We have three things to ask: 1. Watch this video in 4K as in streaming settings as any lower compression will drastically hide visual issues we are trying to demonstrate. 2. Please excuse the audio issues as our studio founder Kevin was recently hit by a drunk driver and is still currently recovering. He did not want to delay the release of this video any further.
@@nzeu725 as in streaming quality since it's a youtube compression issue. You'll be able to view the issues on 720p monitors as long as you have the streaming setting set to 4k.
So I wasn't tripping all these years! It wasn't my eyesight :') Thank you for bringing all of this to light. I'm more than happy to donate to see a change in the industry.
No ray tracing, no increases in fluff effects to muddy up the screen, graphics peaked in like 2015 now they are just laying more nonsense into games to justify hardware innovations(which are mostly just slightly higher horsepower and AI algorithms, horsepower gains are decreasing as ai upscaling is more and more normalized)
They want us to buy the newest Geforce and Radeon gpus. You can't run Ray Traycing? Buy our new Gefore RTX 666 now for $3000. Then you find out it only runs at 40fps. But wait you forgot about Frame generation! Let's double the framerates!
@@saricubra2867 *"I game on a 4:3 1440p CRT monitor from 2002, what is aliasing?"* Come on, man! I gamed on an FW900 (2304x1440) until late 2014, and then a 22" FP1350X (1920x1440) until mid 2018 when I couldn't find a suitable CRT replacement and bought a 55" 4K OLED. If you think there's essentially no aliasing on a CRT, you either have a really cruddy CRT or really cruddy eyesight, or both! Sure, aliasing may inherently be a _bit_ less annoying on a CRT but it's still aliasing. If it weren't visible at all, it would mean the display is extremely blurry --- which is the subject of this video after all. And why I have always despised FXAA and all of the other screen-space blur filters. I've always used 4x MSAA on CRT no matter how high the resolution. After all, it comes down to _angular_ resolution, and not _display_ resolution --- how large the pixels actually appear to your eye. Which is a function of screen size and viewing distance. I've always had my face right up against my monitors in order to maximize Display FoV and thus maximize immersion. I grant that if you sit quite far from your display, your angular resolution will be higher, and any aliasing will be relatively less annoying. But that's no way to game! P.S. If you're reading this and you are into maximizing immersion, ask me about High FoV Gaming --- it's probably not what you think.
Yes, You have convinced me. I kept telling the same thing to my friends. The only thing that should take more resources is better physics and not this trash rendering.
Optimization has gone down the drain. There were 720p 60fps games on the original Xbox and 1080p60 on the PS3, and now almost two decades later we are told 540p on series S is just fine thanks to upscaling.
Very few games actually ran at the "full" 720p/1080p resolution on the PS3/Xbox 360. Eg Halo already ran something like 500p, and it couldnt even hold 30fps. Killzone 2 reached
@@termitreter6545 I know that there were cases of games running badly since the beginning of time. No much sense in mentioning it, as those are infinite. Look up digital foundry's list of 1080p games on ps3. There are many doing at least 1080p 30fps solid. The key here is that those show what can be done on a 200 gflops machine. Then on Ps4 there were much more complex games doing 1080p 60fps, and some even got to 1440p 60fps on PS4 Pro, and now on Series S. One X had a few 4k 60fps games, mostly racing and sports. Ps5 and Series X also got 4k60 on some cases. By now, 4k60 native with a simple aa like FXAA on PS5 pro should be par for the course.
@@rattlehead999 I think it goes beyond that. Let's say a PS5 Pro has about 1.000 times the power and capacity of a Nintendo Wii. Do games have 1000X more polygons, higher res shadows and so on? I really don't see it. There is progress, no doubt about it, but it looks as if to get 10X more of anything, you need 100X more power, and I blame it on optimization. Look up the games that managed at least 1080p 30fps on PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii U. They hold up surprisingly well.
