Best Graphics of 2023 Face-Off: Cyberpunk 2077 RT vs Alan Wake 2 vs Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora!

it's time to talk about our top three uh I think I guess we have to reveal what they are first and then we got to figure out the order they should go in yeah let's just make this mess let's just do it so the games that we picked to put at the top three are as follows Allen wake 2 Avatar frontiers of Pandora and cyberpunk 2077 with path tracing so these games I think all three of them are pushing technology in new and exciting ways really pushing the limits of what we can expect from a realtime Graphics engine these days uh Ray tracing plays a role which is of course critical or you know path tracing in two cases uh I think they're all stunning I know you guys agree I'm going to venture Venture forth for ather and we'll see what happens so I'm going to this is this is really tricky for I propose for the number three spot I want to put cyber punk in there at path tracing and I'll tell you why like I think it looks phenomenal I think it's an incredible achievement but it's also kind of an existing game and you know I think it's a game that was already stunning before they added that in and I think it does add a lot to it but you know it's man this is this is tough to put in order like because it it's really like it's a technical like it's a huge technical accomplishment but I just think what we see in the other two is just ever so slightly A step above and some of it has to do with other elements of those games worlds and the visuals they're reproducing but it's it's very close let me like Let me Give an example I'm I'm going agre with John and put cyberp Punk 2077 on the third place and first I want to talk about why it's already a greatl looking game um for example like even without path tracing uh we already consider it one of the best R tracing implementations when it released back in 2020 we were really we gave it best graphics of the Year back then yep uh fast forward um you add path tracing into it and you actually get to see like the most consistent lighting presentation that is arguably possible in a video game and it elevates the graphics up another level entirely a lot of the little things that the game originally had there are now Amplified extremely like the game relies a lot on heavy neon lighting yeah you had some rra submissives the first time around but now you get like the r race submissive balce with like perfect rester based uh like um direct Shadows then the Bounce from that at least two times in the environment on both the fuse and specular and it leads to a lot of scenarios that both uh that for example other games on this could never possibly do like where you get like Reflections in Reflections which uh just look incredible and given the game's art style focusing heavily on metallic man-made glass structures uh like carbon fibers uh I don't know uh shiny Plastics all these things it's actually kind of perfect for it and the city environment itself with all the large structures constantly getting in the way of direct sunlight lighting uh makes it so that these scenes that otherwise without path tracing look o pretty great now look really really good I would say the only aspects that makes me want to put it at third one is slightly uh I'm going to call it DF political where we gave it already it once before and it's kind of just feels weird to give it again but two actually the better reason is because PA Racing elevates the game extremely but there are still some aspects of it that are left over from the fact that it yes it ran really poorly on Xbox one uh and PS4 but it had a longer development so there's different uh times when assets were made for example in the game and there so you see like varying degrees of texture quality is one thing you see in the game you see varying degrees of how level of detail is handled it's really great for some things not so great for other things um but you know like for me this is it's also a little arbitrary I I love I love loading up the game and just looking at it too uh which is always an accomplishment like I still load up old games that I think look great and walk through them and admire them so I'm going to be doing this also for a very very long time I also want to it's small nitpick but uh I think this is the weaker implementation of Ray reconstruction right now where it still kind of has a somewhat smear AI upscaled look but then if you don't use Ray reconstruction due to the high contrast in many of the scenes it is a little bit noisier than say Allen wake 2 which we'll talk and yeah if you don't raise use rate reconstruction in the game too you don't get like uh highly responsive Reflections yeah or highly respon or highly uh uh uh how do you s it like detailed Reflections there's a lot of things like where you really want R rray reconstruction on for the gameplay but there's aspects of Ray reconstructions which are negatives which impact the visuals which is a shame which is a shame unfortunately I agree uh Oliver what are your takes on this do you agree with us putting this in the third slot yeah so I would agree with it being third mostly not really for uh any reason that's related too much to the quality of the visuals I think what they've achieved here is really really good mostly for the political reason that I don't think that a ray tracing remaster of a game should be number one or number two maybe just because it looks superb but it is an existing title um but I do want to say a little bit about the the lighting cuz I think that like in a typical rasterized game like people don't really understand I think how impressive path tracing can look in a game like cyber Punk because in a typical rasz