Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora PC - An Incredible Showcase For Cutting-Edge Real-Time Graphics

[Music] [Applause] [Music] with Avatar frontiers of Pandora I think we're looking at one of the most visually accomplished releases this year and it seems to kind of come out of nowhere at the end of 2023 with not too much fanfare before releases when you think about it for a minute though it's not too surprising that this is such a visually accomplished title considering what it is and who made it first you have Avatar in the title there say what you will about the narrative quality quality of the films but it's hard to deny the visual quality of what's on screen and the attention to detail of James Cameron as a Creator is really Second To None those Avatar films are visual spectacles and that is definitely a core tended of the movies and it's why people flock to see them but Translating that cinematic quality of visuals over to games is always a challenge modern movies like Avatar 2 can use massive supercomputer server Farms taking hours to render single frames how do you compress that block blackbuster experience down to a local machine that is much less powerful where a frame can only render in a few milliseconds and this is where Ubisoft massive comes in who have been working on this game since at least its 2017 announcement massive have the snow drop engine which they have been using in the past to deliver Cutting Edge visuals that perform incredibly well on proper Hardware as we've seen in games like the division thanks to newer console Hardware though and modern PCS Mass have pushed the barrier further with Snowdrop unlocking a whole host of visual goodness to live up to Avatar's reputation and that's what this video is going to be about today the visuals of massive entertainment's Avatar frontiers of Pandora I'm going to go over the small details and the big picture the video is going to be a review of the technology itself and it's going to be about the premiere PC experience on high-end kit videos covering optimized settings and the consoles will become later but soon enough with that being said let's get right into the meat here the basic challenge to the developers here is to bring that alien world to life Pandora as seen in the films and has to do it with all that same super saturated hyper reality that the films are known for to do this massive have built the world in this game upon a new lighting engine for Snowdrop see in the past snow drop and a number of other Ubisoft titles pioneered a form of realtime Global illumination for games called pre-computed Radiance transfer it is the reason why Far Cry 3 looks the way it does and it is a key Tech that enables large scale open World Lighting with full-time of day changing in titles like the division the tech though of course has a lot of compromises so it kind of has a video game look to the world places in Shadow have a kind of glow to them and objects tend to always look like they're floating above the ground pre-computed Radiance transfer really wouldn't be a great fit for something like Avatar and have the game look as good as it does as a result massive has upgraded snow drop to fully support a global illumination system based on Hardware rate tracing and the results of it are quite the sight to behold the rtgi in this game definitely gives the game its overall look and I think it is that which makes this game stand out in a crowd of other current gen titles but just saying the name Ray tracing doesn't mean too much unless it really Bears out in the visuals and thankfully there are a number of key areas in the game where you can really see that Ray tracing putting in the work to make the game look quite slick one area where you can really see the rtgi are in all those areas that are heavily occluded so the mouths of caves for example where the Skylight is being blocked yet it still floods in from that opening bouncing around the entrance causing it to get noticeably darker the further one looks into the cave you can also see it underneath any of the game's habitations where you can see sunlight and the green of plants tinge the scene but also there's a noticeable darkening projecting from the structure above that is shielding the area below from the light thanks to Ray trce Global illumination corners and crevices in this world and Avatar get suitably dark and objects seldom look like they're floating above the surface upon which they are resting and this makes the game world look that much more tangible it wouldn't have anywhere near the level of realism if rate tracing were not in play this is especially evident in all those areas of lus jungle where the canopy above blocks out a lot of the Sun and Skylight so you can kind of get this feeling of encroaching Darkness from the foliage around you and it's not just pitch black though you can see the color from the leaves and the trees and more bouncing around the scene lighting up little bits of it with localized green bounds walking around the jungles in this this game gave me that same and very rare feeling that I got back when I played crisis in 2007 where the combination of the density of the foliage and its movement mixes seamlessly with the lighting and the dappled Shadows from above and it really communicates that sense that you are in the wilderness here where wood Creeks underneath your feet and exotic plant life surrounds you while strange creatures Dart around in your peripheral vision it is seriously very well done and I think many people will immediately appreciate that just as I did when they first step out into the jungle from the Hightech sci-fi Interiors in which the game actually starts and yes those indoor environments see the same treatment of rra GI so artificial lights will spill light around corners and objects indoors will just as grounded as the one you see outdoors rtgi in this game applies to any area that you can find one of the most interesting areas where the rtgi can be shown off is at night in the game as in the films Pandora at night is lit up not only by the moon but also by the bioluminescence of all the animals and plants that inhabit the world and it gives the game and the films a rather Unique Look Now normally bioluminescence in games is just faked with a full bright texture and no real light is actually emitted from those surfaces that are supposed to be glowing in this game though the ray Trace Global illumination propagates the color from those emissive surfaces around the scene so all the bioluminescent glowy bits and whatnot in the world actually will emit light onto nearby surfaces it is present in all the scenes I've been showing to you now of the game at night and it gives the game here really a look that you haven't seen before for in other video games it's really cool and I'm just going to point it out more specifically what it looks like in detail now check out this plant here its leaves are edged with a red bioluminescence and as you'll notice that red color also spreads around onto the rocks and foliage surrounding