Hallucinations re: the rendering of Cyberpunk 2077
Very interesting article.<p>Some humble thoughts:<p>The discussion on the SSAO suggests that the game&#x27;s system uses GTAO - lots of features suggest at the least heavy inspiration from the technique (see &quot;Practical Realtime Strategies for Accurate Indirect Occlusion&quot; - relatively accessible paper).<p>The way the game&#x27;s rendering is set up seems very carefully thought out. Namely, the relative lack of pre-baking and lighting &quot;tricks.&quot; This accomplishes several things at once: It simplifies development of locations and assets - hugely important in a game with a scope this large, it makes the lighting&#x2F;visuals of the game more robust and consistent in quality, and it also allows the integration of ray tracing effects without changing the artists&#x27; and designers&#x27; process.<p>Since even without ray tracing the game uses PBR and broadly physically plausible (though carefully designed) lighting, adding ray-tracing doesn&#x27;t require a massive amount of extra work. All the information is already there, and it&#x27;ll be much easier to make it look good.<p>All in all, reading this article has done just as much to convince me that the game is &quot;next-gen&quot; (at least in terms of graphics) as actually playing it has :)<p>As a comparison, the ENB mod for Skyrim allows dynamic lighting in that game, but to actually use physically plausible light locations rather than the base game&#x27;s prebaked light maps essentially requires redoing the lighting for all the locations in the entire game (there are several mods that do indeed do this.)<p>Before CP2077 I still hadn&#x27;t seen a game that definitely beat what you could accomplish with modded Skyrim for visuals - even in very recent games it was all still fundamentally done the same way. Good to see that essentially a decade of near stagnation has ended. It&#x27;s a little vexing that the state of PC gaming is so dependent on the release of new consoles, though.<p>Edits: for minor fixes