Believe it or not, this is actually not a photo. But what is it? It actually is GTA 4, brought to new visual heights with the help of PC mods. Checkt out these screenshots which are as close to photo-realism as it gets.
(Grand Theft Auto IV, PC, PS3, Xbox 360)
micro: you could say that about any game you idiot.
3 years from now imagine what crysis could look like. Imagine what oblivion could have looked like utilising modern tech. imagine what half life 2 would be like with destructible environments.
GTA 4 came out over 3 years ago and at the time had good graphics for an open world game.
sorry, but i disagree massively with what your saying. games will continuously get more impressive as time goes on.
Except you have to rebuy MGS 3 on PS3 to make it look better. Anyone who bought GTA 4 in 2008 doesnt have to rebuy it in 2011 to make it look better, they just need to apply the mod.
While in afew years time you may get more mods to make GTA4 look even better, MGS3 remake will be stagnant.
You dont even know if the PS4 will have the BC to play MGS3 or any of the HD remakes you buy today.
@Substance101 That really wasn't the point! When the game was made, it was made for 2 year old tech(hardly dinosaur) and wasn't pushing any graphical boundries then; many openworld games made on consoles since look better than GTA4 and it's the same consoles!
I don't know that 2006-2008 PC's would run this game like this mod, especially the average PC!
Edit: Actually, never mind. I just read some of your other comments and they are just off topic PC elitism for the sake of it!
"Problem was most people tried to play it at max settings and then complained their rigs couldnt handle it. There were certain settings in the game which were overkill like taking the drawdistance above 22, it was unnecessary but killed performance. People would try to max such stuff out then complain."
This is not even the first time you've posted this comment!
Nice looking gfx but IMO totally unplayable. It looks great until you look around, it'll make you sick and dizzy within 5 minutes with all the motion blur going on.
Lol refer to your own comments they look very ps3 biased to me.
True a 2008 pc wont be playing gta 4 with mods. same goes for the ps2 it wont be playing ps3 version of mgs3 either.
However i can tell u a 2015 pc probably will be playing the same copy of gta4 with even better mods, but we sure as hell dont know if ps4 will be playing ps3 version of mgs3 even if it will there wont be any mod making it look better.
Point is, nobody with a PC _today_ is buying 3 year old games.
All you can do is saying it _would_ have looked like this with todays tech 3 years ago. Nobody is playing Crysis1 today, either. So, what's the point? Nice you can pimp an old game for the special ones who can. Good job. Enjoy!
Sorry dude you couldnt be more wrong. Why do you think People are buying old games on the PS3? because they would like to relive the old expereinces.
Same holds true for the PC. I recently purchased Doom 3, Vampire the masquerade, Tombraider legend, GTA sandandreas.
I also replayed my old copy of Dungeon keeper 2 few months back, i replayed Max payne 2 few months back.
I am currently thinking about buying a digital copy of Giants citizen kuboto. Sorry but its not only PS3 gamers buying old games, PC gamers do buy old games as well, and if those same old games can run with mods why not?
Hell i currently play games like Warcraft 3(its still my RTS of choice even though its 10 years old now), same goes for games like CS.
PS2's GTA also is available on PC and currently runs in 1080p with mods simular to this.
Hence its the PC version again which is superior. If you were to run PS2 version even on PS3 it will still run in SUB HD below 480p or so. PC version on the other hand can be run at whatever res you like with what ever mods you prefer.
graphics suck aswell.. i dont get why people think this looks real
i doesnt look real at all... its just pure texture work... u can clearly see that it doesnt look real on many places.. obviously when get a building with a picture of areal one glued on it it will look quite real..
it is astonishing but PC fanboys get it through your thick head GTA4 came out like 3 years ago...at that time it was great and just because mods have made it look mind blowning dont say crap like this is how GTA4 suppose to be...
It wasnt even HD on the consoles. If consoles had the Juice it surely would have atleast come in HD. Infact the PS3 version looks so blurry and the draw distance is severly lacking on both console versions.
