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Graphics Analysis : Demon's Souls Remake

VFXVeteran

Banned
Here it is folks! My graphics analysis of the most popular visual showcase exclusive for the PS5! I’ve taken extra time to fully analyze what is going on in Demon Souls and noted some rendering implementations that hasn’t been seen before in a long time. If I have missed something in my analysis because I haven't seen the whole game please forgive me! I'm very early in the game and just wanted to get my thoughts out.

It’s no surprise that a lot of PS5 fans love the remake of Demon Souls for it’s visuals and rightly so. Demon Souls is one of the best showcases of stunning visuals of any platform to date. But how did they enhance an older game made on the PS3, to look so good as to literally be labeled one of the best looking games this new generation? Well, let’s delve into what works and what doesn’t work. Let’s explore the secrets of Bluepoints’ approach to graphical fidelity and some of the setbacks that they had to compromise on.

Texturing:

This is where most of the rendering budget went for Demon Souls. BluePoint scrapped all the old textures and completely recreated the pipeline with so much detail, you will be hard-pressed to find this kind of fidelity in any current gen game (or next-gen for that matter). I see 8k textures here throughout and they brought back one of the oldest and most expensive techniques to texturing – Parallax/Relief Occlusion Mapping. This expensive technique scans the texture map and figures out based on height what particular texel should be rendered instead of the base height at the location in texture space. It’s a very expensive calculation as it requires stepping through the texture space and using the view vector to find the correct height. This gives an automatic self-shadowing based on the parallax texture map. The results are stunning.

Here is a small diagram of the technique:
LBCcU.png


If texel A is what a normal texture lookup would be given the view vector V, we offset that texel based on a height value and index a different location B for what the user would see. This 'parallax' provides very convincing results.

Here is a picture of the old Crysis on the PC that used it:
maxresdefault.jpg


Notice how the texture map itself (the color) is very low resolution. Bluepoint rectified this by throwing in 8k normal maps and 8k texture maps ON TOP of the parallax mapping - displaying stunning detail! And all of this without counting tessellation!



opOsdoc.jpeg


Notice the detail of normal mapping on top of the POM

Here is another clip from a different angle. I simply could not get the view that makes it break down. It is MUCH more accurate than the new technique found in a lot of games which will break down rather quickly when changing the angle.




Lighting (Projective Textures, Contact Shadows, Shadow Casting Local Light sources):

Another strong rendering implementation in this game is the lighting. While it doesn't have dynamic-time-of-day or have much of the complexity of some other open-world games, it does a reasonably great job in using dynamic local lights, "flashlight" GI bounce (taken from Naughty Dog's GI bounce technique) projective textures, contact shadows and good shadow casting local light sources. I like that they used projective texturing for the talisman on the characters belt.



I can only count some games that use this technique but once again, Bluepoint went texture crazy and used it even in their lighting

Projective textures work by projecting the texture map onto the light source in order to get uniquely shaped shadows.

51809931_1184139785093762_3448154999706615808_o.jpg


Demon Souls also uses contact shadows to help out when screenspace ambient occlusion isn't accurate enough to capture small objects.



Notice the sides of the steps and the cracks and crevices of the stairs here.

Here is another shot at it on the sides of the wall:

dt9VZpP.jpeg



It doesn't work all the time however. When you have a light source (like his belt) illumination an area, it will make it disappear. Notice also the rocks closer to his feet. They look like they are floating in space without the contact shadows in full effect.

aykJxaN.jpeg


PBR Shaders (Metal, Skin, Cloth, Marble, Hair):

Demon Souls uses the well used PBR shaders we have all come to love. The metals look great and very realistic for armor and the cloth looks good as well. The marble and stone being a material with POM and high resolution textures brings out exceptional quality in this game!



Demon Souls has a very good hair shader compared to most games today. It's not film quality but it at least has more than 1 lobe for computation. I'm counting 2 lobes with a diffuse contribution. The more lobes, the better the approximation.



Let's talk about some of the drawbacks and/or sacrifices Demon Soul's had to make in the shading pipeline. It's implementation of skin is not using any sort of subsurface scattering on the NPCs. With most games implementing at least some form of subsurface scattering, it's a bit surprising that Bluepoint didn't go for a better shader. I wonder if resources were limited.