that plant and you can see this in other scenes like in caves really well where all the bioluminescent foliage there also emits onto surfaces nearby it's pretty cool looking [Music] right so lighting I think is the key base upon which this world Pandora is built but what about the world itself here is another area where Avatar really really excels and you'll notice it right away on the small scale when you step out into the jungle for the first time plants the terrain all the little scattered underbrush details in the outdoor sections have a great individual quality all the little bits and doodads hold up to very close scrutiny the game rewards closeup looks with high surface and texture detail sometimes it is almost obscene the amount of small detail you can find like here this random patch of black top I found in a base you zoom in and you realize it's not texture detail on the ground but real geometry all that decadent geometry for what is essentially a flat surface it's awesome shadow detail for many objects in the game will be sharp to hold up that Quality Hardware rate tracing is leveraged here to give objects contact shadows and this is then Blended in with Shadow Maps like we saw in control in 2019 when the lighting combines with the Shadows you'll see that many objects in the game have a great lifelike quality to them and I think this average asset quality being so high is one of the key benefits this game and game engine has from moving to current gen consoles only and modern PCS and like I said when you go through the game you'll be surprised how often anywhere you look that that granular detail holds up thankfully that micro detail up close does not mean the game skimps out on the larger scale by the contrary at a distance this game leverages new GPU driven rendering in the engine to fill out an instance all that detail far far into the distance and it almost always looks like the world is teaming with plant and animal life around you the views of the Landscapes always impress and at normal walking speed the density of the foliage and the ground detail is unprecedented for current gen games it is seriously ridiculously dense at times on PC at least the highest settings will keep level of detail popping very low especially during the on foot segments only when you get access to your Banshee flying Mount does the Popin start to become more visible but given the speed you fly at here and the great amount of distance you're covering I do think it is understandable as to why Poppin is occurring when flying in the air you also get a great appreciation to other upgrades that snow drop has unlike Halo infinite for example large scale Shadow rendering at a distance is here so farway details will often have shadows right where they need them this is achieved with a mix of Hardware Ray tracing for large things like floating islands and rock formations while terrain Shadows are achieved with Ray marching the scale you get while flying in the sky is awesome and it is underscored by great volumetric rendering as well and this is now unified in the snow dropped engine so things like clouds Cloud Shadows Valley fog and more are handled all as a part of one hierarchical system of shading and shadowing so you'll get some High Fidelity Local Light beams that pierce the fog up close while you're on foot but those light beams will not disappear 50 m away from the character in The Distance due to the unified Ray marching it'll go out to the The Horizon and integrate into the cloud rendering creating some great [Music] Vistas so at a distance and up close the Fidelity is super high in Avatar but it's not just a shell of decoration it's not a lifeless world that you just view pictur landscapes in the world itself in this game is very reactive and interactive you can see that in the plant life really well where there's a lot of plant life that serve gameplay purposes offering you speed boosts breaking your Falls or acting as booster pads to propel you up high while jumping the plants can also harm you and will react to your presence showing unique animations and behaviors depending upon the plant type and physically nearly every plant in the game world will move and bend as it is touched by you the wind or non-player characters the game's very crisis-like in that regard and while it is not found on any and every plant in the game World a number of plants in the game world can be fully destroyed usually though destroying a plant means the wholesale destruction of the plant where the plant is healthy in one frame and then it's physical debris in the next due to an explosion or some large soran creature stampeding through them but generally the point here is that the world feels very alive due to how it reacts to you moving through it and interacting with it one aspect that is hard to get across in a video here is how much the audio simulation sells the wild aspect of the game World here when you're out in the jungle on Pandora the audio is incredibly immersive is it changes based upon the surrounding geometry and the local flora and fauna massive have upgraded snow drap here to support R traced audio propagation using Hardware rat tracing if your Hardware supports it and in practice you can really hear great differences in the audio depending upon the surrounding terrain here have a listen as how the audio changes when I'm moving through the world so there are a lot of little details there in the audio that you could hear but the key point is that the auditory experience holds up right next to the visual experience here and on a whole you can be utterly immersed in this alien world when moving through it it is a very unique experience [Music] originally at this point in the video I was going to list a handful of graphical quirks that I noticed during my play and how I wish the game had some higher settings for future proofing the game on PC to lessen some of those visual issues that I noticed but funnily enough with the publishing of a Blog detailing a lot of the information about the PC version of this game there was an interesting little tidbit here if you are reading this you can learn that there's a launch parameter for the game to unlock the so-called unobtanium Mac settings that's a funny play on the pfic element from the films and guess what those unlocked Mac settings solved nearly every qualm I had with my Graphics during the original play of the game I did pre-launch this means three things one I had to re-edit this video after completing it two all this gorgeous footage and b-roll that I have of the game that I've been showing up until this point is not even at the highest settings so think about that for a bit and lastly my list of graphical negatives has been reduced down to two small aspects the first is related to bvh Quality basically even at the stupidly incredible unobtanium settings which caused the RTX 490 to buckle below 60 FPS at 4K DSS quality mode the bvh quality in the game is not always so high in practice this shows up mostly in specular Global illumination also known as Reflections and if you