PC port of GTA 4 had some bugs initially, what games released these days doesnt(even on console)?
Problem was most people tried to play it at max settings and then complained their rigs couldnt handle it. There were certain settings in the game which were overkill like taking the drawdistance above 22, it was unnecessary but killed performance. People would try to max such stuff out then complain.
However most of the problems with bugs were gone after the first month of release. Overall the PC version of GTA 4 even in stock at medium settings blew the console version out of the water.
however this does set a HIGH benchmark for GTA5 haha If only i could play it looking like that...but unfortunately i dont have a rig that can do that lol just a casual laptop user, and no i wont build a pc gaming beast just to run it one game like that :D
you took the time to look at the photos and drool over them but then got mad and posted anyway!
Actually GTAIV PC look great after the first patch thanks to the PC having real power. Texure mods took GTAIV to great new level along with real cars soon after it's release on the PC.
This mod is just getting a lot of fanfare in it's 1.25 version cause it is near perfect but like i said GTAIV PC was doing this level of graphics for a long time.
Aaawww, some console fanboy have a case of eye candy envy. That's cute. The kicker here is that the awesome visuals were brought to us by a bunch of guys working for free just for the love of the game. Thats right, a community that actually create content instead of bending over the table and download $15 DLC map packs and skins while begging for more overpriced crap.
If this mod were to be released for the nextgen console as GTA 4 HD it would cost $45.
That is the real power of PC gaming not just the graphics alone. When a bunch of PSN users can upload a DLC for Uncharted 1 that looks x3 better than Uncharted 3 thats when I'll stop gaming on the PC.
@Micro Sony ... when u said dino tech u din refer to nething nd all those disagrees lolz ... the owners of dino tech do know the are owning dino teck .... wish evolution cud be faster so that those dinos could either evolve or get extinct :P ....
pic? Not even close. Well, actually it looks "Nothing" like a photo nor at any point before I read the article did I ever confuse it with one. now maybe some other pics look better but the face articles picture looks nothing a photo, more like maybe a painting or something non photo realistic.
What sucks is more gaming devs are trying to kill the mod community because they want to sell their own crappy DLC. Enjoy it while it lasts I guess, it'll probably be a thing of the past in the next decade.
Nuklearduke, how can someone disagree, but anyway Azazil is right, enjoy the mods, greed is going to kill them. Man gaming is used to be fun, now its becoming too greedy green!
As much as I expect to see mods decline in the coming years, I really don't think its going to be abolished all around. Bethesda, Valve and Rockstar are all VERY aware that mods help shift copies in the slower selling times, like a year after release
Everyone always knocks the developers of a "shotty" port, but I hardly ever see Modders actually make a game from scratch. And if they do, its a small indie game anyways. Sure you can reply to this by saying their dev team is too small to take on a project like GTA4, but that's exactly my point. With such a big team dev a game, its hard to create something so easily achieveable to what modders can do since they essentially only rewrite what the devs took long hard hours in writing for. The structure and bugs are already worked out, the game is already fully playable (in most occasions xD)..
Uncharted looks good for sure, but photorealistic, no way. I am sure if Naughty Dog were trying for that art style they may be able to achieve it, but that is just not the style of their graphics. They are more cartoony.
Anyone who thinks this looks photorealistic needs to have their eyes examined. Can't you see the absolute lack of "life" in the pictures? They look so stale and artificial. Especially the one with the people and cars in it.
Its actually a mod program called ENB 'iCEnhancer' written by Boris Vorontsov. It works with a lot of other games too, it's just that GTA4 looks the most realistic with it running. It works with Resident Evil 4 and 5, The Saboteur and Oblivion amongst others. All it actually does is tweak the textures and lighting (a bit more complex than that but essentially that is what it does), simple but with awesome results. You can read all about it in the latest edition of PCGamer.
It more than just lighting tweaks. The mod actually implements HDR, radiosity/sky lighting, SSAO, excellent real time lens effects, special DOF, heavily modified reflections and motion blur. Those are the big tings that gives the game it's real look.
