I've never seen anything where they have said anything about which dx version they are using or what kind of mapping they will be using or so on. I've kept an eye on all the information for skyrim, including tweets and I've not seen anything where they talk about any of the graphical tech they are using.

No offense, but if you think that hi-res textures is everything that does a game; it's not.
It plays a role, together with depth of texture, which can't be modded as far as I know (I'm not refering to normal maps.)
Finally, what almost plays an even bigger role is the lighting. One of the best things about Crysis, I think, was how lighting worked. It looked great. It can be modded partly, but how lighting works can't be modded.

What I'm saying is... mods can't do wonders of everything. It can change some, but it can't change all.
And I'd say that higher resolution of textures should be in the game from the start. There should be no need for a new QTP3 mod.

You guys are being Far too critical about this. I'd rather a game that looks like that with great gameplay and story than a smaller game with Crysis level of graphics.

Everything looks amazing so far, but my only worry is the water. I can't really judge completely, but from the screenshot with the lake, the water definitely doesn't look as good as http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfEydWojJzk

Now that I see that OB pic(is that even in game?) I think the resolution on the Skyrim pic is clearly not the same, look how smooth the OB pic is and how grainy the Skyrim is.

Your right, hi-res textures doesn't make a game by itself, hi-res textures in conjunction with AA, AAA, lighting and several other factors make the graphics. I agree with him, with full graphics on the PC I think it will look just as good as Crysis 2. People overestimate the true graphics of Crysis. Crysis has great graphics but what makes them truly look good is that they always have the lighting set up so it brings out of full glory of the environment, because if they gave up any lighting for more realistic things like Skyrim will have, then you would see the environment for what it really is, great but still on the level of other games like metro 2033 and Skyrim.



Yes, the Oblivion pic is definitely better looking, that's because it's on the pc and the Skyrim one is on the 360. What doesn't do the Skyrim pic justice is being so close up to the grass in the foreground. The 360 doesn't have a high AA setting to begin with and to my knowledge, it doesn't even use AAA, so that already just made the grass and trees look nowhere as good as it would on the PC with full graphics. Not to mention the water effects are obviously toned down in the pond.

And this is the hardware you're seeing partly in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WJG14uLA3k
Looks a whole lot better there, if you ask me. Then again TES is a whole lot better on other points.
But concerning graphics only, Crysis 4 years ago beats what I've seen now many times.

Although if there is also a leap as big as in that video between PC and consoles, I'm fine.

The dude in that bar is my new favorite character in the whole elder scrolls series.

You can have both. It's 2011, Crysis was released in 2007 - expecting graphics approaching or exceeding it is not unreasonable.

Well I couldn't possibly know what you are talking about without using technical language. You seem to be really big on parallax effects and whatever, constantly talking about them, which are garbage compared to proper geometry, either via higher-poly source meshes or tessellation.

I don't even know where you get off implying anything about my ideology surrounding what makes a good game. The argument was that a PC shot of CryEngine 3 was far better than the only shot we have of forests in Skyrim. I was saying to make it fair, we'd have to first see it at a higher resolution, rendered on PC, with higher resolution textures for foliage. In which that case I bet the two would look just as good. As for whatever you're implying about texture "depth" it makes absolutely no difference for the quality of foliage. Which relies on the texture resolution and things like transparency AA.

If you don't want to improve your flora textures, then that's your own issue. Look at Improved Flora for Oblivion and tell me you wouldn't want to install it, with some justifiable reason. You'd probably be hard pressed to find a reason, and in that way, yes, higher-resolution textures are quite important.

You cannot compare specs for consoles with a PC. Apples and oranges.

I think some of you are blind,the skyrim one clearly looks better to me,take a proper look at them.
I've looked at both pic's lukeskyrimmer posted for 10 minutes.
To me the skyrim one looks better....and wait till it's running in gameplay.
You wait and see when we have more screens ,footage etc.

A mess? How so?

it is for consoles.

They aren't gonna make a whole new engine just for the pc version.

I agree. It doesn't hurt to aim high and Beth usually do exactly that and having the same hardware for the entire production time I expect them to deliver the best possible graphics for the current generation.