game you know you might have a greatl looking scene right but then you look at it from another angle where you get closer and the specular doesn't look right the shadow maps are too coarse they have aliasing or and they're uniformally sharp and the light maps have obvious stair stepping edges and you move an object or a character and and all of a sudden the lighting kind of breaks and you move the camera up and down and you get screen space artifacts and the ambient occlusion gets messed up and the screen space Reflections get messed up and this is like what we're used to seeing from so many games that are rasterized and here you just see almost none of that like it's it's just so so high quality of the lighting presentation and almost always looks correct absent like some image quality concerns even with 3 reconstruction which I think could be improved roved probably um it just looks correct and I think that's impressive that would be impressive for a game that had a limited scope that was a linear you know 8 to 10 hour Adventure but in the context of a gigantic open world game with like 100 hours of content it's just uh super super impressive because open World Games don't tend to have this really high quality lighting presentation at all um in my experience right so I I think that's those are all points favor the the points that take away I think I totally agree with Alex where the underlying game is still a little bit of an older vintage than other titles on this list and so some of the asset quality isn't isn't quite there relative to some of titles on this list and uh that detracts it a little bit but still I mean the progression of path tracing in games is is quite a sight to beh hold and to have this game a game of this caliber fully path traced or very close to fully path traced it's quite impressive I agree okay so I think we there that we we're unanimous on this then so number three is what this is but I think one and two this this gets a lot more difficult and I myself have not decided yet either so I kind of want to talk through these and then we'll kind of maybe figure out cuz so like yeah that makes sense actually right like Allen W 2 you look at it it's a much smaller scale it's a very dark dim kind of subtle game visually but I think it's one of the most consistent and beautifully lit examples of realtime rendering we've ever seen every scene is oozing with just insane detail there's barely ever a rough Edge to be seen and the way it utilizes R tracing to enhance this produces results that almost look like you could pull them straight out of an actual film you know like that first time you walk into that into the OD deer Diner yeah and you just look look at those tables and the way the light you know floods into the room it's it's not a it's not a brightly lit Diner it's it's dark they have the lights pretty much off you're relying on natural light spilling in through the windows and the doors but the way it just enters the room and bounces around and sort of gives it that ambient light level the way all the materials of different roughness reflect that back uh you know cuz the world's basically a giant mirror with variable roughness right and that's that's actly the feeling you get from these types of scenes but the thing is the thing that's really nuts about all of this is that you have these kind of simple scenes that you know but the game takes you to so many places so many different types of scenes and worlds and all these little tiny objects and little meticulous things always in the scene uh and then you go out you're exploring the city with all those signs you know you're exploring like the game show space some of the stuff they do like the the dancing scene for instance with all those projected uh sequences happening around you uh it's it goes beyond just this remarkable path tracing and it's more like the flexibility of the types of of sequences they're able to produce in this game and just like the way they're able to mess with the player and create visually intriguing uh and just artistically gorgeous sequences I think it's just it's an absolute master class in terms of overall visual design and a perfect marriage of Art and technology and it's 100% their own artistic Vision uh which right and we'll talk about AV Avatar amazing we'll get to that but that is basically designed to look like the films right where this is all remedy and it's striking uh so that's my thoughts first on on Al what what do you think on Alan Wake 2 I I feel like Alex as Mr path trce over there is the Rayman you are the Rayman now you're the current generation of Ray I'm the current gen Rayman uh all Pat raced okay all the time uh so this one is cool there's so many things like I when I saw the game at Gamescom I was like super like blown away with it and I saw a presentation back then that was using their uh path tracing with Ray reconstruction and I just like went to John who didn't get to see this presentation and Rich I was like dude Graphics of the Year Elm 2's got it it's got it like immediately like I said like there's nothing that beats this um and then I got the game in my hands and uh it does a lot of things that I that I really really adore John talked about the Oder Diner scene as being kind of like the subtlety of materials uh but one thing that they also nailed down is that a lot of the just Superfluous things around the environment are all like ridiculously high res the I think the the scope the fact that they're limiting the where you can look and walk around is allowing them to just like amp up a lot of the detail and a lot of scenes and part of that is because they are pushing new technology on PC and consoles they are using the new geometry pipelines offered by modern