Here is a screenshot of the smithy and a sideshot of his skin. It looks completely like diffuse shading.

NFdH4jN.jpeg


Here is a video of me trying to get some kind of light propagation on the skin and it just looks like normal diffuse shading. SSS is expensive and it was probably either too costly for what they had already been doing or maybe the shader wasn't ready.



FX (Water, Fire, Smoke)

Demon Souls uses a horrible water shader. It's just flat out ugly. They seemed to have made it as a complete mirror surface looking like liquid mercury with no layers colors of light scattering underneath and the animation of the water is the old school "sine-wave" animated texture. Again, I don't know if they ran out of rendering budget or just don't have a good water shader in-house. Maybe this was intentional as I haven't gone through the entire game. It is very possible that there is water elsewhere that does have the kind of light propagation and fresnel effect I'm looking for.

Here is a clip of the water in the Nexus:




The fire shader is pretty good but it could use more art direction on the fire. Fire is extremely difficult to implement properly in a game and I'm 99% unsatisfied with most games' fire. Ironically, Ghost of Tsushima has excellent fire effects. That goes to show that artists talent really matters when the rendering budget is small. Their smoke, however looks pretty darn good. I love how it is also illuminated by local light sources and gives the atmosphere a very broody one.

6ZQGkW8.jpeg


eiDwRdi.jpeg



Finally, Demon Souls is a great step in the right direction starting out of the gate for the next-generation PS5. The team went bonkers on the texturing pipeline and pretty much exhausted the rendering budget on getting excellent detail along with good PBR shaders and incredible animation and reasonably good lighting for a closed world RPG. I love how they use shadows to convey a dark and moody atmosphere and making the local light sources dynamic, along with projective texturing and contact shadows for the lighting leaves no stone unturned for some of the more lame lighting techniques that ignore shadowing. It can't be stressed enough that lighting needs shadows. You can't have one without the other.

I'll leave with this. One of the topics of argument is whether Demon Souls uses the SSD to stream the high res 8k textures in per frame. I don't think this is the case. Why? Because despite having incredible detail, the same textures are used over and over again. It is very possible that they cached those textures for a particular level and keep them in VRAM for all the instances of the same texture. I don't see much variety on a per-level basis like other games that use multiple different textures palattes and color schemes. I've reached out to Bluepoint's CEO with no response on the matter. For now, it doesn't really matter. The game is a beautiful exclusive that every Sony gamer should be proud of.
 

DeaconOfTheDank

Gold Member
Good read! I can't wait for you to get to the Shrine of Storms or Tower of Latria. To me, that's where the game absolutely peaks in graphical fidelity and art direction.

There's some interesting light refraction (in the form of water caustic effects) going on in the caves of Shrine of Storms, but I have no idea if it's baked into the material or real-time. Probably the former.

Also, maybe I don't quite understand tessellation, but I had assumed that was what was being used to bring out the uneven brickwork. Could that be why you couldn't get the displacement effect to breakdown under extreme viewing angles?

Just a heads up that the game comes with an excellent in-game photo mode! I bet it would prove really useful to inspect things closer than the in-game camera will get you.
 
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Dr Bass

Member
Dont know if the screenshots reflect the game properly but they dont look great as everybody around here saying its the best looking next gen game so far. The texture work is awesome though.

can defiantly see how they used the budget on that

These screenshots show hardly any of the game. The game is fantastic looking. The detail and lighting in some areas is just plain fun to experience.
 

BuffNTuff

Banned
I enjoyed this game and actually finally got around to finishing it a few weeks ago but I agree that I don’t think it lived up to the next gen visual hype. It looked good but if you would have told me it was running on Xbox series x or pro I would have believed it.
 

THEAP99

Banned
I am replaying the game right now and I don't think the 60 mode visually makes it look next gen. But I think the dualsense support and audio is really crisp and good!
 
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VFXVeteran

Banned
Good read! I can't wait for you to get to the Shrine of Storms or Tower of Latria. To me, that's where the game absolutely peaks in graphical fidelity and art direction.

There's some interesting light refraction (in the form of water caustic effects) going on in the caves of Shrine of Storms, but I have no idea if it's baked into the material or real-time. Probably the former.

