***The High-Res Screenshot Thread!***

Sega Mega Dave said:

Compared to Fallout 4 it looks perfectly fine.

That said you owe me a lot of money as your pics have persuaded me to go back to 21:9 again.

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In motion fallout 4 is a lot better imo, not to mention the performance difference especially when you compare the scale of the game worlds.

And welcome back to the 21.9 master race!

JOSH86 said:

ACS looks lovely, the Sweetfx really helps. Not NV fault you have a naff GPU is it.

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I'm waiting for a good sweetfx config, the current uploaded ones all look naff imo, I suspect that it could make a very nice difference though....

And those screenshots are with max settings.... Being a nvidia sponsored title, it has to be nvidia's fault so! Also, didn't you know, nvidia gimp IQ so I dread to imagine what it must look like on nvidia GPU's

Either way, compare battlefront graphics and performance, ASC in comparison pales, nowhere as good looking and awful performance even for people with 980tis/titan x/fury's, iirc, gregster is getting drops to 23FPS.... Typical ubisoft game.

Nexus18 said:

Either way, compare battlefront graphics and performance, ASC in comparison pales, nowhere as good looking and awful performance even for people with 980tis/

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I have a 980Ti, never seen mine drop below 60fps so that's rubbish.

Don't compare this to SWBF a linear, shallow title. Anyone can make a snow map, doesn't take much does it.

Assassins creed syndicate looks great.

Sorry but didn't you know.... Star wars owns all because it's star wars!

Well a sweetfx config certainly helps with the sharpness etc. but still rather meh looking imo. I must say though, the tessellated brick walls look nice

















And some extra screenies:













I have dropped shadows to high, AA to FXAA & AO to HBAO+ and it plays smooth enough now with not much decrease in IQ

For me batman AK runs superbly (with no smoke gameworks on) and looks a lot better imo too.

Those textures look awful?!

Well, they're OK but would have expected more eye candy with AC!

Awful? Wouldn't say so. Practically all games have pretty crap textures or certain elements (Witcher 3's water and foliage, for example) when you look closely.

In Syndicate, they create a pretty realistic impression combined with the lighting and I guess that's what matters. Especially that there's tons of details in the backstreets etc.

It's not a perfect game but Ubisoft surely knows their thing when it comes to creating game worlds, as I've yet to see more convincing looking cities/buildings than in Syndicate or Unity (and I didn't really like that game).

Amatsubu said:

TBH, I can't see how Syndicate looks bad/average. It looks and runs better than Crapham Knight (and graphics are certainly above Fallout 4), at least for me. Of course PCSS Ultra, MSAA and HBAO+ Ultra are going to destroy performance. They're mostly gimmicks meant to push hardware for not much difference (as usual).

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Ok, ok. Woah now.

HBAO+ Ultra in AC:S is not a 'gimmick'. It is a very worthwhile effect if you can spare it. Check here:

http://images.nvidia.com/geforce-co...parison-005-hbao-plus-ultra-vs-hbao-plus.html

Notice the extra depth given to the train and to the wood flooring. Absolutely a significant improvement.

As for MSAA being a 'gimmick', I dont even know where to begin. MSAA is still one of the best AA solutions out there. Less efficient, performance-wise in many modern deferred-rendered games, but still highly effective, especially to attack shimmering and dithering in many high detail games these days, something more noticeable in motion than in screenshots.

PCSS Ultra I'll give you. A waste of performance unless you've got a ton to spare.

And I'd also agree that AC: Syndicate is actually very nice looking. It apparently runs quite well for people that know how actually adjust settings and not just flip everything to max and then declare, "Unoptimized crap!".

I will say that it doesn't look quite as spectacular as AC: Unity, though. For a couple understandable reasons.

1) AC Unity used pre-baked lighting and had no day/night cycle. This helps immensely as your lighting system doesn't have to be as dynamic(or dynamic at all).