gpus to increase the amount of geometric Fidelity you can see in anyone scene another thing that it's kind of their take on nanite basically right like it's like micro geometry like so very small very small metric detail that uh is called away so you can keep it on screen without having to LOD as often uh the also I like so the one thing that we have to talk about with path tracing that you don't get for example like in Spider-Man or when we get to Avatar is that like usually in a past Trace game the reflections and the quality of the world that is being Ray traced against something that you don't get in ui5 game for example as well too is it is the same quality almost like more or less the exact same quality as the primary view rendering which makes it a lot heavier so people like like why is this so heavy it's like dude it's like rendering the game like a bunch of times like per pixel it's crazy um and and that leads to things where like you don't see a lot of the issues that you see in other games that use real-time rate tracing as a result um you start to get like minor effects like Reflections within reflections uh if you were in path in cyberpunk or in Allen wake if you were to find like a pinhole in a leaf and there was an entire world behind it it would actually do a Pinal camera effect it's just the thing is the game doesn't have the art setup to allow you to do that really easily the lighting is accurate enough to do to start doing minor phenomena of lighting and that leads to a wholly consistent presentation where like Oliver said earlier like with cyberpunk where you move the camera down it doesn't get weird and awkward like you'd see in other titles and here it just like keeps the consistency all the way I think a good example of that Alex is like again right in the diner like on some of the tables they have like like dishes that are very smoothly rendered right with like the subtle material work on it you look at the reflection and it retains that high polygon look uh you actually see the underside of the bowl which wouldn't happen with SSR for instance uh you know and it retains all the shading all the lighting all like the the subtlety of that model in the reflection and and it's lit you know with that gorgeous indirect lighting and it just creates something that's super cohesive yeah uh Oliver yeah I mean gez what do what do I add to all that I think it's just well I'd say that even on consoles you know it it still looks really really good you still get a lot of that lighting presentation and indeed the baked lighting is kind of shared across the game including I believe in the path raced implementation some of the baked lighting is still there there so it's still like it still looks really superb on consoles when you look at little elements like Alan wake's coat when you're in that kind of New York City area just the way that light plays off of it I mean the material response is to die for it just looks so I've never seen something looks so correct the piece of clothing looks so correct in a video game before and yeah I mean the the model is just like outstanding a lot of the time like in the retirement home I was just looking around and being like this looks like it's pulled from a CG film just like John said yep there's a wild amount the the ray reconstruction Works uh flawlessly I would say it's basically perfect in this yeah yeah it's like 99% it's great there's so much Geo in every environment it's just a hard game it's a hard game for me to even pick it apart because it looks like so good at at a level that I almost have trouble critiquing cuz it's it's especially on PC when you turn on path tracing and you have that Rec r reconstruction driven image which just looks like so pristine you know image quality like this in the path Trace title is is just insane um yeah I know what you mean like yeah it's it's really splitting hairs when we come to this level of rendering um like in just in terms of like minor things John you or Oliver you mentioned like the and this is one thing that I want to talk about when we get to Avatar but like when you get to like the like when you do see that they're blending in some of whatever their non rrac GI is over into the path Trace image like you start seeing like errors as a result of that and that is like like it's like one of the few minor blemishes in the game maybe it has positive effects that I talked about in my video but also when it like when there's like a misaligned uh Shadow on an object it just feels awkward in a game that otherwise has never had that before so like it stands out in comparison to other aspects of the game that are pretty much Flawless uh that's really about it's like really like one of the few negatives it's otherwise yeah really good I also think like the bvh with all the like skinned mes meses being represented correctly and all that stuff that's that's a big thing yeah that's that's a big thing too like usually we're so used to seeing like R racing games where like the Shadows don't move correctly with the bushes or the bushes are just straight like most in most games actually bushes and trees will just not move at all in the r tracing if you look and uh yeah that that that definitely shows up oh and the fact that they're doing all this while having some environments absolutely packed with foliage uh is nuts because you don't often see that Although our next game there's a lot of foliage in there and so we we'll try to talk about some of the nitpicks with each game but now I want to talk about Avatar frontiers of Pandora and what it does special and the first thing I thought of was like oh man this is like the followup to crisis one I've always wanted in some ways just in terms of like representing a properly