Minimal ray-tracing, where it counts

Forza Horizon 5 will not feature ray-tracing during regular gameplay. This is a bit of a bummer. However, the bright exterior environment with high roughness surfaces like dirt and foliage isn’t exactly the best showcase for features like ray-traced reflections.

Instead, Playground games decided to deploy ray-tracing where it would the most: up close and personal in the Forzavista model viewer. Forzavista is a separate mode where players can view in-game vehicle models at their highest level of detail. Top LODs in Forza can hit the six figures – we’ll get to this later – which means Forzavista offers incredibly detailed close-up views. Adding ray-tracing to the mix will take things to the next level – glossy and metallic car surfaces will showcase higher quality and more accurate reflections than we’ve seen in a Forza game till date, taking these cars even close to photorealism.

The lack of in-game ray-tracing is a bit of a missed opportunity, since Gran Turismo 7 on PS5 is set to implement this feature. However, this is one of those cases where ray-tracing alone doesn’t define a game’s visuals.

Up against Gran Turismo 7, Forza Horizon 5 looks fantastic and we don’t hold this omission against Playground.

Incredibly high asset quality

Great looking cars and great looking environments have always been a strong suit for the Forza series. In Forza Horizon 5, we see this trend continue. Individual car models are made up of hundreds of thousands of polygons. This means there’s a good degree of high frequency detail on the insides and out. One area where previous generation racing games fell a bit short was in terms of environmental rendering.

This makes sense: most of the polygon budget was dedicated to getting the best-possible car models onscreen. But this often meant that trees, foliage and buildings in the background didn’t look quite as good. Forza Horizon 5 leverages the power of the ninth-gen consoles to delivered uncompromised environmental rendering. Forests, grasslands, and other areas that often challenged earlier Forza games look spectacular here and on par with many AAA open world FPS and TPS titles. That Playground is able to manage this while maintaining spectacularly high cad asset quality is a testament to optimized code and the power of new hardware.

Materials are a real area of strength. Forza Horizon 5 features physically-based material rendering and very high resolution textures. The way that light interacts just right with a car exterior or the way that leather interiors are presented contribute greatly to the visual makeup. One interesting thing to note is that texture quality is very high across the board – not just on cars but in exteriors as well, leveraging the Xbox Series X’s higher VRAM allocation.

Lighting and additional effects

Forza Horizon 5 doesn’t utilize ray-traced lighting, as mentioned. However, Playground has deployed a very accomplished raster-based global illumination implementation technique. We see great use of volumetrics as well, properly conveying the dusty Mexican environs.

We see good use of a number of screen space effects, including parallax occlusion mapping to add depth to rocks and incidentals, and high fidelity ambient occlusion, adding in shade in nooks and cranny below and around vehicles. The trailer also showcases a high sample count motion blur implementation, providing a visceral sense of speed.

Conclusion

Since their launch several months ago, both the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S have been consoles in search of games. The prevalence of cross-gen AAA titles fundamentally restricts what developers can achieve on these machines. Forza Horizon 5 is a cross-gen game. But Playground’s intelligent use of its highly scalable engine means that the top end Xbox Series X/S and PC versions look, at the very least, like something that wouldn’t be out of place in a ninth-gen exclusive. Despite being cross-gen, this is a great visual showcase for the Series X. We’re very interested to see how it’ll stack up to future ninth-gen exclusive Forza titles.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. fans are so committed that, after GSC’s demise, they even took things into their own hands and released S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Anomaly, a full-fledged fan sequel to the original game, running on GSC’s X-Ray engine.

When Microsoft and GSC announced a while back that S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 was real, they were met with equal parts amazement and disbelief. You see, this wasn’t the first time GSC had worked on a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. sequel. Back in 2012, the developer had canned their original attempt at S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, built around the then-next gen Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Shortly afterwards, GSC itself imploded. Franchises have disappeared off the face of the earth after a lot less: we’ve had no word on Dead Space, for instance, simply because the third entry didn’t do that great sales-wise.

Miraculously, GSC’s original owner was able to regain control over the studio and IP.

Fast forward again to last month’s Xbox event at E3 and its now evident that, not only is S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 a real game, it’s one of the most spectacular demonstrations of ninth-gen visual prowess we’ve seen till date. Our TL;DR tech analysis? This looks absolutely insane!

Let’s take a closer look, though. Back from the dead, and with a decade and two console generations worth of technology progress to leverage, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chernobyl is most definitely worth it.

Next-gen character rendering

One of the real standouts of the gameplay trailer was just how great S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chernobyl’s character models looked. We’re looking at polygon counts that could be in the low six-figures, for some stunningly lifelike character closeups. It’s interesting to note here that S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat, the last game in the series, pioneered tessellation as a DX11 technique back in 2009, specifically to round out surfaces like character helmets. Here, we’re seeing GSC leverage the raw horsepower of modern consoles and PCs to add real geometric detail.

High poly counts aren’t the entire story. We’re also seeing some excellent skin rendering and what looks like some of the most convincing hair we’ve seen till date in a video game. Hair follicle counts appear to be in the thousands. In closeup shots of a character with long hair, we’re seeing a degree of fineness to the individual hairs that goes well beyond what was possible last generation, even with proprietary tech like NVIDIA Hairworks.

Enhanced animations

The original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games weren’t well known for complex character animations. Everything from stiff facial rigging during conversations to enemy movement highlighted the X-ray engine’s early 2000s origin. Here, we’re looking at a massively overhauled solution.

This enables complex movements like the brief scene where Bolshak danced. Even in comparison to heavy hitters like Red Dead Redemption 2, the animation work here is just remarkably fluid. We’re seeing Unreal 4’s IK (inverse kinematics) solution in action here allowing for small movements – like when a character flexes their fingers – to animate smoothly. Things aren’t quite at the level of something like, say, The Last of Us Part 2, but this is definitely a generational leap for S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

Ray tracing and advanced lighting

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition showed us what was possible when you leverage RTX ray-tracing in an atmospheric post-Soviet setting. We’re looking at something similar in Heart of Chernobyl. The gameplay trailer highlights ray-traced reflections, adding immensely to the atmosphere in swampy areas and damp interiors. We’re also seeing what looks like a ray-traced global illumination system. This brings desolate building interiors to life, with areas of deep, deep shade and realistic indirect lighting.

The ray-traced lighting and reflections also offer a big boost to anomaly visuals. This is particularly the case with electrical anomalies seen towards the end of the trailer.

Heart of Chernobyl makes great use of volumetric effects. This is noticeable both in a stormy exterior scene and the interior of what looks like a laboratory. Volumetrics are at a high resolution here. We do expect GSC to pare things down a bit in the final code, at least on consoles.

