Square Enix and Microsoft Team Up to make your PC Jealous

Say what you want about Square Enix—and if you’re on the internet chances are you have already—you can’t deny they make damn, damn, DAMN good looking games. I mean, if you want to go for raw graphical power, Crytek may still be top dog, but if you combine graphical fidelity with ascetic vision, then Square Enix is frankly unrivaled. Sure, you can joke about how impractical some of their outfits are, but at least it’s not generic dark power armor #1120. Some flair now and then does the soul (and the eyes) some good.

Well, recently, Square Enix teamed up with Microsoft to show off the upcoming DirectX 12 and what exactly it can accomplish, and I have to say—if the goal was to make me stare longingly at my PC and whisper “Someday…” then mission accomplished. Check it out:



Pretty impressive, right? If you didn’t have the patience to sit through it, or even start it up, it’s basically just a video of a Microsoft rep showing off the graphical power of DirectX 12 using the character showed off in an earlier Demo for Agni’s Philosophy. While he showed off some lighting effects and camera stuff, perhaps the coolest little tidbit was the numbers: apparently each scene in the game (which was apparently in-engine and not a cinematic) was rendered in 63 million polygons. Every one of the character’s hair was an individual polygon rather than a texture, and it looked amazing.

Certainly a high-end graphical tidbit right there, but who knows? Maybe one day graphics like these will be standard? A boy can dream.