• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Star Wars Battlefront 8K ray tracing mod: looks better than movie CGI

IbizaPocholo

NeoGAFs Kent Brockman



EA DICE have quite a beautiful graphics engine on their hands with Frostbite, and when used well it looks absolutely fantastic. But, it has never looked anywhere near as good as some of the work modders put into it, like this new look at Star Wars Battlefront (2015) with next-gen graphics, ray tracing, and running at the GPU-crushing 8K resolution.

Giulio Guglielmi aka Massihancer has put some serious work into his new mod for Star Wars Battlefront, emailing me a link and video to his work. I watched it multiple times and I must say, it is some painstakingly good work. Massihancer explains that he used multiple dedicated graphic shaders -- some of which were created, some of which were modded.

He added in ray tracing which provides some beautiful, realistic reflections while improvements to lighting in general also help create a much more cinematic -- even photo-realistic environment. He didn't stop there, because he also added Pascal Gilcher's "RT Shader" beta that boost the ray-tracing effects, with custom shaders used on top to enhance lighting effects in both direct, and in-direct ones.

The modded Star Wars Battlefront was powered by an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card, with Massihancer also using a Tonemap and dynamic depth of field (DoF) which is similar to Unreal Engine 5 and its recent tech demo. The modder pushed for the cinematic feels by using a camera mod that actually reacts to everything happening in the battlefield, as well as color grading -- something filmmakers do post-production.

82594_02_star-wars-battlefront-8k-ray-tracing-mod-looks-better-than-movie-cgi_full.png
82594_03_star-wars-battlefront-8k-ray-tracing-mod-looks-better-than-movie-cgi_full.png
 
Hands down this is the flick of RTX off | RTX ON that really shows what the "next gen" tech specs requirements are going to be while giving us a glimpse of what to expect. This is what raytracing marketing had been promising with PS5/XSX and I think only PCs and the "Pro" or next next gen systems will really be capable of such details in real time. Also photogrammetry really showing what it is worth.

Super impressive and you can see why shows like The Mandalorian are essentially made in a game engine.
 
Last edited:
I don't get it, to me it just looks like the native game with more bloom.
The game by default already looks fantastic, but this "rtx mod" doesn't seem to really be doing anything, people always exagerate like crazy when they read "RTX" I think.
It's like the hundreds of Grand Theft Auto 5 graphics stuff on youtube.

Video titles like:

'NEXT GEN GTA'
'GTA6 ULTRA REALISTIC NEXT GEN'
'INSANE PHOTOREALISM' <----- This one always gets me 😂😭

* Open video *
- Wet roads, excessive bloom, crushed blacks but this somehow = next gen graphics

:messenger_tears_of_joy::messenger_tears_of_joy::messenger_tears_of_joy::messenger_tears_of_joy:
 

Dr Bass

Member
Better than Pixar.
Oh man, you goin' to jail now.

But seriously, it doesn't look as good in motion as the screenshots make it seem like it would. Still looks "like a game" to me. Maybe it's the camera though, some of the stuff towards the end looks really nice for sure. I play games strictly for gameplay but it's always fun to see progress in graphics. :)
 
I don't get it, to me it just looks like the native game with more bloom.
The game by default already looks fantastic, but this "rtx mod" doesn't seem to really be doing anything, people always exagerate like crazy when they read "RTX" I think.
It's hard to tell what part of the photorealism is backed into the amazing texture work the game comes with in the first place.
 

Lethal01

Member
That’s impressive 5 years ago. Its all about animations and enemy AI..
Ly22bRi.gif


Rock photoscans arent impressive to me. I hope games focus on this more during “next-gen”.

Nah not yet, Visually we are still waaay to behind. We can focus on animation when we stop having games where half the objects don't cast shadows, light doesn't bounce off surfaces and smooth surfaces have totally wrong reflection. T
 

Razvedka

Banned
I remember being very impressed with the visuals of Battlefront, but less so with Battlefront II. Is this just a mistaken impression? In particular I recall the demo or whatever for the first Battlefront as being super impressive with the desert rocks, the lighting.
 
