A new blog post by Bethesda unveiled the graphics technology behind Fallout 4, the highly anticipated post-apocalyptic roleplaying game due for release on November 10 for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
As we already knew, the Creation Engine still powers Fallout 4 (probably because it allows modding, which now will produce mods compatible with consoles as well), but Bethesda has enhanced it significantly. Fallout 4 supports Physically Based Rendering, for starters, which allowed them to add many more dynamic lights to each scene.
Obviously, Fallout 4 supports a day/night cycle and dynamic weather, and here Bethesda confirmed their partnership with NVIDIA (which we first reported on) in order to implement volumetric light (or god rays, if you prefer).
To create that volumetric light spilling across the scene (sometimes called “god rays”) we worked with our friends at NVIDIA, who’ve we worked with dating back to Morrowind’s cutting-edge water. The technique used here runs on the GPU and leverages hardware tessellation. It’s beautiful in motion, and it adds atmospheric depth to the irradiated air of the Wasteland. Like all the other features here, we’ve made it work great regardless of your platform.
The tech team also added dynamic post-process techniques, improvement to the virtual camera and a lot more, which you can find in this list:
- Tiled Deferred Lighting
- Temporal Anti-Aliasing
- Screen Space Reflections
- Bokeh Depth of Field
- Screen Space Ambient Occlusion
- Height Fog
- Motion Blur
- Filmic Tonemapping
- Custom Skin and Hair Shading
- Dynamic Dismemberment using Hardware Tessellation
- Volumetric Lighting
- Gamma Correct Physically Based Shading
Check out some of the official screenshots below.
If you really can't wait, you can check our leaked screenshots and details: 1, 2 and 3. If you're stronger than that, just read the 10 things you might not know about Fallout 4 yet.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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