Why Can’t All Games Have Graphics Like Gran Turismo 5?

What you’re about to see is a gallery of screenshots from Gran Turismo 5, the game that’s taken forever to get here but has finally arrived at long last.

I think there’s no question that these are in fact the best graphics to ever be seen on a console before, but my question is how? How is Gran Turismo able to render this level of detail, but say, Grand Theft Auto, with the same-type cityscapes and cars cannot. I’m sure there are a million technically explanations for this, such as Gran Turismo NOT being full of pedestrians and open world maps and cars not frequently blowing up due to volleys of automatic gunfire, but I just wish than other game could get to this level.

It’s entirely possible a few shots of actual cars slipped in here, because honestly, in some of these its pretty damn hard to tell the difference. Is photorealism the final frontier for games? And when will it finally get here?

Check out the gallery below:

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15 Comments

  1. But only 200 of those cars look great, the non premium ones that got left out look like GT4.

    Looks a bit stupid on the track as well, a mint highly detailed Ferrari will pass your boxy R32 with no interior view… fail.

  2. B/c there is less going on at any moment then in an open world game and the environments are smaller and more controlled than in most action games, not to mention controls are simpler to keep track of and the AI less complex.

    Also, Sony likes to slap several PS3s together (6,12?) to get insane render quality for its production shots of this game. They’ve been demoing this game with that setup for a couple years now.

    Still the graphics are awesome, even if graphical quality in games is overrated these days.

  3. In Assassin’s Creed The Brotherhood, Ezio himself including all other main characters are between 4-6k polygons (tris!) so it’s an incredibly low amount of geometry to depict high quality models and that is usually made up for with a mix of bump, displacement and normal maps depending on the engine.

    Now, 6k tris depicting the human form is a huge challenge. But a car has clearer planes and surfaceareas, like the hood that could consist of very few polygons. Thus you can use your geometry on the places of the car that will be seen the most often, and for it to play lagless you have a lot more polys to make nice surroundings.

    Also, those images are most likely photoshopped a little as well as most product images are.

  4. The true question here shouldn’t be why haven’t games had graphics as good as this, but will they continue to? the other responses have gone a good way explaining the various limitations that may have prevented certain games from achieving this level of fidelity, and as many have pointed out the racing genre can be very forgiving in this department.

    The question will be if moving forward the photorealism can continue to be improved. On the PS3 I certainly see the potential due to the expanded capacity of the Blueray format. In that regard the XBox360 may find itself falling behind. One important thing to consider, is that while the next gen systems are 5 years or more in age, there is a cycle that comes with most consoles where developers are still learning exactly how far they can push the systems and how they can exploit the hardware to its fullest potential. I always like to point out the example of God of War 1 & 2 on the PS2. Consider how amazing those games looked on that system (and still look today). I consider that series to be the pinnacle of graphic ability on the PS2 and it was released close to 5 or 6 years into the PS2 cycle. With the current gen we are just about hitting that development point which makes me very excited to see what pretty things the future may hold for the PS3. (Sorry XBox360)

  5. These screenshots are all from video replays. Which look amazing, but they’ve been rendered. During gameplay it’s still good, but nowhere near that quality.

    And as an earlier poster mentioned, the 200 new cars look great, but the 800 PS2 ports look jagged as all hell, and it’s accentuated when you drive past one of the new cars.

    They’ve made some really weird decisions like that graphics-wise.

  6. racing games aren’t really all that graphic intensive, it’s alot harder to render human movements than cars. Seriously, the only thing that’s moving are the wheels…

  7. the consoles are only as good as computer technology was when they came out, pretty soon they’ll be able to ray-trace in real time and it will be on the pc first. Thing is, every pc game is a fukn console port now, so we still have no idea how good one can make a game look on the pc as is. Even the next Crysis will be a console port.

    And these graphics aren’t even that good. Every recent racing game has looked as good as this. But no one cares because the recent games weren’t GT5

  8. I am no where near as technologically intelligent as some of the other replies but I would have to think that….well it is because the GT5 developers put so much time in to it. They took a long time to develop the game and in the process pushed the engine as much as they could.

    Just an educated guess mind you.

  9. apparently they aren’t that amazing, see ign.com’s review, i believe they cite less than impressive environments as one reason it got an 8.5 out of 10 on graphics. i guess im glad all games don’t look like grand turismo 5. Graphics have to do with the graphics processor of each system and what the developers do with it. The disc issue is easily resolved, see mass effect 2 for a great example. The Xbox 360 is still a very capable system, gears of war 3 is going to be the best looking game on consoles, from what i’ve seen at least. Gears 2 already looks at least as good uncharted 2, halo reach looks really great also.

  10. @Lubz

    I agree. Polyphony digital has never rushed any of the GT titles and it pays off big time. Everything is polished because they spend so much time on it. Plus, all of the cars in this game actually exist and most of the tracks do too. So this way they have something to model everything after – it’s not just conjured up and rendered however the artists feel like rendering it.

  11. it’s pretty simple really.
    You have 10 cars racing eachother in GTA 5
    You basically have 10 moving objects, each with only 5 bits really moving (Each wheel and the body)

    Compare to GTA 4, were you can easily have 25-30 cars on screen, 50 or 60 pedestrians, each if we’re lowballing there skeletons with about 18 moving pieces on them.

    The cpu on GTA 5 is working out were the cars are, how they react with the ground and if they are hitting other cars or not.

    the cpu on GTA 4 is working out were all the cars are, were all the pedestrians are, how the cars interact with eachother, how the pedestrians interact with eachother, how the pedestrians interact with the cars, how the cars react if you start shooting, how the pedestrians act if you start shooting etc etc etc etc.

    GTA 4 is a far more complex game, the more complex you go with what’s on screen and what they’re all doing at once the less detail you can put into each of the individual things.

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