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’d add Denuvo to that list. Easily a 10-20% impact.
These settings can be good, but are often overdone. See bloom in the late 2000s/early 2010s.
Also the ubiquitous “realistic” brown filter a la Far Cry 2 and GTA IV. Which was often combined with excessive bloom to absolutely destroy the player’s eyes.
All those features sucked when they first came out, not just bloom.
motion blur is essential for a proper feeling of speed.
most games don’t need a proper feeling of speed.
… 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.
my basis for the statement is beam.ng. at 100hz, the feeling of speed is markedly different depending on whether motion blur is on. 120 may make a difference.
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.
There is always motion blur if your monitor is shitty enough.
Or your brain slow enough
Or the drugs good enough
yeah the only time I liked it was in need for speed when they added nitro boost. the rest of the options have their uses imo I don’t hate them.
Don’t forget TAA!
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 raytracing 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
magicbullshit stops working, all the hardware in your GPU designed to do that stuff is now basically useless.What? All Ray Tracing games already offer DLSS or FSR, which override TAA and handle motion much better. Yes, they are based on similar principles, but they aren’t the mess TAA is.
Almost all implementations of DLSS and FSR literally are evolutions of TAA.
TAA 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, whatever.
If you are running DLSS or FSR, see if your game will let you turn TAA off.
They often won’t, because they often require TAA to be enabled before DLSS or FSR can then hook into them and extrapolate from there.
Think of TAA as a base game and DLSS/FSR as a dlc. You very often cannot just play the DLC without the original game, and if you actually dig into game engines, you’ll often find you can’t run FSR/DLSS without running TAA.
There are a few exceptions to this, but they are rare.
But why did you buy a 1800€ video card then?
So you can use a more demanding form on anti-aliasing, that doesn’t suck ass?
Like rip maps instead of mip maps? Or is it some AI bs nowadays?
Unreal doesn’t even have other forms of AA iirc. It’s up to the devs to implement
farming bitcoin. Duh.
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
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.
Then you get to enjoy they worst LODs known to man because they were only made as a fallback
what’s wrong with nanite?
Nanite + Lumen run like garbage on anything other than super high end hardware.
It is also very difficult to tweak and optimize.
Nanite isn’t as unperformant as Lumen, but its basically just a time saver for game devs, and its very easy for a less skilled game dev to think they are using it correctly… and actually not be.
But, Nanite + Lumen have also become basically the default for AAA games down to shitty asset flips… because they’re easier to use from a dev standpoint.
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?
The impact is significant enough
Always? I’m currently playing Control on a 4070 Super, and I honestly can’t tell the difference between ray tracing on and off on FPS.
Well you do you then. I’ll leave it off.
Has the person who invented the depth of field effect for a video game ever even PLAYED a game before?
it works great for games that have little to no combat, or combat that’s mostly melee and up to like 3v1. or if it’s a very slight DOF that just gently blurs things far away
idk what deranged individual plays FPS games with heavy DOF though
Yeah, especially games with any amount of sniping. Instantly crippling yourself.
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.
Yup, or if they’re covering up hardware deficiency, like Nintendo sometimes does. And even then, they generally prefer to just make everything a little fuzzy, like BotW.
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.
the problem with dilf is that you need to put the subject of your life in the middle
What is the depth of field option? When it’s on what happens vs when it’s off?
Side question, why the fuck does everything in IT reuse fucking names? Depth of field means how far from character it’ll render the environment, right? So if the above option only has an on or off option then it is affecting something other than the actual depth of field, right? So why the fuck would the name of it be depth of fucking field??? I see this shit all the time as I learn more and more about software related shit.
Put your finger in front of your face. Focus on it. Background blurry? That’s depth of field. Now look at the background and notice your finger get blurry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depth_of_field
It’s not “IT” naming. It’s physics. Probably a century or few old. That’s what they’re trying to emulate to make things like more photographic/cinematic.
Same with almost all the other options listed.
No.
Depth of field is when backgroud/foreground objects get blurred depending on where you’re looking, to simulate eyes focusing on something.
You’re thinking of draw distance, which is where objects far away aren’t rendered. Or possibly level of detail (LoD) where distant objects will be changed to a lower detailed model as they get further away.
Gotcha. Thanks🍻
In this context it just refers to a post processing effect that blurs certain objects based on their distance to the camera. Honestly it is one of the less bad ones imo, as it can be well done and is sometimes necessary to pull off a certain look.
When it’s on, whatever the playable character looks at will be in focus and everything else that is at different distances will be blurry, as it would be the case in real life if your eyes were the playable character’s eyes. The problem is that the player’s eyes are NOT the playable character’s eyes. Players have the ability to look around elsewhere on the screen and the vast majority of them use it all the time in order to play the game. But with that stupid feature on everything is blurry and the only way to get them in focus is to move the playable character’s view around along with it to get the game to focus on it. It just constantly feels like something is wrong with your eyes and you can’t see shit.
It’s like motion blur. Your eyes already do that, you don’t need it to be simulated…
For depth of field, our eyes don’t automatically do that for a rendered image. It’s a 2d image when we look at it and all pixels are the same distance and all are in focus at the same time. It’s the effect you get when you look at something in the distance and put your finger near your eye; it’s blurry (unless you focus on it, in which case the distant objects become blurry).
Even VR doesn’t get it automatically.
It can feel unnatural because we normally control it unconsciously (or consciously if we want to and know how to control those eye muscles at will).
No, your eyes can’t do it on a screen. The effect is physically caused by the different distances of two objects, but the screen is always the same distance from you.
Yes, but you still get the blurry effect outside of the spot on the screen you’re focused on.
Not in the same way. Our eyes have lower resolution away from the center, but that’s not what’s causing DoF effects. You’re still missing the actual DoF.
If the effect was only caused by your eye, the depth wouldn’t matter, but it clearly does.
Yeah I get it, I’m just saying it’s unnecessary. If I need to see what’s going on in the background, then my eyes should be able to focus on it.
There are very few scenarios where DoF would be appropriate (like playing a character who lost their glasses).
Like chromatic aberration, which feels appropriate for Cyberpunk, since the main character gets eye implants and fits the cyberpunk theme.
to be fair you need it for 24fps movies. however, on 144Hz monitors it’s entirely pointless indeed
My Dad showed me the Avatar game on PS4. The default settings have EXTREME motion blur, just by turning the camera; the world becomes a mess of indecipherable colors, it’s sickening.
Turning it off changed the game completely.
Depth of field is basically how your characters eyes are unfocused on everything they aren’t directly looking at.
If there are two boxes, 20 meters apart, one of them will be blurry, while aiming at the other.
Your example is great at illustrating how DoF is often widely exaggerated in implementation, giving the player the experience of having very severe astigmatism, far beyond the real world DoF experienced by the average… eyeball haver.
If only I could just turn off the chromatic aberration in my eyeglasses.
What Anti Aliasing does your glasses use?
I’m on the -4.25 setting but I may be due for a new prescription as newer reality is getting blurry again.
You can get ones with less chromatic aberration, but it’ll cost you.
