The Heaven Benchmark used tessellation quite well on the cobblestone roads and tile roofs. It turns them from flat polygon planes to very bumpy surfaces.

But yeah, grass I'm not so sure about for pretty much the same reason you've said. Truly good grass probably won't come around until they start using fur effects.

Fallout New Vegas/3 looked okay. But the optimization was really horrible, it was impossible to have a decent playthrough without the jittering or stuttering. That's even post-patch and it was also in fallout 3. I just hope skyrim won't be an upgraded gamebyro.

i dont think you can say its not better the textures have been improved so much

Yeah I used to have that. What I meant was my experience with it in Unreal. It sort of worked much better on round surfaces than it did on a floor/wall ect. It probably just
needs to be improved within that engine because you are right, it looked great on the Heaven demo. The only interesting part for me is the fact that they can increase
tessellation on a LOD basis, so as you get closer it gets more detailed. Other than that I don't find it that interesting. I find the lighting effects to be far more impressive.

Damn....Oblivion has not aged well at all. I remember popping the Oblivion disk into my Xbox 360 for the first time and being amazed by the graphics (especially after leaving the sewers). I kinda wish that Bethesda would have waited a little longer to start working on Skyrim so we could have had it on brand new consoles. I want to blown away by the graphics like the first time I saw Oblivion. Oh well, Skyrim still looks damn good.

About what TW2 looks like today. Assuming the next console generation is coming in the next two years or so, it is going to be using tech available today.

Skyrim destroys Oblivion. Destroys. Have you ever seen an open world game on the 360 with Skyrim level graphics? No? There's a reason. Bethesda's the best.

I just hope there is still stay that "Wow!" factor once you leave the "starting area". Like in Oblivion when you left the sewers.

Hey, I'm not complaining. :thumbsup: It comes to show how much more immersed I'm going to be in the world. Gameplay first, story second, then the graphics.

Being a visual artist, I thought I would make really brief comments on the visuals. Since visuals, anything that meets the eyes, means a great deal to me. (And open world rpg's are my favorite genre, so it's not purely about visuals for me, just this post is)

• - The texture quality is uniformly very, very, low.
  
• - The artistry of the landscape models are far more personal, and thick with richness. Outclassing every elder scrolls game combined, and then tenfold.
  
• - The way the engine renders cloud formations obscuring the landscape is brilliant, and stands out as something even peers cannot compete with.
  
• - The shadow level of detail seems to be absent or severely lacking.
  
• - The shadow resolution seems to be as low, or lower, than oblivion.
  
• - The animation seems significantly better than previous elder scrolls game, but feels as if it still does not meet standards. In other words, it's simply ok.
  
• - The density of the environment seems to be sparse, this may be a conscious choice of the developers part for this landscape.
  
• - The density of the indoor detail/environment, seems improved. Significantly even. No question there is going to be a universal separate cell loading system.
  
• - The character models are staggering, for a series that has always been known for having truly ugly character graphics, this jump is HUGE.
  
• - The trees in the game seem to be rather lacking in detail.
  
• - The culling system inclusion is yet unproven, and it's nearly impossible to detect lower quality models.
  
• - There are no modern features yet. No ssao, no godrays, minimal parralaxing outdoors. This is years behind current standards, and these features are meant for a game of this kind.

Overall, it's doing quite a few things very well. Yet the technology seems pre-2006. Skyrim is my most anticipated game in YEARS. But I would really like to see the visuals improve before release.

Interesting - thanks for sharing this detailed anolysis from your clearly very knowledgeable perspective.

How many of these areas that you found sub-par do you suspect are likely or possibly going to look better when we finally get to see screens from the PC version at 1920x1080 or higher resolution with higher res textures, better shadows, etc.?

I'm a content over graphics guy myself but these look amazing.

I loled at the second comparison, the fierce, dirty nord warrior sneering at you vs the dopey smiling face of those incessant fg porters. From what I'm seeing the graphics will be good enough for me, as long as animations are well done. It's tough to tell all the details of their graphics from just a couple screenshots and who knows how the game will feel. By this I mean if you took a screen shot of Oblivion you would think that its beautiful but when roaming around stutters, strange LOD and animations really took away from the immersion. But yeah thay 2nd comparison really is definitive of how different and great the art design is going to be.

I'm not sure if it is a major step up - incremental yes but major?

I've yet to see what modders can do to optimize the nif or texture files so I'm really unsure if it is a major improvement - and the faces aren't really worth comparing as Oblivion had some of the ugliest faces I've ever seen in a game but even the devs recognize that - I think Todd called the random face generator button the Ugly button

The difference is insane. :drool:

I lol at the ugly button. You know what I should get a picture of my character and post it as my avatar or something because I believe I spent a well 5 minutes on him and it came out better than all of the other people in oblivion. Yes, their faces all looked like smashed mudcrabs. It was sad, more so knowing you are the only good looking person left in Cyrodiil. I believe if you turn the age slider all the way down and move the brow somewhat higher in the back end you get a good face and eyes. Then you slide the heavy\light one lower and make your jaw more pronounced. Everyone in oblivion seems to have overbites. Maybe I will do that soon, just to show you what I can do with vanilla oblivion. And without mods too, so this was hard.

Other than that I believe that Skyrim in the PC is the ultimate best way to go in the case of graphics. There are always next gen computers but not always next gen consoles, and with all the modders out there they are probably going to make a Skyrim graphics extender and destroy the optics out of your eyes.

yes I am glad people still make such games I mean REAL open world games

Its graphics are a lot better but we would still enjoy the game with oblivion graphics (though maybe not as much) :brokencomputer:

I yet have to see real moving images from Skyrim. That's when I'll decide if it looks good or not.

Nice.

Yes. Textures appear subpar.
That's my major concern.

Art direction is stunning.

Same here! But then I'm not huge on something being graphically brilliant... I still play SNES RPGs like Secret of Mana and FF6 and those graphics are a joke in comparison to even Oblivion....

Impossible to say. Judging from what they did with oblivion, and assuming they still have editable ini's in place, I would assume the pc version would look drastically better, sporting any shadow resolution you please, however the high setting (assuming you don't touch any ini stuff) would likely still be twice that, if not more, than what we see in these screenshots. Do take into consideration that if you set the shadows to something like 8096x the video ram would be severely impacted (probably need 3gb of video ram for that) , likely destroying most cards framerates in the process. There is also a high chance that the pc version will have the shadow's in the distance being rendered. And that would effect the overall look of the game greatly. The grass would also look a lot better with anisotropic filtering.

Also, on the pc version, those blurry rocks would be detailed and defined, thanks to x16 anisotropic filtering, in fact, all textures would have a far more defined no blur look.

Pc will also likely have slightly higher resolution textures, and stacking anisotropic filtering on top of that, with some super sampling aa (assuming the engine supports it) would make the entire game seem extremely defined, higher detail, and clean. The increased resolution on top of that, and you have, approx, a starting point of 500% gain over the console versions in terms of definition (at 1920x1080 and above), and assuming the graphics sliders are back, you will probably get a 1000% or higher improvement in overall output (and upwards to infinity with ini editing) . Do take into consideration that besides the sliders, this is true for almost all pc games.

Ssao and godrays however, well, we can't know anything about that until we get news on the pc version. There is a slim chance they will be included.