Nah not yet, Visually we are still waaay to behind. We can focus on animation when we stop having games where half the objects don't cast shadows, light doesn't bounce off surfaces and smooth surfaces have totally wrong reflection. T
Nothing is more immersion breaking than an NPC standing there so it can get teabagged by whatever weapon you're wielding. See Cyberpunk as an example.

AI, animation over flashy graphics any day of the fucking week. Hell, I'd take PS4 level graphics if it meant AI/animation got a true next gen upgrade. Give me natural weather patterns, smart AI that can think on their feet and behave naturally over RTX, PTX or whatever the fuck else.
 
Last edited:
Nothing is more immersion breaking than an NPC standing there so it can get teabagged by whatever weapon you're wielding. See Cyberpunk as an example.

AI, animation over flashy graphics any day of the fucking week. Hell, I'd take PS4 level graphics if it meant AI/animation got a true next gen upgrade. Give me natural weather patterns, smart AI that can think on their feet and behave naturally over RTX, PTX or whatever the fuck else.
Aka Deathloop.

Would have been excellent game if the enemy AI wasn’t from Playstation 1.
 

Husky

THE Prey 2 fanatic
Ibiza. Why did you lie to me. None of this is of cinematic quality. You've betrayed my trust.
 

Lethal01

Member
Nothing is more immersion breaking than an NPC standing there so it can get teabagged by whatever weapon you're wielding.

Nothing but when the characters and world are glowing from being badly lit by invisible lights. Bad animations are annoying but bad graphics means the game looks wrong for every second you are playing it, not just when animations are playing.

But I'll offer a compromise, Every game for the next 10 years is anime or pixar styled. That way they get to focus on good animation without sullying my vision with games that are failing to look realistic.
 
Last edited:

ZehDon

Member
That’s impressive 5 years ago. Its all about animations and enemy AI..
Ly22bRi.gif

DeafeningIndelibleArachnid-size_restricted.gif

Rock photoscans arent impressive to me. I hope games focus on this more during “next-gen”.
You're 100% correct in my opinion, but this isn't the best way to make that point. For example, the top two gifs have, what appears to be, frame-identical animation. Is it a nice animation? Sure - but it's still a canned animation. That doesn't really impress me, and the OP's video is more impressive in comparison to just a nice canned animation.

Where animation jumps ahead of lighting for me is when its mixed with real-time physical interactions. TLOUII has some of this type of mixing, but a lot of it is actually just lots and lots of canned animations for the engine to pick between to match the scenario; it frees up the hardware from complex physics based animation simulation for other work. However, simulation systems like the Euphoria animation system, popularised by Rockstar with GTA and RDR, makes animations all the more lifelike for its ability to actually mix physics into the animation, and hand-off between physically calculated animation and key-frame animations fairly seamlessly. Seeing that in action leaves RTX lighting for dead in terms of adding to a believable scene - even stick figures can appears extremely life-like with that approach.
 
Last edited:

TVexperto

Member
I still can't understand why they made the second battlefront look so much worse. the first one had amazing photogrammetry
 

Haggard

Banned
that´s not impressive at all with most effects simply not being registered as lightsources let alone shadow-throwing.
This pretty much looks like the base game with overtuned bloom.
 

A2una1

Member
that´s not impressive at all with most effects simply not being registered as lightsources let alone shadow-throwing.
This pretty much looks like the base game with overtuned bloom.
Pretty much this.

Stormtroopers wearing their full gear is also a nice way to avoid uncanny valley....show me animations and the non armored heroes in action...
 

TrebleShot

Member
If I am 100% honest this level of visuals is what I expected from PS5/XSX at 30fps.

Im not sure well ever get that or the hardware can even get close but if I take my tech knowledge out of it (which is limited) from an umbrella view I expected that much of a step up even if it meant the boxes cost 600-800.

Maybe one day but unlikely, I see this as a kind of CGI level rendering rig level of power now I know what PS5/XSX can do.
 
Top Bottom