
In this video, I focus on showing how you can have an enormous amount of geometry but only because it is instanced across the world. That means the game only stores that one piece of geometry in memory and it makes copies of itself throughout the world. While this should be used, it shouldn't be used as a way of "filling up" the frame. This repeated pattern becomes tiring to look at when you are playing the game.
youtu.be
The Medium:
The world in this game is fairly complex. This is mainly because the game design in showing two different worlds with completely different assets. In this case, everything "pops" out at you. Even when the scenes are focusing on one world, you can still see a lot of unique assets. Look at this forest for example. It looks lush with varied foliage even though it uses instancing as well.
youtu.be
This is the hallmark feature in this game. Two separate worlds with completely different assets, lighting and shaders. The cost for rendering out 2 different framebuffers isn't a 50% hit in rendering performance since both worlds are literally half the full resolution of the game. However, there are different assets being rendered. This adds to the visual complexity of the frame.
youtu.be
CONCLUSION
The Medium uses a thorough use of PBR materials, RT reflections/refractions, excellent world complexity with 2 separate framebuffers representing two totally different scenes with unique assets, multiple shadow casting light sources and good high res textures, the Medium comes out on top. It suffers however with the character animation and the FX is totally non-existent in this psychological thriller.
Meanwhile Returnal has the best behaving and looking FX around with solid character animation. But due to most of it's resources being tied up in a 60FPS target, it left no room to use advanced lighting, higher res textures which could be fully utilized at a higher framebuffer resolution, and non-existant PBR materials, it falls short of contest.
Until next time,
Welcome to the first head-to-head graphics analysis (this is an old thing I did awhile ago and thought I'd start it here) where I delve into comparing two different games picked for comparison in the graphics tech arena. These two games both use UE4 graphics engine to display their technical prowess, however they both implement something special using the engine. We'll go over each category that I judge and will offer a little bit of education for some of the various techniques used in these games. I do not compare performance of these games. Resolution is also not compared unless it hampers the visuals in a negative way (I'll address this in Returnal). So without further ado, let's get started:
TEXTURING:
Returnal:
A little lesson on texturing and rasterization. The below image shows how texturing works. Imagine you have a really nice texture map at a size of 2048 x 2048 (i.e. 2k image). You want to map those texels to the triangle so it would map like below:
However, the devs of Returnal was starved of bandwidth for the PS5 because their target FPS was 60FPS. The compromise is reducing the main bandwidth hog - resolution of the framebuffers (i.e. the 2D grid of pixels that we see on the screen). So what happens when you have a high res texture on a small triangle and you are trying to rasterize that triangle on a very low resolution grid framebuffer (i.e. 1080p). You get pixels that are extremely large and covering a large area of the triangle. This destroys the details in the game. It doesn't matter what you do with that 1080p image for upsampling, reconstruction, etc.. The detail is already lost and can't be recovered. Here is a picture so you can imagine big pixels trying to render a small triangle.
Here is an example of "muddy" textures:
Here I try to get a closer look at the suit texture to show the graininess of the textures and normal maps:
The Medium:
These developers went with high res texture maps and more of a 1:1 texel to screen pixel. Basically the old fashioned way. This shows a significant advantage in image quality throughout the entire game. Viewing the objects in close up renders shows a very high texture resolution. Since there is no DLSS or upsampling algorithm, the native 4k framebuffer will display very high quality pixels at the cost of FPS.
NOTE: This is NOT the case with the XSX however. I believe it's internal resolution is very low as well.
LIGHTING:
When I judge lighting, I take a look at several different things in the lighting pipeline. 1) Are there any shadow casting lights? This is one of the main drawbacks of realtime rendering. All GPUs simply don't have enough bandwidth to go through a huge list of lights testing for shadows. The real world is all about shadows however, so it's absolutely required for good lighting. 2) Global Illumination with Ambient occlusion. This is also a main sticking point with games. Many use the light probe approximation with not enough GPU power to implement a good ambient occlusion term to normalize the ambient lighting. Both Returnal and The Medium fail in this regard unfortunately.