Hopefully... hopefully its not a disappointment like GTA4 was to me. I liked the San Andreas style gameplay. The outright madness you could have in it. This was almost a real life simulator with a few twists. Frame rate is terrible (on PS3), car handling is terrible, controls were awkward and the car camera was horrible as well. All in my opinion of course but I know plenty that agree.
car handling was great in my opinion, my only real problem with gta iv was the lack of player customisation, and map variety (from gritty city to more gritty city to even more gritty city).
When I was in a 3D Studio Max class, my teacher said that no matter how life like things may look in a video game screenshot, you can still always tell if its a CGI image or a photo.
This is really impressive, but you can JUST about see its CGI ;P
Motion blur aside I'll have to check some of these mods out, though truth be told I'm not a proppa GTA fan as I tend to run about crazy-like for a while, lose the story/plot, and the game gets boring!..
That said I'll give it another shot (+ mod) plus some of the others seeing as a Steam deals means I have them all for a super bargin-bin price! :D
I thought that was all there was to GTA...lol. I never get on with the stories...I can't help but wander around and start killing people and stealing cars ans shit.
lmao.. yup that's me in the (gaming) world, fortunately I am a good law abiding citizen in the (real) world.. I'm not a UK rioter despite having been not a particularly innocent teen!..
Running about killing things in GTA also cant be equated to levelling up in Final Fantasy and the like though suppose it the same in some ways..
Well originally didn't interest me then I saw the trailer LOL.. Its such intentional maddness that it might actually be fun..
That said its not a day-1 purchase I have too many of them upcomming and I am playing catch up at the moment too as I bougnht about 40+ games a couple of months ago some of which I'd sold when I was scratching about for mony at the end of last year!..
Anyone who knows even a small amount about creating 3D assets knows that the first screenshot is very easy to achieve, just download a high res photo and project it onto a surface that resembles the object in the photo.
It looks like a photo because essentially it is a photo.
This is fairly old news guys, saw this a couple of months back in Gamesradar. I was gonna comment on the troll (josephayal) above me, but I figured he's not worth my time.
PC Gamers will expect GTA V to look like this day 1!
R* needs to pull a Valve and just hire the mod team that did this and have them Optimize and mod GTA V PC so it looks this good Day 1.
If they optimize it correctly it will run fine on any mid range PC.
You totally failed to realize that GTAIV was a console port to PC and it WAS NOT optimize very well. Google it! 99% of the PC Gaming world complained about GTAIV performance!
The game was very CPU dependent, ate up and wasted Vram like it was air, did not use dual or quad cores evenly, PLUS it had Securom DRM that ate up resources as well!!
So if GTAV was made for the PC instead of just being ported over then the game could have those stellar graphics and run PROPERLY on any mid range PC.
GTAIV is a perfect example of needing a High end PC to compensate for a Developers shitty console port to PC.
I own a PS3 only and i don't agree with you...why be so greedy? a lot of people in this world don't own a ps3 and play on pc or xbox360 so leave the way it is..multi platform :)
You've just got to hand it to the guys at Rockstar. GTA IV's Liberty City is BY FAR the most meticulously detailed city in any open world game. The game's natural detail combined with this mod create these beautiful nearly-photorealistic images. Now you could stick a mod like this on another open world game like Saints Row, but it would still look like crap.
GTA IV's Liberty City is BY FAR the most meticulously detailed city in any open world game. And you have never played STALKER Call of Pripyat!
GTAIV is very very well detailed but if you ever have watched a Chernobyl documentary and then Played STALKER COP you would be amazed as to how exactly identical the game is to the real city!
PLUS...you can go inside every building which is why i would put it slightly above GTAIV.
Nice graphics as always but what kind of pc do you need to run this in 1920x1080 at a playable framerate? I'm not even sure i could with my dual Gtx 460 1GB.
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Uncharted is great but can you imagine if it had free to roam environment to compliment those amazing graphics.
Gears is great but can you imagine if it had 100% distributable environment and costume multi-player maps.
Can you imagine if both games supported community mods.