dense jungle environment with just an insane level of granularity and animation and all the foliage and there's just so much life in this world combined with uh extremely impressive lighting it's it's genuinely uh it's just it's just something you look at and you're like wow that's that's stunning and Alex actually you did a massive PC sort of tech Focus not Tech Focus but you know a Showcase Video talking about all this and I remember when you were working on this you're like oh man this just made the graphics of the Year discussion like difficult now and it's such a different thing compared to Allan Wake and that's also what makes this difficult because I think it is up there but they're so different why don't you talk about a little bit Yeah like the difference between Avatar and uh Alan Wake is essentially it's a scope and it's also a little bit about game goals like Alan W 2 very I mean there is some modularity into how this game can be structured when you're playing specifically as Allen wake and there is like when you're walking around a saga in the forest sections you can go from place to place and it is a bit more open but obviously Avatar has this large no loading screen connected world with multiple biomes in it and that means you have to tle tackle very different technical problems and one thing that I want to say that I really like and it's why I've always like games like Doom 3 and Avatar comes in there and crisis is it's going for like this it's trying to mimic real life by using systems driven approaches to tackle them and obviously I say real life here in great quotation marks because it's taking place on an alien world filled with Fantastical sites but it is trying to bound Itself by realistic concerns and a part of that okay we can talk about ration later but I want to talk first about how the world is like populated like you create like a series of rule sets by designers that say like okay we have this large asset zoo in front of us of different plants that have different lore reasons for existing in different parts of the world like they're in the swamps they're on the plains they're next to riverbeds they find themselves at the base of certain trees Etc and they try and populate the world using these systems that are designed by designers to procedurally place things there is handcrafting in all of this obviously too they can place down individual perfectly handcrafted things if they want but then they're anchored in the terrain uh with like perfect smoothing along the edges to make sure it doesn't look weird and then procedural placement then AIDS in embedding it in the world and I think Avatar does it really really really well I think it it doesn't fall into the usually like kind of strange look some open worlds have where they have like a slight manufactured look or they have a slight overly procedural look to them where like we talked about with no man sky with Oliver recently with uh Rich where it was really obvious that this was just like all procedural stuff the proceduralism in Avatar only AIDS the presentation and a lot of the things that you're seeing I didn't even talk about in the video because I want to let people experience themselves but when you first get your I think they're called I call them banshees but they're called like eons in the game or something like that it's your flying Mount the mission to get the flying Mount is actually a really good super focused linear path Mission but it's embellished by all the procedural aspects of it and where the vegetation is placed how it looks as you're running up the thing the music crescendoing as you jump up in the air into these ever higher structures to get to your flying Mount is really really well done I didn't want to even talk about about video because I wanted people to experience it firsthand but as a part of that like procedural thing is that all the lighting there's unlike Alan Wick to there's no fallback to pre-baked stuff all the lighting in the game has to be real time for the world to even work in the first place uh and they fully committed to Ray tracing even on the current Chen consoles in a whole like holistic way like Reflections GI bits of the shadows and even the audio like cuz like imagine if you had to make a world entirely out of placed emitters of audio you wouldn't it would just sound bad it wouldn't sound right it' be like fake Ambiance you have to like somehow make it like change and move with the character rate tracing is a pretty powerful way to make it do that in a system like systems and and I just love systems driven design like it's always inspired me so much since crisis so that's why I wanted to talk about Avatar as as what it does differently than alen Wick 2 where it's more systems driving a game my initial visual impression of Avatar was really just like those outdoor scenes which look phenomenal like you see an on Spiderman a foliage tons of fine detail on the ground trees mosses and grass like even I mean I'm thinking back to like Horizon forbidden West but I don't think that really even comes close to this in terms of the amount of detailing environment and the Fidelity of the lighting of objects in that environment uh with the rtgi and the RT Reflections um the lighting is very consistent and finally detailed even on consoles and um yeah I don't know I mean like like uh like Alex set I think it's just a a very convincing and and really beautiful systems driven game and um it's it's a very different kind of game from alen Wake like if we're evaluating these two titles against each other is alen wake is like yeah Allen Allan Wake is like super handcrafted in a in a in a in a sense it's very limited it's got a scope that is like it's it's like a decently long game but