TIME has shared some really interesting animated GIFs, showcasing some of Ubisoft’s titles. Now while we all agree that Ubisoft’s games are plagued by the very same “issues/features“, thus making them a bit repetitive and predictable, we can all agree that they at least look beautiful.
Of course we always prefer gameplay over graphics, however these GIFs show how close to reality Ubisoft’s games have actually come.
Below you can find some comparisons between the real world locations and four video-games from Ubisoft: The Division, Watch_Dogs, Far Cry and Ghost Recon: Wildlands.
Enjoy!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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Almost any poor graphics can look slightly real in such a low resolution image and with the right shot.
So the Xbox One?
Games are still far away from reality in terms of visuals, which is visible even looking at those tiny images.
And remember, this comparison doesn’t show closeups, animations and physics, and that’s where the devil is. Foliage is comprised of a few intersected planes, pebbles won’t pop out from gravel if you shoot at the ground, because they’re just part of the texture. Water doesn’t behave like water and people move like robots. There are of course tons of such examples, which together make us see worlds shown in games as something artificial.
Also, as NoClipMode (and I) said, those images have low resolution, which makes it way easier to hide the shortcomings of contemporary real-time graphics.
No.
And why do you disagree?
We’d be even closer if those games were developed for the high end, rather than low end consoles.
We won’t see much use for high end GPU’s if every year brings us closer to a list of games designed for low end cards and CPUs
Hell Nvidia are showing off Volta with a FFXV game we aren’t likely to get in terms of visuals.
That’s why I hope Project Scorpio does what Microsoft promises. They may push the envelope for consoles a bit.
We’d need all 3 to do that, otherwise the market would still be catering to the lowest out of the 3. We need all of them to ramp up their hw game and stick to a higher standard, that way everyone else has a new bar to climb up, rather than the bar below to hang onto.
I agree, but I think the success of Scorpio would burn Sony and they would have to contrive its counterpart, and increase the lowest common denominator.
The third player, Nintendo, doesn’t give a crap about TFLOPS. Their strength is in creativity. No-one waits for them and gimps visuals for their sake.
By the way, I don’t think consoles will ever be better than PCs. Desktops are custom-built, so they always have less restrictions than pre-built consoles for the masses. Therefore, PCs can and often will outperform consoles. This means having “the bar below to hang onto” will always be a thing.
I dunno, EA and others are starting to do business with Ninty and their Switch,rather than outright ignoring them completely.
For the Scorpio to burn Sony, it would need to sell a crap ton in order to make a difference in who gets catered to first.
I don’t think that will be the case. The PS4, PS4 PRO and XBONE and XBONE Scorpio all dwarf the WiiU and Switch in performance and you don’t see many dev’s optimizing their games for the switch or WiiU do you?
Dev’s will always optimize for the most popular systems. If we want better looking titles on PC, we have to do whatever we can to make the PC platform more popular. Which means increase accessibility for new gamers or console converts (lol) and increase the ease of use for console/new players coming to PC.
I see some devs already flocking to the Switch tbh. I don’t see bamco announcing the upcoming One Piece game for PC, PS4 and Switch only as far as I can see, so devs clearly do care and cater to the Switch, seems more so than to announce PC at the same time. Hell I’m expecting them to announce it a year later and be a port based entirely on the Switch, textures and all, just like how Pirate Warriors 3 was the PS3 version on PC and PS4 got the superior version.
Expect to see Switch sales fade away fairly soon.
Textures are mostly fine at this point, what still needs some serious work to resemble real life is lightening.
And models. And animations. And particle effects. Those are often poor and break the illusion.
And Physics! That’s one of the most neglected parts of games today. Physics has a direct impact on fun and immersion.
I’d say latest version of Cryengine with their Sparse Voxel Octree Total Illumination technology has taken a huge step towards more realistic realtime lighting, color and shading. Kingdom Come: Deliverance for example has some breathtaking visuals when tweaked correctly. Unreal Engines lighting, it just doesn’t have that dynamic and depth that CE has, instead it looks kinda overdone and artificial.
Yeah Kingdom Come looks very impressive, can’t wait to get my hands on that game.
Talking of all-things voxels, I wish more games would feature VXAO because it looked stunning in Rise of the Tomb Raider. HBAO+ is pretty good but VXAO is incredible.
Almost close. The photographs need more bloom, sharper shadows and chromatic aberration to achieve the video game look.
Don’t forget cinematic 24fps!
Computer graphics of objects at distance have looked quite nice for a while. Project Gotham Racing 3 – back at the launch of the Xbox 360 – released comparison photos between real-life buildings and their in-game equivalents that could be hard to tell which was which.
The problem these days is largely looking at things close up. Shadows still look terrible, textures still look fake, and particles like smoke and fire still suck. And humans?! Curved surfaces often don’t have enough polys and realistic hair is still way off.
The problem, I suspect, is that we keep chasing higher resolutions. Higher resolution will improve fidelity and reduce aliasing, but it’s not going to make shadows, hair, fire, smoke, etc. look more realistic. It would be good if we could stop at 4k and start focusing on just making graphics look more realistic, especially as the benefits of 8k and beyond are probably negligible, but I’m sure the tech companies will always want to push something new.
Crysis achieved 80% realism back in 2007
1. I would like some high res comparisons please, otherwise there is no point, it’s like comparing a child’s doodle with one of those blurry out of focus UFO pictures. You squint a bit and can’t tell the difference.
2. Where’s Far Cry? The first image (and fourth) is Wildlands, the rest are obviously not Far Cry.
3. I own all these games, and they look absolutely stunning, but at no point was I like “Man, that looks so real!”. It still looks like a video game, great looking video games, absolutely, but still video games.
Most games are on the same level as Half Life 1 when it comes to player movement, AI and physics. Mocap and professional voice acting can only create the illusion of more believable AI at first glance, once you actually get playing it’s no better than Half Life 1 or at best, 2. Prepared destruction events and such only wow total newcomers as well. Every seasoned gamer knows what’s physically interactive and what’s not before even trying. In old games the physically interactive things would have worse lighting and no shadow. In newer games everything casts a shadow but interactive objects are usually more detailed (polycount and texture resolution) for their size. And if they aren’t devs just put a thick outline effect on them!
Graphically I don’t yearn for photorealism anymore. I still hope we get there sooner rather than later just so we can stop worrying about it. But with 20 years down the drain and practically no improvement in AI and physics, and consequently no genuine breakthroughs in player agency or the kind of worlds that can be explored, the day we hit photorealism isn’t going to be a triumph. It’s going to be a collective OH SH*T moment. It’s going to be the day the mainstream realizes just how immature the other aspects of games still are. The player has no body and the enemies have no brain. The gameworld is a steel coffin where no action has any reaction. Every game is the same. Every engine is the same. The interactivity standards we have settled for aren’t even in the same realm as those of 20 years from now.
Those look very good, but they’re still far from real life. 🙁
LOL using the division as a graphics showcase?? That game has 2011 graphics. They are terrible beyond compare.
Could have used something like GTA V mods instead. What do you expect from TIME magazine…