With the full game running at 30fps/1080p on PlayStation 4, IGN created a new video for Grand Theft Auto V, comparing the visual differences between the game on PS4 and PS3.
To get more details about the leap from last-gen to new-gen for Grand Theft Auto V, IGN spoke with Rockstar Games Art Director Aaron Garbut, who revealed, “We’ve spent more man-hours on this than most games get from start to finish.” With the volume of work required for bringing GTA V to the new systems, Garbut says it’s like making a game from scratch.
He adds:
On the art side we’ve taken another look at every asset in the game. From additional dressing and detailing of the world, to looking at every prop and increasing their resolution, or even starting from scratch where appropriate.
One example Garbut gives for what Rockstar went in and did is hand-placing lighting and particle effects in areas they thought would benefit and surprise you. This includes fireflies at night in the countryside, as well as ambient light pollution over Los Santos at night.
After mentioning how the PS4 version of GTA V “runs smoother, it plays smoother, and it feels like it has really evolved into something so much more” when compared to the PS3 version, he talked about the new foliage system:
From Red Dead Redemption, we knew what the world gains by adding vegetation. As soon as we saw the world with the weeds and grass added it really came alive for us in a new way. It softens edges and really does so much to make the world feel less digital and exact.
It’s something as an art team we focus on a lot – break up the hard edges, break up the straight lines and you get something much more real. We then updated all our bushes, plants and trees with much, much more detailed equivalents and then worked on a much more advanced wind system so the branches and leaves blow more realistically. We worked on a layered approach to the grass, starting with hand placed weeds along the bottom of fences and walls, complete with little bits of litter trapped in between, then we layered a base level of grasses of various types over the world.
A quick rundown of other enhancements to GTA V include most lights having dynamic shadows, shadows now cast through fog, cutscene lighting and much of the city lighting was redone, reflections are “massively upgraded,” there’s lots more volumetric fog going on, and the draw distance is “several times what it was before.”
Finally, Garbut summed up his thoughts about GTA V on the new systems by saying, “I’m incredibly proud of what the team has achieved and it feels like a giant leap rather than a tentative step into the next generation.”
What did you think of the comparison video?
[Source: IGN]
