What was the most technically impressive and demanding game each year?

Naturally, this is a very open-ended question.

Which game(s) wowed you the most each year with its amazing graphics, sound, and physics, and its ability to make your shiny gaming rig feel like an antiquated piece of junk.

Here's my list:

2002 - BF1942; Morrowind
2003 - Halo; PlanetSide
2004 - Far Cry; HL2; Doom 3; Chronicles of Riddick: EfBB
2005 - BF2; F.E.A.R.; CoD2; Quake 4
2006 - CoH; Oblivion
2007 - Crysis; CoD4; S.T.A.L.K.E.R. SoC
2008 - Crysis Warhead
2009 - nothing
2010 - Metro 2033
2011 - Witcher 2; BF3
2012 - PlanetSide 2
2013 - Crysis 3; BF4; ARMA 3
2014 - nothing
2015 - Witcher 3?

 

for 2015 so far? Def dragon age inquisition, maxed out, with fade touched textures. That game looks amazing and plays great

 

Didn't that come out in 2014?

 

my bad, because i bought it in 2015 im thinking it was this year. I nominate dragon age for 2014 then!

 

For 2014 ACU maybe? Though it is more bad optimisation than demanding game.
Also, sims are generally demanding. Try maxing out X-Plane 10 or Prepar3d 2. Nope!

 

AC Unity and flight sims are demanding because of poor optimization. Aside from the massive NPC count, I don't find Unity technically impressive. And while flight sims are huge in terms of scale, the assets are extremely low quality. Textures are so bad and there are so many low-poly objects, it hurts my eyes.

 

When was the last time you actually played a modern flight sim? (tip: not MS/DTG FSX)
True that some textures could be higher res and performance could be better, but it's because of that huge scale you've mentioned above that we get these not so good results. Unfortunately things have to be sacrificed so that it wouldn't turn into a complete slideshow...

 

You mean there are actually flight sims with textures that don't look like low-res Google Earth satellite photos stretched over low-poly terrain? Say what?

 

I'm going to say GTA V (PC) and The Division (PC) for 2015. The new snow engine in The Division, combined with the extensive open-world multiplayer game-play, will probably cripple performance. The Witcher 3 may also be pretty demanding. Either way, I'm excited for all three of these games. I think they will be my favorites this year.

 

You got me there, chief.
We could debate about this, why is it so, and what textures do look good (i.e. cockpit) and bad (scenery), but since you are already set against this, I will let go.
Do keep in mind, every game has bad set of textures, even the better looking ones.

Not unless they optimise it right. MP3 had a pretty good performance, so I'm keeping my hopes up for GTA 5, since it's pretty much the same engine, no?

 

No I understand. I'm just giving you a hard time.

Notice how I put PlanetSide 2 in my list for 2012. Even at release, it wasn't the sharpest looking game by a stretch, and it had CPU performance issues out the wazoo due to using an outdated DX9 engine. But it was technically impressive because of the sheer scale and number of simultaneous players, not because it had Crysis 3 levels of detail. Imagine Battlefield times 10 and you get PlanetSide.

Sadly, nowadays it doesn't belong on any list due to the 2 years worth of texture downgrades in the name of "optimization." The game's graphics have easily aged 5 years.

 

I'm gonna start a bit late in the years:
2007 - Crysis
2008 - Crysis Warhead, GTA 4, Far Cry 2
2009 - Batman: Arkham Asylum
2010 - Metro 2033, BF:BC2
2011 - Witcher 2, BF3, Trine 2 (not for system-to-knees, but every bloody thing else), Serious Sam 3: BFE, Crysis 2
2012 - Prototype 2, Far Cry 3, Sleeping Dogs
2013 - Crysis 3; BF4; ARMA 3, Bioshock Infinite, Metro Last Light
2014 - Far Cry 4 (as much as I hate it, it does look good... sadly optimization could take place and have it running better than FC3 DX11), Ryse: Son of Rome
2015 - Evolve, Dying Light

Neither of my 2015 games exactly break the graphical mould, but the lighting and level of detail that went into it is astounding. It doesn't hurt that Evolve's on Cryengine either.

Prototype 2 is because of the sheer fantastic quality of textures on that game, especially for a 2012 title. It has some of the best quality textures I've ever seen, complete with excellent bump mapping without needing tessellation. Sleeping Dogs' rain and reflections are amazing.

Serious Sam 3: BFE is because no system on the planet can run that game FULLY maxed out at 1080p with great frames right now. There's a huge hidden options menu in it that can pile on like three or four kinds of AA at once, including SSAA. It's worse than Star Citizen to be honest >_>.

 

LOL one is not like the others...

