Abishia: if witcher 3 did have graphics anywhere near close to a 20 old years graphics demo i would agree with you
forgoten this demo also 20 years ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bI1_quVr_3w neumi5694: That's why we call them Demos. They show what's possible if you put all your effort into one character with hardly any background.
But when you have an open world with far viewing distance, 10 or 20 characters on the screen, each one with at least some basic AI (other than the purely scripted movements and you want to have the sun shining, water reflections, ambient occlusion, moving clouds and particle effects, then you can't afford as much details for one character.
If you only have one char, you can put a lot more work into facial animations as when you have 30 different char types to animate. And of course these demos are made and optimized for one system, don't have to run on consoles.
I played this demo on my card back then and it certainly was impressive, but already W2 surpasses many aspects of this demo, Ubisoft's open world games do the same. They do have bad character and especially facial animations.If you want to see good character details and lip sync (which this demo does not have at all), you play Detroit.
Switch it to wireframe mode and see how little details the body of the char really has (you can see that in the video on the arms. Witcher has a by far higher polygon count). The shadows compared to modern standards look quite bad and are very static. And this is while having only one single hand animated / scripted character.
Right now we still see mostly improved PS4 technology in our games, which is about half as old as this demo. The new generation stil has to take hold.
You're 100% correct on this.
Abishia: if witcher 3 did have graphics anywhere near close to a 20 old years graphics demo i would agree with you
You did notice how janky the background was in that demo right? Or that in the underwater one, they ditched the background altogether? A lot of detail and processing power goes into a decent looking backdrop.
Anyway:
https://za.ign.com/the-witcher-3/171056/gallery/witcher-3-next-gen-update-screenshot-gallery?p=1 Or - a different game, still looking better than either of those two demos:
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/death-stranding-pc-virtual-photography/
Two other things you aren't taking account of:
- With a tech demo, you can basically fake it; set a number of scenarios and animate each of them. Limited user intervention makes things really easy
- With games you tend to not stop and look at model detail etc because you're playing the game. Generally, they focus resources on things you're more likely to notice
Oh - also, the New Dawn demo was only 10 years ago.