idtech 5 is an abomination (RAGE, wolfenstein tno, the evil within)

abomination? i thought ISIS was

 

Best comment I've read on this forum in days. Far too much whining and toys being thrown out of the pram lately for my liking.

 

I am glad we don't all share the same opinion. I loved the engine. Rage was beautiful. And to the poster above who he quoted you think Ryse is a port? If you think that is a port then we've never gotten a game that wasn't a port.

 

Ryse is a port. Thats why looks identical to the x1 version except on pc we have higher resolutions. Hell, put it on the ps4 at 1080 and you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference.

 

How much better do you expect it to look? It's not like the xbox one looks bad its just at a lower res. I can guarantee me running it at 4k looks a **** ton better than their 900p version or whatever it is.

 

Or even something very basic and simple:

r_customwidth/height.

Older IDtech games capable of running Widescreen resolutions without hassle even if "widescreen" didn't even exist back then. Enjoy your black bars on some other older games

 

Why does idTech 5 and other idTech engines use such LOW resolution textures? They do a great job with lighting effect, but its the low resolution that kills the rest of graphics. I know that it uses great compression that reduces the VRAM needs without practically ANY loss in texture quality, but when textures have some 512x512 resolution, then the game won't look good no matter what. You need to have 2K textures these days at least to make an impression.

I also fail to understand WHY and HOW developers of such engines managed NOT to see and understand these aspects. I mean, what were they pushing in idTech 5? Its same as the idTech engines that was used for Doom 3...

I also don't see how idTech engines are better at lighting than many other engines like Unreal 4.0 and now Unreal 4.5 and even heavily updated Half-Life 2 engine. Take a look at Metro Redux games - amazing lighting without any sacrifice on texture resolution, which results in excellent graphics.

 

The engine is fully capable of higher resolution textures.
The computer capable of running a game on idTech5 with, as you say, 2K resolution textures... doesn't exist yet.

Also, you are misplacing a technical merit where art style and direction should be.
You can have a super high resolution texture, but if it's poorly done and not fitting with the style of the game... it doesn't matter how hi-res it is.
Art style and direction is always far more important then flashy technical abilities. It's something some developers need to learn.

DisHonored is a prime example of this. A gorgeous looking game, but it's textures are anything but hi-res. Yet, it doesn't matter as the art style at work in the game is put to use so wonderfully.
RAGE, Wolf: TNO and The Evil Within all feature great, solid art direction that not only fits the game, but works wonderfully.

 

IDtech 5 based games are always a mess technically... i was really really disapointed when it was announced that wolfenstein would run on idtech 5 engine... and as expected, it was horrible technically. Huge vram reqruirements, despite having very poor texture quality (who gives a **** if the textures are unique, if they look like ****), no sli / cf support, meaning low fps if youre running high resolutions, and no official support for AA (eventhough you could tweak it yourself in the console, it came at EXTREME performance costs, for not that effective msaa).

IDtech 5 is pretty much my least favourite engine. Alooooot of resources used, for not very good visual results. My favourites are cryengine, frostbite and unreal engine (UE3 in ethan carter is EXTREMELY impressive... 1440p, 4xmsaa and maxed out settings otherwise, and still only using 1100 mb vram).

 

Good as The Evil Within is, the id Tech 5 engine is a poor choice for this game based on my playthrough to Chapter 9 so far.

There is lots of noticeable texture pop in during cutscenes, especially when the camera switches angles and performance in general seems pretty poor at 60 FPS due to what is either microstuttering or framepacing issues. 30 FPS actually feels smoother here, which is just plain wrong! Also texture quality overall is not that impressive either for a game taking up 40 GB of hard drive space.

Finally, the switch from OpenGL to DirectX 11 raises the question about whether the game runs worst because of that because in general id Tech games has ran well at 60 FPS whereas The Evil Within just feels plain wrong at 60 FPS despite the fact that Afterburner reports the framerate is almost always 60 FPS on my system.