Also, maybe I don't quite understand tessellation, but I had assumed that was what was being used to bring out the uneven brickwork. Could that be why you couldn't get the displacement effect to breakdown under extreme viewing angles?

Just a heads up that the game comes with an excellent in-game photo mode! I bet it would prove really useful to inspect things closer than the in-game camera will get you.
It's definitely POM. I can get it to break but the camera will move when I get too close to the walls. POM can't produce real shadows like tessellation can.
 
Excellent analysis VFX Veteran. I enjoyed reading it. The game is too hard for my tastes, but having played it the game is stunning.

You people are so easy to please.
No wonder they can get away with so many bad decisions.

Then we have people that are so hard to please. No game is ever good enough for them.
 
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Wow vfx, your post quality is through the roof.

That reads like pretty good analysis without making me angry. Lol.

Apologies for any harsh posts in the past.
 

Mmnow

Member
Facinating post. Outside of the texturing, how many of these techniques were used to make it seem familiar to the original?


Did the ps3 version use parallax mapping?

Yeah, contrary to what most people think, this game was clearly not made with a AAA budget.
This is one of those dog whistles that's going to end up with as many posts as the op.

Not that it matters because an awesome game is an awesome game, but why are people so sure it's AAA? Bluepoint is a smallish team working on multiple projects. Demon's Souls is a very faithful remake, with very little new input, cutting back on a bunch of pre-production.

It looks insanely pretty, but they didn't have to rewrite anything or design much from scratch. It's closer to the Crash Trilogy than Crash 4.
 

Umbral

Member
Great write up. Some of the stuff is over my head but I’ll keep checking the thread if you’re going to add anyting further as you go along.

These are my favorite kind of threads.
 

Rea

Member
with very little new input, cutting back on a bunch of pre-production.

It looks insanely pretty, but they didn't have to rewrite anything or design much from scratch.
Wrong, the only things which are inherited from the original, are gameplay design and boss mechanics. They have to redo everything from the scratch, even adding lots of details to the bosses, npcs and environment. The game engine is their own inhouse engine. They rewrite their engine to take advantage of ps5 SSD i/o, etc. They have to add lots of new visual effects such as real time global illumination, weather system, physics simulation and so on. Speaking of the devs didn't put much effort to the game, when bluepoint has to redid the whole game, is pure nonsense.
 

Rudius

Member
The devs said to Digital Foundry that when viewing the geometric mesh it is so dense that they can't see the polygons. It is not just the texture resolution that is high, but the overall complexity, in a similar way to the Unreal Engine 5 demo.


 
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Mmnow

Member
Wrong, the only things which are inherited from the original, are gameplay design and boss mechanics. They have to redo everything from the scratch, even adding lots of details to the bosses, npcs and environment. The game engine is their own inhouse engine. They rewrite their engine to take advantage of ps5 SSD i/o, etc. They have to add lots of new visual effects such as real time global illumination, weather system, physics simulation and so on. Speaking of the devs didn't put much effort to the game, when bluepoint has to redid the whole game, is pure nonsense.
You can't just say "wrong" and then go on to "correct" something I didn't even say.

I didn't say they didn't put effort in. Clearly they did. I said they were able to skip important bits of preproduction because it's a faithful remake, bringing costs down.



Design is different, as you'd expect from a non-remaster, but layout is identical. Story is identical. Art design is lovingly built upon. Music is lovingly built upon. Systems are lovingly built upon.

These are not insignificant savings.
 

Rea

Member
You can't just say "wrong" and then go on to "correct" something I didn't even say.

I didn't say they didn't put effort in. Clearly they did. I said they were able to skip important bits of preproduction because it's a faithful remake, bringing costs down.



Design is different, as you'd expect from a non-remaster, but layout is identical. Story is identical. Art design is lovingly built upon. Music is lovingly built upon. Systems are lovingly built upon.

These are not insignificant savings.

They didn't skip.. anything, they Remastered everything, they retouched everything, the only thing they don't have to redo is gameplay mechanics,
Yes, i would agree when you say they don't have to recreate the design and gameplay.
 

