What are the best showpiece games out right now?

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I just swapped from 3x GTX Titan to 2x GTX 1080. Also just had a 65 inch 4K OLED come in yesterday. I really want to flex this new rig's muscle. What are the best showpiece games right now?

I already have all of the Crysis and Battlefield games as well as The Division, and just ordered Overwatch, Witcher 3, and the new Mirror's Edge.

Any other recommendations? Stuff a bit off the radar that I might not have thought of, but still has high end graphics is what I'm in the market for. Ryse is a perfect example. I definitely need to get whatever racing game has the best graphics.
 
The new Doom is probably the best show of graphics right now, but also try Ryse: Son of Rome and Forza Apex on the mocrosoft store.
 
Rise of the Tomb Raider is the best looking game that I've seen. Doom is pretty spectacular as well, but I was really more impressed by how efficient the engine is than I was with how it actually looks. GTA 5 is another game that is well engineered to take advantage of high end systems, although the actual game isn't really my cup of tea, so I haven't played it.

Overwatch is super fun, but not really a graphical showpiece sort of game - it seems to be designed primarily to run well on modest hardware. In fact, it's even playable on my Surface Pro 2, which is by no measure a fast machine.
 
Not sure if you are into mmo's but Black Desert is very pretty to look at. Rainbow Six Siege with HD textures pack should be nice as well.
 
Doom I agree with. Crysis 3 in 4k on my system with a single 1080 looks phenomenal and runs okay. Some slowdown in some areas. Not really anything else I can think of, however it's interesting OP posted this today as Kotaku just had a list posted yesterday of their top 5 PC games to showoff graphics with ... http://kotaku.com/the-first-five-games-i-use-to-test-a-new-graphics-card-1783206158

They listed:

1. Witcher 3
2. Rise of the Tomb Raider
3. Hitman
4. Crysis 3
5. Elite Dangerous (VR)
 
I just went back to playing through Witcher 3 (never finished it when it came out) and it is gorgeous with everything cranked up. I stepped down the resolution (to 1080p) and cranked up the options (40" 4K) on my Titan X rig. Walking up to the crest of a hill and getting hit with god rays as you peak the top - my GF (non-gamer) walked in on me playing it and was super impressed. Although the animation can be janky sometimes, the scenery / environment is great.
 
Rise of the Tomb Raider is a heckuva pretty game that would play amazingly on a big-screen TV. Of course, The Witcher 3 is an eye-candy-a-thon.
 
The lighting in Doom is pretty amazing. I think it would be the perfect game to show off the contrast of that shiny new OLED TV you have.

While RotTR has amazing graphics, the color palette is kind of muted, so I don't think I would consider it a showcase game for an OLED TV. The Witcher 3 would be better.
 
Doom is pretty spectacular as well, but I was really more impressed by how efficient the engine is than I was with how it actually looks.

I really have to agree with this and it really made me think about PC graphics in that if developers really put in more time to make efficient engines then great graphics can be achieved with moderate hardware as well without needing super powerful machines to run them. Uncharted 4 is a great example. Even with my PC, Uncharted 4 is one of the best looking games i've ever played if not ever. It truly is a marvel what Naughty Dog is capable of doing with Sony's hardware and just goes to prove it's not always about ultra high specs to do something truly great. I mean, even Crysis 3 can't be cranked ALL the way up on my system in 4K but it can with AA turned off and maybe one or two settings set one notch down. Doom on the other hand ran absolutely beautifully with all settings cranked at 4K and still managed 60fps for the whole game. Incredibly efficient engine and I really hope more developers use the engine or take a cue from id and make their engines more efficient.
 
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I really have to agree with this and it really made me think about PC graphics in that if developers really put in more time to make efficient engines then great graphics can be achieved with moderate hardware as well without needing super powerful machines to run them. Uncharted 4 is a great example. Even with my PC, Uncharted 4 is one of the best looking games i've ever played if not ever. It truly is a marvel what Naughty Dog is capable of doing with Sony's hardware and just goes to prove it's not always about ultra high specs to do something truly great. I mean, even Crysis 3 can't be cranked ALL the way up on my system in 4K but it can with AA turned off and maybe one or two settings set one notch down. Doom on the other hand ran absolutely beautifully with all settings cranked at 4K and still managed 60fps for the whole game. Incredibly efficient engine and I really hope more developers use the engine or take a cue from id and make their engines more efficient.

