Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and Alan Wake II – both were worthy of first place
The authors of Digital Foundry, who constantly analyze graphics in games, announced the results of the year, naming the best games in terms of graphics.
First place went to Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. It was praised for its large, beautiful and detailed open world, global illumination, and the use of ray tracing, which even works on the Xbox Series S.
Second place was given to Alan Wake II, and the authors say that they argued for a long time which of these two games to give first place. As a result, Alan Wake II actually took second place only because of its much more modest scale. At the same time, the game has an abundance of details, excellent implementation of ray tracing, and the picture as a whole looks as if it was taken directly from some movie.
Cyberpunk 2077 earned third place, but not on its own, but thanks to the Ray Tracing: Overdrive mode, which was added only this year. Cyberpunk 2077 has been one of the strongest examples of what ray tracing can look like in games for years, and the new mode takes it all to the next level by adding path tracing. True, this mode is incredibly resource-intensive.
In addition to the top three, the authors identified the remaining games that were included in the top ten, but without ranking:
- Star Wars Jedi: Survivor
- Final Fantasy XVI
- RoboCop: Rogue City
- Resident Evil 4
- Hi-Fi RUSH
- Super Mario Bros. Wonder
- Marvel’s Spider-Man 2
In addition, several games were mentioned separately, although they did not make it to the top ten. These were Dead Space, Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores, Jusant, Armored Core VI: Fires Of Rubicon and Metroid Prime Remastered.