perpendicular to the reflective surface you really won't notice it but when things go out of screen space like we see here we can see that the objects being reflected are of a lower quality and are missing some things missing some details typically reflection objects have no texture detail and a flat color you can also see smaller things like some grass missing at times this is a small visual blemish on an otherwise perfect presentation at times here I would love if there was also an ultra or unobtanium quality level for bvh Quality another thing related to this kind of is how transparencies do not have Ray Trace Reflections as you can see on this glass here there are just standard Cube Maps used in this game which is jarring in an otherwise incredible presentation once again I would love a higher setting here which added transparency Reflections as it would basically perfect this game's visuals but beyond that the unobtanium settings that you can unlock lock on PC solved any of the minor issues I had with the game's presentation on PC I am genuinely in awe at how incredible this game looks both at its highest settings and even not at its highest settings and I love the dedication the developers have shown here for its visual Excellence on all platforms but also especially on PC now before I end this video I want to briefly talk about the gameplay experience this is going to be divisive and everyone's going to have their own taste especially considering it's a huge Ubisoft open world game and when you look at the bullet points of what that means you can feel like something you've seen before you're a fish outof waterer character in a strange exotic place there's a big map to uncover and unlock there are side quests here where you do small chores you have gear that is upgradeable and there's also crafting all of those bullet points that I just described kind of turned me off but when playing the game I realized you can easily selectively filter these things out ignoring nearly all them and instead just playing the game as a game ignoring all the usual open world Ubisoft tropes and that is what made the game really fun for me a great example of this is the ability to turn off navigation hints and turn on in Explorer mode you can get rid of all the HUD helpers navigation hints Etc in the world so you're just going by purely by what you see and what is on your map for me this is a huge part to actually enjoying the game as you are then going through the environment not from point A to point B but you actually have to perceive what is around you and it is more about the Journey of going from place to place through the environment to find things you actually have to navigate the world if there's not hints telling you constantly where to go and I think it works well here in this game because the traversal is actually good there's this weird highway system of pheromones or whatever on Fallen trees that speeds you up and brings you place to place there's also vegetation that acts as a trampoline to get you up to Vertical places you can also double jump in the game and side Dash it's very fun movement and the game has great traversal and an incredible 3D verticality to it that constantly leverages all these systems and I highly recommend people to avoid using fast traveling in this game and also to completely avoid all the usual open world follow the mini map for question mark stuff that you can do if you do that you can enjoy this alien world for what it is the other thing I want to talk about is combat now I keep reading online this is Far Cry on Pandora and when you look at the world map and the game structure yeah it may seem that way on the face of it but that is just the face value in the momentto moment snapshots of gameplay Avatar in my opinion is much closer actually to crisis and I got that the first time I had to infiltrate a base now this is not some dinky encampment clearing like found in the Farcry games the bases in this game are a lot more intimidating much like the bases in crisis 1 third level or some of the later sections of Crisis 3 you have all these entrances to the bases patrolling guards Mech automated turrets and more and much like Crisis you're not a normal Baseline human here like you are in the Far Cry games you are super human you're this giant na'vi thing that Towers over people and as such you are Nimble you can double jump and you can slide great distances and your punches will make grunts fly through the air you have all this power but you're not in Invincible the game's AI Acuity and AI movement is actually surprisingly reactive and fast and they can go places just like you can their weapons are also very very deadly you don't take a lot of damage in this game before you die so like in crisis 1 you have these superhuman abilities but the enemies are also very deadly so the way you have to defeat them is not by tanking their damage rather you have to run from place to place avoiding damage and picking them off one by one smartly you can alert guards for example or mechs with a skillful shot to kill one of them then you disappear run and relocate like a sniper and then from there you lash out at them Predator like from different directions where they do not expect it it's a lot like the gameplay from crisis honestly just without the overt invisibility cloak your cloak in this game is your speed the intervening terrain and your quiet footsteps which create a very similar gameplay Loop during the combat in my opinion so to sum it up the gameplay here in Avatar is pretty great if you enjoy well-designed FPS combat and the world is truly immersive and fun to move through and explore but to unlock this potential and enjoy the world for the way it is you really should turn off and ignore all the open world helpers looting and other trophy stuff that you see in many modern games not just Ubisoft ones if you just fall into this game and start going across the world searching for ingredients to craft a new loin cloth or something then yeah this will just feel like another open world checklist game and it might not be too interesting for you and with that being said I hope you've enjoyed my take here on the highend tech found in Avatar frontiers of Pandora there's some worldclass rendering here and I really think it should not be missed if you're an enjoyer of great visuals with that being said stay tuned though for more videos coming on this game R cover optimize settings and console versions in other videos if you did enjoy the video though hit that like button and subscribe to the channel if you're already a subscriber hit that little bell in the corner to be informed as soon as digital Foundry posts a video if you want to help us out support DF on patreon to get years of our videos in high quality for download comment below follow on Twitter as always this is Alex Bing you farewell [Music] on

Channel: Digital Foundry

Views: 357,010

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Id: LRI_qgVSwMY

Length: 23min 18sec (1398 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 08 2023