Metal Gear Solid V - Graphics Study

Eric Chadwick

Not mine, this is by Adrian Courrèges who has done some other cool breakdowns in the past. Dig around in his site for some goodies!

http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2017/12/15/mgs-v-graphics-study/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zq5mrApE98A

JordanN

A few metrics about this particular scene: 2331 draw calls, 623 textures and 73 render targets were used.

When he says 623 textures, are these all unique texture maps (i.e albedo, metal, roughness, normals)?

I've always been paranoid about texture count. I'm too use to trying to pack as many similar objects under one UV material and paint them as one. So I find it interesting if the average game does employ hundreds of unique textures for every surface vs my preconception that artists go aggressive with texture tiling and packing RGB channels. 

I also wonder if that would explain why games have grown past 50GB in file size. 

Eric Chadwick

There's a lot going on in each scene.

Environment assets, character assets, effects assets, interface assets, first person weapon assets, post process assets, reflection render-to-texture targets, refraction rtt, shadow maps, etc., etc., etc., each with their own sets of textures.

Being careful with each asset still matters. Because it all adds up, more quickly than most artists realize.

Bigg__D

I swear ANYTHING metal gear related always inspires me, I love all the games since MGS1 on PS1, finally playing phantom pain within the last week so kinda late lol. I still have some of the making of MGS4 videos back when they used Softimage xsi. What a shame that they killed XSI, I swear someone needs to bring it back somehow, Autodesk is holding it hostage. Not to sound like a noob but what exactly is a velocity map? 

Eric Chadwick

Bigg__D said:

...
what exactly is a velocity map? 

This might help
https://developer.nvidia.com/gpugems/GPUGems3/gpugems3_ch27.html

Tural

Amazing breakdown. At first when I watched video I got confused a lot because of specular map colors and absence of the glossines/rougness map. But when my eyes caught link about more in-depth explanation I understand what is going on. So why on earth they called it specular map? So what they meant by specular map is container of different maps in RGBA channels. Awesome work Kojimasun awesome

ghaztehschmexeh

JordanN said:

A few metrics about this particular scene: 2331 draw calls, 623 textures and 73 render targets were used.

When he says 623 textures, are these all unique texture maps (i.e albedo, metal, roughness, normals)?

I've always been paranoid about texture count. I'm too use to trying to pack as many similar objects under one UV material and paint them as one. So I find it interesting if the average game does employ hundreds of unique textures for every surface vs my preconception that artists go aggressive with texture tiling and packing RGB channels. 

I also wonder if that would explain why games have grown past 50GB in file size. 

No, packing, tiling and efficiently designed shaders are pretty important. There is no point in having a black and white mask (eg, roughness) as a 3-channel texture (I can think of an edge case but I wouldnt worry about it). 

DEElekgolo

Did some reverse engineering research/modding for their engine game back in the day over on xentax and such.
An interesting part of their texture production process is their creation of linear textures which they used for pretty much all of their photo-sourcing.
Some more info on their g-buffer passes.

pior

Such a gorgeous game - everything is perfectly crafted while also being extremely well optimized, and the picture quality is always so clean and consistent. I kinda wish the breakdown showed outdoor scenes in broad daylight though - the daylight cycle is flawless, and transitioning between dim indoors and bright outdoors (or the opposite) always works well.

I am currently playing through the main game after playing/replaying a ton of GZ earlier, and I am amazed by how well they managed to control exposure levels throughout. Such a crisp looking engine.

kaptainkernals

Also a testimony to how well optimised that engine is, I can run it on my temporary machine (an older laptop with an 840m) - and it runs 50fps+ and looks stunning, and it doesn't feel hindered by the lower end hardware as some other games and engines do.