it's it's a totally different scope than an open world title like Avatar and I kind of think that avatar on some level is a is a more impressive technical accomplishment I think what they've done with it is is just extraordinary and even holding up like really well on consoles like you get two rtfx they're even targeting 60 and they're doing like a pretty credible job of that um whereas like I don't know Allen wake 2 on consoles is like a you know it doesn't have any R Trac like that it's good it's good but it's not quite to the same level of of um of just accomplishment in in some sense as Avatar is is doing although both both look phenomenal yeah dude that's that's actually that I was just thinking about that that's a really good point as well uh is that I think it is fair to take the console versions into account when discussing this right because making a console version of one of these games is difficult uh and the decisions that Mass have made enabling these R traced effects at this scale and quality on a console it's kind of one of the best examples we've ever seen of that on these machines right yeah which I think is also a feat to be recognized it's cutting the right corners and they said it when I talked with them the interview like so like I love the super pristine aspect that Pat racing gives us and I would love path tracing and Avatar so if you're out there and you look at massive path Trac consider path tracing but I also like the fact that they are trying to get as they said in the interview like the best bang for the buck of all the rendering techniques they can throw out there and that is uh a balancing act that is hard to do um and they managed to do it across a variety of platforms with very different specifications going all the way up to these unobtanium settings on PC which uh fine you know make the Rous Reflections make the the game still uses Shadow Maps which is probably like the largest detriment in the entire visual presentation um that's really about it and then obviously like the the rro reflection resolution is HED up considerably the only issue in the game like VIs that you don't really get in Alam 2 is like you move that camera down and you can see where like the SSR Blends in uh um but like the like the world design I also feel like the Interiors while good feel significantly less good than the exteriors in a way that's slightly unbalanced like they they feel a little bit I don't know that it's it's good but there's something about it that just felt a little bit off to me a little bit of inconsistency there yeah yeah although I will say that some of the artificial environments in particular and also the open world environments the more green environments you'd say reminded me a lot of Crisis 3 and I just I love that aspect of it like I I don't know I imagine they did take some inspiration maybe some employees uh work they do have some they do have some far more cryc people I know that for a fact so I thought that was just really cool cuz I mean I played through Cris 3 recently uh and I just I was just reminded of that while playing it still good it's it's still phenomenal but absent Crisis 4 well we'll have that soon enough but this is like the next closest thing in terms of style it is yeah my goodness and making that video too uh we talk about audio I think Alan Wake too actually has great great audio presentation as well um great blending of score with game great blending of ambiance with game Avatar 2 has to do it in a very different way because it's not narration based it's it's this is such a hard this such such a hard discussion because we're looking at two very different types of I know exactly another thing that Alan Wick obviously given its focus has I think over Avatar is just like character models and character rendering which is just like absurd in Allen wake 2 but obviously this is a very different game and they do a great job with the na'vi but I feel like the human characters and Avatar are perhaps less like they're good but not stunning and I would actually say when I when I think back to Psycho in Crisis 3 during that cut scene when he leans over and looks at you at the beginning somehow that still looks better in my mind oh it does I'd say it does think looks I think psycho looks better than the character models year but psycho was also like five years ahead I know but na he was living up to his name models look great though they do they look freaking great yeah yeah all those na'vi in crisis um but yeah this this is this is hard I don't know I I feel like we've both kind of we've all described these games here though and the interesting thing is that of the three in the top three um Avatar has better HDR as well yeah Avatar does have really great HDR I think um they all interestingly have R tracing and I think that goes to show that like the the next like some of the next level rendering that needs to occur in games is driven by the the scenarios that R tracing can create that are not necessarily created without it so I think that's a pretty important distinction versus like the rest of the list wow this is this is hard what what are the drawbacks for Allan Wake 2 I mean I can I can be brave and just say a personal opinion about it and then we can all say so for me I want to just put Avatar at one because it appeals to some of my sensibilities of why I got interested in into in rendering like I was really inspired by Doom 3 back in the day I was really inspired by crisis for example when halflife 2 in Doom 3 came out I played a lot at halflife 2 and I liked it a lot and I really liked the uh the physics driven aspect of it but I was just like super fascinated at like this adherence to real time all the time that Doom 3 had to me it was just