Heart of Chernobyl uses physically-based material rendering – as is standard in modern games. It’s worth noting, however, to highlight the massive leap from earlier S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games. GSC Game World used real-life photos of the Chernobyl exclusion zone to author the textures for 2007’s Shadow of Chernobyl. In certain situations, this had eerily lifelike results. However, because physically correct – and thanks to the X-ray engine’s rather simple dynamic lighting, these textures often felt “off.” Here in Heart of Chernobyl, we’re seeing a similar approach. But thanks to the use of physically accurate material rendering, Heart of Chernobyl’s textures are frequently photorealistic, bringing the Exclusion Zone to life with unprecedented detail.

Conclusion

With Unreal 5 announced recently, and currently in early access, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Heart of Chernobyl’s visuals are out of date since it’s built on the “old” Unreal 4. Using an older engine doesn’t necessarily mean poorer visuals. Arkham Knight, for example, one of the best-looking titles in the eighth-gen, was built on Unreal 3. GSC leverages the complete suite of scalable UE4 capabilities in Heart of Chernobyl to create something that genuinely looks “ninth-Gen,” a clear step over the cross-Gen content we’ve seen so far. It’ll be particularly interesting to see how the game stacks up in terms of visuals to Chernobylite. This is a S.T.A.L.K.E.R.-inspired survival horror shooter that’s leaving early access this month and also runs on UE4. Thanks to photogrammetry and a generous draw distance, Chernobylite often looked and played like a next-gen S.T.A.L.K.E.R. We’re looking forward to seeing how the final version stacks up.

Back in 2010, Metro 2033 at its highest settings barely ran on flagship graphics cards like the GeForce GTX 480. Its extensive use of DirectX 11 features like hardware tessellation gave these parts a thorough workout, and made 60 FPS gaming a distant dream for next-gen hardware. Even in 2021, Metro 2033 cranked up to its highest settings holds up surprisingly well, barring the occasional low-res texture.

In 2013, months before the eighth-generation consoles came out, 4A Games launched Metro: Last Light, a game that demanded a GeForce GTX Titan as its recommended GPU. Back in the pre-GPU-shortage days, when $900 was an unheard-of ask for graphics grunt, Metro Last Light proved its mettle, with an enhanced visual set and more open environments. In terms of visual features, both Metro games held their own to the extent that, in 2014, 4A Games bundled the two and released them with just a bit of spit and polish as Metro Redux on the PS4 and Xbox One.

Fast forward five years, and in-game visuals have somewhat stagnated. While the PlayStation 5 and Xbox One promised impressive “next-gen” rendering technologies like physically-based material and global illumination, the midrange graphics hardware powering both these consoles – equivalent to an HD 7870 and HD 7790 respectively – soon turned something of a hard wall for AAA developers. Back in 2012, Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs tech demo showcased a game with mind blowing visuals, with reflections and real-time shadows, in particular, a leap above anything we’d seen in seventh-gen titles. A year later, when it released on the eighth-gen consoles, Watch Dogs was roundly criticizing for what fans thought were “downgraded” graphics.

“Downgrading” was something of recurrent theme in criticism of eighth-gen visuals, all the way up to Cyberpunk 2077 – which looks like a PlayStation 1 game on base platforms while assets stream in.

The logic made sense – developers had to compromise their graphics vision to accommodate hardware that would’ve been described as midrange even before the consoles themselves came out. But in 2019, with the 9th generation consoles just months away, and with NVIDIA having announced its ray-tracing enabled RTX cards, people were excited to see what the future actually looked like.

Metro Exodus on PC delivered a taste of that vision, with a single-bounce RTGI implementation, and lifelike materials. But over the past two years, ray-tracing hardware and top-end PC components have become significantly more capable. Better still, Sony and Microsoft impressed by announcing ninth-gen console specs that were a genuine leap over their predecessors.

It’s in this context that 4A Games released Metro Exodus: Enhanced Edition.

Ray-tracing front and center: a true next-gen showcase

When NVIDIA launched its Turing cards in 2019, and renamed their top-end GPU nomenclature – RTX instead of GTX cards – there was ample room for skepticism. The “new” cards like the GeForce RTX 2080 offered minimal performance gains over their Pascal predecessors. Apart from Quake II – a vintage 1997 shooter – Battlefield V was the only AAA game on sight with RTX effects enabled. And DLSS 1.0 – the AI upscaling technique NVIDIA outed to offset the performance impact of RTX, was laughable, with worse image quality than simple resolution scaling.

Ampere, and the arrival of the GeForce RTX 3080, alongside AMD’s competition in the form of the RX 6800 XT, reset expectations: here were cards with enough raw graphics horsepower to enable 4K/60 raster experience. On top of that they had the ray-tracing chops to deploy top-end effects, backed up by AI image upscaling that delivered better-than-native image quality. The PS5 and Xbox Series X aren’t quite in the same ballpark – but they’re close. And that’s exactly what empowered 4A Games to deliver Metro Exodus: Enhanced Edition. Is the enhanced edition more than a simple remaster? What does it bring to the table in terms of visuals? Is this a showcase of potential ninth-gen graphics? Yes, a lot.

The biggest change Metro Exodus: Enhanced Edition brings about is in terms of ray-traced lighting. 2019’s Metro Exodus launched before the announcement of the next-gen consoles. No one new if the PS5 and Xbox Series X would get hardware ray-tracing like NVIDIA’s top-end cards. As a result, 4A hedged their bets. The original game featured single-bounce ray-traced global illumination in exteriors, but also a standard rasterized lighting path. Ray-tracing was “bolted on,” and while the effect was convincing, there were major limitations. For starters, the single-bounce approach prevented light accumulation. This meant that areas like the interior of a cargo container – with poor direct lighting – wound up being unnaturally dark. Gamers had two not-so-great choices – rasterized lighting without tracing, or ray-tracing that led to unnaturally dark environments.

Metro Exodus: Enhanced Edition is the first AAA title on PC to require ray-tracing hardware. It won’t run on hardware without ray-tracing capabilities because fallback lighting no longer exists. 4A artists got rid of “fake” raster lights around Metro Exodus levels, meaning everything relied on the multi-bounce ray-traced lighting. Infinite light bounces are critical to the visual look of the enhanced edition. In the original, light from a light source would hit an object, then reflect or “bounce” a single time. This worked reasonably well in well-lit exteriors, but caused other areas to become overly dark. In the enhanced edition, infinite light bounce means that light from a single, indirect source can propagate across a whole interior – the light from an open window will hit the wall opposite, then “bounce” to the floor, then back to the wall – just like light does in real life. Multiple-bounce ray-tracing is extremely expensive from a computation standpoint. As a result, 4A leveraged an innovative shortcut. Light bounce wasn’t handled completely in real time. Rather, Metro Exodus: Enhanced Edition used a “temporal accumulation” approach, with lighting information extracted across multiple frames. This means it can take 1-2 seconds for light to propagate across a scene – but this is almost impossible to notice in-game.

