The future of PC graphics. The future is now.

Today the industry sees tons of various game engine and graphical renders. At each E3 we are bombarded by flashy graphics and technical terms like Physically Based Rendering.

There are some beautiful games out there and some on the near horizon that look even better. Witcher 3 looks absolutely fantastic with the new Need for Speed and Star Wars Battlefront games looking even better.

Though these games all have one thing in common, they are multiplatform games built to be run on the Playstation 4 and Xbox One. Systems with outdated hardware in relation to the current high-end equipment on the PC.

So what would happen if somebody took one of these modern game engines, let's say the Unreal 4 engine and punished top-end PC hardware? Well... we would get a glimpse of the future.

(sorry I've been watching a lot of Top Gear so I wrote kind of like how Jeremy Clarkson would speak, read that all above in his voice like I did when I wrote it)

Anyways kidding aside, somebody did take the Unreal 4 engine and punish modern hardware with it. A user by the name of koooolalala on Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/user/koooolalala The pictures below are all running in real time at 1080p30. He claims that he could hit 60 if he threw some ridiculous hardware at ie (like tri SLI).

Don't believe they are real-time? He's got videos...

He's done a lot of great work with the Unreal 4 engine. See below...

His global illumination demos are very impressive

And he's done some good shader work...

More global illumination

So all of this is running in REAL TIME on a PC. This goes to show you how capable modern PCs really are when you develop graphics for the high end hardware. The gap between the high end PC hardware and the consoles is far larger than many would have you believe.

INB4 "Uncharted 4 still looks better"

Uncharted 4 still looks better.

@Heil68: Oh you...

Star Citezen will look even better.

Don't start the fire bro.

Jebus, that is crazy. I'm still finding myself a bit skeptical though. While AAA is completely console focused, there are some PC centered developers out there that have been known to prioritize graphics, I would think we would have seen something of this caliber in an actual game already if machines could handle it.

@davillain-: Sadly Star Citizen won't look better. Two things. The first being despite their claims, they need to build the game for a range of hardware. Sliders to turn off and on graphical rendering effects aren't going to cut it due to the second reason.

These scenes are highly tailored for super amazing graphics. It takes a lot of manual work to get these scenes done. As of right now it's really impossible to do a game the size of Star Citizen to that level of quality. In the future, as tools and procedural generation gets better (he actually used PG in theses scenes quite a bit to help him flesh out the details), building games to this level of quality will be possible.

Star Citizen will blow minds when it comes out, that I'm not denying. It'll look far better than any game on the market and will be a tough one to beat. It just won't be this photorealistic.

wheres GPUking? he needs to see these and then shut the **** up

totally blew my mind to be honest, i knew that PC's where capable of great graphics but Colour me suprised

Incredible. Games may not actually look that good for quite a while, but it shows just how much of a beast UE4 is when utilized with the right hardware.

Machines can't handle it yet. Right now this would be like Crysis level stuff, no one would be able to max it out at 60 unless, as mentioned before, they own like 3 980s. No one wants to repeat what Crytek did. They want their game to sell, not impress. The renaissance of PC gaming is over, now we just have this incremental improvement. Something like this will only be standard in maybe 3 or 4 years.

Here is my favorite of his GI demos, the simplest:

This sort of thing is already feasible for current hardware. This, and any other indoors scenes. My 970 can just about do 50-60 fps in the PAris apartment scene that got somewhat viral a few months ago. It's also possible to bake GI and that is why indoors is easier on hardware, and is totally possible on current gen consoles. It just requires a looot of effort.

...but it does! D: mud king easily. :3

Throw a large amount of AI in there and something other then environments and it won't look like that.

I'm tired of people saying consoles hold back gaming. Titles with great visuals require large teams and massive budgets, and the PC Platform isn't strong enough to support them.

@AM-Gamer: I'm thinking the AI would look just fine. It's more along the lines that you could only run this game with the .1% of PC hardware right now. Developers aren't going to pour tens of millions into a game that less than 500,000 people can play.

Oh, you :P

I think the question is "How do you develop profitable games that look like that?" I think it's still going to be quite some time before we are actually playing games that look that good.

@PurpleMan5000: That is the question.

This is exciting because these kind of graphics are actually obtainable in real time right now. That's a huge step forward.

Holy Shi........, that looks amazing. It always surprises me what can be done with the proper hardware being pushed. I hope we actually get a game with that kind of visual fidelity soon.

Great, but making a game for only high end rigs without scalability.

Though i'm interested in seeing how walking sims of the future will look, since there's nothing happening on screen

@deadline-zero0: Walking Sim + these graphics + VR.

Ya! its not ideal at this moment. You'd be making a better move by letting the community mod your games to hell, and back. Though, at that point it stops being the product you developed.

