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Very interesting article. Some humble thoughts: The discussion on the SSAO suggests that the game's system uses GTAO - lots of features suggest at the least h

Very interesting article. Some humble thoughts: The discussion on the SSAO suggests that the game's system uses GTAO - lots of features suggest at the least heavy inspiration from the technique (see "Practical Realtime Strategies for Accurate Indirect Occlusion" - relatively accessible paper). The way the game's rendering is set up seems very carefully thought out. Namely, the relative lack of pre-baking and lighting "tricks." This accomplishes several things at once: It simplifies development of locations and assets - hugely important in a game with a scope this large, it makes the lighting/visuals of the game more robust and consistent in quality, and it also allows the integration of ray tracing effects without changing the artists' and designers' process. Since even without ray tracing the game uses PBR and broadly physically plausible (though carefully designed) lighting, adding ray-tracing doesn't require a massive amount of extra work. All the information is already there, and it'll be much easier to make it look good. All in all, reading this article has done just as much to convince me that the game is "next-gen" (at least in terms of graphics) as actually playing it has :) As a comparison, the ENB mod for Skyrim allows dynamic lighting in that game, but to actually use physically plausible light locations rather than the base game's prebaked light maps essentially requires redoing the lighting for all the locations in the entire game (there are several mods that do indeed do this.) Before CP2077 I still hadn't seen a game that definitely beat what you could accomplish with modded Skyrim for visuals - even in very recent games it was all still fundamentally done the same way. Good to see that essentially a decade of near stagnation has ended. It's a little vexing that the state of PC gaming is so dependent on the release of new consoles, though. Edits: for minor fixes