DLSS 2.0: Getting upscaling right

2019’s Metro Exodus launched with DLSS 1.0, NVIDIA’s initial solution to the profound performance hit incurred by ray-tracing. DLSS 1.0, was in a word, bad. Dropping the shading rate in Metro Exodus to 0.7x (effectively running shaders at 70 percent resolution) delivered better image quality than DLSS and more or less equivalent performance. DLSS 1.0 image quality was so laughably bad that AMD actually introduced CAS, little more than a post-process sharpening filter, as an alternative. If your AI-upscaled wizardry delivers worse results than sharpening an upscale frame, it needs a fundamental rework.

NVIDIA apparently got the message, completely revamping their approach to DLSS. DLSS 2.0, the implementation we see in Metro Exodus, delivers on NVIDIA’s original promise. The “Quality” setting actually manages to look better than native with Metro’s standard TAA. Balanced and Performance are also hard to tell apart.  And remarkably, performance is better than 1.0. We’re looking at massively improved image quality – genuinely on par with native rendering, with better performance.

Enhanced textures: A mixed bag

4A Games promised the addition of 4K textures to Metro Exodus: Enhanced Edition. Unfortunately, texture quality is undermined significantly by what seems to be a bug in the texture streaming system. On our RTX 3080 test bed, we were unable to get full-resolution textures to load in at native or with DLSS enabled. In some maps like Caspian, certain parts of geometry – half of a rock, for instance – would load up with a high res texture, while the other half would remain blurry. This was a frustrating situation that persisted across most of the game. When textures actually loaded in, however, they were great. While the ray-traced lighting was fantastic, the low texture resolution – something we hope 4A will fix with a patch – detracted from the overall experience.

Metro Exodus: Enhanced Edition is the first major game to require ray-tracing hardware. At times, the game manages a level of photorealism we’ve simply not seen elsewhere. 2010’s Metro 2033 was a decent predictor of what visuals would look like in eighth-gen titles. Likewise, we think Metro Exodus: Enhanced Edition sets the bar, as it is, for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S titles as we move past the cross-gen era.

This game was reviewed on PC.

With the RDNA2 architecture, AMD’s implemented hardware accelerated ray-tracing on both consoles via its Ray Accelerator (RA) modules. This means that, in games like Metro Exodus where ray-tracing is an option, AMD hardware (at least technically) can offer feature parity. This is just one half of the equation, and the reason NVIDIA debuted DLSS upscaling alongside ray-tracing. Current-gen graphics cards, whether on PC or in consoles, are simply not powerful enough to handle ray-traced workloads at a native 4K resolution. The way things stand now, cards like the GeForce RTX 3080 and RX 6800 XT – both of which are considerably more powerful than the GPUs in either the Xbox Series X or PlayStation 5 – are just about able to deliver a consistent 4K/60 FPS experience in most AAA rasterized titles.

On the NVIDIA side of the fence, DLSS is a must-enable feature if you’re running tracing, clawing back most of the performance you lose, while actually enhancing image quality in some cases. With DLSS 2.0 in Performance mode, many ray-traced titles deliver 4K/60 or something close to it.

AMD, on the other hand, currently offers no such option. If you turn on ray-tracing on RDNA2 cards or on the consoles, performance and resolution are the only available levels to pull. This is set to change soon, however. AMD announced its own take on AI upscaling, Fidelity FX Super Resolution, months back, alongside the debut of the RDNA2 cards. Since both the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X share the same GPU architecture as the RX 6800 XT and co, Super Resolution will almost certainly make its way over to consoles. AMD has offered precious little further input, however, about how Fidelity FX Super Resolution works, what image quality looks like, and the performance impact. We should hear more in the months to come. But before that, let’s take a look at the potential implications of AI upscaling for the current crop of consoles.

The possible end of upscaling as we know it

Both ninth generation consoles are massively powerful devices. However, neither is quite up to the task of delivering a flawless 4K/60 FPS experience in most of today’s AAA titles. And as we move out of the eighth-gen transition period, hardware requirements will only increase, not decrease.

Case in point? The Medium on the Xbox Series X. It’s fair to say that this isn’t a very well optimized game. However, the dual-world gameplay element can be very performance intensive when combined with ray-traced reflections. The only way Bloober Team managed to maintain reasonable performance on the Xbox Series X is by dropping resolution as low as 900p in those areas – almost ⅛ native 4K. Even the most advanced temporal upscaling techniques are limited when confronted with such a profound lack of pixels. As a result, image quality in The Medium on Series X ranges from acceptable to absolutely terrible. On PC, however, RTX series owners have the option of enabling DLSS. In performance mode, the GeForce RTX 3080 is able to stick closely to 4K/60 FPS, albeit with some dips into the 40 FPS range. It’s not ideal. However, image quality is a night-and-day improvement, despite DLSS upscaling from a 1080p base image.

This is the single biggest game changer we see if and when AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution debuts on console: developers will no longer need to resort to conventional upscaling techniques when performance limited. They can leverage Super Resolution to deliver great image quality without sacrificing performance or high-impact visual features like ray-tracing.

On the Sony side of things, games like Spider-Man: Miles Morales stand to benefit tremendously. With ray-tracing disabled, Miles Morales manages to deliver a 4K/60 experience, albeit with periodic dynamic resolution dips below. In the ray-tracing “fidelity” mode, you get a native 4K output, but only at 30 FPS. A ray-tracing performance mode does exist, but comes at a sharp cost in terms of resolution and even features like pedestrian density. Basically, native 4K/60 FPS is off the table on consoles when ray-tracing is enabled. FidelityFX Super Resolution could make this a moot point, however. If it offers image quality that at least approaches DLSS 2.0 in Performance mode, Super Resolution could enable developers to add in lavish ray-tracing and other high-end technical features without worrying about hitting a native 4K resolution target. This is a real “have your cake and eat it, too” situation. In upcoming games like Gran Turismo 7, that make extensive use of ray-tracing alongside high quality core assets, Super Resolution could be the key to great image quality and great overall visuals.

