Note photorealistic: you cannot determine if a HD video is real or rendered, no serious issue as nobody is stupid enough to render a mundane scene who could be done with actors as it’s more expensive than A list actors.

I litterally cant talk to you lol...ive never used these words in a sentence before so im having trouble with comprehension.....u know ur system talk

Use biased images much? RDR had "bushes" too and they went a whole lot further than Skyrim's. Look at 3:23 for example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmgeX_MnCU0

Look, I'm all for pointing out the good aspects of Skyrim, but can we stop trying to do so by sh*tting all over RDR which is one of the best achievements in videogame environments ever? It's pretty pathetic.

I'm not convinced a quad SLI system would improve anything, especially if the problems lie in the engine itself. My rig is a couple years old, but it's a dual core, 64 bit rig with 8 gigs of memory and a GTX 470. it should be able to run it no problem, but even with ini tweaks I get the stuff popping into view. The Fallouts were a little better in that they fade into view a little better, but the fact remains that the objects should be seen from much farther away than they are rendering. Hell, if it will run better, I'll get me another 470 and build a new rig for Skyrim, I just don't think it will matter compared to what I'm running now.

Please elaborate on your thoughts. Thanks!

So after watching the demo you believe you will have the same pop in as OB and FO3 even though the only thing popping and fading in the vid is the grass which is being rendered at at least twice the distance as a maxed PC OB and is on an early 360 build?

Is this a joke? Those bushes are hardly the density of the grass in Skyrim. I'm comparing the grass, nothing else. In RDR, they are flat 2-poly billboards. The grass in Skyrim has a 3d form.

stop being so picky. /topic

Reading about an argument over grass. That's a new low for me.

Your correct, yet its very odd that there is no movement at all untill very close. I would like to see movement from that far otherwise its basically a statue.

I really hope this will be adjustable. They should let us do much as our PCs can handle

I don't know what ini tweaks you did, but for FNV I found that ramping up everything past the default max using FOMM did nothing(at least not much) until I also change the Ugrid, then I saw a significant difference.

Why cant i compare it to 5 year old games...o wait scratch that 4 years old.

like crysis 1?
http://www6.incrysis.com/screenshots/realistic_forest3hm1.jpg
damn dem textures.

But even though crysis 1 IS 4 year's old it's also made around PC only hardware so that would be a bit unfair, and as for the witcher 2 it's also built around pc hardware and it will be drastically scaled down for consoles. But even then i doubt the PC version of skyrim will even come close to the witcher simply because skyrim is made based around console hardware and ported over to the pc with a few things like AA and better draw distances.

It's not bethesda's fault a good portion of the market is on the consoles, and thus they designed it around the lowest common denominator. How if it had been the other way around and they built the game for the pc and scaled it down for the consoles the differences of what we have now and what we could of had would be immense. Of course that's a big IF.

What grass? You compaired RDR's grass to Skyrim's tufts or whatever they were. This is Skyrim's grass - http://elderscrolls.com/skyrim/media/screenshots/wolves-heal-mace/ - which is also made up of "2d billboards". That "3d form" you're talking about is just a couple of 2d billboards crossing eachother.

Is it really that hard to accept that RDR has superior foliage? Look, if I had the choice to only play one of those two games I would pick Skyrim every time since it sounds superior in general, but if I was handing out awards for realistic foliage I would give it to RDR every time.

I can't accept what isn't true. Even with that screenshot, Skyrim's grass still looks superior.

3D grass is terribly inefficient. I really hope Bethesda didn't do such a thing. If you're talking about the combining of 2D meshes as someone else said, that seems more likely... but 3D grass... I've yet to see such a wasteful thing in a video game.

Nothin wrong with 3d grass of course could only be done on PC.

It would still be terribly inefficient. There's barely any visible gain from 3D grass compared to whatever else resources could be spent rendering... plus 3D meshes don't seem to have the ability to be turned off, in most cases, and my PC would have great difficulty managing to deal with 3D grass. I'd rather see higher resolutions on 2D grass than see 3D grass because of how thin grass is and because we're not at the point of supercomputers in everyone's homes. 3D grass is one of those trivial things that I doubt will be done any time in the near future for any sandbox game.