2) After the massive outrage over AC Unity's performance problems on consoles(which was legitimate, but I also felt it was slightly hypocritical cuz I never saw anybody roast GTA V or The Last of Us for being terrible...but that's another conversation), Ubisoft clearly dialed things back for AC Syndicate to hit a more reliable framerate. And it was successful. It also means the game runs better on PC from Day 1 than Unity did. I'm a fan of that sort of prioritizing myself, but clearly the complaints about the graphics show why developers push graphics over performance in the first place, because that's what ultimately sells.

3) Less fancy interiors. AC Unity was given a long development time and was supposed to be the 'mega' next-gen-only debut for AC. Syndicate did not get as much of a lead time and was more of an iterative title.

Seanspeed said:

2) After the massive outrage over AC Unity's performance problems on consoles(which was legitimate, but I also felt it was slightly hypocritical cuz I never saw anybody roast GTA V or The Last of Us for being terrible...but that's another conversation), Ubisoft clearly dialed things back for AC Syndicate to hit a more reliable framerate. And it was successful. It also means the game runs better on PC from Day 1 than Unity did. I'm a fan of that sort of prioritizing myself, but clearly the complaints about the graphics show why developers push graphics over performance in the first place, because that's what ultimately sells.

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The problem is when you have games that look far better in every way (imo anyway) i.e. GTA 5, battlefront, crysis 3, the witcher 3 etc. and perform a lot better (with max settings) too then when you get games like unity/syndicate, they just come across as poorly optimised. I would include batman AK as well since it ran very well for me and is probably 2nd on my list for "overall" graphics but I know that a lot of people still have/had problems with it....

Not sure about gta 5 on the console but the PC version was flawless, myself and 10+ other people from here where up to all hours in the morning playing it and we couldn't stop commenting on how good it looked and how well it performed.

Nexus18 said:

The problem is when you have games that look far better in every way i.e. GTA 5, battlefront, crysis 3, the witcher 3 etc. and perform a lot better (with max settings) too then when you get games like unity/syndicate, they just come across as poorly optimised. I would include batman AK as well since it ran very well for me and is probably 2nd on my list for "overall" graphics but I know that a lot of people still have/had problems with it....

Not sure about gta 5 on the console but the PC version was flawless, myself and 10+ other people from here where up to all hours in the morning playing it and we couldn't stop commenting on how good it looked and how well it performed.

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See, this is one of the problems when people throw out the 'unoptimized' accusation. They dont really understand how priorities in game development work.

GTA V, Battlefront, Crysis 3, and The Witcher 3 all are fairly different games with different priorities. I'll go through them one by one here:

GTA V - this is a massive, ultra detailed game. But even this $100,000,000+ budgeted game(not to be dismissed) shows its limitations in quite a few ways. It has janky in-game animations, poor LoD(the tradeoff for its great draw distances), terrible dithering and aliasing problems, etc. Impressive looking game and certainly well optimized overall, but definitely not without some major compromises.



Battlefront is an online-only competitive shooter with a small handful of environments that obviously had blood and sweat poured into each and every one whereas most other competitive shooters have to divide their attention amongst a greater variety of unique environments. This is very impactful in terms of art creation and optimization. Not that I deny it is wonderfully optimized for what it is(it super is), but it's still a different type of game.

Crysis 3 is a linear FPS. Like Battlefront, I would never deny that it's amazingly optimized and beautiful, but it's a linear shooter all the same. This grants a huge advantage to culling and general optimization.

The Witcher 3 is not a great example. It looks great, but it is carried a lot by its art style. From a technical standpoint, I'd say it's 'good', but not necessarily great. It has loads of weak aspects like textures, LoD, aliasing, AO, trees with limited geometry(significant because of how frequent they are), mediocre lighting, etc.

Now dont get my nitpicking wrong. I think ALL of these games looks great ultimately. But I think AC Syndicate does as well. For its own reasons. You can point to certain aspects and say, "Those look bad", but just like I can do the same for these other games, that doesn't mean the game as a whole is unimpressive. AC games generally go for very high NPC counts and they tend to have tons of buildings and geometry in tightly packed areas. This last point is really important because if you look at a game like The Witcher 3, it has lots of performance issues when in a similar situation like in Novigrad, where even a top performing CPU or GPU will still experience framerate drops.