hutzlibu 6y ago
"It's a little vexing that the state of PC gaming is so dependent on the release of new consoles, though" Thats apparently where the big money is. Also, there are lots of folks like me, who play only occasionally and therefore not needing to spend so much for a state of the art gaming PC, and get by with their 5+years old one. But yes, if the high end PC gamer hardware would be standard ... that would allow for some serious graphical (and other) improvements. I am finally back into game developement (as a side project) - and I am surprised again, how much hardware constraints limit game developement, too. Many things I want to do, are just not possible on the average machine (but thats the bonus from developing on average hardware, you find out about that early on). I still dream of a voxel sandbox gameengine with integrated chemistry and physics. There are quite some projects promised that years ago, but apparently it is not yet possible with todays hardware. Maybe soon?
- corysama 6y ago
  Not quite sandbox or chemistry, but you might appreciate https://www.teardowngame.com/ https://www.teardowngame.com/
ReactiveJelly 6y ago
I remember when Doom 3 made the same promise. All dynamic lighting, dynamic shadows, no lightmaps. I guess it was a couple generations too early for that to work. Maybe lightmaps are dying off now because game worlds are getting bigger and denser, and storage isn't getting faster as fast as GPUs are, so it's better to throw together something approximate and dynamic that can be rendered in 2 or 3 frames, than something perfect that can never move and has limited resolution at bake time.
- medlyyy 6y ago
  I would say it's a few things at once. GPUs now have pretty much general purpose compute, and they're typically memory-bandwidth bound more than compute bound. So - the paper & article briefly talk about - for example temporal reprojection/accumulation in order to get enough samples (see figure 3 in paper) and applying extra compute (filters) using the information already locally available to increase image quality while having no effect on performance due to the memory bandwidth limitation. You can see what this accumulation looks like for CP2077's SSAO in this Gamer's Nexus video: https://youtu.be/zUVhfD3jpFE?t=960 https://youtu.be/zUVhfD3jpFE?t=960 He attributes it to TAA but to me it looks like a clear example of the exact temporal accumulation technique described by the GTAO paper in order to get samples performance-efficiently. This ("free" compute due to memory bottlenecks) is true for the last-gen consoles as well as modern cards. So rather than a storage limitation, it's more a limitation of being able to get the data from system memory or even on-card GPU memory to the GPU cores fast enough since the cores now process it so quickly. A general increase in resolution of textures and towards 1440p and 4K displays has not helped with that issue. Going along with that is a general trend towards PBR (physically based rendering) in all fields that use computer graphics - film/tv, 3D modelling, design, games. The PBR philosophy is generally anti using tricks & hacks where possible. The reasons why are the reasons that PBR has been so widely (almost universally) adopted: PBR makes it easy for artists to create consistent and robust results, using understandable methods that mostly work how you would intuitively think they should, and the results automatically look good and are interoperable since there is a clear target - to emulate real light transport, materials and so on. It's simply not feasible (or at the very least extremely costly in artist/dev labour) to be manually designing bespoke tricks to get each individual scene to look right. It's a "let the computer do the work" type of philosophy, which Cyberpunk seems to follow since they didn't even seem to include manually placed occlusion planes, for example (going by the original article). So it's a combination of the hardware now being capable of it, having gradual software/algorithmic improvements to get better approximations to correct lighting, and a relatively wholesale overhaul of the entire graphics pipeline toward PBR, due to its substantial benefits. Then, since the PBR approach is highly compatible with ray-tracing inherently, ray tracing is the cherry on top, for now still only usable on top end hardware for realtime games.
steeleduncan 6y ago
> Namely, the relative lack of pre-baking and lighting "tricks." Possibly this explains the issues on ps4/xb1 hardware. If cp2077 were designed for the new generation of GPUs where those tricks are unnecessary, it clearly wouldn't backport well onto hardware that requires those tricks.
- medlyyy 6y ago
  I do think it contributes, however the techniques for rendering these have also advanced in quality and performance over the years, so it's probably possible for them to get the game to a decent state even on last gen consoles.
mekkkkkk 6y ago
If you want to see a game whose graphics are unbounded by consoles, take a look at Star Citizen. Yes, it's incomplete. Yes, it's buggy. Yes, it might be a microtransaction hoax. But damn, it looks good. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJ_9kli9gwU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJ_9kli9gwU
- medlyyy 6y ago
  Thanks for the link. To me you've kinda proved my point. Nothing in that video strikes me as being "next gen" in terms of graphics. They have a decent filmic post processing filter and high res textures, I guess? CP2077 looks much, much better than that.
  - saberdancer 6y ago
    I am stunned how good CP2077 looks. I feel like any scene is a wallpaper. Especially with how smooth and connected everything is. I am running on RTX3080 on max settings at 1440p so your mileage may vary.
  - mekkkkkk 6y ago
    Hmm, alright. I suppose it's subjective then. To me SC is the better looking one by a mile. Interesting how differently we see it.
    - medlyyy 6y ago
      I don't think it's subjective. It's moments like this: https://youtu.be/nJ_9kli9gwU?t=961 https://youtu.be/nJ_9kli9gwU?t=961 that reveal the limitations of SC's engine. Coming from playing CP2077 the lighting looks badly off. I do agree it does some things better, but it overall still looks "current gen."
formerly_proven 6y ago
> As a comparison, the ENB mod for Skyrim allows dynamic lighting in that game, but to actually use physically plausible light locations rather than the base game's prebaked light maps essentially requires redoing the lighting for all the locations in the entire game (there are several mods that do indeed do this.) Skyrim doesn't use prebaked lights and shadows at all. That's why you generally only have a handful of active light sources per scene with everything else being filled in with ambient (interiors) or sky (exterior) light.

hutzlibu 6y ago

"It's a little vexing that the state of PC gaming is so dependent on the release of new consoles, though" Thats apparently where the big money is. Also, there are lots of folks like me, who play only occasionally and therefore not needing to spend so much for a state of the art gaming PC, and get by with their 5+years old one. But yes, if the high end PC gamer hardware would be standard ... that would allow for some serious graphical (and other) improvements. I am finally back into game developement (as a side project) - and I am surprised again, how much hardware constraints limit game developement, too. Many things I want to do, are just not possible on the average machine (but thats the bonus from developing on average hardware, you find out about that early on). I still dream of a voxel sandbox gameengine with integrated chemistry and physics. There are quite some projects promised that years ago, but apparently it is not yet possible with todays hardware. Maybe soon?

corysama 6y ago
Not quite sandbox or chemistry, but you might appreciate https://www.teardowngame.com/ https://www.teardowngame.com/

ReactiveJelly 6y ago

I remember when Doom 3 made the same promise. All dynamic lighting, dynamic shadows, no lightmaps. I guess it was a couple generations too early for that to work. Maybe lightmaps are dying off now because game worlds are getting bigger and denser, and storage isn't getting faster as fast as GPUs are, so it's better to throw together something approximate and dynamic that can be rendered in 2 or 3 frames, than something perfect that can never move and has limited resolution at bake time.

