GTA V – Graphics Study (2015) | Hacker News Reader

GTA V – Graphics Study (2015)

adriancourreges.com

Previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10492876

I love how HN doesn't cry repost, and instead just treats the previous thread as background to the current one. It's refreshing, because the reality is that most of us don't see every single post. Barring a topic from being discussed ever again, simply because it's been here before is ridiculous.

You only get the cries of repost here when it’s a short time (hours or days).

Exactly! I just stumbled upon this blog and thought that this is something for HN. Really pleasurable.

Having been pressured to install GTA V onto my PS4 so I could play online with friend (it's really not my preferred type of game), I was simply blown away by the environment. Nothing else on the PS4 comes close, as far as seamless expansiveness goes.

To be honest, it's so immersive that in my opinion, GTA VI (or VII) should definitely support VR when they are released.

there are already some cool VR mods for GTA V, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zbo0mBgqzE . Back in the day, there were some for GTA IV too.

Watch_Dogs 2 looks much better, try it! I also installed GTA V recently as my cousin pressured me to it, ended up in "FAST" team in stunt races; overall it's too repetitive, only stunt races seem to be fun and all the stuff I had to do to earn money (Doomsday Heist loops, Super car warehouse sales etc.) is just to buy best cars for those races. Comparing to Watch_Dogs 2 it was a significant downgrade in almost everything, unless you treat GTA V as a "psychopath simulator", then it has no competition.

I still find Red Dead Redemption to do a better job at being immersive.

It's obviously much less pretty than WD2 and GTA5 (heard there was a fancy re-release though?), but it feels much more alive. And I suppose the 'wild west' environment being less demanding than a modern city helps too.

And in another couple years we'll have real-time ray tracing!

Amazing how far and fast we've come since Wolfenstein.

Nevermind those years, it's already here: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/directx/2018/03/19/announci...

From the looks of it, the major engines are on route to supporting it, remains to be seen though if any actual games get on board.

It's a strange message that one. On one hand, we can totally do raytracing now without any specialized API. Screen space reflection is raytracing, but only on what's visible on screen. On the other, you can't possibly use raytracing as your only rendering technique for the amount of details in AAA video games. There's a reason we are not doing that now. New hardware more tailored for that kind of work will help, but don't expect the next GTA (or whatever) to have a full raytracing rendering like you see in those demo. Noticed the tiny size of the scenes? We'll see what the next generation of consoles brings us - especially since current gen are using AMD hardware and they've been really silent about this DXR announcement.

That, like fusion power, is something that has been said for decades now. I like to think it'll happen, but for now we'll probably get partial ray tracing to enhance reflections and such; full ray tracing will require several generations of graphics processing still. And even then it will depend on what resolution it has to be done on; graphics cards needed years to render HD resolution and are now again struggling to do 4K and / or VR graphics. Ray tracing will be another order of magnitude more resource intensive.

What level of graphics programming and/or reverse engineering expertise do you need in order to dissect a frame like this? I wouldn't even know where to begin, but I'd love to be able to do stuff like this!

If you specifically want to do something like this you can use RenderDoc (https://renderdoc.org/) and simply run a game through it. You should get a result that's pretty similar. The deferred shading technique used in GTA V is now pretty much the standard way of doing things in most AAA engines I know of and is pretty well documented. Mozilla has a great article about using it in WebGL : https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/01/webgl-deferred-shading/

It's a good article that's why I remember it, but it's from 2015 so it would be nice to update the title.

Updated.

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