Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora was Digital Foundry’s choice for 2023’s best graphics of the year and so it was with some degree of excitement that we received review code for Star Wars Outlaws. Ubisoft Massive’s high-tech Snowdrop Engine has returned, once again delivering some of the best visuals we’ve seen. The key technological foundations remain: RT global illumination for diffuse lighting and reflections, volumetric fog, clouds and sky, and extreme quality detail and texture work. On top of that, PC users can take visuals to the next level with RTX Direct Illumination, making every light and shadow ray-traced. There are flaws and issues that need improvement, but there’s no doubt that this is another key showcase title for the PC format.
Looking at the key Snowdrop features though, there are some interesting changes – if not in the core technology itself then in the execution. I would argue that the ray-traced lighting in particular gets more opportunity to shine due to the diversity of the worlds you visit and the plethora of industrially-produced surfaces. In Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, man-made interiors were perhaps the least impressive parts of that game’s visual make up, with outdoor areas looking so much better. In Star Wars Outlaws, there’s a similar dynamic time of day to Avatar and other open world games, but by necessity, a great chunk of the game takes place in areas that are built up, like industrial areas, habitations, and mining complexes.
You can find yourself sneaking around high tech interiors with smooth curvy lines and polished surfaces, or you can find yourself in grungy low-tech areas that are overcrowded and have poor access to daylight. With dynamic lighting, indoor environments, or areas that are heavily sheltered from direct sunlighting, are harder to illuminate convincingly as all objects occluding light make it harder to rely upon typical rasterisation techniques. Ubisoft Massive’s usage of ray-traced global illumination and reflections in Star Wars Outlaws makes the game scenes’ architecture actually work from a lighting perspective without looking awkward – and it enables viable playspaces that are rare to see in games using traditional rasterised lighting techniques.
For example, the city of Mirogana is built into – and underneath – what looks like a giant hollowed out mountain, and many areas of the city never ever see direct sunlight due to rock, masonry, or other constructions getting in the way. In a game that uses rasterised techniques for real-time lighting, lighting such a city would be a nightmare as those techniques lack the precision to make occluded areas without direct lighting look realistic.
Thanks to RTGI and RT reflections in Snowdrop, Mirogana actually works in spite of the lack of direct lighting. All those areas out of sunlight or out of the neon glow of artificial lamps take on a hyper-realistic look – where the little bits of sky peaking through light up the areas below, giving them a blue or grey directional tint. Meanwhile, all objects cast shadows from that skylight, grounding them into the world and making them look natural – not hovering or glowing like you might see in a game lacking ray-traced lighting. This fidelity in this environment would be impossible to model with previous state-of-the-art real-time lighting techniques.
If you have the PC horsepower to spare, you can move to the next level in realism thanks to RTX Direct Illumination and DLSS Ray Reconstruction. RTXDI is a technique also known as ReStir Direct Lighting. This technique is a form of path-tracing, replacing nearly all of the game’s direct lighting – getting rid of shadow maps and making each light and its shadow ray-traced. Like Avatar, the base game uses shadow maps and rasterised lighting for all the closest game shadows from the sun or from any of the game’s artificial lights: RTXDI replaces these with ray-traced lights and ray-traced shadows. That’s an overly simplistic overview but effectively, we’re looking at a far more comprehensive solution for RT lighting that the video embedded above is best positioned to showcase.
With Outlaws possessing so many ray-traced lighting features, it makes sense to denoise them to make them look better and here is where DLSS Ray Reconstruction comes to the fore. This Nvidia RTX-exclusive technology looks to improve upon classic denoisers by utilising machine learning to do the upscaling and denoising in one step – in practice it has shown great promise and results, albeit with issues. It’s a similar situation in Outlaws, but with some key differences. To point out the many positives first, Ray Reconstruction dramatically improves the quality of lighting, reflection stability and detail – especially in motion, where effects update much faster than they do with standard denoisers. Additionally, noise and flicker are reduced with ray reconstruction and detail in shadows and reflections is much, much improved.
Ray reconstruction also has some issues – edge cases that just don’t look right. Some detail is denoised into oblivion, while there’s some smearing on Kay’s hair. I also noticed that the holograms smear on edges, while Ray Reconstruction also has problems with hard edges, with undulating waves and ghost effects that aren’t there with standard denoising. We’re still in the first generation of Ray Reconstruction, but a year has passed now since we first saw it in Cyberpunk 2077 and it’s time for a quality update from Nvidia. Its benefits are supremely obvious, but the drawbacks simply can’t be overlooked right now.