@@SalveMonesvol Yup, that's very true and developers should really go back to PS3 and very early PS4 graphical fidelity, but with modern rendering tech like ray tracing and such, until engines become good enough to render crazy high fidelity.
Basically TAA is implemented to mask all the graphics effects flickering like hell, with a soft blur that's almost literally like playing without glasses
Really reminds me of the low quality FXAA days of PS3/360 games/PC ports. Also motion blur, because somehow devs thought 20fps is made better when you add motion blur.
GTX 750Ti 🤝 R9 380X "Yeah 4gb vram should be able to run anything!" In all honesty too many games nowadays ask for WAY too much considering what they visually produce. And more accessible games means more sales for publishers which makes these incredibly demanding games make absolutely no sense to me
I hope this comes to fruition one day. Thank you for such a detailed analysis and bringing all of this to light even if all of us common users don’t comprehend every technical detail. Good luck!
So it wasn't my hardware... good to know. I have a pretty decent setup with an i9 and rtx 3070 ti, 32 ram, and still struggle to run modern games at 60fps on 1080p without it being a blurry mess (its a ROG zephyrus laptop but still..). When I could run Batman: Arkham Knight in my previous setup with a gtx1080 (also a laptop) flawlessly and that game looked beautiful, way better than the games I'm running now. Hope this issue gets resolved in the future.
Tbh a laptop 3070 TI is quite shit its about the equivalent of a 3060TI on a desktop which itself is basically a med level 1080p gpu (for last gen games) + that I9 cpu you have in your laptop I'm almost certain is thermal throttling hard and bottlenecking your gpu even more. While its right that modern videogames suck huge balls due to shitfaced optimisation, its also true that laptops will become ancient quite quickly due to limited thermal mitigation and weaker overall hardware. But the biggest issues laptops have is losing heat, high thermals throttle your gpu/cpu which bottlenecks it even more. Try undervolting both your gpu and cpu if you know how and you'll most likely get a much faster laptop as a result of that.
@@itsme12305 I have a 3090ti and 10850k; games still look like trash and have problems running that are modern. The over reliance on software "tricks" to make games look better or smoother is not working. the 50xx series isn't promising big gains in raster, they want to give us more fake frames, that look messy in motion.
Thank you for the support! It helps alot! We don't want to crowd fund on YT, we just want to get some more information out first before we go through with a full on crowdfunding page. Let people learn about our goals etc.
No joke - perfect example are Xbox One X enhanced games from Xbox360 (9x resolution with increased AF and in some cases textures and maybe LOD). Ninja Gaiden II or Gears of War 3 are perfect examples. I highly suggest checking comparisons.
Thanks for the video, it explained and confirmed what I had been feeling about graphics settings in recent video games. I have been playing retro games for some time and came back to 'current gen' titles in 2023, bought an RTX4 series GPU for it. My enthousiasm had mainly sparked because ray tracing seemed an actual cool innovation. When I started playing, the video settings (upscaling, AA, sharpening) were a puzzle. I like tweaking settings, but still I noticed it was very hard to just get a decent, clean picture. I thought that shaders and effects (let alone ray tracing) had just deveoloped to a point that hardware couldn't keep up and that the upscaling and resulting blur were a necessary evil. This did not explain the various and all bad AA options though; I was used to AA that actually made the picture better, 10 years ago. Now I learned it's what I hoped it wouldn't be: lazyness in optimization and a wrong direction in innovation. Thanks for speaking so clearly about it and starting something that looks like a new direction!
People need to realize that more computationally powerful hardware in the last 10 years has not made games look better, it has enabled developers to dump more of the cost of development onto consumers. By listing more powerful hardware as required, developers make sure that, instead of paying for someone to optimize their game, they can make YOU pay for hardware that can run poorly optimized software. CONSUMERS ARE ESSENTIALLY PAYING A HIDDEN FEE ON MODERN VIDEO GAMES WITHOUT NECESSARILY GETTING ANYTHING IN RETURN. And this is beneficial to everyone else than the end consumer. Hardware companies get more revenue because they get to sell you more hardware.
