
GTA V – Graphics Study (2015) - christoph-heiss
http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2015/11/02/gta-v-graphics-study/
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Const-me
Previous discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10492876](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10492876)

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Meegul
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.

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

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Jaruzel
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.

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bitL
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.

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mercer
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.

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

<mind blown>

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

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svantana
Nevermind those years, it's already here:
[https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/directx/2018/03/19/announci...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/directx/2018/03/19/announcing-
microsoft-directx-raytracing/)

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.

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subb
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.

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archagon
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!

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justinplouffe
If you specifically want to do something like this you can use RenderDoc
([https://renderdoc.org/](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/](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/01/webgl-deferred-shading/)

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comboy
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.

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dang
Updated.

