I want fidelity, crisp frames, with a cool art style, not some jank and blurry attempt at “realism”. Ban TAA, ban ML upscaling, ban frame generation. Ban AAA.
(All the best games are indie games)
I recently upgraded my computer with the best possible components, and it makes me so mad that games look worse than they did when I put my last pc together. What’s the point of bothering with graphics at all if you’re going to add a smear filter.
Indie games out here killing it with pixel art.
Because the bigger games are made as quickly and cheaply as possible.
The now so popular UE5 just enables this practice, because it allows an easy avenue to “realistic” looking games with all the fancy lighting. Quick to put together, but in the end, you get a poor performing blurry mess. And a happy nvidia, because you slapped their dlss bullshit on it. So thats the new trend.
Why the hate against TAA?
TAA can be fine when implemented well. Temporal information can be very useful for adding more detail over multiple frames that couldn’t be obtained without doing more samples every frame.
However, when done poorly it makes things blurry as you move the camera. The information needs to be correctly adjusted for camera movements or it smears all over the screen. It’s also made worse with things like rain drop effects and things like that.
TAA is useful. It’s just too many games just enable it and it without knowing how to use it well and it just degrades the image.
Do you have an example of a game using TAA correctly? Because so far, all the games I’ve played with TAA on are blurry.
Doom Eternal has a good implementation of TAA, but you need absurd amounts of sharpening to get the smearing to disappear. In an ideal world, we’d all be using beautiful MSAA,bBut that would maybe be a bit more work than just toggling a checkbox for developers, so that will never happen. :(
Not necessarily, no. I watched this interview with one of the Squad devs recently, and he did a really good explanation of it though, if you want to hear it.
It’ll never be perfect, but it can help, especially in slower paced games, or games where most of what you see is very far away (so it moves slowly on screen).
It’ll always make a blurry mess, thats just how it is. Devs will always play it down because it’s the most straight forward thing to implement and Squad already has a performance issue without UE5.
It’s completely shit, it’s like covering your monitor in vaseline. All games with deferred rendering should use SMAA.
That’s 3 hairs on the arm you see. Give me my $90
If we consider a game as a cake, I think of the graphics as its frostings. Sure, it could make the game look very good, but won’t do shit if the base of the cake is crap.
i’d consider realistic graphics as fondant, sure you can create amazing visuals with it… but that thing is barely edible. give me some buttercream (stylised graphics) instead
One of the things I liked about Blizzard was that they never tried to use fondant. It was all buttercream…
Until Activision made them start mixing fiberglass into the frosting to cut costs
As Alton Brown said, “Cake is only the delivery system for frosting.”
The frosting might give my system constipation though.
Just don’t understand people looking at screenshots and gameplay videos and commenting on how the shadows on some background detail look slightly better with the FSSMGXTR scaling setting turned to BBXT5 instead of HAMndX3.
I remember people discussing hardware and one of the best advice comments I’ve ever seen was:
“Turn off that little FPS counter and just enjoy the damn game.”
People get so wrapped up in the hardware hobby they forget why they care in the first place, which would be fine if it wasn’t just fuelled by hardware marketing to make everyone else feel like they’re “missing out.”
This is a nice thought. I love a nice looking game, but as long as it runs smooth and I can enjoy it IDGAF what setting is on max or medium, probably 9 out of 10 I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference anyways.
The ray tracing is a great example for HW marketing bullshit, where you get nicer picture, but much slower framerates and requires crazy expensive hardware, but its all the buzz, everyone is obsessed with it. I mean Im not an expert but wtf is going on with the GPU prices its not normal.
It’s the same mindset as people who overclock or tune their cars
And then they complain that their framerate is too low, causing flickering or lag apparently but it causes blurring instead which they do with motion blur effect already. 🤪
All of this is lost on me. Out of ancient habit, I keep my video streams throttled to 360p to ‘save bandwidth’ even though that hasn’t been a necessity for me for a decade or so.
1080p60fps gives me motion sickness. I have no idea what 4k120fps would do to me, not that I have a capable monitor.
Does ASCII art count? Dwarf Fortress, MUDs, etc. are great fun.
It was never about fun. It’s about experiencing the game.
When I read a book, the goal is to have whatever experience the book is going to give me, and leave my own life behind for a while.
