rockpapershotgun.com/baldurs-gate-3-publishing-director-says-almost-all-games-should-cost-more-at-a-base-level-because-they-cost-so-much-to-make
@LittleTom @doonxib @Shadowman311 I hate that weird soft "realistic" look every game has now. Ugly models aside, the lighting and gfx pipeline don't help. Weird dof on stuff. Bad AA options (other than like DLAA). using dithering instead of transparency and then the game still runs like ass anyway. I miss when games had sharp and stylized graphics and you dealt with the jaggies by cranking the resolution or using msaa, not this weird blurring shit.
@LittleTom @doonxib @Shadowman311 it looks worse because we're not all playing on CRTs
Transparency is one of those legitimately Hard(TM) problems in graphics, but there are a lot of options for working around it. Dithering reeks of "all the good engine devs quit because of HR".
@gentoobro @LittleTom @Shadowman311 @doonxib i think dithering is used because it is just more performant. i wish games that used it on PC at least had the option to use transparent textures instead though. dithering really is annoying to me.
It's not really more performant. The all the polygons still have to be rasterized every frame anyway. You potentially save a little bit on lighting, but at the cost of losing lighting fidelity so it's not a fair comparison.
Mainly it's a very lazy solution to the problem of draw order in a deferred lighting system. The obvious solution is to use the normal opaque-then-backface-then-frontface trick in a dedicated forward+ pass, assuming your engine isn't forward+ anyway. But this would require effort.
@gentoobro @LittleTom @Shadowman311 @doonxib i know that a lot of ps3/ps4 games suffered from the use of transparency in some games. like they would tank frames and stutter whenever transparent textures/effects would appear. witcher 3 comes to mind immediately. i think it has something to do with memory bandwidth but not totally sure.
Dunno. Consoles are weird. Memory bandwidth is often one of the things they have in excess, whereas shader units and cpu cycles tend to be lacking. Maybe they were doing something crazy like sorting all their triangles back-to-front on the cpu?
@gentoobro @LittleTom @Shadowman311 @doonxib 
i'm no expert. i do know that like, the switch has piss poor memory and bayonetta 3 suffers because of it. it also uses tons of dithering whenever there is transparency going on and it looks like ass. so i'm just kinda smashing those ideas together too lol. like if it were developed for a better console maybe they wouldn't have to use it. the previous two games didn't use it at all though from what i remember so it still definitely is a developer problem where they're just not building their games from the ground up with performance in mind. they're just going all out and hoping that they can just brute force shit, or that dynamic res will take the edge off things. if a wii u game looks and plays better than its switch sequel, you know something is fucked.
From a hardware perspective, the Switch isn't a console, it's a phone with a 10 year old mid-range video card attached to it. It barely has any memory, and it's slow memory. It's likely running a traditional forward pipeline to save on framebuffer size. Why they would dither I can't guess. It makes little sense when your greatest asset is shader cycles. Maybe they're using some sort of fixed light buffer that can only hold a small number of lights and they're cycling back and forth each frame? Would be weird.
AA is kind of dumb now. Pixels are tiny on modern high res monitors. Just render at 4k. Oh, takes too much hardware? Ok, then run the lighting at 2k.
@gentoobro @LittleTom @Shadowman311 @doonxib which is exactly why DLSS/DLAA are much better AA solutions than TAA/FXAA.
Nah. Gimme those vector units, I can use them to add more visual quality on purpose than some "AI" pixel guessing scheme. Remember, there's no free lunch and everything you do means you're not doing something else.
@gentoobro @LittleTom @Shadowman311 @doonxib my main thing is that i just don't like the game looking blurry or shimmery.
Yeah. Those things are terrible. Whoever puts motion blur into games should be drawn and quartered. Also, people need to take a cloose look at the roughness values of their textures. I think it's too low in many cases.
@gentoobro @LittleTom @Shadowman311 @doonxib motion blur works great for two things.
1) racing games
2) 30fps
i'm not trying to willingly play a game at 30fps but it does make it look better lol
there was something weird about the alone in the dark remake where motion blur made the game WAY smoother too, like without it on the game looked stuttery even above 60fps but turning it on just smoothed that right over. not even from a visual level but i think it legitimately improved the frame times.
fair.
Motion blur that's any good is not cheap. Turn it off and maybe you'd get more than 30fps.
I'd be willing to bet that Alone in the Dark had serious frame time consistency problems. An otherwise reasonably performing game can feel like a stuttery mess if the frame time jumps around.
@LittleTom @doonxib @Shadowman311 @gentoobro that's a decent way of doing it too, I prefer fully off but I can understand want object blur on. It sucks that most games only have one setting for both.