There is another way Super Resolution could change things: it could turn the Xbox Series S into a viable 4K machine. While Microsoft has heavily promoted the Series S as a 1440p or even 1080p machine, the fact is that the Xbox Series S can (and does) run a limited number of games at native 4K, such as Ori and the Will of the Wisp. Super Resolution could allow developers the option to offer native 4K output on the Series S across a wider range of games.

Implementation could be a game changer – or a dealbreaker

Right now, one of the biggest drawbacks to AMD’s Super Resolution feature is just how little we know about it. We don’t know how it works at a technical level (though tipsters hint that it’s a shader-based solution, much like “DLSS 1.9” in Control.) We don’t know when it’s coming out, and we don’t know about how in-game integration will work, apart from the fact that it’ll be cross-platform. AMD’s vague statements indicate that Super Resolution could even work on NVIDIA cards – though whether those need to be recent RTX cards or if it works on older parts remains to be seen.

From a console perspective, the biggest question here is just how difficult (or easy) will it be for developers to enable Super Resolution? Currently, adding DLSS 2.0 to games requires quite a bit of time for integration. The process is a whole lot easier than it was with DLSS 1.0 (which was trained on a per-game basis). However, it’s still a non-negligible amount of work which means that not all new titles ship with the feature. If Super Resolution is truly cross-platform as AMD claims and if it’s easy to integrate, we could see most (or even all) console titles ship with the feature replacing dynamic resolution scaling. If it’s harder to implement, we might see it limited to a smaller selection of AMD-sponsored titles.

Conclusion

AMD’s certainly taking its time to bring FidelityFX Super Resolution to the market. However, the little we know about the tech (that its cross-platform, likely shader-based, and will work on consoles) is nothing but good news for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S owners. If FidelityFX Super Resolution is easy to implement and delivers a genuine boost to image quality, it could be the transformative “secret sauce” that’ll help this generation of consoles stay relevant as performance-sapping ray-tracing becomes more and more important.

Reviews for the game were fairly unenthusiastic, criticizing its bland open world and repetitive mission structure. However, at a technical level, Bend’s work was impressive, pushing PlayStation 4 hardware hard. Just like Horizon Zero Dawn, we expect Days Gone to be a visual treat on PC. But just how does the new version stack up to the existing PlayStation code? Let’s take a look at some of the key improvements.

A higher resolution and higher frame rates

The two biggest wins on PC are in terms of performance and image quality. On the base PlayStation 4, Days Gone ran at a more or less stable 1080p/30 FPS, albeit with dips below when bigger crowds of “freakers” made it onscreen.

High-end PC parts like the GeForce RTX 3080 deliver over 5 times the raw compute of the PlayStation 4’s ancient Pitcairn GPU.  Bend specified support for “higher resolutions” and an “unlocked framerate.” Your specific PC configuration will determine just what this scale to. However, we do have some reference points. Days Gone’s official GPU requirements are the same as Horizon Zero Dawn’s, with the recommended specs calling for a Radeon RX 580 or GeForce GTX 1060.

This indicates that performance should be largely on par with Horizon Zero Dawn. If you have a GeForce RTX 3070/2080 Ti on up, this means that a locked 4K/60 FPS Days Gone experience should be viable, with some headroom to spare. This would mean better performance and image quality than the enhanced PlayStation 4 Pro port, allowing the high-quality artwork and animation to really shine through. These are easy PC wins, though, and Bend has indicated that it’s made improvements elsewhere, too.

It’s relevant to note here that the PlayStation 5 already runs Days Gone at 60 FPS via backwards compatibility. At double the framerate, the overall, moment-to-moment gameplay experience is much improved. On PC, we expect owners of high refresh rate monitors to hit even higher frame rates, assuming resolution is kept in check, open the door to a much more fluid gameplay experience.

Ultrawide support

Bend indicated that Days Gone will feature 21:9 support for gamers with ultrawide monitors. Open world titles with expansive vistas like Days Gone benefit massively from a wider presentation. While it’s not a must-have, ultrawide support is a great plus if you have one of those 34-in curved monster panels.

“Improved graphics”: Better LODs and higher quality shadows

Early on, Bend announced that Days Gone would feature “improved graphics” on PC, though it didn’t quite specify what that meant. A peek at Days Gone gameplay footage on PC gives us a clearer look, however.

In terms of visuals, we’re not really looking at a day-and-night improvement over the PlayStation 4 code. The PS4 version of the game was already one of the better-looking open world titles out on eighth-gen platforms. When it comes to the PC port, we’re seeing similarities here to Guerrilla’s work on the PC port of Horizon Zero Dawn.

Graphics improvements focus primarily on pushing level of detail and foliage rendering further out. Days Gone on PC features denser foliage with a significantly higher draw distance. In more open parts of the map, this can have a transformative impact on background visuals. Foliage isn’t the only area of improvement, however. Static and dynamic object LODs have improved. This means that high quality meshes are rendered in much further out into the scene, with minimal pop-in, something that’s furthered helped along by the move to SSD storage.

Shadow quality also sees iterative quality improvements. We’re looking at higher resolution shadows overall, and a more generous cut-off point for dynamic shadow cascades. This can make the games forest environments significantly more atmospheric.

Bend promised larger hordes of the game’s “freakers”/zombies. The PlayStation 4 code caps the onscreen freaker count to 300. This is a generous amount. However, the PC version dials things up, with up to 500 freakers rendered onscreen at time.

Bend’s crowd rendering tech was optimized for the PlayStation 4’s meagre Jaguar CPU cores. This means that higher freaker counts shouldn’t hammer current-gen CPUs that hard, fortunately.

Does Days Gone feature ray-tracing or AI upscaling on PC?

We’ve seen some console or multiplatform releases, re-release on PC with additional next-gen tech built in. Even on console, certain exclusives like Sony’s Spiderman received updates to enable ray-tracing.

Bend, however, has clarified that Days Gone on PC will feature neither DLSS AI upscaling or ray-tracing. There’s two ways to look at this. On the one hand, the lack of DLSS could be a problem for mid-range systems. If we look at PC performance in games like Horizon Zero Dawn, however, it’s clear that parts from the GeForce RTX 3070 on up will easily clear the 4K/60 mark at native resolution, making DLSS redundant. Moreover, the lack of ray-tracing could mean better performance across a wider range of hardware configurations. Sans advanced lighting, the visuals might not exactly stand up to current-gen standards. However, Days Gone was never a bad-looking game to start off with, so that’s largely a moot point.