Very good. The so-called "game developers" act under the directives of big capitalist corporations. The entire production takes place according to principles of usury and the international - exploiting system of the matrix (in the literal term). The world is "wired" to perform the "loosh" from the major to the disputed matters in our lives thanks to the malignant technology of parallel dimension, which powers the simulation and implements distraction and oblivion daily, i.e. global abduction. They are doing these things because they can. People accept this and become slaves to it because they are bodies of this technology and have no free will. They don't know anything different and don't want to know how and when all this started because they are biological machines, aka automatons. Therefore, they continue to consume. In an evolved civilization, which foremost sprouts from the "consciousness of the body" and through the body, video games would not exist, as much as 95% of the habits and "work" we conduct in our daily lives. I hope this did not intrigue anyone.
I hope you'll reach this goal Edit: didn't know this will be visible as a comment, thought it will be only visible to the video poster. So, since it's public: I thought I'm going insane with TAA ghosting, so glad it's not my sanity that's wrong
@2MichalChojnowski2 it's his money. Let him do whatever he thinks is right. And did you even understand what this video is about? You sound like you don't.
The fundamental problem here, and the reason the mainstream has adopted TAA as default for a decade now, is that most effects in modern games happen per pixel, not per vertex. This means MSAA can only be the first step in a long pipeline of ALIASING AVOIDANCE. After MSAA gives you clean geometry you have to watch out for every new pixel shader effect not to add noticable aliasing to the image once more. Yes, over the last decade we're also seeing a lot of noisy temporal sampling, but these techniques have been invented because TAA is the standard, not vice versa! For flawless image quality without supersampling you have to PREVENT aliasing at the shader level. By moving some effects back to the vertex shader you can leverage the additional samples MSAA gives you. And then pixel shaders can still be used for effects that create smooth gradients or are generally subtle (low contrast, low frequency). The only alternative I can imagine is sort of the opposite extreme, an engine built around supersampling. You minimize the cost of each pixel so you can render at least 4x, then apply some kind of post-process-AA (SSAAx4 is still visibly flawed), then scale back down to the screen resolution. Maybe this could get you *close enough* to 8x quality, but performance will be a problem.
One root cause of the problem is that everyone uses deferred shading. There is some weird mindset that drives developers to use that. I prefer forward rendering pipeline. That allows high performance and good MSAA and no need to recompile shaders. So it is actually simpler. You only need to take care overdraw having occluders in scene and have some logic to handle what dynamic light sources lit what assets because there is that 8 light source limitation per mesh.
@@gruntaxeman3740 Devs largely switchrd to deferred shading because it scales better with multiple light points and with open world games and games in general becoming larger traditional forward rendering is a problem and the 8th gen consoles had a big memory increase allowing deferred to become the standard.
@@lordanonimmo7699 I'm confident that most cases that is huge misstep. Light source limitation is not "8 light sources per scene". It is "8 light sources in fixed pipeline". So what is required is to light source states every area in 3D-space, based on light sources influence. So in reality we are talking max 8 eight light sources per mesh. There are really no issues to have plenty of light sources in scene. It is not only AA what suffers in deferred shading. In performance point of view, the issue is memory bandwidth. Forward rendering pipeline requires much less of memory bandwidth and that is the bottleneck. It was bottleneck in 8th gen consoles and it is still, because memory is shared to CPU and GPU.
I have been absolutely losing my mind trying to explain this phenomenon to my friends and family over the past few years and never knew what the actual issue was. I've noticed a significant decrease in the average performance of AAA games and they all have that weird see-through "everything looks fuzzy or blurry" effect and no amount of decreasing the graphics settings even helps performance. I am so glad to have stumbled upon a video like this that explains the reasons behind what I noticed about games in this regard. Thank you so much
thank god i found somebody talking about this. people kept gaslighting me and blaming my monitor. but how could it be my monitor if i can capture the issue in a screenshot/video. for the longest time i thought i have a broken monitor or something.
