I don't know about anyone else, but I kind of feel like a year after the launch of current gen consoles the most visually impressive game is still either Ryse or Infamous Second Son. For the past six months or so nothing has come out on either console, or on the PC. that has really blown my mind like a couple of the launch (or in Infamous's case slightly post launch) games. As we enter into the Holiday Season I thought it was interesting that we are really missing any sort of major technical showpiece for the new consoles this year outside of maybe Assassin's Creed Unity in November.
So imagine my surprise when I booted up The Vanishing of Ethan Carter and realized that this game made using Unreal Engine 3 is easily the most visually impressive game on the market right now. I guess the developer used a technique where they scanned in real life objects to their computers using hundreds of photographs and then put those objects into the game. The end result is the most stunning forest I have ever seen rendered in a game. They also spent a lot of time talking up their vegetation shaders that let them, among other things, render grass far into the distance. It seems like a minor thing but as the following screenshot I hope shows, it makes a big difference.
Imagine if all that grass was swaying in the wind and you get the idea. Also impressive is how much detail distant objects retain. Look at this screenshot.
It's honestly a little hard to tell with just a screenshot, but they are rendering the grass across the river from where I took this shot. At a full run that is at least two or three minutes from this spot. And the little stream going off into the distance behind the building at the bottom of the shot? That leads to a valley which is where I took the above two shots.
I'm not normally a guy to save screenshots and gush over this type of thing but both from an artistic and technical standpoint this game blew my mind. And mind you I was playing this on a half-decade old computer that was not exactly state of the art when I got it. With my 2 GB Geforce 560 ti, a Core i7 920, and 6 GB of RAM I am able to play this mostly maxed out at 1080p at between 40 and 60 fps. It's far from a smooth 60 and in certain situations it will drop into the 30's. My limited VRAM also means there is some jerkiness when the game has to stream in new assets. But there are games that don't look half as good as this one that don't run half as well on my computer. I think it is safe to say that with a 670 or higher you should be able to play this at 1080p maxed out at a steady 60 fps as long as you are willing to forgo MSAA and have a SSD installed to keep the streaming from becoming an issue. I ended up using the SweetFX Injector to put some SMAA into the game as MSAA caused a consistent 10 fps dip throughout the entire game. And while I can deal with playing a game running in the mid 40's, I pretty much draw the line there and none of the other normal tweaks (like turning off SSAO or lowering depth of field quality) was having much of an effect.
Anyways, all told this is just an amazingly beautiful game. Which is good because you spend most of the game exploring the area and the complete and utter lack of guidance means that you'll have to comb over some areas quite a few times. But with the areas looking this good I don't have any issue with that. And because the game doesn't require any quick or precise movement the variable framerate doesn't hinder the gameplay. I don't think I would recommend it if you have their minimum spec requirement of a 512 MB GPU, but I think as long as you are pushing 2 GB of VRAM along with a decent amount of system RAM you should be able to run this game well enough to play through it.
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