Conclusion: an iterative improvement and a sign of what’s to come

Days Gone on PC isn’t going to be a revelatory experience. From what we’ve seen so far, it’ll hew to Guerrilla’s approach to Horizon Zero Dawn: minor touch ups to core assets, together with a more profound improvement to performance and image quality. At the end of the day, this is a PlayStation 4 game – running on PC isn’t going to magically turn it into a next-gen experience.

At the same time, it is an interesting portent of things to come. Sony’s newfound commitment to PC means that a whole host of other eighth-gen exclusives, from God of War to Bloodborne, could actually make their way over. And unlike older console ports (Dark Souls comes to mind here), the PC experience here isn’t fundamentally compromised.

From that perspective, Days Gone on PC is more about expectation setting when it comes to future PlayStation ports to the platform. What Bend has managed to do here makes us look forward to a higher quality bar for that Bloodborne port that just has to happen.

In terms of high-end features like ray-tracing, Days Gone indicates that Sony studios might not be looking at investing the time to add these in just for PC users. However, in the years to come, once the PlayStation 4 series is phased out, we’d expect to see eighth-gen re-releases targeted at both PC and PS5 that incorporate next-gen tech.

When it arrived in 2017, Resident Evil 7 was something of an eighth-Gen technical showcase. It leveraged the strengths of both the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One to great effect. The cramped interior environment were limited in scope but took the load off the consoles’ weak processors. Instead, the RE Engine focused on moment to moment, up-close visuals, with high fidelity models and spectacular material work. To top things off, Capcom aimed for and largely achieved a lock on 1080p/60 on both the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. At a technical level, Resident Evil 7 was an example of eighth-gen gaming done right: great visuals and atmosphere without compromising on performance.

Resident Evil Village comes out right at a time when eight gen consoles are pretty much outdated tech wise, with the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X already out on the market for months. In some ways, it’s launch mirrors that of Resident Evil 4, coming out right at the end of a generation, with Capcom leverage years of platform expertise to deliver better visual than you’d think those aging machines were capable of. In early 2005, with the Xbox 360 months away, Resident Evil 4 delivered a taste of seventh-Gen gaming on platforms like the GameCube and PlayStation 2, with high fidelity models, animated hair, dynamic light, and volumetric particle volumes. Here in 2021, we’re seeing Capcom doing something similar. Yes, Resident Evil Village is a cross-gen title. But it’s also Capcom taking their optimized Resident Evil 7 engine, dialling things up to 11 and delivering truly impressive visuals on everything from the base Xbox One on up. How does it stack up compared to its immediate predecessor, though? Let’s take a look!

Character models

Resident Evil 7 already offered up high fidelity character models. Each member of the Baker family was rendered flawlessly with polygon counts in the high five figures. Barring some of Naughty Dog’s work and the God of War reboot, these were easily some of the most detailed character models we’ve seen this entire generation. Skin rendering was a strong point, with Capcom’s great SSS implementation realistically depicting NPC skin in reaction to ambient light. Resident Evil 7 has impressive hair rendering for the time, but eighth-Gen constraints meant that Mia and other characters often wound up with a case of “spaghetti hair,” too sparse and broad.

Resident Evil Village takes the strengths of Resident Evil 7’s character rendering approach and elevates things. Dimitrescu has taken up the lion’s share of coverage about Resident Evil Village characters. While she’s super tall, what’s more impressive is the amount of detail Capcom’s managed to add to her character model and those of other key NPCs revealed so far. It’s a clear step up from Resident Evil 7. We’re looking at higher poly-counts and better quality hair rendering. More importantly, though, incidental objects, like clutter and items on desks receive a major boost to fidelity. The great characters ate up most of Resident Evil 7’s polygon budget. But here, we see more of a ninth-gen orientation, with incidental objects getting a level of care that’s simply missing in the previous game, without compromising on the characters themselves.

World and Environment

Resident Evil 7 was set in a single (well, technically two) sprawling houses on the Baker family estate. As the name suggests, however, Resident Evil Village is considerably larger in scope, set in what appears to be a remote village in Romania. Exterior environments were a weak point for Resident Evil 7, though not necessarily for the RE Engine itself – Monster Hunter Rise being a recent case in point. In Resident Evil 7, the few exteriors available were tightly confined corridor-like spaces. This was a necessary compromise, considering the game’s visual quality and performance profile. Resident Evil Village, on the other hand, opens things up considerably, with what’s effectively a mini open world.

While there is, of course a lot more hand-holding and barred off areas than you’d see in the likes of Red Dead Redemption 2, this is a big move forward for the Resident Evil franchise. The open world structure also means that side quests are coming to the game, which could considerably increase length and replayability. Resident Evil 7 was a singularly focused experience. However, this led to playtimes as low as 8 hours, not factoring in DLC. A broader experience would be a welcome experience, though Capcom will have to balance quality with bloat – something that didn’t happen with 2012’s Resident Evil 6.

Lighting, Effects, and Post-Processing

Resident Evil Village’s wintry village environment makes for a qualitatively different visual milieu compared to the decaying bayou in Resident Evil 7. This has a tangible impact on Capcom’s artist direction with regards to lighting and effects, as well as technical implications.

Resident Evil 7 made frequent use of volumetric particles for its dust, soot, and general murkiness. This was something that contributed greatly to the game’s visual appeal. Most lights were dynamic, but this was viable from a performance perspective because of the environment – mostly poorly-lit interiors. With Resident Evil Village, there’s a much greater emphasis on exterior environments. And while houses and underground areas are as oppressively disgusting as we’re used to from RE, wintry outdoor areas have a “clearer” look, for lack of a better term. Sky lighting is a new feature here, with the skylight appearing to cast dynamic shadows in exterior scenes. This likely contributes to the massive performance differential on eighth-gen consoles between Resident Evil Village and Resident Evil 7. The end results are, however, frequently spectacular. Resident Evil Village incorporates ray-tracing. However, the effect is fairly subtle. We’re looking at a combination of ray-traced global illumination and ray-traced reflections. The global illumination adds a layer of depth to indirect shadows, above and beyond what the game’s already-capable ambient occlusion implementation manages: this accentuates the atmosphere in interiors, as do the ray-traced reflections.

Compared to Resident Evil 7, Village pares back post-processing effects. It’s not so much that they’re absent as it is an aesthetic choice: film-grain, light bleed and other effects were all part of Resident Evil 7’s visual set, evoking found-footage films. Village, on the other hand, opts for a tamer post-process pipeline, something that adds to image clarity on a scene-to-scene basis.