So yea, I'm not saying AC Syndicate is a game changer or even one of the best looking games ever. But it's respectable for what it is doing. Certainly cant call it ugly or unoptimized.

Yes I am well aware of them being different types of games but still that doesn't change the fact that they are better looking imo and perform far better.

ACS might be more advanced in terms of the NPC count, building geometry or whatever but at the end of the day, to my eyes it just doesn't look anywhere as impressive "overall" as those other games mentioned and from my experience, the performance is noticeably worse too.

I will give it you in terms of battlefront & crysis 3 being linear/small scale but gta 5 & most certainly the witcher 3 aren't and I won't disagree about the witcher 3 textures, some are atrocious looking i.e. the trees, bushes & especially the water, in fact ACS water looks very similar to TW 3's water but still.... For me, when I launch the witcher 3 etc. up, I think to myself "wow that looks damn nice" where as with ACS, I can't help but think, meh average looking at best.

I'm not very far in ACS yet, my last screenshot is where I left of... but it seems pretty linear to me so far.

As mentioned earlier Batman AK is my second favourite game for graphics and that has a pretty big game world, tightly packed buildings with unique textures, superb lighting/shadows, great physics etc. and runs very well on my system compared to ACS.

I would eve say that watch dogs is more impressive "overall" than ACS.

Also, what settings is GTA 5 running at there? My game looks nothing like that....

Nexus18 said:

Yes I am well aware of them being different types of games but still that doesn't change the fact that they are better looking imo and perform far better.

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Well if you're going to ignore all the factors involved and only judge how it looks, then all of these games look poor compared to The Order.

Also if you want to bring Arkham Knight into the mix, then you should take into account how barren and lifeless the city is. It also does not have tons of unique textures for buildings. It has tons of reused textures throughout. I also dont think the lighting is all that special, particularly for a game that takes place entirely at night(and mostly in the rain).

You seem to not care what the reasons for differences in graphics are, but I dont understand that. You are basically arguing all games should be as simple as possible just so they can prioritize graphics and not get criticized for 'looking bad'.

I see what you are saying about them all having their strong/weak points but like I said, when I jump in the games, there is nothing about ACS that impresses me the same way as the witcher's 3/fallout 4 vast open beautiful looking world with amazing lighting/shadows or GTA 5's amazing textures, water (including the sea bed), weather system (fog, rain, thunder storms etc.) lighting/shadows, physics likewise with batman's unique building textures, lighting/shadows, physics etc.

And fallout 4, the witcher 3 have a good high NPC count too....

Have you played it since it latest patch? It looks noticeably better now. The city is barren, lifeless??? Not sure what game you are playing but in my Gotham City, there are criminals on every road with car chases, tanks patrolling the roads, helicopters patrolling the sky.

kaiden on steam who fixed the game in a number of ways including the awful texture pop-in said that one of the reasons for this was because of the amount of unique textures that was used, it wasn't like the witcher 3, gta 5 where they just copy and paste trees, buildings, grass, bushes etc.

You are basically arguing all games should be as simple as possible just so they can prioritize graphics and not get criticized for 'looking bad'

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Wait... so you are saying that GTA 5, batman AK, the witcher 3/fallout 4 are simple games just because they look pretty

From what I have played of ACS so far, it seems pretty simple to me....

Why are you getting so upset over my opinion on graphics of games anyway? You do realise we have different tastes, most think fallout 4 looks crap but I don't go and criticise their opinion... To my eyes, fallout 4 looks superb once sweetfx is applied.

Again, what settings is that GTA 5 running at? It looks awful, low res. & blurry....

EDIT:

And for the record, I have been criticising star wars big time for its dumbed down simple gameplay....

No, I am not calling those games simple. Far from it. I was making a point about how they all make compromises in order to do other things well.

I'm also not criticizing your opinion necessarily, just the perspective you have where all these factors are unimportant and apparently only the end 'pretty factor' matters.