Returnal:
Here is a view of local FX lighting. The approximation looks crude however it's still better than no lighting at all.
The god rays in this game capture the mood very well in this game. Using the moon as a global shadow casting light source does give the game a great atmosphere for being on the planet.
The Medium:
This game goes a step further with shadows/light than Returnal by introducing at least a constant local shadow casting light source at all times added to the global light source. It's mood is therefore more realized than Returnal.
Like Returnal, The Medium does use a light source for it's special FX. These don't need to cast shadows but they need to be convincing. Here the glow from the ground looks more refined than Returnal's FX light sources.
SHADERS:
Shaders are the bread and butter of a game looking the best it can be. We've seen time and time again with last-gen how impactful physically-based shaders coupled with a talented artist team can make graphics look amazing. I won't go into too many details on how shaders work in this review, but I will encourage people to read my thread on PBR.
Returnal:
The team completely abandoned PBR in this game and it's a shame. While it's there in cinematics, it's nowhere to be found in the game. Stone and bone give the same energy response. The suit of the main character is a mixed bag. I couldn't tell whether it was made of rubber or just a specular plastic suit. I explored a lot during a level to try and see if I could find any glimpse of it. That was very telling.
Here's a show of stone and what appears to be marble but looks like a plastic gem. The vines are also not very convincing with specular thrown on top of a lambertian-like texture color for the wood.
Returnal Materials Part 1
Here's a show of stone and what appears to be marble but looks like a plastic gem. The vines are also not very convincing with specular thrown on top of a ...
Here we see stone steps and moss grass. There is literally no perceivable difference between them when it should be. Also the stone statue on the right has the same light response as the stone stairs.
Returnal Materials Part 2
Here we see stone steps and moss grass. There is literally no perceivable difference between them when it should be. Also the stone statue on the right has...
The Medium:
This game has one of the best PBR implementations of games to date. I don't know whether the team used the built-in UE4 shaders or implemented their own. The specular response is outstanding and they even use RT reflections on every material that is shiny and not just the mirrors. Here is a video of the shaders being used for all kind of variety of objects. You can see the RT reflections not only on the mirror but the floors. The windows are using RT refractions (which is very expensive).
The Medium Materials Part 1
An excellent display of materials using PBR. Look at the floor specular and the mirror all using RT reflections at nearly full res.
Here the mirror reflection isn't anywhere near as low level as most other games using RT reflections. A testiment to the team wanting to brute force their implementation without much sacrifice.
The Medium Materials Part 2
Look at the variety of materials on various different objects.
Here is a vid of some of the PBR materials in the game. Because of the higher resolution, the materials don't appear "muddied" and show excellent specular response. It reminds me of The Order's materials. Give a really great PBR system to a talented artist and that's the recipe for film-like rendering quality.
The Medium PBR Materials
Excellent PBR materials in this game.
Just for giggles, I did a capture of a cinematic that displays probably the best skin shader I've ever seen in a game. Sorry for the morbid video but I just had to capture this material response to light. The last I've seen skin shading like this was in a realtime demo.
The Medium Materials Part 3
Even though this is a cinematic, I've never seen a more accurate skin shader in a game to date.
FX:
When I look at FX, I look for excellent use of transparency sprites, physical motion with fluid dynamics and response to lighting from the environment. Most studios don't concentrate on physics-based FX due to their expensive cost as well as requiring a talented team that understands physical motion. With that said let's delve into the FX of Returnal.
Returnal:
Returnal shines in the FX department. It's literally one of the best FX implementation (if not the) in a game. The team is very talented at portraying very good physics and captured a lot of fluid dynamics in their textures.
Returnal FX Part 1
Returnal shines in the FX department. It's literally one of the best FX implementation (if not the) in a game. The team is very talented at portraying very...
Take a look at the smooth fluid flow smoke dynamics and spark particle system. It's very appealing and add so much dynamic movement to the scene. It looks natural and your eye is drawn to it.
Returnal FX Part 2
Smooth fluid flow dynamics.