I'm well aware of how Tessellation works and up until recently...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uavLefzDuQ

...I had yet to see a demo that smoothed objects in previously created environments when they were supposed to be. They are definitely getting better control over it and when games are created with assets that are specifically intended to be Tessellated then we will see it actually improve the overall game world. However even in the previously linked vid you can see undesired effects in the environment surrounding the intended focus. That vid is the best I've seen so far but Tessellation still isn't ready for prime time yet.

The problem is that the vegetation is completely different. The grass on the ground is the same quality as Oblivion's on max graphics on my computer and the trees aren't even a fair comparison on the console. Console's don't support AAA, so trees like those in TES won't look nearly as good a palm tree leaf which is just one entire leaf. You NEED AAA to make trees like those in Oblivion and Skyrim (and even grass and weeds look better) look as real as possible.

Nonsense. You probably haven't even heard of PN Triangles or Phong tessellation. Those can do smoothing without geometry made specifically for tessellation. They could at least give PC users one of those solutions with extremely little effort. I assume they make hard edges in the game correctly, with a few edge loops, but if not they could easily only apply the smoothing to the more organic models, like NPCs, creatures, rocks, etc.

There's nothing keeping it from being "ready for prime time". There are no changes to be made to tessellation at a hardware level. It's all up to the implementers.

Oh, I'm not arguing that occasionally it has undesired effects if you don't have it set just right, but overall tessellation makes things look far better than alternatives.

From what I know of, tessellation is the best thing. After that, parallax occlusion mapping is the best to bring out depth of textures. The reason that's important is obvious. You're supposed to look at an object, and believe it's a real object (or close to), rather than just looking at object and thinking "okay so there's some flat texture around that to try and make me believe it's real, but it clearly fails because it looks so flat". I'm not speaking of foilage only. I'm speaking of textues in general. Without any real depth of textures, it doesn't really matter to me how hi-res they are. They will still look ugly and unrealistic. It hurts my eyes to look at Oblivion's landscape textures, for instance.

The reason I brought this up was because of "I would say that on PC forests will look just about as good as that CryEngine 3 shot. Especially after graphics mods to up the resolution of all the flora and fauna textures.", which I think implies that you think hi-res textures are basically the important thing graphics-wise.
I'm just saying that it's not the most important thing, but just that it plays pretty big part.
Lighting is probably the most important thing, imo.



Yeah that's a good point. Palm trees have indeed, well, very big "leaves".
Anyway, on a site note; this is how I would like Skyrim trees should look like on PC (/consoles), I think: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8Re377ol0g
Also, it may be overdone a bit, but the lighting makes it look really beautiful.

I can smell the spruce trees when I look at that shot. Looks like the forest I live in.

I'm not dissing the tech and I can see it being very big eventually but I have yet to be satisfied with any implementation I've seen. It's great that it improves the poly count as higher res meshes look more realistic but it needs more fine tuning because at it's current level of implementation it actually detracts from the realism, not all objects in real life have that much detail. The world looks fake to me with absolutely no flat surfaces. Fact is, it's too new to be in any game(w/ a 4 dev cycle) coming out this year and I am very pleased that it won't be mucking up the latest Elder Scrolls game.

Not that I don't have confidence in Beth but I'd really rather they didn't mess around with any 1yr old tech. It's looks good for TES 6 though as they will have at least 3 to 4 years to perfect their implementation of it.

I think the Oblivion forest looks better because it's another kind of forest: friendly, vibrant, round, compact, idyllic, lotr-ish (still definitely not 'lush jungle' lol). The Skyrim forest is more appropriate for the rough climate of Skyrim, distressing, disquieting, more scary. Look at their branches, they are telling a story, those trees must have seen terrible things happening.

The thing is, you don't have to. It has to be scalable *anyway*, adding support for nice graphics just means your ceiling is higher. Contrary to what is apparently popular belief, support for modern technology does not remove support for half-decade old technology.

Bethesda Blog says the Gamereactor magazine is already out. Apparently not...