As for Fallout 4 - I fail to see what you're so impressed over. I dont think it's a bad looking game at all. The lighting is nice, but everything else is mediocre or just plain below average. Art direction is great and that makes up for a lot, but man, the LoD is just straight up terrible and it makes any 'large spanning' screenshot look quite terrible.

As for that GTA V shot, I dont remember the *exact* settings. But it was 1080p and 2xMSAA without the Advanced LoD slider up(too costly). The game actually does look like that, shocker, I know. I can turn up the settings and resolution like crazy and make things like a lot nicer, but it also doesn't run anything close to 60fps on my GTX970 if I do that, either. I actually do this frequently as I love taking screenshots that look nice, but I'm not blinded to the fact that the game doesn't look half as nice when reduced to settings that make it playable at 60fps. The super detail levels the game has really makes resolutions like 4k look incredible, but that same extreme detail level also makes 1080p look a bit lackluster. Not that this is anything to be super ashamed of given that it still has last-gen roots.

Nexus18 said:

The problem is when you have games that look far better in every way (imo anyway) i.e. GTA 5, battlefront, crysis 3, the witcher 3 etc. and perform a lot better (with max settings) too then when you get games like unity/syndicate, they just come across as poorly optimised. I would include batman AK as well since it ran very well for me and is probably 2nd on my list for "overall" graphics but I know that a lot of people still have/had problems with it....


Not sure about gta 5 on the console but the PC version was flawless, myself and 10+ other people from here where up to all hours in the morning playing it and we couldn't stop commenting on how good it looked and how well it performed.

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I get what you're saying Nexus and absolutely won't try to force you to admit that Syndicate looks amazing but consider this:

Just as Seanspeed said, Battlefront is a completely different game and, TBH, it still has its flaws in the graphics department but creates a nice realistic impression overall.

About Arkham Knight, it only gets away with it's graphics because of the night-time setting and flashy rain/neons which distract from its inadequacies. Character models and textures are mostly rather poor (except Batman). It has nice lighting but so does Syndicate.
And the streets are lifeless compared to all the games we're discussing, a couple of thugs here and there and a chopper aren't anything special UE3 is showing it's age, but they mask it pretty nicely, IMO.

Besides, wasn't it you who said that you get GPU usage drops, crashes and had to use Kaiden's tool beforehand to get the game to run acceptably? That's far from running superbly or being optimised in my book. All I did in Syndicate was installing it and whacking everything to highest settings except Nvidia stuff (HBAO+ enabled) and it averages 50fps at 1440p. Locked 60fps at 1080p with some Nvidia stuff.

Fallout 4, you said it looks meh a couple of pages ago Since we're comparing different genres anyway, just look at Syndicate's city view and Fallout 4's from the top of that tower However, I still like how the game looks.



Witcher 3 visuals are really cack at times, seriously. The water and foliage looks appaling, and so can the weather effects and certain times of day. Besides, it just looks really off without SweetFX, I couldn't believe me eyes when I first ran the game and got to the first open area. I know I'll be killed for this since this game has a big cult of followers, but sod it. It looks good overall but nothing striking.

I agree about GTA V, fantastic looking game. Still, it has its limitations.

And you can't max those games and run with a higher framerate than Syndicate. That's just a lie. In Witcher 3, I have to lower a couple settings to medium at 1440p and still get lower frames than in Syndicate. All that to stand in an empty field looking at cardboard on LSD swaying in the wind;p
GTA V with ultra grass and all the additional goodies turned on will destroy your PC. Even at 1080p.

Don't mistake extra effects that can be turned on if you have the grunt with bad optimisation.

You didn't even get to London, give it a chance. To me, it looks pretty great at 1440p. I wouldn't exactly say my shots of it are bad/atrocious/ugly etc.

My top 3 this year graphically:

1. GTA V (one of the best games I've ever played, and one of the best looking on top of that)
2. Phantom Pain (post processing/filtering/lighting and the overall look, also one of the best games I've ever played, especially if you approach it right)
3. Syndicate (don't know much about it, only got to London but I'm sure as hell it looks nice)

Hope you don't read this as an attack since it isn't one, I respect your opinion, just want to share mine

@Seanspeed

I don't know what it is about fallout 4 but there is just something about it, maybe it is the sheer size of the game world and detail put into it and the lighting/shadows that help give it a pretty look, it is so atmospheric that you just feel immersed in the fallout world. Initially I did think that the game looked very meh though, maybe I just have yet to get further into ACS....