I have a 4k 48" OLED and can see what you are talking about clearly lol. Keep in mind most noobs run upscaling blurry messes so dont' really see artifacts, just frames. Sigh.
THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I've been complaining about this stuff for a very long time now and everyone kept telling me I'm the problem and I am wrong, and I've always been mindblown that people weren't seeing it, I'm like how can you not see these issues
The TAA and upscaler part made me throw my fist in the air. You put it into words so elegantly, far better than I could have. I also love how you sound progressively angrier and angrier as you talk about this issue. Honestly, it's a fucking joke that it came to this, that developers can just do this mess instead of real optimisation... What a tragedy.
Some history: Killzone on PS4 was the first big game with temporal reprojection pipeline. They rendered odd/even scanlines and reprojected the previous frame with motion vectors for missing pixels. This technique allowed 60Hz multiplayer in a game with 30Hz single player campaign. Which was great for gamers. None of these long smear artifacts existed as pixel was fully refreshed every other frame. And there was no noise based optimizations. PS4 Pro was the big reason for these techniques to get popular. It was heavy marketed as 4K console and 4K sticker on the box required 4K framebuffer. But Ps5 Pro only has 2x faster GPU for 4x higher pixel count. Checkerboard rendering was invented. It was an improved version of the scanline technique of Killzone. 50% pixels refeshed every frame. I’d say modern temporal AA was first used by Ubisoft’s For Honor in 2017. It was basically a modified TAA shader that was accumulating into a native res buffer. This solved some of the checkerboard issues like sawtooth pattern in occluded areas. UE4.19 TAA was similar to this algorithm. When people got used to 4K rendering with checkerboard and TAAU, they didn’t want to spend half of the PS5 GPU gains by disabling these PS4 Pro 4K tricks. Thus temporal reconstruction become the standard way to render 4K on consoles. Meanwhile people had started to use TAA (no upscaling) as their general filter for everything. This was needed because games were moving away from static baked lighting to dynamic solutions. Dynamic solutions were more expensive and lower quality. TAA helped hiding the issues. There still isn’t enough performance to calculate high quality fully dynamic GI and reflections without any tricks. That would be even slower without TAA. If you want dynamic stuff that’s the cost. UE5 forcing dynamic stuff to all users is not great. Not all games need fully dynamic lighting and reflections. TAA also made it possible to add competely new effects. Such as volumetrics and volumetric clouds. Horizon Forbidden West had game play inside volumetric cloud caves for example. For most games it’s not worth to use that many GPU cycles for volumetrics rendering. Clouds can be faked using existing techniques just fine if you are not flying inside big cloud caves. Their new volumetrics tech leans heavily on temporal accumulation. Was it worth to Horizon Forbidden West to have reprojected volumetric could render tech? That’s up to players to decide. It made new gameplay possible. However if UE5 introduces similar tech and forces it to all users, then we have a problem. Simple efficient solutions are still useful and don’t require temporal accumulation. I just wanted to emphasize that people don’t do temporal jitter because they are lazy. It’s super difficult to make these algorithms fully real time. Added GPU cost is huge and you have to compromise. All of this is especially true for ray-tracing. You are tracing thin rays. Each gives you very little data. Randomizing the rays randomizes memory access patterns which hurts caches. You want to minimize the amount of rays you cast. Temporal accumulation is required for acceptable quality. Even offline ray-tracers use temporal techniques and denoisers. If we want to go there, we have to accept this. I personally feel that ray-tracing is too expensive right now compared to the gains. On RTX 4090 it’s usable due to HW advances and sheer HW power, but still far from efficient. Raster algos (and baking) provide similar results for much cheaper GPU cost.