Conclusion

Resident Evil Village is a cross-gen title, but at first glance, it’s a clear step above the visual quality we’re used to on eighth-gen platforms. Capcom appears to have wrung every drop of power out of the aging PlayStation 4 and Xbox One to deliver visuals that wouldn’t look out of place in a launch-day ninth-gen title. This doesn’t mean that the next-gen platforms haven’t received love. Apart from improved performance, ray-tracing is a subtle, yet significant improvement. In the years to come, we expect Resident Evil Village to be something of a visual benchmark to measure future ninth-gen titles against.

Let’s take a closer look at the significant next-gen features in action from the available gameplay footage.

Engine overview

WB Games Montréal will be utilising the Unreal Engine 4 to create Gotham Knights in a similar vein to the previous Arkham games, which were made in Unreal Engine 3. UE4 provides some useful features to be utilised behind the scenes and a significant number are noticeable in the released gameplay footage.  The high-quality post-processing which includes the motion blur, bloom, lens flare, chromatic aberration and depth of field are staple UE4 effects which can be noticeably distinguished. Particle effects including volumetric fog and sparks are also rendered in real time thanks to UE4. In the scene where Mr. Freeze starts up his gun, snow particles can be seen dynamically reacting in real time to the motion of the gun.

The characters also feature advanced shading models with each material displaying a unique reaction to light rays hitting them and with subsurface scattering visible on the face and eye textures of the main characters.

Models, texture quality, and environmental asset quality

The PS5 and the Xbox Series X feature higher VRAM than their respective predecessors, both including a 16 GB of combined RAM space for CPU and GPU usage. Gotham Knights is making great use of the higher memory capabilities with high resolution 4K textures both for character models and the environmental assets. Whether it’s flopping capes of justice, the suits, snow-covered roads, intricately designed interiors, or Mr. Freeze’s distinctive face and armor, those high-fidelity textures are a cut above the eighth-gen standard and pair well with the high fidelity in-game models.

The same goes for model quality, as even in cinematic close-up shots the seams and edges of both the protagonist and the complicated mechanical design of the Mr. Freeze blend smoothly. The game’s clothing features some high-quality material based reflectance characteristics, with each component scattering the light rays with realistic detail depending on the underlying material texture. Skin shading with sub surface scattering is also visible under the detailed wrinkles, pores or lips of the character models.

For some reason, hair seem to be a significant weak point in some next-gen titles and even here, Batgirl’s longer hair is lumped into a singular entity as if affixed by a gel. We’ve seen better quality strand rendering. The quality of the hair texture and its reaction to light sources is still presentable, however.

Lighting and shadow quality

Gotham Knights isn’t officially confirmed to have ray-tracing yet and we don’t see the technique in play in current gameplay footage, but considering how frequently developers are deploying ray-tracing – Spider-Man: Miles Morales is a good example – it is entirely possible it could be added later on. Gotham’s neon lighting and ever-present puddles have the potential to look great with ray-traced reflections.

Raster-based global illumination and screen space reflections both make the cut, however. Light bounce is visible in gameplay trailers, with transference from dynamic light sources. The screen space reflections look fine, too, though, as always with SSR, temporal stability is an issue. WB Montreal also makes great use of dynamic lighting, from flashy electric sparks to the glow of unique weapons each character uses: these light up the environment and nearby particle volumes of snow and smoke. The volumetric fog present is equally affected by dynamic lights as is seen whenever a coloured super attack is utilised, such as batgirl’s red-lit circle of bats.

It’s interesting to note that, compared to other third-person action titles, we’re seeing a higher volume of particles visible on screen for longer periods of time: the extra GPU headroom from the next-gen consoles means that WB Montreal can afford a more lax. Sparks of fire or electricity fall to the ground and bounce before dissipating, all hinting at a higher particle limit than previous gen consoles.

Shadows are also affected by the dynamic lighting and feature a form of contact-hardening, visibly getting softer as their distance from the light source increases, as seen in the final boss encounter with the huge tower of light.

UE4’s deferred rendering pipeline is being leveraged to great extent here with multiple dynamic light sources in action which include particle effects, sky-lighting, and a large number of point light sources at a time.

Post-processing

When it comes to console gaming, post-process effects are one of the first to be axed whenever a gain in performance is to be attained. Thankfully, next-gen consoles offer enough processing power in the post-processing pipeline to avoid these reductions in quality and bring them at par with standard PC post-processing levels.

A superior depth-of-field effect, and per object and camera motion blur at high sample counts are visible throughout the fight scenes as well as when driving down the road in the bat-bike contraption.

There is tasteful use of bloom such as when the lightning strikes, though this is reined in in other circumstances, such as electric gun blasts, to stay in line with the overall art style.

The ambient occlusion implementation has a high sample count with accurate shading on surfaces like the grilles on ramps or large vehicles.

While it isn’t visible here, we expect WB Montreal to use UE4’s high-quality temporal upsampling for dynamic resolution scaling. While it isn’t on par with DLSS, temporal scaling can offer reasonable image quality, even at lower resolutions, while keeping AA artifacts minimized.

On the PC side of things, NVIDIA also launched the DLSS plugin for the Unreal Marketplace a while back. Easy implementation means that we’ll likely see DLSS upscaling implemented on the PC version of the game for considerable performance gains.

Conclusion

As it stands now, Gotham Knights is graphically well-crafted game that wouldn’t look too out of place in a Series X or PS5 library. It is, however, lacking a number of features like ray-tracing and advanced hair physics. This is likely because of the fact that’s built as a cross-gen title. It will be interesting to see whether or not WB Montreal drops the previous-gen versions entirely, which could open the door to more ambitious visuals

Released back in 2014 after multiple delays, DriveClub was unfortunately the victim of a terrible launch with server issues and public disinterest due to competing titles. As it stands, DriveClub’s online servers have officially been shut down in March 2020 and the studio behind it, Evolution, dissolved. Looking back at the game though, it is undoubtedly one of the best looking racing games of the eighth gen of consoles.

Engine Overview

A lot of this had to do with the way the developers approached the Engine, aptly named DriveClub Engine. This engine was built specifically with the game in mind and was hoped to sustain games throughout the PS4 life cycle, though unfortunately the studio was of course shut down eventually.

The engine was built around making everything as dynamic as possible with minimal “baked” effects involved. The incredible dynamic weather and time-of-day effects were courtesy fully volumetric cloud systems and a mixture of rendering systems. Featuring deferred rendering, tile-based rendering and forward rendering being utilised simultaneously to create this physically based rendering pipeline, each surface could be meticulously given reflectivity and gloss properties in real-time, allowing for some incredible material-based reflections. Particles were rendered in real-time as well allowing for the best looking rain and snow effects seen in a video game to date, with individual droplets reflecting lights, reacting to the dynamic environmental wind system and even streaking across the windshield based on the momentum of the vehicle. Roads would accumulate puddles dynamically based on the amount of rain and temperature while surfaces as far as the mountain top to the asphalt would reflect light based on the level of wetness, possible due to that physically based rendering pipeline.

