Godot has come a very long way in a very short period of time, but until recently I don’t believe many would believe that Godot was capable of creating photorealistic graphics. The release of Ella: A Study in Realism by Andres Hernandez illustrates just how graphically capable Godot has become. With the release of Godot 3.3 and Godot 3.4, more and more graphical functionality was added to the game engine such as an improved lighmapper and global illumination and improved tone mapping as well as hundreds of other new features and improvements.
The Ella demo is available for Windows, Linux and Mac and is a great benchmark of Godot graphical capability. Ella is described as:
Ella : a study in realism. Graphics demo with an interactive camera, made using the Godot Engine in about one week. Uses global illumination in Godot 3.4.2 to achieve realistic lighting, all in real time (no baked lightmaps). The character model and some assets were made with photogrammetry for the highest possible quality.
Press Escape to view the options. Space to toggle cinematic camera. WASD or Arrow keys move around. Mouse to look.
Keep in mind, this is a high end demo and requires a modern machine to run on the full settings. If you have a laptop or integrated graphics, you’ll likely need to reduce the settings in the menu. There is a low spec mode for computers that are still good but only slightly older.
You can see the Ella Godot 3.4 photorealistic demo running on an M1 MAX 24 core GPU in the video below. If you try it on your own machine, please post your performance results in the video comments.