This game really shows off it's excellent FX during combat sequences. Here is a vid with beautiful explosions, particles and overall movement of the enemies:
Returnal FX Part 3
Action sequence with physically accurate explosions.
The Medium:
There literally isn't any standout feature in FX for this game and so it's automatically loses by default. This game is a slow adventure with puzzle-solving so it makes sense that the team concentrated on other aspects in rendering like lighting/shading.
ANIMATION:
Animation is judged by several things. The main character needs to represent movement in the most realistic way possible. The king of animation in games today is the folks at Naughty Dog. They emphasize motion of literally every aspect of a game. Different kinds of poses, keyframes, motion-capture, lip-sync, NPC animation, etc.. It's all very important to portray a character in motion. With that said, let's take a look:
Returnal:
The game has a very solid animation structure thoughout the game. The movement of the enemies are smooth and fluid. With their superior FX, Returnal portrays very realistic animated particles, explosions and the character has a solid base of keyframe animation. The walking, dashing, and running animations are very fluid and the character feels alive. Here is a vid of me showing several of the animation cycles for the character.
Returnal Animation Part 1
Very good animation on the character.
The Medium:
The Medium falls very short in the animation department. The character is stiff in literally all of her actions. Walking is probably the best element of all the animations in the game. Her running is horrible and she "glides" across the scenes. There is very little follow-through with her actions and there is a delay in response when moving from one action to the next. The team should have spent a little more time working on the animation of the character. She is stiff and floats across the ground:
The Medium Character Animation
The team should have spent a little more time working on the animation of the character. She is stiff and floats across the ground.
WORLD COMPLEXITY:
World complexity is a very deep topic and as such it's really hard to define it when reviewing games. I consider world complexity to mean "how many varying assets do you have on screen in one given frame?" or how "busy" the scene is during gameplay. I do NOT consider a highly complex world to be a spam of 1 asset multiple times taking up almost the entire frame. Those kind of instances use cheap tactics to save on memory footprint. It also reduces the shader cost for the frame as the same shader can be cached in memory. An example of a really high complex world would be a game (sim) like FS2020. Although the assets are static and not in motion, the amount of *unique* assets matter and obviously take a big toll on the rendering pipeline.
Returnal:
In this video, I focus on showing how you can have an enormous amount of geometry but only because it is instanced across the world. That means the game only stores that one piece of geometry in memory and it makes copies of itself throughout the world. While this should be used, it shouldn't be used as a way of "filling up" the frame. This repeated pattern becomes tiring to look at when you are playing the game.
Returnal World Complexity Part 1
Returnal may seem like it has a lot going on but in reality, it's using a significant number of instances of the same geometry. This was used to allow for i...
The Medium:
The world in this game is fairly complex. This is mainly because the game design in showing two different worlds with completely different assets. In this case, everything "pops" out at you. Even when the scenes are focusing on one world, you can still see a lot of unique assets. Look at this forest for example. It looks lush with varied foliage even though it uses instancing as well.
The Medium World Complexity Part 3
More of the forest level.
This is the hallmark feature in this game. Two separate worlds with completely different assets, lighting and shaders. The cost for rendering out 2 different framebuffers isn't a 50% hit in rendering performance since both worlds are literally half the full resolution of the game. However, there are different assets being rendered. This adds to the visual complexity of the frame.
The Medium World Complexity Part 2
Two distinct rendering buffers with completely separate assets where caching is probably not allowed. Excellent use of the UE here.
CONCLUSION
The Medium uses a thorough use of PBR materials, RT reflections/refractions, excellent world complexity with 2 separate framebuffers representing two totally different scenes with unique assets, multiple shadow casting light sources and good high res textures, the Medium comes out on top. It suffers however with the character animation and the FX is totally non-existent in this psychological thriller.
Meanwhile Returnal has the best behaving and looking FX around with solid character animation. But due to most of it's resources being tied up in a 60FPS target, it left no room to use advanced lighting, higher res textures which could be fully utilized at a higher framebuffer resolution, and non-existant PBR materials, it falls short of contest.
Until next time,
Last edited by a moderator:
