Digital Foundry 2024 Graphics of the Year Awards

Overview of the Year in Graphics

This episode of Digital Foundry features a comprehensive review of the most visually impressive games of 2024. The team evaluates titles based on technical fidelity, art direction, and overall polish, highlighting the evolution of engines like UE5 and the continued optimization for modern hardware.

Key Highlights & Honorable Mentions

• Stalker 2: Praised for its atmospheric lighting and fog, despite lingering technical challenges.
• Persona 3 Reload & Metaphor: ReFantazio: Recognized for their exceptionally clean UI, sharp presentation, and distinct artistic visions.
• Night Dive Studios: A blanket shout-out for their definitive remasters of classic titles, bringing them to modern systems at high frame rates.
• Tiny Glade: Highlighted as a cozy but technically dense experience featuring advanced software ray tracing.
• Final Fantasy VII Rebirth: Lauded specifically for its world-class cutscenes and the significant visual uplift provided by the PS5 Pro update.

Deep Dive into Top Candidates

Technical Standouts

"The RTGI as powered by Lumen, which is a specific version of RTGI, works really well... I noticed that there wasn't any fake lights there."

• Dragon’s Dogma 2: Impressive use of RTGI to facilitate exploration in a massive, open world.
• Riven Remake: A masterful transition of 90s pre-rendered visuals into a fully realized real-time 3D environment.
• Dragon Age: The Veilguard: Received significant praise for its robust strand hair system, a feature rarely executed this well in real-time.
• Silent Hill 2: Identified as an Unreal Engine 5 masterpiece, specifically for its atmospheric lighting and material quality, despite some performance stuttering.
• Astro Bot: Celebrated for its perfect frame pacing, beautiful art style, and complex physics simulations that avoid the bloat of many modern titles.
• Black Myth: Wukong: An extraordinarily ambitious UE5 production noted for its path-traced lighting and intense fluid simulations.

The Top Three

1. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle: Took the top spot due to its incredible combination of scope, Path Tracing on PC, and rock-solid 60 FPS performance on home consoles.
2. Senua's Saga: Hellblade II: Regarded as the most visually coherent and impeccable UE5 tech showpiece, delivering nearly photorealistic character rendering.
3. Star Wars Outlaws: Recognized for utilizing the Snowdrop Engine to create a highly cohesive, lived-in world with advanced ray-traced lighting.