Getting lost in a AAA fantasy world with super-high-fidelity graphics is an amazing experience.
Sure, until you inevitably hit a pile of immersion breaking jank.
Journey the game had extremely great graphics that are also good style and made you get lost in the fantasy and experience.
The character still did not have things like visible strands of individual hair. Realistic does not automatically make it good. It just makes it expensive.
Are you referencing the one by Jenovah Chen, who made Fl0w and Flower? Those two games were so good but I never got to play Journey, is it still ps3 exclusive?
Yes they are the developer. There was a pc release.
Duuuuude I’m going to have to try and pirate or purchase that! And Flower too if that ever got a pc release. Fl0w I still have the freeware version.
Also, it is more expensive on the GPU than it is in terms of creator time.
A creator with experience in making realistic hair using currently available tools, won’t take significantly more time as compared to one with experience in some other art style, making the thing in that art style.
Unless, you manage to get that to run well on a lower powered GPU, in which case, 🚀
Absolutely not, of course it is about having fun.
Are you going to just experience something that makes you feel miserable? Not an unfun moment for catharsis later, but an entire make-you-feel-awful experience?
Getting lost in a fantasy world is about having fun.Horror games exist though. There’s all sorts of indie horror games that pretty much only exist to tell a very bleak and depressing story and then it’s over.
They’re not for everyone, and maybe not even you, but I would say that experiencing those might be enjoyable but not fun.
That’s a good point. They’re tools that help us feel a variety of things.
Games and books are easier to think of as being “fun” in many cases. Listening to music isn’t “fun” in the same sense, but it allows us to feel all kinds of stuff. Makes sense that games and books can be thought of outside the fun paradigm too.
It’s fun to think of yourself, having had those feelings while playing said game/ reading said book.
Counterpoint: RE: 4 was so much fun.
It’s like you’ve never played a survival horror game…
Senua Hellblade is all about experience. A very depressing one as well. And it’s one of the greatest games of all time IMHO. Graphics, sound and story are more important than grinding XP points in ten different ways. People who say otherwise and praise pixelated mess are those who cannot afford to buy high end hardware to play modern games. I get it, RTX5080 is expensive, but no one is judging you for not being able to buy it, so get off your high horse.
I saw a text based porn game yesterday. Was pretty fun but not much porn.
What’s the fediverse etiquette for “can wet get a link to that?”, but in a way that’s not weirder than this already is…? I’ve made it weird. Maybe it was already weird.
Ok ok, i searched browsing history (you know what i mean…).
Thanks!
I want a fun game that can run on my shitty PC
Anything from 6 or so years before your PC fabrication ought to be easy to run at a fast framerate.
Lucky for your, there are lots of older games as well as plenty of indie games that focus on gameplay with very limited graphics.
Terraria
Back to board games I guess.
The Campaign for North Africa it is, then.
Fuck TAA and proprietary TAA. :)
Vintage Story has the graphics of that other voxel graphics based block game. The gameplay is so good that I bought and play VS, and Terraria, but I haven’t ever played more than 30 minutes of the other block game.
Graphics barely matter. Gameplay is king.
There was an excellent text based RPG called Roadwarden that came out the other year. It’s just text and illustrations so thought I’d use this post to mention it.
If small amounts of animation are allowed then WORLD OF HORROR was decent too.
Roadwarden is excellent.
Unpopular opinion but graphics do matter a little bit or at least more than the meme depicts. Dwarf Fortress was unplayable before they added actual graphics to it. I wish things moved between tiles fluidly like in Rimworld instead of it being a slideshow, but I can actually stand to play Dwarf Fortress now. If the only video games that existed were text-based, I’d probably never play video games again. Ps2 era graphics on the other hand, hell yeah. 90s era dos graphics are passable too. But PLEASE no text adventure games.
Dwarf Fortress was unplayable before they added actual graphics to it.
Supremely unbased, I still just see elf, dwarf, plump helmet…
Dwarf Fortress was unplayable before they added actual graphics to it
OBJECTION!!
The ASCII graphics have a charm of its own, even if it skews the horizontal-vertical distances due to characters being 8x12
Hyperbole and a half style artwork.
I miss her :(
Hope she’s doing ok
I’ve yet to actually play it, shame on me, but A Blind Legend took an interesting approach to being graphicsless!
Interesting! Added to my wishlist.