Baked lighting is great for runtime (if your content is mostly static), but it has other issues. AAA games today have big game worlds and lots of content. Game downloads already are hitting 100GB. Baked lighting takes a lot of storage space. Dynamic solutions don’t. Baking lightmaps for small game levels was fine. But today’s massive BR maps require too long baking times to make the iteration time fast enough for level designers and lighting artists. Dynamic solution allows developrs to see lighting changes immediately. Productivity is better. Developers want to patch these big BR maps in production, which would require new light bake -> massive patch to all uses. That’s not really feasible for games like Fortnite that are constantly updated. There’s a lot of developers waiting for a future where you don’t need to bake any lighting. Super fast workflows and iteration time. The downside of this future is higher HW requirements for players (temporal makes perf hit more bearable). It’s a compromise, but many believe it’s a necessary compromise to produce more and more complex and polished content. Team sizes are massive today. Productivity is a real bottleneck.
So your essentially saying that we have ended up in this spot because consoles keep promising resolutions and framerates that they aren't capable of. Thus developers have to cut corners just so little timmy can tick the 4k box in the settings despite his image looking only marginally better than 1080p.
The real issue is that with better HW, devs these days just put in less effort for same results, rather than same effort for better results. Called this out in 2020 when people said that the new consoles will give us better-looking games due to the faster loading - I called out they'll just start using less optimized textures, which is exactly what happened.
Oh its been going on far longer than that, just not for Graphics. The storage space requirements for these games has ballooned to such a degree because of the advancement in storage space. They thought "well storage is cheap now so we dont need to optimize the size of the game to save space". But that got so out of control, that storage had to advance to increase access speeds. Now we're on NVME and the sizes are once again ballooning up (see CoD's 250~some GB install size). It will only go two directions from here. 1. It will continue until the size of the games overrides the performance of the drives, causing increased loading times. 2. 'Cloud' gaming will be pushed where publishers will start hosting the games themselves, realizes how bloated and unoptimized their games are, and start cutting corners. I miss the days when games *had* to be on Physical media, because it forced devs to optimize the size of the game for the media it was going to be on, lest it increase the cost of distribution. And even further back than that, up until the mid 90's they ALSO had to worry about how much of the systems Memory was taking up, so they had to really optimize what was on screen at any given time. THAT is why that era was the golden age for gaming. Because Devs pushed hardware, as well as their development skills to their limits to get as much game as possible within their limited operating budget (time and resources). Thats why, even for all their faults, i still appreciate that Nintendo still works to optimize their games to keep costs down (Their games are significantly less resource intensive than Sony's or Microsoft's.. or most other 3rd-party AAA publishers).
@@Methos_ Will it? We're getting the same frame-rate today as 4 years ago on new games. The requirements go up in lockstep with technology. Unless you turn on DLSS and frame-gen. They're relying on cheats to give you better performance as they optimize the games less and less.
@@tundranocaps idk there's plenty of games released in the 2020s that I'm getting 200-700+ fps on. Single player games rarely need more than 120fps anyways. Technology will improve, faster hardware will become cheaper, and they'll rely less heavily on these solutions with time. It's a transitional thing
True transparency or single layer transparency has many disadvantages. Sorting, shader cost, clipping, culling and and and. Temporal dithering is a simple opacity mask technology. It use small noise tilling tex and multiply this with a gradient fade. It need TAA for no flickering or showing pixled dithering. Advantage? Fast, low shader cost, no switching model for blend.
@@UlrichThümmler You forgot the downside: it looks absolutely shit. Subtle things that need transparency like hair, for example, have been completely ruined and not only do they need TAA to look even remotely acceptable, but even with TAA the hair looks like total crap compared to any game from 10 or sometimes even 15 years ago. Yeah, hair in the old days with its transparency had problems too, such as the interaction with depth of field which was totally flawed (hair goes out of focus even if the character's head is in focus), but even with these drawbacks, the end result was still so absurdly better than the garbage we have today that it's one of the best arguments as to why the industry is going down the wrong path: characters hair.
