Is Godot 4 going to go anywhere near the state-of-the-art when it comes to photorealism?

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:bust_in_silhouette: Asked By johnygames

So, with Vulkan and global illumination improvements being in the pipeline and all, how will Godot 4 fare against other industry-standard game engines when it comes to visual quality? Are we going to see any stunning arch-viz demos from Godot anytime soon? I know that Godot has come a long way, but it is still subpar as regards visuals and photorealism. I was hoping this would change, but maybe it’s all just wishful thinking. Does anyone have any idea as to how far future versions of Godot will reach performance-wise?

I read up on the latest Godot News from time to time and I have to say future development looks promising. Yet, i cannot compare Godot’s visual quality to other realtime engines’ quality. I can’t help but wonder: how far will Godot go in the near future?

Noone knows exactly, except Reduz, it all depends on him :). I think that even with current engine you could theoretically get close to visual quality of other engines, but the bottleneck is the awful performance and lack of features that make life easier. Also another problem is that no AAA studio uses godot, so noone is even trying to create photorealism.
Reduz is currently working on implementing Vulkan and improving the 3D rendering pipeline, which will surely make Godot more competitive 3D engine. I believe that 4.0 will satisfy the basic feature needs for creating a decent 3D game, which will probably attract more people to use Godot for 3D. More users = more nice looking projects.

But I think that there is still at least one year to go until that basic feature set will be satisfied. So don’t expect too much in the “near” future :slight_smile: But Godot is on a good path to become the “Blender” of game engines in next couple of years (best open source alternative - which can be used for big projects).

gmaps | 2019-11-20 09:04

Well, I agree that Godot is going to attract more game developers in the future, I am just hoping to see Godot being used for realtime animation rendering as well.

johnygames | 2019-11-22 22:15

:bust_in_silhouette: Reply From: Calinou

Godot 4.0’s renderer is focused mainly on improving performance and keeping the current flexibility. The forward rendering approach is being augmented with clustering, but keeping forward rendering makes it possible to use MSAA (something appreciated among current users). Godot 4.0 will definitely be able to offer better visuals than 3.x, but it doesn’t aim to compete with something like Blender’s Eevee.

Future 4.x versions may include a “cinematic” renderer with deferred rendering, TAA, motion blur and raytracing. However, this will be a separate renderer as it will have higher-end requirements and will be less flexible (like most deferred renderers).