Found this channel, Threat Interactive, some time ago and have been watching the videos. He uses debugging tools to go step by step on how each frame is generated, explaining bottlenecks, things that reduce performance (like computing some stuff more than once, out of order, etc) and things that make the final frame look bad (usually bad anti aliasing)
The dude gets very mad about the state of current games’ pipelines, mainly due to how Unreal and Nvidia have fucked things over for their profit - and really, when we take graphics from today and compare with games from 2016, it’s easy to see downgrades in quality AND performance.
I enjoyed Threat Interactive for a while, really in-depth content, but I found him so angry and so constantly negative that I found it overbearing. Realized I just wasn’t having fun with his content anymore, the doom and gloom was just excessive.
Also, I don’t think things are all bad. Yes there’s a metric ton of BS, and stuff like ghosting isn’t a delightful new problem. But a lot of the new tech is interesting, once the technology matures and sheds some of the excessive performance costs that required these compromises.
Let me give an example. DOOM TDA took a lot of flak for requiring raytracing, and indeed performance is a lot slower than Eternal, but it actually runs pretty well on a broad spread of hardware and looks fantastic. Also, the game’s destruction feels fantastic, it’s badass to see your gunfire shredding small buildings, it adds a lot, and it would be impossible to light dynamic geometry and physics like that without RT. I want to see that kind of destruction brought to a ton of games, but I don’t want to go back to the flat lighting of the early 3D era either. RT does both, so I want to see where that technology can go, even if it means we’ll get a bunch of games with so-so implementations and compromises while the industry figures it out.
It’s also just… cool. Sue me, I’m into tech, I want to see a game run at 20FPS with high resolution path tracing even if that’s far from practical and probably not the best use of dev resources lol.
First time watching him. I couldn’t get through the video that OP picked. It starts with him saying that everyone seems to think Expedition 33 is some beautiful game but it’s actually shit because the shadows are fucked and the textures are bullshit.
If this guy can’t enjoy Expedition 33 because of details so small he needs to show it by playing them slowed down, zoomed in, and with a red circle around them, I don’t think he can enjoy anything.
Yeah… unfortunately I’m unsurprised. E33 is undeniably technically messy, even on PC with some mods to fix issues like framerate capped cutscenes, it’s got some attacks that trigger noticeable stutters and the like, even with shaders compiled. And I noticed visual issues like a ton of pop-in travelling the world map.
But like… this is a small team, and my god they had a jawdropping art direction, it’s a gorgeous game. I haven’t watched the video myself (and don’t intend to), but if you wanted to criticize UE for creating an engine that encourages bad habits in smaller projects like this, that would be fine, the issues I ran into undeniably have some “UE5-ness” about them. But if you put it in terms of “this game doesn’t look good/is bad”, you’ve totally lost me. It’s not pushing any technical boundaries, but it’s the most visually striking game I’ve played in ages.
Good art direction always beats out technology. Technology is just there to help the art shine, or to hold it back, but tech alone never defines a game.
Very few game, E33 included, are technological marvels honestly. Most game devs, especially small/indie ones, just want to make the game and not worry about how the engine works internally or how the code in their shaders work or so on.
Some of the more popular PC games still being played today are XNA/MonoGame games ffs.
TI is just an arrogant POS lol.
Yea I remember watching a few of his videos and stopping quickly when noticing how toxic he always is.
I tried watching this video to learn something newI have little experience in, and 5 minutes in all I could think of was this guys needs to change his medication and touch some grass.
In that case I’d recommend checking out this list, Acerola on youtube and prof. Cem Yuksel’s lessons on youtube
These are MUCH closer to what I was hoping for - thanks!
I don’t know how the newest Doom does raytracing, but if it’s one case where it only “works” with an Nvidia card, I suppose Threat dude is right in that the company is being the biggest wall against vendor agnostic - and possibly more performant - raytracing
How exactly is DXR or vulkan RT not vendor agnostic?
Yeah, personally played it on a 7900XTX (ew, Nvidia /s), on both Windows and Linux. They also have console versions, so definitely not vendor locked!
I’d 100% agree with you if it was though, a totally vendor-locked game would be really gross.
That’s not the case, it works great with (newish) AMD cards as well.
That’s good to know :)