3 years from now imagine what crysis could look like. Imagine what oblivion could have looked like utilising modern tech. imagine what half life 2 would be like with destructible environments.
GTA 4 came out over 3 years ago and at the time had good graphics for an open world game.
sorry, but i disagree massively with what your saying. games will continuously get more impressive as time goes on.
MGS3 looks better running on PS3/360 than it did running on PS2. Such is the nature of technology!
Except you have to rebuy MGS 3 on PS3 to make it look better. Anyone who bought GTA 4 in 2008 doesnt have to rebuy it in 2011 to make it look better, they just need to apply the mod.
While in afew years time you may get more mods to make GTA4 look even better, MGS3 remake will be stagnant.
You dont even know if the PS4 will have the BC to play MGS3 or any of the HD remakes you buy today.
That really wasn't the point! When the game was made, it was made for 2 year old tech(hardly dinosaur) and wasn't pushing any graphical boundries then; many openworld games made on consoles since look better than GTA4 and it's the same consoles!
I don't know that 2006-2008 PC's would run this game like this mod, especially the average PC!
Edit: Actually, never mind. I just read some of your other comments and they are just off topic PC elitism for the sake of it!
"Problem was most people tried to play it at max settings and then complained their rigs couldnt handle it. There were certain settings in the game which were overkill like taking the drawdistance above 22, it was unnecessary but killed performance. People would try to max such stuff out then complain."
This is not even the first time you've posted this comment!
It looks great until you look around, it'll make you sick and dizzy within 5 minutes with all the motion blur going on.
Lol refer to your own comments they look very ps3 biased to me.
True a 2008 pc wont be playing gta 4 with mods. same goes for the ps2 it wont be playing ps3 version of mgs3 either.
However i can tell u a 2015 pc probably will be playing the same copy of gta4 with even better mods, but we sure as hell dont know if ps4 will be playing ps3 version of mgs3 even if it will there wont be any mod making it look better.
All you can do is saying it _would_ have looked like this with todays tech 3 years ago. Nobody is playing Crysis1 today, either. So, what's the point? Nice you can pimp an old game for the special ones who can. Good job. Enjoy!
4 people missed your sarcasm haha
Sorry dude you couldnt be more wrong. Why do you think People are buying old games on the PS3? because they would like to relive the old expereinces.
Same holds true for the PC. I recently purchased Doom 3, Vampire the masquerade, Tombraider legend, GTA sandandreas.
I also replayed my old copy of Dungeon keeper 2 few months back, i replayed Max payne 2 few months back.
I am currently thinking about buying a digital copy of Giants citizen kuboto. Sorry but its not only PS3 gamers buying old games, PC gamers do buy old games as well, and if those same old games can run with mods why not?
Hell i currently play games like Warcraft 3(its still my RTS of choice even though its 10 years old now), same goes for games like CS.
Hence its the PC version again which is superior. If you were to run PS2 version even on PS3 it will still run in SUB HD below 480p or so. PC version on the other hand can be run at whatever res you like with what ever mods you prefer.
What the hell does running in 1080p on PC have to do with gameplay??
graphics suck aswell.. i dont get why people think this looks real
i doesnt look real at all... its just pure texture work... u can clearly see that it doesnt look real on many places.. obviously when get a building with a picture of areal one glued on it it will look quite real..
So why do PS3 fans get all excited for HD remakes running in 720p on PS3? that doesnt have to do anything with game play either.
Funny when another platform does stuff for free, which console gamers have to pay huge amounts of money for all of a sudden it gets flamed.
Sorry but i just think you are jealous of PCs superior backward compatibility and the ability to run mods.
PC port of GTA 4 had some bugs initially, what games released these days doesnt(even on console)?
Problem was most people tried to play it at max settings and then complained their rigs couldnt handle it. There were certain settings in the game which were overkill like taking the drawdistance above 22, it was unnecessary but killed performance. People would try to max such stuff out then complain.
However most of the problems with bugs were gone after the first month of release. Overall the PC version of GTA 4 even in stock at medium settings blew the console version out of the water.
you took the time to look at the photos and drool over them but then got mad and posted anyway!