I've been thinking about this since 2GB became "too small" for graphics cards. With 4K, maybe so, but for the longest time, really good looking games ran on 1 or 2GB cards. It was pretty much Watch Dogs I think that started the 3GB+ trend, and I really have to think that based on the way the game looked, (and the company's track record) that it was just lazy coding that started the trend.

I'm all for more memory on hardware, faster buses, higher clock rates, new tech in general, but I also want software that properly takes advantage of that. I really don't think we actually need 8+GB on graphics cards right now, if everyone could code like the id guys. Unfortunately that's not how things are though. I think the extra memory is a crutch in many or even most cases with devs.
 
I've been thinking about this since 2GB became "too small" for graphics cards. With 4K, maybe so, but for the longest time, really good looking games ran on 1 or 2GB cards. It was pretty much Watch Dogs I think that started the 3GB+ trend, and I really have to think that based on the way the game looked, (and the company's track record) that it was just lazy coding that started the trend.

I'm all for more memory on hardware, faster buses, higher clock rates, new tech in general, but I also want software that properly takes advantage of that. I really don't think we actually need 8+GB on graphics cards right now, if everyone could code like the id guys. Unfortunately that's not how things are though. I think the extra memory is a crutch in many or even most cases with devs.

Do you remember the 96k game competition? I remember it vividly since 2004 was the year of Half Life 2 and Doom 3. Back in 2004 a German group won the contest by creating a first person shooter with impressive assets as well as realistic shadows that was a total of 97,280 bytes. Wiki article: .kkrieger - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia . The game itself was called .kkrieger.

Here is a video for reference. Keep in mind this whole thing is under 98k. That's fucking insane. This is the kind of optimization we need. 50gb games are absolutely ridiculous.

 
I do indeed. It was Farb Raush if I remember correctly. (I've been watching demos since the C64 :D )

I typically like to watch the 64K intros more for the same reason. They seem to be able to cram some incredible code into a small space.
 
Do you remember the 96k game competition? I remember it vividly since 2004 was the year of Half Life 2 and Doom 3. Back in 2004 a German group won the contest by creating a first person shooter with impressive assets as well as realistic shadows that was a total of 97,280 bytes. Wiki article: .kkrieger - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia . The game itself was called .kkrieger.

Here is a video for reference. Keep in mind this whole thing is under 98k. That's fucking insane. This is the kind of optimization we need. 50gb games are absolutely ridiculous.

You don't understand how this works. The 96k game uses mathematically generated assets. It still uses at least the same amount of video memory and ram as any game at runtime, since it generates everything in memory. This kind of "optimization" is completely useless for regular game coding.
 
You don't understand how this works. The 96k game uses mathematically generated assets. It still uses at least the same amount of video memory and ram as any game at runtime, since it generates everything in memory. This kind of "optimization" is completely useless for regular game coding.

Well, not entirely useless, but the sentiment is sound. If big game devs put that much effort into their coding in general, we'd be in a better place. Doom isn't going to fit into 96K, but its code is solid, well optimized, and performs excellently on mid range hardware. I wouldn't say that a 50GB game is ridiculous provided it performs well. Assets do take up plenty of space. I do think there is room for procedurally generated assets in some cases though. Mixture of photgraphic or painted textures for example, possibly some types of geometry (alien landscapes come to mind) effects, etc.
 
Isn't Doom using megatextures, which allow artists to basically paint everywhere without having to worry so much about tiles and memory management? I'm guessing to recreate that kind of detail procedurally would take a frickin' huge amount of time, and for each artist you'd need another person to try and "math it up". Nah, I think Carmack was right to try and give the artists more freedom. It didn't work great for Rage because hardware wasn't ready to handle the higher resolution textures, but we're probably now starting to realize the benefits of it

OTOH, maybe the same game would've taken less time to produce using tiles, guess we'll never know for sure?

EDIT: Yes, they are still using megatextures in Doom, but they reintroduced dynamic lighting

 
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Nvidia Funhouse when it comes out later this month. When they demoed it publicly, the machine was running 3x 1080, with one being used just for physics.
 
