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Game screenshots taken at such high quality they look like art

One man's mission to show how beautiful they can be.

Duncan Harris takes clean, artistic screenshots of games at their highest resolution and best possible settings. The results are stunning.

His latest project is Mass Effect 3. He composes pictures using 4K rendering, 4xSGSSAA antialiasing, illumination mod 1.5, Smarteck's high resolution textures, free camera, custom FOV and timestop.

What he ends up with are pictures like concept art.

Can you play Mass Effect 3 looking like that? Not at Harris' definition of playable. He told me it took two Nvidia Kepler cards to keep the game running at less than 10 frames-per-second. You could turn antialising down and your eyes would barely notice if the picture was moving, he explained, but when the image is still the difference is apparent.

Harris has covered a variety of games. His Skyrim and Another World collections are wonderful. I suppose all the collections are.

With Harris' permission I assembled a small collection to highlight his work.

His PC specs, in case you're wondering:

  • Motherboard: Intel Desktop Board DX58SO2
  • CPU: Intel Core i7-980X Processor Extreme Edition (12M Cache, 3.33 GHz, 6.40 GT/s Intel QPI)
  • Videocard: 2x Nvidia GeForce GTX670 (SLI)
  • RAM: 16gb Corsair Vengeance Low-Profile DDR3 (4gb DIMMs)
  • Storage (OS): Intel Solid-State Drive (Intel SSD) 320 (120gb)
  • Storage (Games): 2x Samsung HD250HJ 250GB Internal SATA 8MB 7200RPM (500gb RAID configuration)
  • Storage (Swapfile/Storage): Force Series GT 120GB SATA 3 6Gb/s Solid-State Drive
  • Monitor: Samsung 2333SW 23" Widescreen DVI LCD Monitor