Even the vehicles themselves were created with accurate CAD models from the manufacturers themselves when possible and coated with multiple physical layers ranging from metal to paint and gloss. Collisions would then be calculated based on the impact angles and each layer would be deformed in real time as needed, from simple paint chips to bent metal, which would then reflect light and react to water independently. Detailed screen space reflections and shadows would be taken into account for all these surfaces, with dirt on the windshield diffusing the sunlight, after the volumetric clouds had diffused it, while headlights would actually contain light sources refracted by the plastic and glass casings. Even the thin film interference effects forming a rainbow on the glass would be rendered in real-time. All of this was then refreshed at a stable 30 FPS, while having extremely low controller latency even after performing the physics calculations needed for handling a vehicle, such as the car and tyre frictions.

Even the anti-aliasing was given multiple layers, utilising a mixture of pixel-based system, temporal-based, FXAA and material-based systems. On top of it was another layer for rectifying any other jagged edges in sight. Other post processing effects such as depth of field, motion blur and bloom were implemented atop this rendered image to create the illusion of high speed. Even the LOD streaming was spot on for all the surfaces in view, with rare texture pop-ins in the distance.

Clearly, this game and its engine were way ahead of it’s time. To this day, DriveClub looks incredible and the only limitation would be the 1080 30FPS cap, lack of ray tracing, occasional texture pop-ins or jagged edges and the texture resolutions.

What A Potential PS5 Patch Could Do

Over on the PS4 Pro, it was never patched with higher resolution textures. The former director did confirm it will never receive any updates, although it was technically possible, but we believe the potential for it to shine on the next gen systems is stellar.

With the PS5 sporting an SSD, higher resolution textures could be loaded in at incredible speeds eliminating any pop ups seen in the field of view. Everything from the particles to the environmental density could be further scaled up to make the already realistic looking game more grounded. The additional VRAM overhead could be utilised to further add post-processing effects to remove the very rare aliasing present on surfaces, or the lack of details in textures further than a few meters from the camera.

All of this could be neatly bundled into a 60 FPS experience which would make driving the cars feel even more exhilarating and attention-gripping. Slap on some raytracing instead of the screen-space reflections, and the already incredible dynamic lighting system would be unbeatable in the even in the current market. The DualShock 5 controller which also features haptic feedback and rumble would be the cherry on the cake with each button having different levels of force needed such as the brakes or the clutch, and the rumble of every different texture the car could drive through reflected accurately in the DualShock rumble motors.

The game engine and game holds promise to be scaled up into the next-gen hardware and though Sony has a slate of games ready for arrival on next-gen showcase, Gran Turismo 7 by Polyphony Digital among them, DriveClub would serve to further showcase the beauty of next-gen scaling.

Hopefully there are similar thoughts thrown around at the Sony HQ and somebody is given hold of the IP to patch it into the 9^th generation of console, because it sure as heck deserves it.

With a release date of March 26^th 2021, with ninth-gen consoles already firmly entrenched, Monster Hunter Rise has its work cut out for it if it wants to impress today’s audiences.

Let’s take a closer look at the significant features presented in the available gameplay footage.

Engine overview

This is the first time the RE Engine is being used on Nintendo Switch hardware. The RE Engine is a proven powerhouse, at the heart of games such as Resident Evil 7, The RE remakes, and the upcoming Resident Evil Village, all of which have some of the best-looking visuals in the AAA market.

To utilise the Engine on Switch though, the developers had to scale down certain features. This is understandable considering that Capcom had previously tried porting Resident Evil 7 to the switch, but the performance limitations rendered it unplayable. It’s likely that Capcom has tweaked the RE Engine considerably to work well in this specific game.

Considering that the RE Engine can scale up to 4K resolution with HDR support and a VR specific mode, there  are definitely features being left on the table. If/when a Nintendo Switch Pro comes out, we might just some of this being implemented – in particular, improvements to the low resolution artwork currently in the game.

Even with the lower quality textures, though, the visuals are some of the best we’ve seen on Switch to date. Better yet,  the game targets a solid 30 FPS and mostly sticks to in.

One of the main features of the RE engine is photorealistic shading and material rendering. The main character models display that in close shots. Even the monsters have incredible model detail with the individual feathers or scales being visible when up close. Texture quality could use improvement, but that has more to do with the Switch’s memory limitations.

Models, texture quality, and environmental asset quality

The models utilised in this game for the main characters and the monsters are extremely detailed, and so are the textures applied to them.

Unfortunately, the environmental assets have taken a huge hit in this regard to keep the game at a steady 30 FPS. There are very notable repeating textures on walls and rocks, from dirt to lines of snow. Textures on doors or trees can look very underwhelming when observed up close. So much so, it appears that Capcom intentionally held back on applying high fidelity textures globally  to avoid the Switch’s VRAM limitations. If there’s ever been a Switch game asking for a high res texture pack, it’s this one.

The contrast is very evident between the high detail models and textures used on the actual player characters, weapons, armours, and monsters, and the rest of the environment. Moment to moment gameplay looks great, but the hit to texture quality could impact slower paced exploration segments.

Lighting and shadow quality

Coming to the lighting and shadow quality though, the RE Engine once again delivers strong results. This is the same engine used to provide incredibly photorealistic lighting in the Resident Evil games.

Monster Hunter Rise dips into this feature set with high quality lighting and reflections. Reflective surfaces such as water leverage SSR (screen space reflections).  Simple reflective surfaces also reflect any dynamic lights around it as long as they are visible.

Characters and monsters feature detailed subsurface scattering effects on their skin and scales. Global and ambient shadows are present throughout scenes of battle but especially so in the player hub area.

There is of course no ray tracing at play here, considering the Switch doesn’t contain Ray Tracing hardware.

Post-processing

Post-processing on Nintendo games is always a treat. What Nintendo games often can’t make up for in terms of graphics owing to their weaker hardware, they do so in visual and aesthetic styling. A colourful palette and tasteful effects can go a long way, as in Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

Monster Hunter Rise tries to capture a similar aesthetic, but only to an extent. It seems the developers instead went for a mix of the gritty colours seen in Monster Hunter World and the vibrant palette of the past Monster Hunter games and Switch games in general.