Well I play GTA 5 on everything max except shadows, grass, no in game AA and extended graphics options turned off on my pc in sig and it holds 60fps 90% of the time and it doesn't look anything like that to me, I have posted various screenshots of the game in here. Like every game though, I use sweetfx.

@Amatsubu

Yup, no doubt there are some awful textures in batman, I actually think batman's suit look rather low res. compared to others but for the most part it looks lovely imo, no doubt that the rain and lighting helps and I'm sure if the game was set on a sunny day, it would probably look awful.

Honestly, I have quite a lot going on in my game at the current point, a lot more than just a few thugs i.e. when gliding above areas and with the sonic vision or whatever it is You should see loads of blue blips on the ground and the AK's jets/helis with that red beam are every where as well as the kobra tanks, of course it isn't the same scale of "busy" as ACS London but it is still far from baron and lifeless imo.

When the game first came out, it was unplayable, with Kaiden's tool, it ran very well on my pc surprisingly, it wasn't perfect like mad max, gta 5 etc. During my entire gameplay time, the only serious issue I have had so far are crashes (iirc about 5 in about 60 hours), like I said, I would include it in my list for comparisons but given the issues, which most people had/have, there is no doubt it is a buggy unoptimised POS Compared to all those games (I have them all tweaked to my liking so as to get 50+ fps most of the time), ACS looks the worse to me and also doesn't run as well, who knows, maybe someone will also release a tool or something to make it run better.

And yes, like the witcher 3, I originally thought fallout 4 looked very poor but it has grown on me a lot, the "overall" look was nice in the end, the water, bush and tree textures are god awful though:

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showpost.php?p=28071026&postcount=3055

Maybe I'm just a sucker for fancy lighting/shadows and art style

Yup your screenshots don't look bad, perhaps I just have yet to see the game's true beauty although I can see my FPS tanking even more thus having to reduce graphics even further...

Yeah, I'm the same when it comes to lighting/shadows and artstyle
I tend to value them more than textures, lack of jaggies etc. That's why I love how Phantom Pain, Syndicate, GTA V and Fallout 4 look in motion. Batman's shadows/lighting are also very nice.

Syndicate's very nice when you get to London. The overall atmosphere, lighting and how realistic the buildings look is what gets me. Also, lots of stuff like people dancing in the backstreets, children playing football, birds flying, paper debris fluttering in the wind etc. Scripted but greatly adds to the ambience.

I'll make a couple of GTA V shots in the evening if I have some free time, I'm quite curious how the game looks in screenshots with my settings. Running 1440p, SweetFX, traffic/peds density tweaked above max values (the game shows I'm using 5400mb Vram) and most stuff maxed. Should be pretty nice

Well I got to London and I must say it is has certainly "opened" up and the amount of detail is astonishing, FPS has dropped from 50-60 to 30's, although it varies.

IMO the Lighting isn't that good, not bad, but not up there with fallout 4, GTA 5 etc. imo and I actually feel that it is one of the reasons for the game not looking as good as it could in certain areas, it is too bright/glowy looking at times and gives a washed out appearance, maybe it will change/improve as I get further into the game or perhaps this is just the style that ubi were aiming for. I'm sure someone will improve the colours/contrast of the game with another sweetfx config though....



























Assuming that the NPC count, buildings geometry etc. is the reason for the poor performance and the reason for lesser quality textures etc., I would rather them cut back on that and improve the other areas more. Saying that, I'm sure that they could have used better textures as with the last few games i.e. GTA 5, the textures aren't demanding at all i.e. there is little to no difference in performance between various settings:

http://www.geforce.co.uk/whats-new/...ance-guide#grand-theft-auto-v-texture-quality

Fallout 4, with STALKER Shader Mod