2017 Best Graphics
- Thread starter VFX_Veteran
- Start date
Well s***.. if we are talking about a videogame that looks like a cartoon, Dragon's Lair has everyone beat! 
Horizon had a long screenshot thread on GAF. It's started up again at Reset. None of the other games being mentioned had a screenshot thread, except Hellblade, but it died out fast.
https://www.resetera.com/threads/horizon-zero-dawn-screenshot-thread.3988/
https://www.resetera.com/threads/horizon-zero-dawn-screenshot-thread.3988/
All things considered I think Horizon and Battlefront 2 (PC) are pretty much on equal footing for me in terms of graphics.
My 2 cents.
My 2 cents.
She has fleeked out eyebrows, arched within an inch of their life, but the bitch can't run a brush through her hair?More:
Just going by what I played and can comment on (haven't played Wolfenstein, AC Origins), gotta give it up to Horizon Zero Dawn with the caveat that I agree with VFX summation about the character model and I would also say the snow areas are kind of bad in comparison to RotTR. Also the checkerboard-artifacts, that Digital Foundry swore they cannot see or find, are a bit of an eyesore when you come across them. Anyways, it's a gorgeous game that just makes you want to bust out photomode around every single corner and capture the beauty, they definitely made their engine capable of producing very surreal looking moments and that definitely bodes well for Kojima's upcoming project.
That'll definitely be worth checking out then, I forgot that was incoming actually.
For how many things they got right in the game, it was kind of baffling how meh the snow/ice areas were, like they just rushed to finish it or something. If they could nail the RotTR snow, it would look amazing in there with those night shots and with crazy looking sunsets and all.
I'll post some H:ZD shots in a bit, I guess I forgot to upload and post them before, I think I have a few keepers.
I'll post a few more later. I don't wanna bomb the thread more than I have already, lol
Last edited:
Horizon had a long screenshot thread on GAF. It's started up again at Reset. None of the other games being mentioned had a screenshot thread, except Hellblade, but it died out fast.
https://www.resetera.com/threads/horizon-zero-dawn-screenshot-thread.3988/
OK. So the classic move from PS4 gamers is to post PhotoMode shots. Let's not post those and let's post true-to-scale images (not downsampled).
We've already mentioned the foliage being awesome. So check on that.
We've also mentioned that HZD shines best at night to hide it's daylight artificial lighting as seen your day shots. Also, her character still looks subpar to other characters like Senua.... and the machines can always look good. Examine the shot above this last one.. every single material is colored the same. Contrast that with highly varying materials in Destiny 2. There is a big difference.
I'm not going to pick all these apart, but I'll explain what I mean in one.
The glow effect around the fire is way too spread out in a spherical fashion. That breaks the illusion down. Their use of volume light shafts here is overdone.
Hellblade on the other hand, has proper fire lighting with no glow. The lighting spreads out in the area physically accurate leaning to a more nature atmosphere.
Look how Ahloy doesn't have enough ambient occlusion on her outfit compared to Senua. Also notice how the blue sky shades every since pixel in the scene - there is literally NO falloff from the sky. In this Hellblade scene, you see nature colors and only see light from the sky in areas that are dark and in shadow. It's a very subtle affect that's more natural. Senua is simply way more detailed than Aloy and Senua's skin is much much more natural without the "plastic" looking feel.
Another natural lighting shot that literally blows any other lighting away by the use of an offline renderer GI renderer (i.e. Enlighten). The light bounce around from the scene and the shadowing makes the image 'lure' the users eyes in the right areas of brightness and darkness.
In HZD (and practically every other game), you don't have this mix of proper light propagation and falloff. Everything is taking light from standard GI probes that add way too much ambient into the shading.
Nothing comes even close to this face in realtime (this is NOT photo-mode). She is littered with detail in all areas. Her skin shader shows light scattering and falling off, the tint on the edge of her nose proves this. Her eyelids aren't bleeding out light and her mouth has the proper colors for lipstick on pink.
Last edited:
I VERY good example of light propagation and how it falls off non-linearly. There just simply isn't enough energy in the hallway to light every brick wall looking down. And even her outfit has several areas of dark under the light. This is the most realistic lighting I've seen in a game. And it makes a world of difference in the image quality.
Contrast wtih HZD:
There is way too much brown from the sky even around areas that the bricks should be blocked out from light outside. This proves their technique for lighting global illumination needs some work.
Last edited:
For realistic character models and world. HZD for overall style it's Cuphead for me.
Assassins creed and Mordor to be seen in 4k
Assassins creed and Mordor to be seen in 4k