“When we are working with real-time graphics one of our main focuses is finding the right balance between quality and performance. But sometimes we, the graphics programmers, can get carried away and forget about productivity, iteration, adaptability, etc. That’s why we keep reminding us that it’s important to understand what the artists need and develop the technology for them, not just for our own needs” — PES Graphics Team

With any development, not just PES, the conflict between tech and art continues to be one of the biggest problems for game developers. Finding the perfect technology to help build a good lighting in a real-time sports game is extremely difficult, especially since there are such challenging technological requirements.

“At the end of the day, we also need to put emphasis on optimization. In the last few years, we reshaped our engine to maximize performance for our specific requirements while we simplified our graphics source code to improve flexibility and to reduce potential bugs. We are now also using dynamic resolution and a state of the art temporal-spatial upsampler for all our platforms. This was the most significant optimization effort but we did not stop there; our graphics pipeline is periodically checked in search of bottlenecks and optimization opportunities. When we find something strange we analyze it right away and, if possible, take actions as fast as we can.” — PES Graphics Team

Lighting in PES

“Technically speaking, the PES lighting system is nothing special in itself. It consists of a typical Deferred rendering pipeline and a physically based shading model.

We focus instead on enabling the creation of as many higher quality assets as possible within a short amount of time. We accelerated iteration and allowed artists to spend more time doing what they love – art.” — PES Graphics Team