Most visually impressive game of 2015

The Division easily best looking game.

 

The Witcher 3 has potential. Witcher 2 still looks great, at least it can't get worse.

 

U4E stuff in Q2 - Q4 2015+, and FoxEngine stuff, Snowdrop has potential too..


Witcher3 doesn't look anything special to me, especially if its toned down like in some newer video, that looked really bad.

 

The Order 1886 doesn´t even look like native 800p :3eyes:

 

CryEngine has enormous potential too, and it's cheaper than UE4.


Didn't see the newer videos.

 

Crysis

 

I'm hoping to see a game that takes advantage of UE4, if not I'd say Witcher 3 has a good chance.
Although that might end up being the most technically impressive game.

 

Batman Arkham Knight as far as I'm concerned. The art might play a big role in this though.

 

True, but imo it has potential cause of CD Projekt RED's solid reputation of non-bullsh*tters and honest, devoted developers

But again, we've been lied so much, so grand and so long that believing in something this days becoming a very stupid thing to do...

 

That because it is NOT native 800p, it is actually native 1:1 pixel mapped 1080p albeit with a letterboxed 1920x800 presentation.

 

...except it's from Ubisoft so it almost certainly won't look like what we've seen by the time it is actually released!

 

The Order 1886 is easily the best looking game released this year, I wont comment on unreleased titles.

 

That image was taken from very early in development, as you can see by the screenshots. I thought the Witcher 3 was going to use GPU PhysX as well, but so far, we haven't seen any use of it whatsoever in gameplay..

Here is a more recent link with more up to date information

All the physics in the gameplay videos we've seen has been driven purely by the CPU, to include cloth, destruction, particle effects, water simulation etcetera... Only Hairworks runs on the GPU, and that uses DirectCompute so it's accessible to AMD users as well.

Thing is, I believe CDPR doesn't want to exclude AMD users from being able to enjoy the game in all it's glory, and software PhysX 3.3.2 is fast enough to deliver PhysX effects that was previously exclusive to hardware accelerated PhysX.

Lords of the Fallen is a good example. The only GPU accelerated PhysX effect in that game I believe, is the turbulence. Everything else runs on the CPU.

Honestly, it seems as though NVidia isn't as serious about developing GPU PhysX as they once were, which is wise I think. As long as GPU PhysX uses CUDA, it will never be embraced by mainstream developers because AMD users cannot use it.

And with DX12 around the corner which reduces CPU overhead and CPUs becoming more threaded and more powerful, it makes sense to focus on software physics instead.

 

Which in itself is no conclusive evidence there won't be GPU based Physx effects.
Peruse this :
http://www.dsogaming.com/news/the-witcher-3-developer-its-up-to-nvidia-to-let-amd-users-enjoy-physx-hair-and-fur-effects/

Physics is the kind of workload that is a better fit for GPUs nowadays. I don't believe the lower CPU overhead will benefit physical interactions that much. AI surely.

 

True, but it's highly suggestive.

I mentioned this earlier already. Hairworks doesn't use PhysX, it uses DirectCompute, so AMD users will be able to use it..

Some physics workloads are a better fit for the GPU, but not all. Some still run better on the CPU, and make more sense to be calculated by the CPU, ie gameplay destruction.

Even cloth simulation runs better on CPU than GPU. PhysX 3.3.2 has the new cloth solver that is 500% faster than the one in PhysX 2.8.4 due to using vector SIMD, and can do multiple instances of cloth simulation on screen at once with no slowdowns.

I remember back in the day when Batman Arkham City and Mafia 2 were shining examples of GPU accelerated cloth simulation. But Lords of the Fallen and many other games now have far superior cloth simulation compared to Mafia 2 and Arkham City, and they use the CPU..

I used to be a big proponent of GPU physics, but not anymore. I realized that the only way physics is going to evolve is with the CPU, because AMD, Intel and NVidia are never going to see eye to eye on hardware accelerated physics despite it's potential.

And with CPU cores getting wider vectors and more execution units, it makes more sense to focus on CPU based physics. I'm actually glad that the Witcher 3 apparently won't be using hardware accelerated physics, because I don't want my GPUs to have to worry about doing physics calculations.

I want them to focus solely on rendering

 

There's PhysX in some console games with AMD hardware, so I guess this won't be a problem.

 

I can't wait for the 3.4 SDK, FLEX's unified solver and grid free methods should give some nice results.

 

I'd say Arkham Knight.

The recent W3 pics were pretty "meh"

As far as CPU physics... when my H80 was malfunctioning, "Welcome to the Jungle" in Crysis 3 almost melted my CPU... like near 70C before I realized how much that bloody grass was stressing the FPUs and that ultimately made me RMA the H80.

Seriously, it's like Prime95 or IBT stress... for grass of all things...

 

Yeah PhysX 3.4 is going to be awesome. It uses Opcode 2 as well..