 

LOL. Well if GTA 5 ever comes out, maybe it might make the list too XD

 

How about Wolf: New Order for 2014? That game looked great.

I guess a list of candidates for 2014 would be: FC4, Wolfenstein: New Order, Shadow of Mordor, Dragon Age: Inquisition

Was Alien:Isolation intense graphically?

 

anyone have any ideas on how batman arkham knight should perform? huge open world and atmosphere effects and lighting. insane polygon counts on the character models from what i've seen.

im sure trying to play it with all AA turned on and max settings and getting 60fps will be near impossible with a mobile gpu

 

It's still using UE3, so should run extremely well unless it's optimized like poo

 

then why is it considered next-gen and only for xbone and ps4? they dropped the old consoles and they even skimped out on the wii u which is closer to next gen than last gen

 

Because last-gen lacks DX11-class hardware and Arkham Knight was built on Unreal Engine 3.5 which is DX11.

Wii U is much closer to last-gen than current-gen. It has a weaker CPU than Xbox 360, a Radeon 2900 class GPU, and 1/4 the RAM of current-gen. You can look up Digital Foundry comparisons where Wii U looks and performs worse than 360 and PS3 in multiplats, e.g. AC Black Flag. Wii U was built for Nintendo games, not for AAA multiplats.

 

well wii u has some custom parts last i checked the some people don't even know the specifics of. plus nintendo is really good at developing, optimizing and pushing their games for wii u. smash bros, bayonetta 2, and mario kart 8 could be considered great graphics for 2014, besides the lack of anti-aliasing at some points.

either way, would you say a 980m could max it all out at 60fps?

 

Those are all Nintendo games . Great gameplay for sure, but simplistic graphics. There's no magic. No amount of software optimization is gonna make up for 10+ year old hardware.

No one knows for sure until Arkham Knight releases, but based on the track record of UE3 and UE3.5 games, it should run extremely well on 980M. After all, you're talking 3x the performance of the strongest console GPU.

 

well the first one, arkham asylum, same out in 2009 and it has a hard time maintaining 60fps on the 880m and has a lot of frame dips at some points maxed out

 

That's messed up. You should literally never drop below 120 FPS on your 880M. I could max out Arkham Asylum with an 8800 GT back in the day LOL.

 

It might be older hardware, but Nintendo is catching up quicker than they are falling behind. Compare a Wii (regular) to a PS3, then compare the Wii U to a One. Nintendo games look pretty good right now. If anything, they're the company that tries new things and still has some 'magic' left. It's a shame they don't want the absolute bleeding edge, but they aren't stuck in the stone age, either.

 

It was not directly "intense" (as in to run) but it was a beautiful world, especially if you forced shadow resolution to like 16K; it made the whole thing that much better apparently.

 

True, Nintendo has always found a way to make first-party titles look good because of their distinctive art style, but in terms of raw horsepower, they haven't been anywhere near competitive since GameCube.

360 GPU: 240 GFLOPS
Wii GPU: 11 GFLOPS

PS4 GPU: 1843.2 GFLOPS
XB1 GPU: 1310.2 GFLOPS
Wii U GPU: 352 GFLOPS

 

Those numbers are such a fail.. They really need to improve.. That's a joke literally!

 

Huh, how do those specs compare to PC GPUs, both mobile and desktop?


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You can't directly compare them, different vendors/architectures and whatnot

 

Fair enough, I just assumed that GFLOPS was some sort of processing standard useful for comparisons sake.


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It becomes useless when you start trying to compare Nvidia vs. AMD and across different architectures which may be more or less performant per GFLOPS, esp. when the number and efficiency of ALUs differ which factors into the calculation of FLOPS.

 

Ah I see. Thanks for the insight. Too bad consoles can't run 3DMark haha


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It would be interesting if future mark could write a custom version for each console and have the score calculated to match PC. I'm not sure it would be possible and not have any comparison still be apples to oranges.

 

It's possible, it just won't ever happen. The only console benchmarks are the internal ones at MS and Sony that never see the light of day.

 

Nintendo has underpowered machines but their games look amazing. The Windwaker remake for the Wii U is one of the most beautiful games I have ever played, all platforms combined.

 

That's because The Wind Waker's art style is brilliant. Even the original game still looks good today.


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I'm not surprised this thread has basically turned into this: http://www.pcgamer.com/crysis-3-graphics-face-off/

 

Ryse for PC does look incredible and murdered my rig before I massively tweaked settings.

 

Theoretical throughput still provides a base line for comparison. Actually it's common practice to compare HPC (super computer) systems with ALU/FPU peak throughput even though the same issue also exist. I would also argue that architecture differences among consoles were bigger back in the day.

