Hello fellow PCMASTERRACERS!
I hereby submit my result after analyzing gameplay footage from the 4K gameplay video from AC: O running off the Xbone X:
NOTES in advance of report
NOTE 1 - All pictures are raw, directly taken from the 2160p source video of IGN's 20'minute gameplay video(s) on youtube.
NOTE 2 - I know there are compression to some extent, but nowhere near as much as on 1080p utube videos and shouldn't affect the visuals all too much.
NOTE 3 - I know that this from an early Alpha build, but I doubt that all of those textures i mention in my pictures are gonna be replaced/reworked. The reason the textures look low-res are NOT because of video compression but the fact that they are of a lower resolution due to LOW or MEDIUM preset for the Textures setting, because that's necessary sacrifices needed for the console to run this build at 30 FPS.
NOTE 4 - I'm a die hard PcMasterRace person myself, I mostly play in 4K on my 980Ti, I will soon upgrade it I promise. I hate consoles, because I think that they (among other things) are holding back the technical development and advancement of real-time graphics in games.
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My report:
As we can clearly see, the graphical fidelity and settings has been significantly toned down to allow the new console to output a higher resolution without dropping down to a slideshow. Take note that Ubisoft used Checkerboard rendering so it's not true 4K like that little derp Phil Spencer lied about in the presentation.
Here's some things I've noticed.
Terrain seem to use some form of bump or normal or parallax mapping, a low quality version of some sort, but only in some places, not all. For walls and floors, stone walls, stone floors etc NO Parallax Occlusion Mapping or Tessellation seem to be in use. The lack of HBAO or any proper Ambient Occlusion is evident. Water shader stops rendering around 20-30 yards out. Reflections are low-res and inaccurate. Soft particles and smoke (from chimneys for example) are not affected by wind, examples of where that's the case is: Crysis 1 (2007) The Division (2016). Low-res shadows, short shadows rendering distance, incorrectly rendered shadows (baked?) In some scenes (example of this is visible in the final picture) Shadows are badly rendered, not starting where it's supposed to, for example from NPC's the shadows starts rendering after some distance from the characters feet. Shadow LOD are severe, and quality drops fast with distance, blocky inaccurate shadows.
Low-res textures EVERYWHERE, it's evident that this is LOW or maybe Medium settings for the textures, I've honestly seen better textures in both Half-life 2 and Overwatch. Textures are streaming, evidently, and just like Original Crysis, the distant textures for the mountains are really low-res. This could easily be fixed with the e_texturesstreaming=0 command.
Normalmaps are clunky and seemingly low-res as well. Cut-scenes are getting boosted graphics, just like previous AC games. Example: Bushes moves nice in the wind in cuts-scenes but not in the same way during gameplay. Implementation of SubSurface Scattering can be noted on some materials, for example the cloth on the shop-stands on the streets in the villages, however it is very poorly implemented and too much light passes through. Some cloth doesn't even have this effect.
Level of detail (LOD) is really bad, scaled back in favor for the consoles limited compute power. We can see LOTS of sprites, starting even rather close to the character and just increases with distance, noted are that the sprites are of quite low resolution. In Crysis 1, we could set the resolution of sprites from 16x16-128x128, default was 64 I believe, at 128 they looked better than the sprites used in AC: O on the settings used during this gameplay. Houses are rendered, but LOD keeps them very simple in the distance. I know, for a fact that previous AC games had bad LOD for both textures, objects etc even on highest possible settings on PC. So this could be forgiving if that's also the case with AC: O.
Lighting is flat, and I spot no sign of any form of Global Illumination or Voxel based lighting systems. Lighting also seem rather simple to be honest, where surfaces picks up too much brightness and are overexposed, just like if the contrast ratio of lighting contra materials are quite limited. In my opinion even the lighting in the CryEngine2 is better than in this game.
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Conclusion:
I think it's rather pathetic that Sony and Microsoft are pushing 3840x2160 before anything else, PC hardware manufacturers has just begun to provide us with hardware capable of 4K gaming at reasonable framerates, and with the limited compute power of the new consoles they are doing EVERYTHING they can to try to play in the same field, which obviously is impossible, so they are instead lying, throwing false PR at their base of users with expressions such as "4K Console" etc, Highlighting the words "4K and 60 FPS" in the same sentence.
Examples: Look at AC: O, not only does it NOT run native 4K resolution, but also at a mere 30 FPS. Look at Metro: Exodus, presented first to the world at the Xbox event, even with the Xbox outro with the Xbox sign, but the truth? The truth is that it ran on gaming PC! All the lies, all the false PR stunts combined makes me sick.
When I say "they are doing EVERYTHING they can" I mean it. More examples: They are not rendering in native 4K, using checkerboard and dynamic resolutions and stills screams "True 4K" They are scaling back the graphical settings to allow for 4K or 4K-ish resolutions. Sacrificing graphical fidelity and eye-candy to market their false 4K BS!
What does all this breed you may ask? Well ironically, despite more capable console hardware, developers are even more held back now than even before because they can't push the graphics on 4K as they could on 720p or 1080p. And they are reasoning like this: They don't want the PC version of their game to be so far ahead of the console version, because that is gonna hurt sales. And profit is everything these days. So they try to keep all versions of their game in the same ballpark = PC version gets held back, and as mentioned earlier, even more so now than before, because devs must take 4K into account this time. As a 4K gamer for a couple of years back, I know what the resolution 3840x2160 demands from hardware, ESPECIALLY when effects like Ambient Occlusion, Depth of field, Volumetric Lighting and particles are involved, they strike the framerate with brutal force and consoles are FAR from the point of handing that, you need at least 11 TFOPS of Single precision compute performance in the graphics department alone, and a very capable CPU to keep the framerate up along with it. 6 TFLOPS and an ancient CPU? PFffff...........
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Other than that, I can't say I'm exited about this game, looks like just another Copy-Paste from LazySoft, BugiSoft, GreedySoft, DowngradeSoft... As an old Swedish expression tells: Beloved child has many names.
Submitted by soetdjur | #Specialdealer Special Offer Online Shopping Store 2016
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