The best-looking video game ever made is DICE's original Mirror's Edge released in 2008.
It featured highly photorealistic light calculations, yet was still able to achieve an extremely beautiful stylized look.
The ray-traced lighting was pregenerated with middleware called Beast Lighting, which allowed them to tune the reflection and color intensity of the light.
Never let anyone from NVidia tell you that raytracing HAS to look bad.
Modern graphics cannot reach this fidelity because of a lack of Art Direction, not because you need a more powerful GPU.
Unfortunately, the creator Illuminate Labs was acquired by Autodesk in 2010 and Beast Lighting hasn't been utilized to the same degree since. What happened to DICE is common knowledge.
It featured highly photorealistic light calculations, yet was still able to achieve an extremely beautiful stylized look.
The ray-traced lighting was pregenerated with middleware called Beast Lighting, which allowed them to tune the reflection and color intensity of the light.
Never let anyone from NVidia tell you that raytracing HAS to look bad.
Modern graphics cannot reach this fidelity because of a lack of Art Direction, not because you need a more powerful GPU.
Unfortunately, the creator Illuminate Labs was acquired by Autodesk in 2010 and Beast Lighting hasn't been utilized to the same degree since. What happened to DICE is common knowledge.
