TBH, she's hawt.

I realy arnt gonig to believe anything aobout the graphics untill the game comes out, sorry. After they cut shadows and other stuff out of the game just before launch I was pissed off.

An actual evaluation, with.. Ahh forget, I'll skip the technical terms.

Yeah, there's shadows. It's just shadow maps, played almost any game in the last 3 years? Then you know what they'll look like in Skyrim. The sun will cast nice soft shadows, as well as maybe a big light or two indoors.
The biggest improvement is that they've simply upped the amount of polygons (model detail) and texture resolution. So everything looks more detailed. How? Better culling (not displaying stuff you can't see) and streaming (not putting stuff in ram you don't need). They also have better modelers and a newer version of speedtree, so the trees obviously look better.
They got rid of facegen ( I think) and replaced it with, well something better.

Can't really tell much else. They're missing a lot of shiny shiny that others put in a lot, no motion blur, SSAO, godrays or etc. But we can't even see shadows in some of the shots, and the clouds look exactly the same so if Pete is to be believed then the screenshots we have right now are incomplete, to put it one way. Oh and someone above me got how they do the snow right. But if they're doing it dynamically then we won't be having our legs stick through it ala Uncharted 2.

I just ask, where's my subsurface scattering shader? The skin on that troll looks awfully "ceramic" and not really like skin at all. And where's my tessellated (3d, not a flat surface) water? Oh and subsurface scattering (what makes skin look like, skin and not a hard surface) can also be used for fur.

I don't know, but having a flat surface water, even with animated bumpmaps, fresnel, and refraction, sounds like a disappointed coming. There should really be waves, reacting to wind conditions (especially at sea), splashes against objects, caustics on the seabed, and foam. Maybe only usable on high level computers for now, but down the line maybe even I will be able to enjoy it.

And for gods sake, make the water splash sound dependent on your energy into the water. If you jump in, then fine, major splash. But when trying to be stealthy and you carefully sink your foot into water, there should be no sound of a diving whale. Few games have managed this right. In Vietcong in the river swamps, I was constantly hushing my character for being too noisy, lol.

I mentioned this earlier when everyone was praising the graphics but got totally slammed, even though I mentioned that I didn't know for sure that was what the final result would be.

Would be cool if some areas on the mountain were deeply covered in snow your guy/gal would struggle to move forward. Hopefully something more than just a decrease in speed statistic.

It does look a bit flat in some shots, but things like Parallax Occlusion Mapping are REALLY expensive. Tessellation in DX11 is actually much cheaper, and is real geometry without all the artifacts of POM. So if they scrapped POM for full, real-time shadows, I'd be glad to make that trade. One is much more immersion breaking than the other. Basically, POM is so bad on performance, I say "Why bother?".

Of course, I'll continue to hope that they are going to support DX11 in the PC version. Multiple rendering engines isn't out of the question. You need to have a non-DirectX engine for PS3, for example. Tessellation could essentially be "free" if the models already have height maps (which is the same thing as bump maps, but with the connotation that they are meant for geometry displacement). And considering it seems the team uses Z-Brush extensively for modeling, they have much more detailed source meshes. It would serve as an instant visual upgrade, with the only cost being writing the shaders.

I honestly believe that the game is going to look pretty fantastic....super-impressed with the screens so far,...the lighting, & level of detail (especially on clothing & weapons) looks really great so far.

come on people you cant have everything in 1 game yet, this will be cutting edge, but when people use comparisons between half life and a TES game I wanna puke, I hated that piece of sharp edged crap from the get go, it wasnt even in the same league at all, and it bored the hell out of me and you gotta use steam to play it, I hate STEAM !

I would love Skyrim to have POM, but I have only ever seen this implemented in Crysis. Are there any console games that have this feature? (Note that Oblivion had parallax mapping in some indoor areas.)

a dev on the forum also confirmed it on a thread, page 1 or 2 I think

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?app=forums&module=post§ion=post&do=reply_post&f=118&t=1158209&qpid=16975397

What was that in response to?

I'm dying to see these mountains you guys are talking about. Hopefully my GI will arrive this week.

Well it is a pretty good snow effect to make the illusion of snow but they made a huge mistake having it fade in like 1 sec. They could've done a better looking texture displacement too. Looked a little bit too much like a wave occlusion map. As for you betting that it will be better snow effects than in Skyrim, I'll take that bet.

I don't really know how Skryim would compare to Crysis, but POM only costs about 1 fps on my computer, while real-time shadows and HDR cost about 4-5 fps each.

Just thought I'd let you know.

:shrug:

Yes sir. Cell processor doing what it does best. Tearing through anything you throw at it.

Seriously though. I have always been impressed with the water in these games. Morrowind was the first I played and I just recently installed it again and was surprised at how well it looked. Oblivion looked good, but was made better by even simple .ini tweaks let alone mods.
Should be good.

Is it really though? Can you really tell, or are you just saying this because you feel you must fill this thread with possibly incorrect info? I'm not saying it won't be better, but come on, there's no way to tell.

Yes. It is observable to the naked eye that the animation in that video clip is far smoother an sophisticated than anything in previous BGS games.

If people couldn't tell how good an animation was by observing it, then no-one would have a problem with Oblivion's animation.

Size matters not; because it's about cells, with parallax occlusion and DX11 Tessaellation could only go on the PC version of the game.

The AO looks like it could be pre-baked.

Interesting. What makes you say this? This would imply that there is no AO on the objects that can be moved around - I can't tell from the screenshot whether this is the case or not.

Aren't the shots from the magazine made on a 360? Maybe they added DX 10 or 11 support for the PC version. I know it's very optimistic but you never know.


About the Uncharted snow vid: I'm not exactly impressed. It looks like decals with some form of bump mapping to give it depth and particle effects. I'm not saying it looks bad mind you... I'm just saying that for me it isn't as "OMG" as some see it.

To OP, would it be possible to edit in links to these screenshots you are referencing?? it would make my life alot easier.

Almost all of the screenshots are from the recent GI article and aren't available yet on the web. I have linked to one screen capture from the recent Sounds of Skyrim video that is available on the GI website.