GymWolf

Member
Yo veteran, your opinion on big creatures and npcs?!

do you think they are a clear step up compared to the best old gen titles?

image heavy spoiler
demons-souls-ps5-screenshot-2.original.jpg

maxresdefault.jpg

maxresdefault.jpg

maxresdefault.jpg
Demons-Souls-Remake-World-Tendency.jpg
maxresdefault.jpg
oob1lyjdwzspufp09toe.jpg
witchhh-F.jpg
Maiden-In-Black.jpg

dmf-if-1.jpg

or you think that locations and environment received the best texture treatment (for whatever technical or budget reason)?!
 

Darius87

Member
Souls adds nothing new to the table. It's a modern updated DS engine with dynamic lighting and some great high res textures.


These textures aren't even 8k like in Crysis. You still aren't telling me why I can't shrink the size of my textures down?

Very good post! That's one of DS biggest detractors that put it in current gen territory for me. The shaders aren't done well at all. Everything has a limited color palette. It's also one of the reasons I prefer BG3's visuals over this game. BG3 has a wide gamut of interesting and varied materials.
just some examples of disparity before having PS5 and after.
I guess he come around full circle from denial, anger... and finally acceptance (y)
 
The devs said to Digital Foundry that when viewing the geometric mesh it is so dense that they can't see the polygons. It is not just the texture resolution that is high, but the overall complexity, in a similar way to the Unreal Engine 5 demo.



Yes he completely forgot about the dense geometry used in this game.
 

SubZer0

Banned
Here it is folks! My graphics analysis of the most popular visual showcase exclusive for the PS5! I’ve taken extra time to fully analyze what is going on in Demon Souls and noted some rendering implementations that hasn’t been seen before in a long time. If I have missed something in my analysis because I haven't seen the whole game please forgive me! I'm very early in the game and just wanted to get my thoughts out.

It’s no surprise that a lot of PS5 fans love the remake of Demon Souls for it’s visuals and rightly so. Demon Souls is one of the best showcases of stunning visuals of any platform to date. But how did they enhance an older game made on the PS3, to look so good as to literally be labeled one of the best looking games this new generation? Well, let’s delve into what works and what doesn’t work. Let’s explore the secrets of Bluepoints’ approach to graphical fidelity and some of the setbacks that they had to compromise on.

Texturing:

This is where most of the rendering budget went for Demon Souls. BluePoint scrapped all the old textures and completely recreated the pipeline with so much detail, you will be hard-pressed to find this kind of fidelity in any current gen game (or next-gen for that matter). I see 8k textures here throughout and they brought back one of the oldest and most expensive techniques to texturing – Parallax/Relief Occlusion Mapping. This expensive technique scans the texture map and figures out based on height what particular texel should be rendered instead of the base height at the location in texture space. It’s a very expensive calculation as it requires stepping through the texture space and using the view vector to find the correct height. This gives an automatic self-shadowing based on the parallax texture map. The results are stunning.

Here is a small diagram of the technique:
LBCcU.png


If texel A is what a normal texture lookup would be given the view vector V, we offset that texel based on a height value and index a different location B for what the user would see. This 'parallax' provides very convincing results.

Here is a picture of the old Crysis on the PC that used it:
maxresdefault.jpg


Notice how the texture map itself (the color) is very low resolution. Bluepoint rectified this by throwing in 8k normal maps and 8k texture maps ON TOP of the parallax mapping - displaying stunning detail! And all of this without counting tessellation!



opOsdoc.jpeg


Notice the detail of normal mapping on top of the POM

Here is another clip from a different angle. I simply could not get the view that makes it break down. It is MUCH more accurate than the new technique found in a lot of games which will break down rather quickly when changing the angle.




Lighting (Projective Textures, Contact Shadows, Shadow Casting Local Light sources):

Another strong rendering implementation in this game is the lighting. While it doesn't have dynamic-time-of-day or have much of the complexity of some other open-world games, it does a reasonably great job in using dynamic local lights, "flashlight" GI bounce (taken from Naughty Dog's GI bounce technique) projective textures, contact shadows and good shadow casting local light sources. I like that they used projective texturing for the talisman on the characters belt.



I can only count some games that use this technique but once again, Bluepoint went texture crazy and used it even in their lighting

Projective textures work by projecting the texture map onto the light source in order to get uniquely shaped shadows.

51809931_1184139785093762_3448154999706615808_o.jpg


Demon Souls also uses contact shadows to help out when screenspace ambient occlusion isn't accurate enough to capture small objects.



