All,
I've spent the better part of 6 months playing some of the best games on the PC that has come out since the next-generation of consoles started. Here are some impressions that I've gathered about some of the games I've picked that covers pretty much every single tech that's out there including on the PS5/XSX exclusives.
1) Lighting
While we've come a long way with going towards RT for the foreseeable future, I'm still having a lot of complaints about lighting in general. We still see the old light probe GI solutions in most of the games that have come out since this generation has started. It's really really annoying to see that game companies are still satisfied with light probes for representing bounced light when objects are in shadow. I love the fact that games like Control, Metro, Crysis Remake and Cyberpunk has decided to enhance the experience by using RT for GI. However, Cyberpunk is suffering greatly with ambient occlusion. I'm still seeing the same old code from Witcher 3 in Cyberpunk and it's annoying:
The characters look horrible in the shade. Their clothes and skin literally look like constant ambient light has been put on them. CDPR wasted their resources on getting the RT ambient occlusion in for larger objects but completely abandoned casting rays on the characters clothes. Even their walking on the ground shows very light occlusion ultimately making the character look like they are floating on the surface.
2) Area Lights
Contrast that with what CDPR *did* get right and that's area lights. This is probably one of the most important forms of accurate rendering lights. The realworld has lights that are oddly shaped and not just spheres or arrows. Implementing area lights in a game is considered paramount to getting good local light sources.
3) NPCs, Fallbacks of SSAO
We are just now getting to the point where we can do full on subsurface scattering in gameplay and not worry about the massive hit in framerates. The hair shading still has a ways to go but adding a couple of specular terms in the hair, adding in the best PBR shading, higher res textures and you are closer to in-game cinematics - still aways off though. The other fallback is in SSAO. While it's great for still objects, it still rears it's ugly head. In this video, you can see it misses some items on the table and it disappears when an object is front of the view camera.
4) Baked lighting is still a good solution for now
Baked lightmaps and ambient occlusion is still a good solution for now when you set the scene up properly. You won't see the dynamic lighting but it will not suffer from the above mentions in games that want to utilize dynamic TOD, dynamic lights or dynamic objects in the scene. Demon Souls looks so good because they implemented this old tried and true system. There is an Indie game called Mortal Shell that is very similar to DS in both art direction and technology. Here is some gameplay that doesn't show any of the weaknesses in lighting that I was mentioning but it does use static objects, shadows, etc..
5) Better PBR without using RT
Microsoft's Flight Simulator has got me very excited for what's to come. They have hit all the nails on the heads in terms of graphics tech and it shows. This PBR shader usage is pretty much the best I've seen and I'd imagine that games like GT7 will look like this on their cars. If we could only get this quality for in-game characters.
6) Environment Lighting + FX
Again FS2020 is top dog here. I've studied several aspects of their lighting engine and I can't find any weaknesses at all. They are literally sampling the entire sky when they shade objects on the ground. I would love to read the paper on how they did this without ray-tracing. It reminds me of Lumen in the UE5 demo. They aren't using any tricks to do this like 99% of all games out there where the clouds aren't a part of the lighting equation or MIE scattering isn't being utilized.
7) Cloud FX Rendering
This has got to be a first for finally moving away from facing ratio sprite cards. FS2020's cloud rendering uses true 3D volume textures with literally no aliasing, light attenuation, and procedural noise shaders with implicit surfaces all deforming in realtime. The only fallback I see in this technique is there isn't enough layers of 3D texture. You can tell this when flying through them. This is obviously to limit bandwidth constraints. I would love to revisit 4-5yrs from now and see if we can adjust the resolution of these 3D volumes to maybe 64-128 z-levels to see how the GPU handles it.
8) Photogrammetry
We need more of this technique. It was done first in Star Wars battlefront I believe and those textures looked stellar. I know it's a lot of prep work to implement properly and would raise costs of the budget much higher, but you really can't beat true photography.
I'm excited for what's ahead but at the same time I'm very cautious. I don't expect all games to start having these things correct out the gate this generation. MFS2020 is clearly designed with future hardware in mind and RT is a bandwidth hog. We might see only a handful of games doing a lot of these features at once. But anything is better than nothing.