Step 1. Turn on ray tracing
Step 2. Check some forum or protondb and discover that the ray tracing/DX12 is garbage and gets like 10 frames
Step 3. Switch back to DX11, disable ray tracing
Step 4. Play the game
I don't even check anymore lol.
True, I've had very few games worth the fps hit
If I know a game I'm about to play runs on Unreal Engine, I'm passing a -dx11 flag immediately. It removes a lot of useless Unreal features like Nanite
Then you get to enjoy they worst LODs known to man because they were only made as a fallback
Nanite doesn't affect any of the post processing stuff nor the smeary look. I don't like that games rely on it but modern ue5 games author their assets for nanite. All it affects is model quality and lods.
Lumen and other real time GI stuff is what forces them to use temporal anti aliasing and other blurring effects, that's where the slop is.
Out of all of these, motion blur is the worst, but second to that is Temporal Anti Aliasing. No, I don't need my game to look blurry with every trailing edge leaving a smear.
TAA is kind of the foundation that almost all real time EDIT: ~~raytracing~~ frame upscaling and frame generation are built on, and built off of.
This is why it is increasingly difficult to find a newer, high fidelity game that even allows you to actually turn it off.
If you could, all the subsequent ~~magic~~ bullshit stops working, all the hardware in your GPU designed to do that stuff is now basically useless.
EDIT: I goofed, but the conversation thus far seems to have proceeded assuming I meant what I actually meant.
Realtime raytracing is not per se foundationally reliant on TAA, DLSS and FSR frame upscaling and later framgen tech however basically are, they evolved out of TAA.
However, without the framegen frame rate gains enabled by modern frame upscaling... realtime raytracing would be too 'expensive' to implement on all but fairly high end cards / your average console, without serious frame rate drops.
Befor Realtime raytracing, the paradigm was that all scenes would have static light maps and light environments, baked into the map, with a fairly small number of dynamic light sources and shadows.
With Realtime raytracing... basically everything is now dynamic lights.
That tanks your frame rate, so Nvidia then barrelled ahead with frame upscaling and later frame generation to compensate for the framerate loss that they introduced with realtime raytracing, and because they're an effective monopoly, AMD followed along, as did basically all major game developers and many major game engines (UE5 to name a really big one).
motion blur is essential for a proper feeling of speed.
most games don't need a proper feeling of speed.
There is always motion blur if your monitor is shitty enough.
Motion blur is guarenteed to give me motion sickness every time. Sometimes I forget to turn it off on a new game... About 30 minutes in I'll break into cold sweats and feel like I'm going to puke. I fucking hate that it's on by default in so many games.
Motion blur + low FOV is an instant headache.
... What?
I mean... the alternative is to get hardware (including a monitor) capable of just running the game at an fps/hz above roughly 120 (ymmv), such that your actual eyes and brain do real motion blur.
Motion blur is a crutch to be able to simulate that from back when hardware was much less powerful and max resolutions and frame rates were much lower.
At highet resolutions, most motion blur algorithms are quite inefficient and eat your overall fps... so it would make more sense to just remove it, have higher fps, and experience actual motion blur from your eyes+brain and higher fps.
Has the person who invented the depth of field effect for a video game ever even PLAYED a game before?
I mean, it works in... hmmm... RPGs, maybe?
When I was a kid there was an effect in FF8 where the background blurred out in Balamb Garden and it made the place feel bigger. A 2D painted background blur, haha.
Then someone was like, let's do that in the twenty-first century and ruined everything. When you've got draw distance, why blur?
Yes, it makes sense in a game where the designer already knows where the important action is and controls the camera to focus on it. It however does not work in a game where the action could be anywhere and camera doesn't necessarily focus on it.
Well, not exactly, but they were described to him once by an elderly man with severe cataracts and that was deemed more than sufficient by corporate.
Now... in fairness...
Chromatic abberation and lense flares, whether you do or don't appreciate how they look (imo they arguably make sense in say CP77 as you have robot eyes)...
... they at least usually don't nuke your performance.
Motion blur, DoF and ray tracing almost always do.
Hairworks? Seems to be a complete roll of the dice between the specific game and your hardware.
I love it when the hair bugs out and covers the whole distance from 0 0 0 to 23944 39393 39
Taps temple Auto disable ray tracing if your gpu is too old to support it ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Disable it with new GPUs as well.
Why is that? If it has no significant impact on FPS, and you enjoy the high fidelity light simulation, then why turn it off?
I’d add Denuvo to that list. Easily a 10-20% impact.
If only I could just turn off the chromatic aberration in my eyeglasses.
You can get ones with less chromatic aberration, but it'll cost you.
Depth of field and chromatic aberration are pretty cool if done right.
Depth of field is a really important framing tool for photography and film. The same applies to games in that sense. If you have cinematics/cutscenes in your games, they prob utilize depth of field in some sense. Action and dialogue scenes usually emphasize the characters, in which a narrow depth of field can be used to put focus towards just the characters. Meanwhile things like discovering a new region puts emphasis on the landscape, meaning they can use a large depth of field (no background blur essentially)
Chromatic aberration is cool if done right. It makes a little bit of an out of place feel to things, which makes sense in certain games and not so much in others. Signalis and dredge are a few games which chromatic aberration adds to the artstyle imo. Though obviously if it hurts your eyes then it still plays just as fine without it on.
These settings can be good, but are often overdone. See bloom in the late 2000s/early 2010s.
And film grain. Get that fake static out of here
Most "film grain" is just additive noise akin to digital camera noise. I've modded a bunch of games for HDR (RenoDX creator) and I strip it from almost every game because it's unbearable. I have a custom film grain that mimic real film and at low levels it's imperceptible and acts as a dithering tool to improve gradients (remove banding). For some games that emulate a film look sometimes the (proper) film grain lends to the the look.
Shadows: Off
Polygons: Low
Idle Animation: Off
Draw distance: Low
Billboards instead of models for scenery items: On
I don't mind a bit of lens flare, and I like depth of field in dialog interactions. But motion blur and chromatic aberration can fuck right off.
Don't forget TAA!
PS3-> everything is sepia filtered and bloomed until nearly unplayable.
I will say that a well executed motion blur is just a chef's kiss type deal, but it's hard to get right and easy to fuck up
I like DoF as it actually has a purpose in framing a subject. The rest are just lazy attempts at making the game "look better" by just slopping on more and more effects.
Current ray tracing sucks because its all fake AI bullshit.
I always turn that shit off. Especially bad when it's a first-person game, as if your eyes were a camera.
The main problem with these is giving people control of these properties without them knowing how the cameras work in real life.
This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.
Be warned:
If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.