medlyyy 6y ago
I would say it's a few things at once. GPUs now have pretty much general purpose compute, and they're typically memory-bandwidth bound more than compute bound. So - the paper & article briefly talk about - for example temporal reprojection/accumulation in order to get enough samples (see figure 3 in paper) and applying extra compute (filters) using the information already locally available to increase image quality while having no effect on performance due to the memory bandwidth limitation. You can see what this accumulation looks like for CP2077's SSAO in this Gamer's Nexus video: https://youtu.be/zUVhfD3jpFE?t=960 https://youtu.be/zUVhfD3jpFE?t=960 He attributes it to TAA but to me it looks like a clear example of the exact temporal accumulation technique described by the GTAO paper in order to get samples performance-efficiently. This ("free" compute due to memory bottlenecks) is true for the last-gen consoles as well as modern cards. So rather than a storage limitation, it's more a limitation of being able to get the data from system memory or even on-card GPU memory to the GPU cores fast enough since the cores now process it so quickly. A general increase in resolution of textures and towards 1440p and 4K displays has not helped with that issue. Going along with that is a general trend towards PBR (physically based rendering) in all fields that use computer graphics - film/tv, 3D modelling, design, games. The PBR philosophy is generally anti using tricks & hacks where possible. The reasons why are the reasons that PBR has been so widely (almost universally) adopted: PBR makes it easy for artists to create consistent and robust results, using understandable methods that mostly work how you would intuitively think they should, and the results automatically look good and are interoperable since there is a clear target - to emulate real light transport, materials and so on. It's simply not feasible (or at the very least extremely costly in artist/dev labour) to be manually designing bespoke tricks to get each individual scene to look right. It's a "let the computer do the work" type of philosophy, which Cyberpunk seems to follow since they didn't even seem to include manually placed occlusion planes, for example (going by the original article). So it's a combination of the hardware now being capable of it, having gradual software/algorithmic improvements to get better approximations to correct lighting, and a relatively wholesale overhaul of the entire graphics pipeline toward PBR, due to its substantial benefits. Then, since the PBR approach is highly compatible with ray-tracing inherently, ray tracing is the cherry on top, for now still only usable on top end hardware for realtime games.

steeleduncan 6y ago

> Namely, the relative lack of pre-baking and lighting "tricks." Possibly this explains the issues on ps4/xb1 hardware. If cp2077 were designed for the new generation of GPUs where those tricks are unnecessary, it clearly wouldn't backport well onto hardware that requires those tricks.

medlyyy 6y ago
I do think it contributes, however the techniques for rendering these have also advanced in quality and performance over the years, so it's probably possible for them to get the game to a decent state even on last gen consoles.

mekkkkkk 6y ago

If you want to see a game whose graphics are unbounded by consoles, take a look at Star Citizen. Yes, it's incomplete. Yes, it's buggy. Yes, it might be a microtransaction hoax. But damn, it looks good. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJ_9kli9gwU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJ_9kli9gwU

medlyyy 6y ago
Thanks for the link. To me you've kinda proved my point. Nothing in that video strikes me as being "next gen" in terms of graphics. They have a decent filmic post processing filter and high res textures, I guess? CP2077 looks much, much better than that.
- saberdancer 6y ago
  I am stunned how good CP2077 looks. I feel like any scene is a wallpaper. Especially with how smooth and connected everything is. I am running on RTX3080 on max settings at 1440p so your mileage may vary.
- mekkkkkk 6y ago
  Hmm, alright. I suppose it's subjective then. To me SC is the better looking one by a mile. Interesting how differently we see it.
  - medlyyy 6y ago
    I don't think it's subjective. It's moments like this: https://youtu.be/nJ_9kli9gwU?t=961 https://youtu.be/nJ_9kli9gwU?t=961 that reveal the limitations of SC's engine. Coming from playing CP2077 the lighting looks badly off. I do agree it does some things better, but it overall still looks "current gen."

formerly_proven 6y ago

> As a comparison, the ENB mod for Skyrim allows dynamic lighting in that game, but to actually use physically plausible light locations rather than the base game's prebaked light maps essentially requires redoing the lighting for all the locations in the entire game (there are several mods that do indeed do this.) Skyrim doesn't use prebaked lights and shadows at all. That's why you generally only have a handful of active light sources per scene with everything else being filled in with ambient (interiors) or sky (exterior) light.