The result is an interesting mix of vibrant HUD and weapon and damage effects, paired with gritty looking environments and monsters. The game could have utilised a more distinct style to make it stand out, but the current effects try to ground it in a form of reality.

As for the other effects such as particles, the RE Engine is capable of rendering multiple particles volumes  simultaneously. While fighting monsters, especially in co-op, you often end up lost in a flurry of lighting effects flashing all over the screen. But despite the complexity of these effects,  the frame rate seldom dips below 30.

Water and fire effects are also surprisingly detailed: water caustics is in play, adding depth to splash effects, and fire lasts on environmental assets. Again, however,  certain effects such as bubbles look incredibly cartoonish and this can be attributed to the weird blend of aesthetic: that the developers have gone for.

Ambient occlusion is utilised but in a rather pared back form. Its evident in hub areas and the characters and monsters themselves. However, the low draw distance means it’s often hard to see in the environment. It’s a subtle effect, though on portable devices, so not a big loss.

Hopefully these tinier details will be fleshed out if or when  a more powerful Switch arrives or perhaps even in  the rumoured PC port. But even  as it stands, Monster Hunter Rise is an incredibly good-looking game for Switch and aesthetically pleasing with a blend of realism and vibrancy.

Conclusion

Pushing the limits of the Switch hardware and featuring some extremely enjoyable gameplay, Monster Hunter Rise is looking like a game worthy of stealing the limelight among all the other next gen games coming out this year. It might not stand up to ninth-Gen quality standards, but Capcom have clearly pushed the Switch’s mobile hardware to its limits to great effect.

Engine overview

At this point of time, Unreal 4 is familiar, well-trodden territory. While it hasn’t seen the kind of third-party licensing success as Unreal 3, this is an engine of choice for AA efforts from studios like People Can Fly. You have an accomplished deferred rendering setup in place, allowing for a large number of dynamic light sources at a time. Both DirectX 12 and DirectX 11 code paths exist. What’s interesting is that it’s the same core technology that Borderlands 3 is built on. It’ll be interesting to see what directions People Can Fly tale things compared to Gearbox. People Can Fly have outed a positively massive amount of gameplay content for Outriders over the past couple months.

This is great since it offers a solid basis for analysis. Based on what we’ve seen so far, however, People Can Fly hasn’t exactly pushed the envelope. When the initial trailer was outed last May, some outlets described the game as appearing like something that “came out of 2008.” While the brownish palette and sci-fi militarism are a nice throwback, many of People Can Fly’s technical decisions seem retrograde too, which is much less of a good thing. All in all, this is much more of a cross-gen title than we expected. And, arguably, even if it had released exclusively on eighth gen a year ago, Outriders wouldn’t exactly have won any awards for its visuals. What does it get right? And what could have been improved? Let’s take a look

Lighting and shadow rendering

Gameplay scenes in Outriders feel strangely flat. It’s hard to put your finger on exactly what’s wrong until focusing more closely on the game’s lighting setup. Between Lightmass global illumination and a scalable deferred rendering solution that allows for a large number of shadow-casting light sources on-scene at once without too much of a performance hit, Unreal 4 has the potential to deliver great lighting. Unfortunately, Outriders isn’t exactly a shining example of this. In interior scenes such as caves, we saw a disappointingly limited number of shadow-casting lights. While sky lighting (from the sun) casts player and NPC shadows in exteriors, interior details like an animal carcass hanging over a fire don’t seem to cast dynamic shadows. This is puzzling since this is something even old games managed to do. Presumably, this is a performance-oriented optimization to ensure that the game runs at a steady 60 FPS clip across the next-gen platforms. But as a result of this, there are plenty of areas in the game that, at first inspection, wouldn’t hold up even in a standard eighth-gen title.

We do see a reasonable number of dynamic light sources (albeit not shadow-casting ones), including muzzle flash and explosions. Puzzlingly, even certain explosion effects used unlit particles, resulting in some very flat-looking scenes.

Ray-tracing and DLSS? Nope!

Outriders will not feature ray-tracing. Considering its relatively less ambitious asset quality, ray-traced reflections and shadowing could have been implemented without too much of a performance hit. After all, this is a game where the recommended GPU for 1080p/60 FPS is the GeForce GTX 1060. There is definitely enough performance headroom for RTX graphics cards to run ray-tracing effects and even to make that an option on the console outings.

While ray-tracing is absent, People Can Fly have opted to include NVIDIA’s DLSS 2.0 technology. This is a fantastic addition and could potentially make 4K/144 Hz gaming a possibility on cards like the GeForce RTX 3080 and GeForce RTX 3090. DLSS 2.0 reconstructs the frame leveraging deep learning and, in cases like Control, the results are nothing short of phenomenal: near-native or better than native image quality with a massive boost to performance. Since Outriders doesn’t feature RTX effects, baseline performance is expected to be high and DLSS will only push things further.

Asset quality and material rendering

We’d say Outriders features decent character and environmental models – if it were an eighth-gen exclusive title. As it stands, however, asset quality is disappointing. People Can Fly make use of relatively low-polygon character models during gameplay. While substantially higher quality assets do make their appearance in cutscenes, much of the time, the game brings to mind earlier Gears of War titles, and not necessarily in a good way. Material rendering is par for the course, with  a physically based material rendering pipeline. Certain assets like rocks and exterior surfaces look good enough. However, material quality really isn’t where it ought to be at, even in cutscenes.

Post-processing effects

Outriders makes full use of Unreal 4’s post-process suite and in this area, at least, the visual takeaway is decent. We see a high sample count motion blur implementation, both per-object and for the camera. Screen-space reflections are in place, fleshing out puddles and other highly-reflective surfaces. We were also pleasantly surprised by the ambient occlusion quality: Outriders is a bit heavy-handed with AO, but AO adds considerably to scenes that would be otherwise flat due to the lack of dynamic shadowing. Bokeh depth of field is also in play, though it’s considerably more noticeable in cutscenes.

Conclusion

Outriders isn’t going to win any awards for its visuals. It wouldn’t exactly have impressed if it came out in 2016. But while the visuals are a disappointment, gameplay looks to be Outriders’ strong suit, with Gears of War-style snap cover and more than a little Bulletstorm DNA in the mix. Even if the graphics don’t impress, we expect performance to be Outriders’ real savior. The game’s minimum specs indicate that even the ancient GeForce GTX 750 Ti will be able to deliver a 60 FPS experience, albeit at 1080. The min specs are actually a shade lower than Mass Effect: Legendary Edition, remarkable considering that the latter is a 7th gen remaster. Whether or not it looks good in the process, Outriders looks set to be one of the most performance-friendly titles we’ve seen in a while.