There’s less than a week left until Fallout 4 is unleashed upon the masses, and fans of the series will finally get to explore an all new post-apocalyptic wasteland.

Ahead of the release Bethesda has released some details on the technology behind the graphics of the game, as well a collection of new screenshots from the game to enjoy. Click on over to the other side to read about the tech and check out the images.

The Graphics Technology of Fallout 4

The hardware we play games on continues to advance at a rapid pace with exciting new graphics features. Our Creation Engine has evolved to incorporate this new technology in order to empower the artists and designers at Bethesda Game Studios to create an immersive new world. The tech team here is closely aligned with the art team, and together we carefully selected each individual feature based on specific artistic and performance goals we wanted to achieve in creating this world.

The first thing we did after Skyrim was to enhance the Creation Engine’s graphical core by adding a physically based deferred renderer. This new renderer allows us to add many more dynamic lights to every scene, and paint our surfaces with realistic materials. We want objects and characters in the world to feel tactile and grounded, and a big part of that is ensuring that these materials are distinct – that metal reflects light in a distinct manner from wood, for example.

As always, our world features fully dynamic time of day and weather. 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.

When a rain storm rolls in, our new material system allows the surfaces of the world to get wet, and a new cloth simulation system makes cloth, hair, and vegetation blow in the wind.

The player can go anywhere in the world at any time of day, so we added dynamic post-process techniques that enhance the vibrancy and color of our scenery for maximum emotional impact. Our virtual cameras received a major upgrade as well. We’re not going to spoil every improvement we’ve made, but for those of you who enjoy the technical details, here’s a sampling of what we’ve added to the latest version of the Creation Engine:

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

If you’re not sure what all of that means, don’t worry. What’s important is how this technology comes together with the art and gameplay of Fallout 4 to create a dynamic, immersive experience – no matter your gaming system. We pride ourselves in being a highly collaborative team, always balancing graphics, gameplay, art, and performance. We hope that when you get a chance to play the game on November 10, you’ll agree.

Be sure to pre-order Fallout 4 for Xbox One, PS4, or PC now!

Images

[Source: Bethesda]