Actually GTAIV PC look great after the first patch thanks to the PC having real power. Texure mods took GTAIV to great new level along with real cars soon after it's release on the PC.
This mod is just getting a lot of fanfare in it's 1.25 version cause it is near perfect but like i said GTAIV PC was doing this level of graphics for a long time.
Its just not GTA4 that you can enjoy with mods. Also there are countless other games which are PC exclusive.
While consoles have exclusives too, i have to point out most of them are rehashes.
Check this PC exclusive out, then tell me if there is anything like this on console:
http://www.youtube.com/watc...
I personally have a PC with 3 screens, i bought the same thrustmaster replica warthhog flight stick ill be doing some flying simulations soon ;-)
If this mod were to be released for the nextgen console as GTA 4 HD it would cost $45.
That is the real power of PC gaming not just the graphics alone. When a bunch of PSN users can upload a DLC for Uncharted 1 that looks x3 better than Uncharted 3 thats when I'll stop gaming on the PC.
Agree or Disagree if you Agree or Disagree
Well, actually it looks "Nothing" like a photo nor at any point before I read the article did I ever confuse it with one. now maybe some other pics look better but the face articles picture looks nothing a photo, more like maybe a painting or something non photo realistic.
... but GTA4 never had any official mod support either.
Same goes for MW2.
As long as people want it, someone will hack and mod it.
http://www.gta4.net/map/
Entire GTA4 map, WITH street view. :D
http://i488.photobucket.com...
Wow hang on this is from the ENB thing? Damn that shit gives results
Just a question...
Great, thanks steven.
It works with Resident Evil 4 and 5, The Saboteur and Oblivion amongst others.
All it actually does is tweak the textures and lighting (a bit more complex than that but essentially that is what it does), simple but with awesome results.
You can read all about it in the latest edition of PCGamer.
When I was in a 3D Studio Max class, my teacher said that no matter how life like things may look in a video game screenshot, you can still always tell if its a CGI image or a photo.
This is really impressive, but you can JUST about see its CGI ;P
That said I'll give it another shot (+ mod) plus some of the others seeing as a Steam deals means I have them all for a super bargin-bin price! :D
Running about killing things in GTA also cant be equated to levelling up in Final Fantasy and the like though suppose it the same in some ways..
That said its not a day-1 purchase I have too many of them upcomming and I am playing catch up at the moment too as I bougnht about 40+ games a couple of months ago some of which I'd sold when I was scratching about for mony at the end of last year!..
It looks like a photo because essentially it is a photo.
but other than that, it does look amazing.
PC Gamers will expect GTA V to look like this day 1!
R* needs to pull a Valve and just hire the mod team that did this and have them Optimize and mod GTA V PC so it looks this good Day 1.
WRONG!
If they optimize it correctly it will run fine on any mid range PC.
You totally failed to realize that GTAIV was a console port to PC and it WAS NOT optimize very well. Google it! 99% of the PC Gaming world complained about GTAIV performance!
The game was very CPU dependent, ate up and wasted Vram like it was air, did not use dual or quad cores evenly, PLUS it had Securom DRM that ate up resources as well!!
So if GTAV was made for the PC instead of just being ported over then the game could have those stellar graphics and run PROPERLY on any mid range PC.
GTAIV is a perfect example of needing a High end PC to compensate for a Developers shitty console port to PC.
you would be lucky if the pc got GTA V to begin with :P
And you have never played STALKER Call of Pripyat!
GTAIV is very very well detailed but if you ever have watched a Chernobyl documentary and then Played STALKER COP you would be amazed as to how exactly identical the game is to the real city!
PLUS...you can go inside every building which is why i would put it slightly above GTAIV.
I'm not even sure i could with my dual Gtx 460 1GB.
a Single GTX460 would be more then enough graphic processing.
However a 3.8/4ghz processor dual/quad would be recommended for a constant perfect frame rate.
Ya I can tell, not sayin it looks bad but not that impressed.