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
The slideshow Control experience does look stellar for a bit
Best use of ray tracing I’ve seen is to make old games look good, like Quake II or Portal or Minecraft. Newer games are “I see the reflection in the puddle just under the car when I put them side by side” and I just can’t bring myself to care.
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
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:
raytracingframe 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
magicbullshit 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.
Or your brain slow enough
Or the drugs good enough
… 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.
You still see doubled images instead of a smooth blur in your peripheral vision I think when you’re focused on the car for example in a racing game.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding you but isn’t that screen tearing?
I mean just from persistence of vision you’ll see multiple copies of a moving object if your eyes aren’t moving. I have realized tho that in the main racing game I use motion blur in (beamng) I’m not actually reaching above 80fps very often.
here, I copied someone’s shader to make a quick comparison:
with blur: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/wcjSzV
without blur: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/wf2XRV
Even at 144hz, one looks smooth while the other has sharp edges along the path.
Keep in mind that this technically only works if your eye doesn’t follow any of the circles, as that would require a different motion blur computation. That’s obviously not something that can be accounted for on a flatscreen, maybe in VR at some point though if we ever get to that level of sophistication. VR motion blur without taking eye movement into account is obviously terrible and makes everyone sick.
Someone else made a comparison for that, where you’re supposed to follow the red dot with your eye. (keep in mind that this demo uses motion blur lengths longer than a frame, which you would not have if aiming for a human eye-like realistic look)
Okay now I got it from your explanation, thanks!
By the way, the first two Shadertoys aren’t working for me, I just get “:-( We either didn’t find the page you were looking for, or there was an internal error.”. The third one works, though…
Oh I guess I set it to private instead of unlisted on accident. It should be fixed now.
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.
i need some motion blur on otherwise i get motion sickness.
Wait, I’ve been turning it off to prevent motion sickness. 🤔
My friend is the same way as you haha.
Taps temple Auto disable ray tracing if your gpu is too old to support it ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
The preference against DOF is fine. However, I’m looking at my f/0.95 and f/1.4 lenses and wondering why it’s kind of prized in photography for some genres and hated in games?
Bad effects are bad.
I used to hate film grain and then did the research for implementing myself, digging up old research papers on how It works at a scientific level. I ended up implementing a custom film grain in Starfield Luma and RenoDX. I actually like it and it has a level of “je ne sais quoi” that clicks in my brain that feels like film.
The gist is that everyone just does additive random noise which raises black floor and dirties the image. Film grain is perceptual which acts like cracks in the “dots” that compose an image. It’s not something to be “scanned” or overlayed (which gives a dirty screen effect).
Related, motion blur is how we see things in real life. Our eyes have a certain level of blur/shutter speed and games can have a soap opera effect. I’ve only seen per-object motion blur look decent, but fullscreen is just weird, IMO.
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.
Except I hate not being able to see my entire field of view clearly, why did we fight so hard for graphics only to blur that shit out past 50 feet?
Chromatic aberration is also one of the few effects that actually happens with our eyes instead of being an effect designed to replicate a camera sensor.
I feel like depth of field and motion blur have their place, yeah. I worked on a horror game one time, and we used a dynamic depth of field- anything you were looking at was in focus, but things nearer/farther than that were slightly blurred out, and when you moved where you were looking, it would take a moment (less than half a second) to ‘refocus’ if it was a different distance from the previous thing. Combined with light motion blur, it created a very subtle effect that ratcheted up anxiety when poking around. When combined with objects in the game being capable of casting non-euclidean shadows for things you aren’t looking at, it created a very pervasive unsettling feeling.
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.
Agreed. It fits very well in very specific places, but when not there, it’s just noise
Hating on hair quality is a new one for me. I can understand turning off Ray Tracing if you can have a low-end GPU, but hair quality? It’s been at least a decade since I’ve last heard people complaining that their GPU couldn’t handle Hairworks. Does any game even still use it?
It could be a twelve year old capture.
But what about Bloom?
raytracing’s the cool kid, keep him in
Shadows: Off
Polygons: Low
Idle Animation: Off
Draw distance: Low
Billboards instead of models for scenery items: OnHas 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.
I’d add Denuvo to that list. Easily a 10-20% impact.
Unfortunately that’s not a setting most of us can just disable.
/c/[email protected] sure you can
