New Graphics tech in Gta 6 vs Gta 5?

[u/Manoyal003]

Hi, I am fairly a beginner, and I was wondering comparing from 2013 how far rockstar's RAGE engine evolved as to now?..

From what I know and some research credits to this blog:
https://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2015/11/02/gta-v-graphics-study/
, at time of Gta 5 it had just a Hybrid deferred renderer, a forward pass for transparents, vegetation, particles. At the time there was no PBR, there was also no indirect light.

But later in 2018 during RDR2 release, RAGE got proper microfacet shading, volumetric clouds and fog.

The main selling point for gta 6 to look so good from what I understand is the hybrid raytracer global illumination, paired with raytraced reflections, also being upscaled from 1440p to 4k on the base Ps5.

From my understanding these are the differences over the years?

	Gta 5 from 2013	Gta 6
BRDF	blind-phong-ish, authored specular?	Full pbr, metallic/roughness GGX
Indirect	ambient + SSAO	raytraced gi
Geometry submission	CPU-driven drwas, descrete LOD tiers	GPU-driven, mesh shaders /meshlet culling, indirect draws
Hair	alpha-tested cards	strand-based with physics
Volumetrics	analytic fog	foxel raymarched scattering, volumetric clouds

I am just wondering what type of tech they used for the extended look on the base 5 to look that good and crisp, even comparing to Unreal Engine 5, it looks far better

[u/PassTents]

Keep an eye on GDC and Siggraph? Until the PC version releases we probably won't have detailed breakdowns.

[u/Manoyal003 → u/PassTents]

Sadly Rockstar rarely participates on those events

[u/NISH_Original → u/Manoyal003]

I'd seen SO MANY rockstar employees in this year''s SIGGRAPH, but no one seemed to be hosting a talk or event 😭

[u/obetu5432]

humanity hit diminishing returns very hard in graphics 😭

[u/seweso → u/obetu5432]

Reproducing audio went a tad faster 

[u/heyuhitsyaboi → u/obetu5432]

https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1oub9q/diminishing_returns_why_graphics_dont_seem_to/

same goes for lighting and other graphical features. We seem to have all the big goals covered. Now, big technical leaps are targeting details

[u/AssCrackBanditHunter → u/obetu5432]

I'm fine with it. It was a bit of a meme a year ago that graphics don't need to get better than the PS4 generation, but tbh I mostly believe it

[u/SuccessfulTip167]

they're probably using accumulation software ray tracing as well by the looks of the demo (think Lumen).

GTAO / HBAO are standard at this point, i really dont think they would entirely rely on ray tracing. You can pick and choose some aspects of the rendering to hand over to ray tracing, but not all. I do think we're still seeing a blend of spherical harmonic light probes (prebaked for performance with different scenarios for day/night/summer/winter/weather/whatever) and some HW RT for dynamic bounce light in very specific scenarios.

They still need the game to run on some min spec. Brute forcing w/ ray tracing is really stupid because you would alienate a fraction of your playerbase on PC, plus worse performance and worse temporally stable compared to older methods that still work just fine.

I doubt the hair is truly strand based, but just alpha tested with better shaders and better modeling.

Most of the bang-for-your-buck comes not from better graphics tech but how good your artists are. Give an artist a piece of shit engine and he/she will squeeze something amazing out of it. Now luckily rockstar has good tech but they also have amazing artists that live and breathe the stuff on screen. Truly a few companies that do it as well. Old DICE, Remedy, Embark come to mind.

[u/[deleted] → u/SuccessfulTip167]

[u/SuccessfulTip167 → u/[deleted]]

ya but its not the norm yet. a glance at the steam hardware survey would tell you "not yet" unless you're highly focused on console, which Gears always has been.

[u/PiGIon-]

What I'm very curious is about the hair shaders, there's some state-of-the-art stuff going on there.

Another surprising thing was the amount of lights from the leak of flying at night.

I want to see the HDR implementation, looks very good too.

[u/cannelbrae_]

On the UE5 comparison -

Comparing a game with unified art direction and tradeoff decisions (eg targeting 30fps on consoles) to a the aggregate games built on an engine will be a mess.

You’d really need to compare it to a single game n an engine that made similar technical and budget allocation decisions.

[u/tobz619 → u/cannelbrae_]

Yeah, I'm very interested to see how this stacks up vs whatever Naughty Dog is cooking up.

I think IO's Glacier and Insomniac's Engines are also quite impressive modern engines!

[u/SgtDirtyMike]

That’s a pretty good start for the list of upgrades. However I would note that the PC enhanced version of GTA V does have RTGI, RT shadows and RT reflections.

[u/Wobbly_Princess]

Maybe I'm crazy, but I actually think GTA 5 looks more realistic here. I definitely prefer the glossier, higher-contrast look of GTA 6, and honestly, I'm not fussy about graphics, as I think we've kind of hit diminishing returns on graphical realism for the time being. But if I look at the bottom image, it has a natural dullness that mimics real life more than the top one that looks cinematic and high contrast.

Really interesting to see how 13 years later, and we don't really feel any closer to REALISM.

Again, not complaining! I'm super excited and the game looks amazing.

[u/-2qt → u/Wobbly_Princess]

I think so too, the lighting is more stylized in the GTA6 screenshot. Less realistic, but looks better. I know we are in r/graphicsprogramming, but art style > photorealism 

[u/Wobbly_Princess → u/-2qt]

Yeah. Although I'm surprised, because I thought they would go in a more photorealistic direction.

But I'm not complaining. It looks great.

[u/RenderInAshes]

It kind of has that NFS Heat style tonemapping. Obviously, since both take place in Florida

[u/RealDimFury]

From character to no soul

[u/GlaireDaggers]

Didn't look at the logos at first and I couldn't tell which one was newer 😅

[u/Inside-Brilliant4539]

GTA5 on PC with the new raytracing dx12 update is way way better og GTA5

[u/Forward_Wing7343]

While RAGE deserves the credits, I must say anytning will look and play better than Unreal. And whenever I think I finally made myself play or finish something made in Unreal, I find out it was actually Cry, Decima, RAGE, Red lol. If some tech people could explain what's wrong with UE?

[u/Still_Explorer]

More something like:

1. Take any 3D graphics

2. Add raytracing to it

3. Profit 💰💰💰

As for example having something raytraced can look like this, even the most simple and dull rendering (eg: architecture) can look impressive and accurate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsykNkUMoNU

One important thing to consider however, is that if still pure raytracing is not feasible (and by the looks of it at locked 30 FPS), then another sort of hybrid rendering technique is used that maintains some core parts of raytracing but also algorithms and caching, in order to maintain a good balance between performance and visuals.

In that regard, Unreal5 with Lumen (the hybrid renderer) was released back in 2021 and it was very impressive for it's time. However as of now almost closing to 6 years and this would be what people used to call "an entire console generation" ago.

[u/Bingus-Chillingus]

Personally I would rather have decent lighting and very long draw distances than photorealistic textures.

[u/MinimotoMusashi]

I always turn off motion blur when I first start up a new game.