Well Half-Life Alyx uses forward rendering and has a brilliant MSAA implementation. It is optimised because it needs to be. You cannot have this thing chugging along with 30Hz at full HD. You need 4K or more running at 90Hz or more. So they invested a good amount of time into making sure it functions properly before releasing it.

Also, foliage really doesn’t need to be fixed, if it is done properly. Example, 20 year old games like Halo 3 or the Crysis games.

I take issue with modern games because why the hell are they forgetting lessons of the past? Crysis and Halo 3 for example are 20 years old and they have better looking foliage than most modern games because they know what to do to avoid pop-in and noise. Yes, modern games have more foliage, because more VRAM, but older games have better looking foliage, due to the lack of wonky artifacts, in my opinion. And also, the proprietary TAA implementations, or TSR implementations, in my experience, add a ton of input latency, which makes the game feel worse. MSAA, because it uses geometry information to build AA, enhances image quality significantly and gives a better looking and more coherent picture than any other implementation of anti-aliasing, including proprietary TSR. Also, MSAA isn’t my religion, I realise that there are some aspects where TAA and TSR can be useful, but problem is, in modern games it gets abused because devs can then say “we’ll just do the absolute minimum, make sure the game executes on hardware at HD 30 Hz, and then we’ll just let the magic TSR and frame generation handle the rest”.

Well, the problem with MSAA is that it needs to have good geometry in the first place if quad overdraw is complete shit because no one bothered to make tessellation or proper LOD models and let just some automatic tool handle everything without any supervision, then yes, it will be horrible. If devs say, “it makes my geometry timing horrible”, then we already know that their geometries are utter rubbish.

Also a brilliant example of why I’m bothered by that is Payday 3 because it looks like a late PS3 game and runs like complete trash and has a massive CPU bottleneck, no matter what you do, even if you doctor around with the engine settings themselves.

If you pick a resolution that requires fractional scaling (eg 1080p on your 1440p monitor) it’ll look real dogshit because it’s trying to represent one game pixel with like one and a half real ones along either direction. A resolution that would use integer scaling (ie 720p for your monitor) will just use two pixels in either direction to show one game one (like four pixels all showing the same thing), so it’ll be more pixellated but much less blurry and gross. FSR is the better solution most of the time, but if you did want to go below native again that’d make it a little less gross.

i just wish it wasn’t the general direction the industry had decided to push things.

it’s become the expected norm. it’s the performance metric games are optimized to hit now, and it’s far from prefect.

i was just playing red dead 2 yesterday with dlss and i was legitimately struggling to do some things due to the artifacting. like there are some small missions and challenges that require you to find and shoot specific tiny birds with a bow, but dlss struggles with small things flying across a dynamic background. the birds would literally fade in and out of existence.

same thing with trying to snipe distant heads. the little red fatal zone indicator would ghost like hell and fade in and out.

like, it may be better than needing to drop your resolution, but it still kind of sucks sometimes.