• Psythik@lemm.ee
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    8 days ago

    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?

  • Artyom@lemm.ee
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    9 days ago

    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

    • JakJak98@lemmy.world
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      8 days ago

      I feel like bloom depends on how intense it is, and if it makes sense to reasonably play the game.

      Like, if it’s the sun, yeah, bloom is OK.

      If it’s anything else? Pass.

    • ShortFuse@lemmy.world
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      8 days ago

      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.

      • kautau@lemmy.world
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        8 days ago

        Agreed. It fits very well in very specific places, but when not there, it’s just noise

  • Baguette@lemm.ee
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    8 days ago

    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.

    • justastranger@sh.itjust.works
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      8 days ago

      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.

    • ysjet@lemmy.world
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      8 days ago

      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.

  • yonder@sh.itjust.works
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    9 days ago

    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.

    • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zip
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      8 days ago

      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).

      • Vlyn@lemmy.zip
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        9 days ago

        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.

        • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zip
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          9 days ago

          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.

          • Vlyn@lemmy.zip
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            8 days ago

            TAA just means temporal anti aliasing. Temporal as in relying on data from the previous frames.

            The implementation of DLSS and FSR are wholly separate from the old TAA. Yes, they work on the same principals, but do their own thing.

            TAA as a setting gets disabled because the newer methodes fully overwrite it. Some games hide the old setting, others gray it out, it depends.

            • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zip
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              8 days ago

              The implementation of DLSS and FSR are wholly separate from the old TAA. Yes, they work on the same principals, but do their own thing.

              TAA as a setting gets disabled because the newer methodes fully overwrite it.

              This is very often false.

              DLSS/FSR need per pixel motion vectors, or at least comparisons, between frames, to work.

              TAA very often is the thing that they get those motion vectors from… ie, they are dependent on it, not seperate from it.

              Indeed, in many games, significant other portions/features of a game’s graphical engine bug out massively when TAA is manually disabled, which means these features/portions are also dependent on TAA.

              Sorry to link to the bad site, but:

              https://www.reddit.com/r/FuckTAA/comments/motdjd/list_of_known_workarounds_for_games_with_forced/

              And here’s all the games that force TAA which no one has yet figured out how to disable:

              https://www.reddit.com/r/FuckTAA/comments/rgxy44/list_of_games_with_forced_taa/

              Please go through all of these and notice how many modern games:

              1. Do not allow the user to turn off TAA easily, forcing them to basically mod the game by manually editing config files or more extensive workarounds.

              2. Don’t even tell the user that TAA is being used, requiring them to dig through the game to discover that it is.

              3. When TAA is manually disabled, DLSS/FSR breaks, or other massive graphical issues crop up.

              TAA is the foundational layer that many modern games are built on… because DLSS/FSR/XeSS and/or other significant parts of the game’s graphical engine hook into the pixel motion per frame comparisons that are done by TAA.

              The newer methods very often do not overwrite TAA, they are instead dependent on it.

              Its like trying to run or compile code that is dependent on a library you don’t actually have present… it will either fail entirely, or kind of work, but in a broken way.

              Sure, there are some instances where DLSS/FSR is implemented in games, in a way that is actually its whole own, self contained pipeline… but very often, this is not the case, TAA is a dependency for DLSS/FSR or other graphical features of the game engine.

              TAA is massively different that older MSAA or FXAA or SMAA kinds of AA… because those don’t compare frames to previous frames, they just apply an effect to a single frame.

              TAA provides ways of comparing differences in sequences of frames, and many, many games use those methods to feed into many other graphical features that are built on top of, and require those methods.

              To use your own words: TAA is indeed a mess, and you apoarently have no idea how foundational this mess is to basically all the new progression of heavily marketed, ‘revolutionary’ graphical rendering techniques of the past 5 ish years.

  • Yaarmehearty@lemmy.ml
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    8 days ago

    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?

    • ne0phyte@feddit.org
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      8 days ago

      It is unnatural. The focus follows where you are looking at. Having that fixed based on the mouse/center of the screen instead of what my eyes are doing feels so wrong to me.

      I bet with good eye tracking it would feel different.

      • Yaarmehearty@lemmy.ml
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        8 days ago

        That makes sense, if you can’t dynamically control what is in focus then it’s taking a lot of control away from the player.

        I can also see why a dev would want to use it for a fixed angle cutscene to create subject separation and pull attention in the scene though.

  • DaddleDew@lemmy.world
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    9 days ago

    Has the person who invented the depth of field effect for a video game ever even PLAYED a game before?

  • gamer@lemm.ee
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    9 days ago

    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.

    • Trollception@sh.itjust.works
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      8 days ago

      Ray tracing is not related to AI. Why do you think it’s fake AI bullshit? It’s tracing rays in the same fashion that blender or Maya would. I think you may be confusing this with DLSS?

      • gamer@lemm.ee
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        8 days ago

        “real time raytracing” as is advertised by hardware vendors and implemented in games today is primarily faked by AI de-noising. Even the most powerful cards can’t fire anywhere near enough rays to fully raytrace a scene in realtime, so instead they just fire a very low number of rays, and use denoising to clean up the noisy result. That’s why, if you look closely, you’ll notice that reflections can look weird, and blurry/smeary (especially on weaker cards). It’s because the majority of those pixels are predicted by machine learning, not actually sampled from the real scene data.

        Blender/Maya’s and other film raytracers have always used some form of denoising (before machine learning denoising, there were other algorithms used), but in films they’re applied after casting thousands of rays per pixel. In a game today, scenes are rendering around 1 ray per pixel, and with DLSS it’s probably even less since the internal render resolution is 2-4x smaller than the final image.

        As a technologist, I’ll readily admit these are cool applications of machine learning, but as a #gamer4lyfe, I hate how they look in actual games. Until gpus can hit thousands (or maybe just hundreds) of rays per pixel in real time, I’ll continue to call it “fake AI bullshit” rather than “real time raytracing”

        also, here’s an informative video for anyone curious: https://youtu.be/6O2B9BZiZjQ

        • Trollception@sh.itjust.works
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          7 days ago

          To each their own. I love ray tracing and think it looks far better than without it. I’m not concerned with how we got here but simply the end result of what is displayed on my screen and it’s pleasing to my eyes.

  • lime!@feddit.nu
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    9 days ago

    motion blur is essential for a proper feeling of speed.

    most games don’t need a proper feeling of speed.

  • Soapbox1858@lemm.ee
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    9 days ago

    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.

      • kerrigan778@lemmy.world
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        8 days ago

        I mean, lens flare does happen in the eye, just much less dramatically because there’s only the one lens and everything is round. But “glare” like how the rest of your sight gets washed out because the sun is in your field of view is a manifestation of lens flare. The eyelashes can also produce some weird light artifacts that resemble camera lens flares but it’s a different phenomenon.