Well, not entirely useless, but the sentiment is sound. If big game devs put that much effort into their coding in general, we'd be in a better place. Doom isn't going to fit into 96K, but its code is solid, well optimized, and performs excellently on mid range hardware. I wouldn't say that a 50GB game is ridiculous provided it performs well. Assets do take up plenty of space. I do think there is room for procedurally generated assets in some cases though. Mixture of photgraphic or painted textures for example, possibly some types of geometry (alien landscapes come to mind) effects, etc.
There is no need to put any effort into this, as there is no important benefit. I don't really care if a game is 50GB or 5GB. Sure they can juggle around with assets to generate them at runtime, but there is no need. I'd rather see the effort spent elsewhere like on general bugfixes and actual performance optimization. Thinking that if they put effort into asset compression then they will put effort into everything else is at best anecdotal evidence, or wishful thinking. I'd think that it could even be counter productive as any man hours spent on making the game smaller, could've been used elsewhere in production.

Now optimizing the game to reduce loading times is a good thing, but the game size on disk doesn't immediately translate into loading times. It's about organization. In fact these farbrauch demos tend to spend a lot of time pre-generating assets before they run. So for 64K / 96K demos they sure take their sweet time. All things considered, this kind of expertise is not something needed or even wanted in game development.
 
Isn't Doom using megatextures, which allow artists to basically paint everywhere without having to worry so much about tiles and memory management? I'm guessing to recreate that kind of detail procedurally would take a frickin' huge amount of time, and for each artist you'd need another person to try and "math it up". Nah, I think Carmack was right to try and give the artists more freedom. It didn't work great for Rage because hardware wasn't ready to handle the higher resolution textures, but we're probably now starting to realize the benefits of it

OTOH, maybe the same game would've taken less time to produce using tiles, guess we'll never know for sure?

EDIT: Yes, they are still using megatextures in Doom, but they reintroduced dynamic lighting



pretty cool. didnt know the new doom engine was that legit.
 
Doom is quite beautiful but I felt it suffered from slight input lag...

Every time I've run into input lag in games it was either too much post-processing by the TV or running the graphics settings too high for the video card to keep up on a PC. The graphics settings is usually the cuprit, you can get low but seemingly playable framerates except for the massive input lag caused by a lack of memory/GPU horsepower on the videocard.
 
I've run it on a 980Ti at 1440p @ good fps. I'm a CSGO competitive player for reference, with vsync off of course. I got used to the feel, but its there.
 
So, on the actual topic here, I'd agree with the Doom suggestion. Also Mirror's Edge Catalyst is absolutely gorgeous.
 
Rise of the Tomb Raider, Ryse, Crysis 3.
A genre that always used to be the hallmark for graphics was the racing genre. Anyone know of a good racing game that looks good/runs well? Dirt 3's the last one I can remember.
 
Rise of the Tomb Raider, Ryse, Crysis 3.
A genre that always used to be the hallmark for graphics was the racing genre. Anyone know of a good racing game that looks good/runs well? Dirt 3's the last one I can remember.
DiRT Rally :p. GRID Autosport is another good one.
 
Rise of the Tomb Raider, Ryse, Crysis 3.
A genre that always used to be the hallmark for graphics was the racing genre. Anyone know of a good racing game that looks good/runs well? Dirt 3's the last one I can remember.

Go for Project Cars if you want excellent graphics. Do a race with dynamic weather from rain to clear. The lighting and effects are outstanding.
 
With max settings AC Unity can actually be quite stunning. 2 1080's should be able to do 4k at a decent framerate.
 
Not sure the game is any good, but Everyone has gone to the rapture looks great.
 
Witcher 3
Assassin's Creed Syndicate
Rise of the Tomb Raider
Crysis 3
Homefront Revolution
Metro Redux games
Crysis
The Division
Forza 6 APEX
Project CARS
Dirt Rally
Killer Instinct
Divinity Original Sin Enhanced Edition
Battlefield 4
Ryse Son of Rome
Quantum Break

Upcoming

Deus Ex HR
Forza Horizon 3
Battlefield 1

Console

Uncharted 4
 
To me, Quantum Break looks pretty average. The environments are alright but the characters look like chalk, that and it requires a futuristic hyper Titan QXZ Ti to run at an actual 1080p, otherwise its running at 'glorious' 720p' even if you have it set to your monitor's native resolution.
 
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