Notice the sides of the steps and the cracks and crevices of the stairs here.

Here is another shot at it on the sides of the wall:

dt9VZpP.jpeg



It doesn't work all the time however. When you have a light source (like his belt) illumination an area, it will make it disappear. Notice also the rocks closer to his feet. They look like they are floating in space without the contact shadows in full effect.

aykJxaN.jpeg


PBR Shaders (Metal, Skin, Cloth, Marble, Hair):

Demon Souls uses the well used PBR shaders we have all come to love. The metals look great and very realistic for armor and the cloth looks good as well. The marble and stone being a material with POM and high resolution textures brings out exceptional quality in this game!



Demon Souls has a very good hair shader compared to most games today. It's not film quality but it at least has more than 1 lobe for computation. I'm counting 2 lobes with a diffuse contribution. The more lobes, the better the approximation.



Let's talk about some of the drawbacks and/or sacrifices Demon Soul's had to make in the shading pipeline. It's implementation of skin is not using any sort of subsurface scattering on the NPCs. With most games implementing at least some form of subsurface scattering, it's a bit surprising that Bluepoint didn't go for a better shader. I wonder if resources were limited.

Here is a screenshot of the smithy and a sideshot of his skin. It looks completely like diffuse shading.

NFdH4jN.jpeg


Here is a video of me trying to get some kind of light propagation on the skin and it just looks like normal diffuse shading. SSS is expensive and it was probably either too costly for what they had already been doing or maybe the shader wasn't ready.



FX (Water, Fire, Smoke)

Demon Souls uses a horrible water shader. It's just flat out ugly. They seemed to have made it as a complete mirror surface looking like liquid mercury with no layers colors of light scattering underneath and the animation of the water is the old school "sine-wave" animated texture. Again, I don't know if they ran out of rendering budget or just don't have a good water shader in-house. Maybe this was intentional as I haven't gone through the entire game. It is very possible that there is water elsewhere that does have the kind of light propagation and fresnel effect I'm looking for.

Here is a clip of the water in the Nexus:




The fire shader is pretty good but it could use more art direction on the fire. Fire is extremely difficult to implement properly in a game and I'm 99% unsatisfied with most games' fire. Ironically, Ghost of Tsushima has excellent fire effects. That goes to show that artists talent really matters when the rendering budget is small. Their smoke, however looks pretty darn good. I love how it is also illuminated by local light sources and gives the atmosphere a very broody one.

6ZQGkW8.jpeg


eiDwRdi.jpeg



Finally, Demon Souls is a great step in the right direction starting out of the gate for the next-generation PS5. The team went bonkers on the texturing pipeline and pretty much exhausted the rendering budget on getting excellent detail along with good PBR shaders and incredible animation and reasonably good lighting for a closed world RPG. I love how they use shadows to convey a dark and moody atmosphere and making the local light sources dynamic, along with projective texturing and contact shadows for the lighting leaves no stone unturned for some of the more lame lighting techniques that ignore shadowing. It can't be stressed enough that lighting needs shadows. You can't have one without the other.

I'll leave with this. One of the topics of argument is whether Demon Souls uses the SSD to stream the high res 8k textures in per frame. I don't think this is the case. Why? Because despite having incredible detail, the same textures are used over and over again. It is very possible that they cached those textures for a particular level and keep them in VRAM for all the instances of the same texture. I don't see much variety on a per-level basis like other games that use multiple different textures palattes and color schemes. I've reached out to Bluepoint's CEO with no response on the matter. For now, it doesn't really matter. The game is a beautiful exclusive that every Sony gamer should be proud of.

Wow great work 👏👌 congratulation
 

Mmnow

Member
They didn't skip.. anything, they Remastered everything, they retouched everything, the only thing they don't have to redo is gameplay mechanics,
Yes, i would agree when you say they don't have to recreate the design and gameplay.
They didn't remaster anything. They remade it. They still had little if any story, character and level planning to do, which would have saved them time and money.

If you agree, I don't really understand why you've spent two posts telling me I'm wrong, since that was my whole point.

We can't be sure it's AAA - whatever the specific of that means to each of us - because the difference between a new game of Demon's Souls scope and a remake of Demon's Souls scope could be years and millions and millions of dollars. We just don't know
 
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