I do agree with others though that id Tech is probably the least impressive engine of all the current one. Heck, I'm no fan of the dated Unreal Engine 3 but I'd rather have a game use that over id Tech because, as The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, proves it can still do some stunning looking games and nice textures with generally great performance, since the engine is well optimised for PC.

 

I've always felt that idtech5 was a poormans UE3 due the way texture looked on early Ue3 games. The browns or drab colors and washed out textures that look like too much bloom or whitelevel had been used on everything. Its like the north koreans try to bootleg a game engine and decided to base it of Epics engine.

Though i dont believe for a second that the way idtech5 turned out was anything like what JC wanted. The guy has always been at the top of tech curve, theres no way he wanted the engine to be so limited on the pc.

 

Too soon

Spoiler

How things in Turkey this troubled days? I wanna do my big adventure from Kars to Istanbul this winter...

 

I agree that the world graphics are not the best and there is this strange mix between high-res objects and low-res worldmaps but both RAGE and Wolfenstein had some kickas NPC models and both games run perfectly.

Like some have already mentioned, in a few years (?) when 1TB SSDs will cost 150$/100€ the megatextures won't have to be compressed that much/at all and it will be a completely different story.

But then again, I cannot explain why The Evil Within runs poorly.

What a poor comparison, Borderlands is MEANT to look cartoonish. It's the artstyle of the game just like Wildstar or even WoW.

 

I think he was trying to point out that it looks exactly the same as the other two games. And that it looks dumb.

 

No idea where you got that it's a mess technically.
RAGE and Wolf: TNO run flawlessly (unless you are running AMD hardware, but that's more of a compatibility issue with AMD and OpenGL) and are extremely light on hardware requirements.
It's okay if you dislike the engine, but what you're saying... it's resource heavy, all games on it are a mess... is simply not true.

As Carmack said on his twitter, the fact that Tango replaced Mega-Texture with a dynamic lighting engine is probably part of what is causing the performance issues.
Also, the fact that the game doesn't seem to use multi-core CPUS properly. It almost completely loads up the first core, but barely touches the others.

 

It's funny how you rebut his post about id5 games being a technical mess but in your next paragraph, you point out TEW's multi core functionality is effectively broken. TEW being a id5 game...

Anyways, my two cents about id5 games:

50GB installs

Maxing my VRAM but textures look dated

60 fps cap

No multi-GPU support

Sound effects are bland and generic

Character models look dated

AI lacks intelligence

Texture popping. Looks terrible and breaks immersion

id Tech 5 was created to work around the limitations of consoles. If it's not obvious enough, here's the proof guys:

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/john_carmack_says_id_will_take_console-first_approach_games

http://kotaku.com/5847761/why-was-the-pc-launch-of-rage-such-a-cluster

Here is the direct quote from John Carmack:

"You can choose to design a game around the specs of a high-end PC and make console versions that fail to hit the design point, or design around the specs of the consoles and have a high-end PC provide incremental quality improvements," "We chose the latter."

"We do not see the PC as the leading platform for games," "That statement will enrage some people, but it is hard to characterize it otherwise; both console versions will have larger audiences than the PC version.”

So there you have it. id Tech 5 is anti-PC gaming. Therefore, it is an abomination. It is crap.

 

I really don't care how 'technologically advanced' it is, it's not particularly PC friendly (SLI/CF) and there are other engines that are.

You can't blow on about 4K and then use an engine that isn't multiGPU compatible (effectively cancelling any kind of 4K support).

Yep, TNO was decent, as was Rage and TEW is pretty good from what I've played of it but all of them would have been a lot better on UE4.

Hopefully, idtech6 (or whatever it is called) remedies the shortfalls of idtech5 and is far more PC friendly.

 

Pretty much.

The atmosphere in Rage was amazing at times though:

 

i recommend NO my friend.