Now that Horizon: Zero Dawn is out, what are the best looking games?

From what I've seen so far:

1. Battlefield 1(PC)

2. Battlefront(PC)

3. Assassin's Creed Unity(PC)

4a. The Witcher 3(PC)

4b. Horizon: Zero Dawn(PS4 Pro)

5. Ryse: Son of Rome(PC)

6. Rise of the Tomb Raider(PC)

7. Crysis 3(PC)

8. Uncharted 4(PS4 Pro)

9. Quantum Break(PC)

10. Watch_Dogs 2(PC)

From a pure asthetics/graphics perspective, Horizon and Battlefront.

From a technical/machine pushing perspective probably Total War Warhammer or Battlefield 1.

Battlefront 2 will sling it this year, unless SQ42 releases (lol, no)

Yeah, sounds about right. I might flip Witcher and Horizon around, even though you basically have them as tied, which is fair. But of course I haven't seen Horizon running in front of me, so I could be overselling it.

My understanding is Horizon looks far better than Witcher

In 4K at max settings? I wouldn't say so. On the PS4? Probably.

I've seen The Witcher 3 on PS4 because I bought for my friend for his birthday and the difference was honestly quite shocking. From Ultra/4K/Hairworks to Medium/1080p/No Hairworks I wasn't expecting such a big difference. For a very odd reason The Witcher 3 looks horrible on a 4K TV at 1080p. I can see the aliasing and even pixels crawling. At 1440p it mostly disappears and at 4K it looks fantastic.

@Juub1990: Ah. Yeah, I was comparing The Witcher 3 on PS4 as on my TV, with the footage from Digital Foundry's Horizon assessment, so I hadn't taken the PC version into account.

As much as I like Witcher 3 (I own Witcher 3 on all platforms & not counting PC), I'll say Zero Dawn looks good in PS4 vs Witcher 3 PS4 but since I haven't played the game yet, can't say much more then that.

1. Battlefield 1
2. Battlefront
3. AC Unity/Witcher 3
4. RotTR
5. Horizon
6. Ryse
7. Uncharted 4
8. DOOM
9. Metro: Last Light
10. Crysis 3

We have a very similar list. I wanted to slide DOOM somewhere in here too but ultimately went with Wach_Dogs 2.

Not sure about Metro LL though. The environment, lighting and textures look pretty fantastic but these character models are awful. It would probably make it in my top 20 though.

not a bad list TC, though unless the steam version looks better I thought Quantum Break didn't look so great. I'd maybe sub that out for GTA V on PC, and Metro Last Light for Watch Dogs 2

EDIT: actually, I think i'd want The Division on there as well... maybe instead of AC: Unity?

Ratchet and clank kills most of them.... Soooo why's it not in the list?

@with_teeth26: Did you enable everything at Ultra and disabled upscaling? The difference is quite significant.

Technical graphics. Ratchet and Clank looks superb, one of the prettier games this gen imo, but the art carries it a lot. That's not to say it's a slouch in the technical department, but top 10 best technical graphics around? Nah.

In no particular order-

Battlefield 1 and 4

Battlefront

Crysis 3

Metro last light

Witcher 3

Assassin creed unity

Far cry primal and 4

Vanishing of Ethan Carter

Rise of tomb raider

Alien isolation

Dying light

Mirror edge( new one)

Batman Arkham Knight

Uncharted 4

Horizon zero dawn

Quantum break

Ryse

The division

Since this is technical graphics only list so I'm not mentioning but my personal best visuals for a game is Ori and the blind forest.

The fact that Horizon is able to compete against PC's best is an achievement on its own right. When was the last time we've seen anything like that on the Xbox? 2006, when Gears 1 came out.

My personal list in no particular order

BF1

Witcher 3

Battlefront

Uncharted 4

DOOM

Horizon

Unreal Tournament Alpha

Star Citizen

Call of Duty Infinite Warfare (campaign mode)

Rise of Tomb Raider

Ratchet and Clank

I had the windows store version which was a blurry unoptimized mess, Steam version might be a different story but I can only talk about what I've seen

sensing the presence of a spirit , might be gpuking's ghost

Definitely for me.... Especially since they added TAA via a patch and really cleaned up the IQ...... Play it on Pro with HDR and it's tough to beat.

Lets see what Scorpio can do. I bet Forza 7 is going to look very good.

The blur goes away if you turn off upscaling and at 4K the game looks downright gorgeous and the lighting system is second to none but sadly the volumetric lighting absolutely kills performance.

2013 when Ryse came out.

If you're talking about a good looking game than pure pixel power it's kinda hard to actually find blemishes or anything that doesn't look good in Portal 2. It's sparse environments and lighting works wonders with source engine. Animations as well, even though it's rudimentary mechanical characters still manage to emote better than most games. Comparatively Left4dead looked like shit in almost every respect barring model

Horizon animations during cutscenes look odd. Bit of uncanny problem. Like dead people have risen again. It ain't right.