One of the challenges a developer has to make these days, is to consider what needs to be drawn, what can be toned back a bit, and what shouldn't be there in the first place. We must look at what Todd says about 'drawing everything' differently than what we traditionally consider the word, 'everything' means. It's possible he means drawing everything they possibly can at one time with the hardware they've been given - and this will naturally lead to pop-in issues, such as trees, grass, and other small items such as rocks or spiderwebs. Since they've been locked away behind closed doors for the greater part of the past 5 years making this game, some nuances of speech can be lost in translation, whereby we misinterpret what is said.

Saying that, they should have considered a lot of different aspects on what needs to be drawn, all the time, and what can be toned back, or lost altogether. I'm not a huge fan of the grass to be perfectly honest, and mainly because of the issue that has risen in this thread. It loses it's appeal when you watch it 'roll out' (as another put it nicely) right in front of you, and if you're trying to get svcked into the game, you don't want to watch stuff like that. PC users were able to combat this in Oblivion with a few different methods, those being shorter grass, low-poly grass, and tweaking the game ini to allow the grass to be infinitely drawn. Console users, oth, are unable to use these mods and tweaks, and therefore are left with what has been given to them. In that case, I would suggest just turning it off entirely, as not only would a rendering pipeline be available for other tasks, but performance would be greatly improved. However, I do believe that option was unavailable for console users, unless someone can state otherwise. In regards to Skyrim's current grass draw distance, it's disgusting, and I feel sorry for anyone playing the game on a console who had higher hopes for it to be drawn farther from the player. I know my hopes for something as silly as this has been pretty high, because it really killed the immersion factor for me until I read about the tweaks I then applied to Oblivion.

The tress still pop-in, far in the background. Farther than what was seen in Oblivion, but you still notice it. I don't have a timestamp as I'm too lazy to look it up, but I posted about it in another thread around the E3 scourge on the forums. Right in the beginning as Todd runs down the hill, you can see in the distance where trees didn't exist, and then magically there they are. For myself personally, I was hoping this would be something they'd address, but that is simply not the case. I'm not a fan of when things are generated on the fly when it comes to something that should be static like trees, so I am hoping they take more time if they develop another TES game and hand-place all the trees. I mean, that's what you do when you have millions of dollars to throw at a project. You assign teams of people to do stuff like this while you create your masterpiece.

Don't get me wrong. I know my post is critical, and I know a good portion of you are going to nitpick it apart and most likely say I'm a TES hater, but that is simply not the case. I love the fact they are trying to add as much detail as possible to their games, visually and story-wise, but I also have a big problem when it comes to LOD and filtering techniques for video game graphic engines. You see, back in the late 90's and early 2000's, developers had a strict guideline they stuck to when it came to ensuring that everything looked the same up close and from a distance. Sure, the games weren't THAT pretty, and the textures were muddy, but you knew that if you maxed out the games settings, you didn't have to worry about your eye being diverted from your viewpoint to a part on the side of the screen where an NPC just magically appears or whatnot. You didn't have LOD domes that stretched out from the playable character, where you can obviously see where the filtering process kicks in and you get more detailed textures. I think sometimes developers want to do too much, and the final execution doesn't always turn out the way it was planned. Just look at Duke Nukem Forever. There's an awesome article I read recently that was published in 2009 about the events that lead up to the games finishing process, but if you read it, you'll know they switched game engines at least twice so the game would have the most features....

Anyways, Skyrim will be a good game. Being critical is just part of being a diehard fan and hoping certain nitpicky things are addressed. Yes, the draw distance is incredible for the hardware used. Yes, the game does look amazing with the attention to detail they've put into it. Does it meet everyone's criteria? No. But that's ok. Skyrim will still be fun.

I am amazed at how much of an issue GRASS seems to be for everyone. Grass? Really? If that's the worst graphical thing we see in Skyrim I'm going to count this game among the most epic visual experiences of all time. And we haven't even seen PC gameplay or graphics yet. Geez.

Hey Op, draw distance and view distance are totally different. Someone most likely has told you this already.

The draw distance for grass is absolutely horrendous console crap.

This^ a hundred times. Everyone needs to stop worrying. The draw diatances are fine considering how much else is in the game.

...and the draw distances will be one of the things a PC will most likely improve upon if it bothers you that much.

Thank you for posting the images of the map and the view. I was worried that that view was looknig all the way from one side of the map to the other, which would make it a very small map.

I was right.

http://www.thedragonborn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/skyrimmap.jpg

It only took him 10 minutes to clear half the map.

That makes me a Sad Panda.

They took this and cut it up from the much larger showing of Skyrim I do believe. But that still saddens me.

Edited video much?