On that less than positive note, I want to go into some of the things that Outlaws does not do well, requiring improvement. For example, characters look better in gameplay than they do in cinematics, which applies to Kay and all the lead cast, but also NPCs too. Kay’s stilted animation and lighting do her no favours in cutscenes, almost making her look like a different character altogether – an animatron in comparison to the life-like person seen in gameplay. In most triple-A fare, cinematics fare much better than in-game characters, but not here. In the grand scheme of things, I am happy that fewer resources are spent on cutscenes than gameplay fidelity, but it is jarring when the game switches to cinematics where everything looks so stilted in comparison to the otherwise naturalistic feeling of the gameplay scenes.
Getting back to image quality, there are issues in two areas. First, aliasing and ghosting. Features like Kay’s hair or the moving grass in the game never look stable. With hair rendering, it is eternally aliased, regardless of how much image quality you throw at it. For grass or other fine features, it can smear and look aliased in a less than pleasant way, even when maxed out. Perhaps this has something to do with motion vector quality for these elements, but Outlaws has issues with image quality here that Avatar did not.
Another image quality issue stems from the game’s post-processing. Star Wars Outlaws has a constant blur and lens barrel distortion around the screen edges – this, coupled with film grain and chromatic aberration, leads to a distinctly softer image than that seen in Avatar. You can turn off film grain or chromatic aberration, but trying to turn off other lens effects has issues. Using the cinematic effects quality option, dropping to medium settings does seem to get rid of the constant unfocused pixel look in the centre of the image, but adds its own semi-transparent horizontal line artefacts. This is not good. As I see it, Ubisoft Massive should make all of its lens effects and post-processing separately togglable so users can tune visuals to taste. Lens flares, bloom, barrel distortion, and more should all be separate options, just like chromatic aberration and motion blur are.
Beyond this I did notice a couple other smaller things that I wish were different. Some water effects in the game appear to move at lower frame-rates than the rest of the presentation, which isn’t good. Meanwhile, motion blur looks fine, but does not seem to apply to the main character – perhaps this intentional, but her movement looks much ‘framier’ than other character movement. And lastly, glass is shaded with a semi-real-time cubemap system with very slow updates. Given the wealth of ray tracing, even in transparent surfaces like water, I wish transparencies like glass similarly used RT reflections.
And lastly there are issues with those RT reflections – they are fine enough in the game, but similar to Avatar, they still do not use ultra high quality objects and materials found in the primary world. When the camera goes out of screen space, you’ll see how objects still use averaged materials, lacking texture detail. This is fine enough for rough reflections, but on mirror-like surfaces like water and more, it is really obvious that screen-space reflections are doing heavy lifting, even on ultra settings. Basically, I really wish there was a reflection option which offered higher texture and material quality to reflections out of screen space and also added in the objects that RTXDI is tracing against. It would be the cherry on top here for a gorgeous ray tracing implementation – expensive, but even more forward-looking.
Speaking of which, an ‘-unlockmaxsettings’ command line option opens a hidden “Outlaw” graphics preset, designed for the hardware of the future and massively impactful on today’s hardware. Most of these settings offer small refinements for a huge GPU cost and are not recommended. However, the additional quality available for RTXDI is more interesting, adding further stability to lighting. Meanwhile Outlaw-level specular reflections add characters into RT reflections – a clear upgrade over the game’s standard ultra. Ultimately though, the Outlaw preset is for maximum image quality with the lowest frame-rate possible.
In terms of performance generally, we’ll be going into depth on this in another article, but generally it’s just as good as it was in Avatar – but there are two flaws, both linked to RTXDI. I observed GPU load increasing by almost 2.5x in some area, for no obvious reason. These little zones are scattered across the open world and make RTXDI a lurching performance mess at times. Another issue is frame-time stability which can vary drastically with RTXDI, leading to distracting frame-time stutters when traversing the game world. It’s in the realm of 150ms on an RTX 4090 and Ryzen 7 7800X3D and it feels awful when this happens. To my mind, this needs fixing for RTXDI to be considered a viable option for any player.
In summary though, Star Wars Outlaws does look stunning. I think Ubisoft Massive has made something special that is right up there with the best we’ve seen this generation, if not even better. I also want to praise the fact that Outlaws lets powerful PCs stretch their legs and is not artificially limited by console restrictions. It is nice to see a game look a lot better on PC because the developer gives users the forward-looking tech that PCs get years ahead of time.
There is greatness here, but there are also serious polish issues that need addressing. In spite of its obvious quality wins, Ray Reconstruction needs to be updated by either Nvidia or Massive to be more viable to prevent the trails behind objects and to stabilise geometry edges to prevent the ‘waviness’. RTXDI needs to have its frame-time issues ironed out. And for the game in general, image quality needs to improve. Some patches are required to improve the presents, but I’m confident it’ll happen – and at that point, we’ll be looking at one of the best – if not the best – PC games of the year.