like it spoke to me and that's what spoke to me about crisis as well so I'm so I'm very interested in Avatar trying to keep this lineage up of real time all the time proceduralism Etc so I want to put that at one as being like technically this discussion as heck kind of reminds me of back around 2010 when people were talking about crisis versus Metro 2033 as like top tier Graphics cuz the difference between those games is very similar to the difference between these games uh in terms of scope and visual style and everything oh but man this is we can have differing opinions no but like Avatar like I'm I'm letting your video run now and just thinking about it the way it looks in HDR and everything moves it's so freaking goodl looking it's so goodl Looking In Action they both are I'm I'm almost inclined to agree that's the thing even though Allan Wake like on the on the micro level feels more impressive there's just something about the on the micro level it is more impressive just this it's just this crazy like when you look at the these forests and you look at the way everything's lit so coherently and beautifully and it's just so vibrant and yet runs so smooth and I think that I I would say the thing that maybe tips it over for me and why I would do it beyond all the things we've said it is the console version because I think delivering a console version without having to sacrifice his features that's that's a huge accomplishment like like very much worthy of Praise so yeah I might vote avatar for number one just by a hair just by a hair I would say like in terms of the game that I think looks better in any given shot I would say Allen wake to right yeah because they're they're accomplishing a lot within a limited scope of title and the lighting looks outstanding um even absent like some little problems with the Shadows that you see sometimes because the baked lighting and things like this but but it just looks it looks so good in every shot and the variety of the locations it's it's doing some impressive things and some technically challenging things maybe that aren't quite on the same scale as achieving an open world Pandora but are still you know very uh very hard things and the technology behind it is incredible but if but Graphics is more than just producing a great looking image and I think what Avatar is doing in terms of hitting uh multiple rate racing effects making those fundamental to the visuals having like an incredible open world environment where you can go anywhere where it's so it has so much flexibility in that respect um and then achieving all that on power limited and constrained platforms delivering basically the full feature set visual feature set on an Xbox series s you know it's pretty pretty special so to me I think that it's it's just a matter of you know what do you prioritize in your ranking but I think in terms of a graphics of the Year award I think that I'd probably give it to Avatar just because I think that that is the more probably technically impressive overall effort in realtime rendering putting it that way real time rendering yeah yeah that's a good way to put it and real time emphasis on real time you know yeah it it does Avatar does feel like an extension of the crisis model I think that what krych was trying to do I think you're right about that it's the first time we've had one that's convincingly like that with this sort of jungle likee environment as well so we haven't really seen much like progress in that area right like trying to keep all the systemic things alive this kind of dense jungle and this sort of coherent lighting Far Cry certainly hasn't kept that up that BEC somewhat formulaic and it just kind of you know it doesn't really work the same way um yeah the scale is completely different in a Far Cry game it's very interesting even though like that that was like part that lead up to discussion this is that the comparisons with other rubis soft titles and Far Cry came about and I felt like they didn't Jive completely other than the face level yeah like even Far Cry 6 has a sort of similar setting but it does not look anything like this nowhere nowhere near this and it runs worse the CPU CPU wise yeah yeah the performance on the consoles like we're talking about like achieving this this these things while also running on the consoles like the game is like ridiculously multi-threaded um it is using your GPU really really well if we're talking about options on PC it has the it is the best PC Port I played this year probably perfect I mean I just loaded pretty much perfect it just went it just went and it started and like had all these things all these features all these things you can tweak has like it has like a benchmark Suite to like rival offline tools it's it's it's so good a massive have done an incredible job so I think I think we've collectively agreed we've split hairs to do it though we both agree that we we both agree that we love alen Wick too but I think it's just like ier put it really well like the emphasis on like technical achievement and real-time rendering across the breadth of systems probably has to go to Avatar okay but you know number number two for alen Wake that's still a remarkable achievement I think and it's a stunning game and then Avatar number one so there like this much just just a little bit just barely we're lucky though that we're in like when you look at the top three though like these games it's it's insane what it's been achieved here this truly Next Level stuff beautiful beautiful games yeah uh yeah I can't say enough but I think yeah well done to all these Developers

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Length: 36min 30sec (2190 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 27 2023