From Wiki:
NV 980M - 3189
NV 980 - 4612
NV Titan X - 6144
NV Titan Z - 8122
AMD M290X - 2176~2304
AMD M295X - 3277
AMD 280X - 3482~4096
AMD 290X - 5632
AMD 295X2 - 11467

 

And that's where the comparison breaks down. M295X is only a match for 970M, 980M is closer in performance to 290X than to the other AMD GPUs, and 980 is clearly faster than 290X. None of which makes sense when you look solely at the GFLOPS.

 

It's not that off. Put PS4/XBO/WU into the list and FLOPS still provides a good indication of the general "scale" of performance on different platforms. 970M vs M295X is about 7:10 in terms of FLOPS, which is not exactly night and day in the world of computing performance.

 

PS4 and XB1, sure, since the GPUs are so similar. Ironically comparing TeraScale 1 vs. GCN in terms of FLOPS makes the Wii U GPU look better. The actual difference is more like an order of magnitude.

 

^the xbone and the PS4 /is/ a PC.

1999 - Lander 3d, Battlezone 2
2000 - Giants: Citizen Kabuto
2001 - ICO, I-War 2
2002 - Jedi Knight: Outcast
2003 - Prince of Persia: Sands of Time
2004 - Rallisport Challenge
2005 - Shadow of the Colossus
2006 - Okami
2007 - Lair
2008 - Mirror's Edge
2009 - Killzone 2, Infamous
2010 - MAG
2011 - Fancy Pants Adventures
2012 - Swords&Sworcery, Dishonored
2013 - DmC
2014 - FTL: Advanced Edition
2015 - Pillars of Eternity

 

^PC only, bro

 

DmC?

 

Devil may Cry

 

I know what DmC means, brother. My reaction is he thinks that game is technically impressive yet it's not. Not only it's a joke of a Devil May Cry game, that game can run on mid end PCs with fast fps.

inb4uhatedisgamecuzdante'shairisblacklulz

 

To be fair though, console titles aside none of the games he listed were technically impressive or demanding. Take Jedi Outcast for example. That game was running on a 1999 Quake III Engine in 2002 while Morrowind had pixel and vertex shaders and BF1942 had huge maps and 64 players and was the first game to require 1GB RAM at highest settings. You could easily max out Jedi Outcast on a Pentium III and GeForce 2.

 

Actually, all of the games I listed had at least one unique technical solution from a software development standpoint And what Factor 5 did with Lair still isn't possible to reproduce completely on a PC. Basically, the technique isn't viable without either a faster bus system, a cut down skeleton of an engine, or just massively more processing power.

And remember that you can make any computer grind to a halt by drawing one pixel over and over, if the pixel has enough filters, and enough math underneath. But it doesn't mean that the pixel is extremely impressive to look at.

So for example: DmC was the only "AAA" game based on the Unreal Engine, that had a guaranteed execution time for animation states to have consistent object positions with any kind of guaranteed precision. That people rather want to play in 120fps - and don't realize that this means the math in the background has to execute 4 times as fast to be consistent between frames, or that the math has to be done asynchronously, or that the animation has to be done asynchronously - that doesn't change the fact that DmC was the only Unreal Engine based game to have consistent hit-detection and animation in the actual game (and not just in the cutscenes).

Jedi Outcast is similar. This was also a licensed engine game with a few extra modules. And one of those subtle things were that the "gibs" were, broadly speaking, location based, and it was one of the first games to use hit-based gibs well. You can't actually cut someone's arm off in any direction, and so on. But the way it's used is a really good compromise with the tech and the artistic presentation. So that you don't end up in die-by-the-sword territory, or simply have the usual solution: explode arm at the same time every time, and spawn an explosion of blood next to it. Since then, the best we've seen has been button-prompts for "take-downs". It's still common, even in completely new games, to see that triggered one single take-down animation when two models are supposed to interact. Making Jedi Outcast still one of the most "technically impressive" games out there.

...want me to continue on the list?

 

It may not be technically all that impressive (only UE3), but it sure looks mighty fine running at native 4K, 60fps, everything cranked up to the maximum (including AA). Oooooh yeah. The art style of the various environments in the levels is superb. Reminds me somewhat of Alice: Madness Returns that I played last year. I'm loving it, personally.

Anyone mentioned Shadow Warrior yet? I mean, it clearly loses out to Crysis 3 and Metro Last Light for the year 2013 (there's also BioShock Infinite, but it's the art style that makes it so good, I don't think it's technically as impressive as Shadow Warrior though), but still looks great. It's getting a major (free) DX11 patch next week too, a year and a half after initial release, showing how awesome the developers are (the Dark Souls II publisher wants people to pay for the exact same thing, only a year after initial release).