Surprised more haven't said Far Cry Primal. Maybe not enough played it. Not the best but belongs on the top ten list for me.

I wanted to put it in an honorable mentions list along with DOOM.

@Juub1990: fair enough. It's a damn fine looking game but then thats a damn fine looking list I can't particularly argue with.

The Order 1886 is still the finest looking game I've ever seen.

Ever since you've been back you've done nothing but troll.

No troll.

Horizon looks insane !' Probably the best looking console game to date and I'm a fan of the witcher 3 so far my favorite game ever but even I think horizon looks better !! Even beats uc4 by a little .. horizon can easily b with PCs best

horizon looks better than anything in that list. Apparently some people can't handle the truth, but horizon is basically running on a system that's close to gtx 980 performance at 30 fps and 4k checkerboard. The game is also designed from the ground up to run with this hardware and uses all sort of new techniques that other games are not using. All of these games don't even support hdr.

Horizon is the new graphics king.

@commander: The Pro's GPU isn't all that close to a 980. It's slower than the RX 480 which is in turn slower than the 980.

the gtx 980 has 4.6 tflops, the ps4 pro 4.2 tlfops. Not to mention that optimization plays a major role here as well.

@commander: Yeah it's not that simple lol.

Indeed it's not that simple, console games are much more optimized which means they can get a lot more out of hardware than a pc.

Probably explains why so many games run so poorly on them. Dat optimization.

you're just butthurt that your pc can't run the best looking game, but newsflash, it's only going to get worse. The next graphical powerhouse will most likely be red dead redemption 2 and it won't be on the pc.

Can't go past Witcher 3 for me, on anything.

@commander: I got a PS4 Pro and a PC so what do I care lol? Doesn't change the fact that what you said is plain untrue. You can't just compare FLOP's and draw a conclusion from that.

1. The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild.

2. uh.....hmm......cant think of anything else so The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

Why because nvidia cards have better optimization than amd cards, guess what consoles have better optimization too. The comparison won't be far off, besides , I said close to gtx 980 performance.

@commander: That's not necessarily true either.

Still from what I remember the PS4 Pro's GPU was much closer in performance to the RX 470 than the RX 480. That puts it significantly behind the GTX 980.

@commander: Pro is slower than a 470 which is still slower than even a 970. It comes nowhere near a 980/1060.

Also Portal 2's a better game.

but horizon isnt out yet

When you're saying closer in performance to the rx 470 than the rx480, you mean it's faster than a rx 470, a rx 470 has 4.9 tflops, you're basically proving my point. There's only about 15 percent difference in performance with the gtx 980 as well.

It may not reach gtx 980 levels, but didn't I say almost...

We could start argueing about the semantics of the word 'almost' but that is not the point here, the point is that the pc doesn't have any games that are as technically advanced as horizon.

I don't even think it's faster than an RX 470 actually. The 980 isn't only 15% faster than the RX 470, it's more like 30-35% faster. You can't compare FLOP's across different GPU architectures and just conclude that. The PS4's GPU really isn't close to the 980.

https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ASUS/RX_470_STRIX_OC/16.html

On average the 980 is about 30-35% faster. Only in games that make heavy use of Async compute like Ashes of the Singularity does the RX 470 close the gap or even pulls ahead at times.

Horizon is definitely impressive but has some shortcomings. No GI whatsoever when old games like Crysis 3 has it. No Dynamic Foliage whereas Rise of The Tomb Raider on PC has it. DF also mentioned the water wasn't doing anything when Aloy was walking through it. Then add in the fact the game doesn't have things like VXAO or high resolution shadows then you'll see it's not as technically advanced as you might think. It does feature many advanced rendering techniques but the system it was developed for held it back a bit. It is more advanced in certain areas than the top tier PC games but it isn't more advanced in every area.

that game got crushed by Killzone. Ryse was a linear blurry mess. No competition whatsoever.

I found Ryse very impressive at the time. Yeah 900p wasn't great but outside of that it was technically quite good.

I'm not comparing flops I compared benchmarks. Maybe you should look at benchmarks, the rx 470 is only about 15 difference with the rx 480 and that card trades blows with the gtx 980.

The ps4 pro will defenitely achieve higher performance than the rx 470, simply because of optimization. The ps4 pro has low level api, so it can work closer to the metal, it has a more specific but also slimmer operating system and it has shared memory. Not to mention optimization can even be increased the further we are in a gen, simply because devs are more accustomed to the hardware.

I'm not saying horizon didn't have its shortcomings, the first crysis had its shortcomings as well, of course horizon isn't as the same level of crysis back in 2007 but some techniques are brand new and defenitely a game changer. The dynamic weather and cloud system is something that trumps all other games. They also do a lot of techniques that are know already pretty much perfectly. The checkerboard rendering works flawlessly as well.

They do pretty much everything extemely well and add some, and this in an open world game where nature meets technology. The total package is a landmark. History will prove it.