Someone has to try. :P

Looks like modern tech, i'm not seeing what's so amazing. Standard UE4 fare. ...Oh yes it's on PC heh PC master race and all that, indeed.

Also even if these were amazing, there's nothing going on.

Looks great! I honestly feel these tools can and are getting dangerously close to CGI "picture perfect" films.

Shame we won't get any sort of game (for now) that looks and plays like that. Hopefully the GPU revolution will help a bit with that!

question : so can gaming really achieve something like this? from what im hearing, gaming is so much harder because it is interactive and not static blah blah .

@Wasdie: yep and that's the problem. Until it can run on affordable hardware it won't happen.

Uncharted 4 still looks better though. :P

holy shit

Don't know if we can keep the fidelity this high if we're targeting VR.

Can we? Sure, but the more objects, being ti npc, buildings, etc, have to rendered on screen, the more power is neeeded.

@jsmoke03: Yes it can, just give it time. Right now engineers are coming up with ways to allow people to more quickly build very detailed levels like this. A lot of procedural generation. The small rocks in the first few screenshots here were all made with procedural generation instead of being hand drawn. This allows devs to make stupid high fidelity much more quickly.

The Unreal 4 engine is also a leader in fully dynamic stuff. You can prebake global illumination onto the environment if you want, but you can also run it in real time. The latter takes far more processing power and we'll get there eventually.

This is why these are tech demos of what's to come.

And the answer is simple. When the PS5 and next Xbox come around. But I imagine PS5 games will look even better than what any PC could do right now. New graphics techniques and stuff.

Er, yeah might as well post that Square Enix demo which ran on quad sli titan x, that's even more impressive than this beach sim but hey it's realtime tho! It makes me laugh when people even raise the thought of having a studio spending an astronomical budget on a pc exclusive aiming for the highend hardware required for this demo. At least not now or any time soon. Like I said earlier, by the time most pc gamers are equipped with hardware that can run this (assuming it's a fully functional game world with this level of detail, that's a big if), we would have PS5 and whatever other nextgen consoles ready to hit the market or already have.

Regardless, UC4 still looks better in fire, smoke, mud and character models..since this demo doesn't even have any lol.

@Wasdie: "(sorry I've been watching a lot of Top Gear so I wrote kind of like how Jeremy Clarkson would speak, read that all above in his voice like I did when I wrote it)"

So can we expect you to punch out some poor bloke and get fired as a mod now too? :P

Those look amazing, but I presume we probably at least 5-10 years away from anyone practically using those in game though?

As I said couple of times before... Unreal Engine 4 is mighty impressive.

Looks incredible.

Wonder how much an open world game would cost to develop with those graphics. Although that's a problem in 10+ years, since most high end PC's would have problems running that

The only thing that looks (much) better is the lighting. I've said for years its the lack of truly natural lighting in video games thats holding the graphics back.

I don't get why people are saying catering to the 1% of PC gamers is unprofitable when it's not about that, it's about making people buy machines to play the game itself by showing unreal graphics (like the one in the OP). It's just like Crysis, that sold great and helped the PC market because it made people go out and buy a system to run it.

You show people something unbelievable, something to experience for themselves, they'll go out and buy it.

I wish someone would make a forest like this, inject a more advanced version of Assassin's Creed 3's tree/rock climbing system and then make a Robin Hood game or something. Just moving around a space like this would be incredible though. Well I guess I allready can, that's what forests look like, just need to step outside :).

Yeah perhaps Nvidia could co-finace it as they have no stake in console anymore?

I honestly think that this is the only thing that makes Driveclub look realistic, I don't know how they did it, I don't know what their engine is doing but it has the most realistic looking lighting model I've ever seen in a game.

Graphics look really great.

Great times to be gamers guys and gals. Imagine that grapghic quality with realistic game animations. Gaming is the entertainment medium of the future. We just need decent stories now lol.

@Wasdie: cool let me know when you actually get a game to take advantage of that. for now have fun with Turd Simulator.

Looks great. Until it's in a game I'm still waiting for something on PC as good looking as The Order.

My ps4 can't handle this kind of visuals. I asked Sony why, they told me to f*ck off and that graphics aren't important.

that title sounds like an ad lol. UE4 is a beast like i expected.

this same topic was posted yesterday

I have to admit @Wasdie seems like Epic really have created a 10+ year plan for Unreal Engine 4. Seems like it will be greater than Valve Corporation's Source 2 plan.

Good stuff, very impressive. It's not that for away from being in game, in 3 years single high end cards will be as powerful, if not more so than tri SLI 980ti's

They'd only get shot down for gimping AMD cards

That's a good point. Lighting in a game makes or breaks game graphics. Other stuff is important too but lighting is among most important. Not so long ago Vanishing of Ethan Carter devs demonstrated that how lighting can turn PS2 looking into visually spectacular looking one.