In a highly stylized game, like Genshin Impact, I think it's appropriate and, IMHO, actually adds to the charm, but in a game going for realism, it's wholly inappropriate.
As an Unreal developer i'd say you said right things. I wish i could add support for SMAA or optimize TAA/TSR, but these are forgotten topics that have no support on the forums, no documentation and no tutorials. And trying to learn it from scratch is an expensive task that will cost even me as an indie thousands of dollars and months in R&D. But why don't huge AAA studios do it i have no idea honestly
Simple, because it costs time and money that publishers would rather not spend. And considering how long it takes games to come out these days, I really can't blame them in the slightest. They're practically getting death threats for already spending 5 plus years per title. And from a corporate perspective, what kind of fool spends time and money on something that doesn't immediately make them more money back?
I'm sure there are many papers out on reference implementations for FXAA and SMAA. My first place to look would be ReShade shaders that are commonly available. I'm assuming if you know how to code UE pixel shaders, you can port it over.
I remember back before TAA was being implemented you wouldn't use the only valid AA implementation out at the time, SMAA, at all if 1. you wanted better performance and 2. You wanted a clearer image. What a sour taste left in my mouth when not only did TAA start showing up as a performance hogging visual mess, but it eventually became forced in every new title being released past a certain point. I remember this dread washing over me every time I launched a new game. Thank you for voicing this issue in detail. I always thought I was the only one who cared as much, but it's nice to see effort being put towards scolding and cleaning up developmental laziness of the past many years of video game industry.
it's not that simple. I'm working in gamedev industry as a QA specialist. And i'm working closely with render teams, and the stuff they are doing is insane. It's just we're so limited in technology, that it's currently impossible to have native 4k resolution quality without using AAs at decent performance.
So is ue 5 forcing you or is it you dont have the graphics card for it(not saying this rudely)blaming the engine is easy atleast say the truth @@maxcr1t
@@maxcr1t then don't have native 4K resolution. so simple. best selling gpu is 4060 followed by 3060, so the overwhelming majority of gamers are playing at 1080p. not even 1440p. and you're talking about 4K. what??? completely out of touch with reality. no wonder gaming goes to sh1t.
i think it's also important to note that a lot of the examples of ghosting with taa shown here come from the fact that the velocity vectors for those pixels are not being correctly calculated. if this is correctly done and inusable samples from previous frames are correctly discarded then ghosting becomes a much smaller issue, of course some blurryness and artifacts still remain because of it being a temporal method (which the video mentions in detail) and i agree that taa is probably not ideal for visual clarity.
Is it even realistic to expect the velocity vectors to be calculated correctly? The examples are extreme, but this effect appears all the time. At first I thought my monitor is shit, but then I noticed that not every game has that ghosting. Personally, I'd take a grainy image over those artifacts any day.
When you say "velocity vectors for those pixels are not being correctly calculated", do you mean the standard game motion vectors? Would solutions like optical flow help? I know that optical flow is expensive for real time, I'm just asking because I am interested in what you said.
@@Croftmaniac05 So yeah normally for taa (and other effects) games create motion vectors for every pixel on the screen, basically the offset of that pixel from where it would have been in the previous frame to the current frame. at 4:33 for example you see ghosting of the gun, multiple transparent guns sort of overlaying. if the motion (velocity, used interchangeably ) vectors get calculated correctly (or at all since it doesn't look like there are any velocity vectors here) then this ghosting does not occur. you can still have other artifacts, where there is a big occlusion difference for example. Taa normally filters most these cases out and doesn't use them.
Some constructive feedback : At many points you really pass over points way too fast without actually elaborating what the issue is. At pretty much every point you barely give us, the viewer, any time, without pausing the video, to comprehend what the actual issue is, let alone recognize differences in the shown scenes. It would be better if you narrate what exactly the issue is and let people recognize what you are showing, instead of switching to a completely different scene every 5 seconds (exaggerated). I do realize that it's possible for the viewer to stop the video, rewind, and step through each part manually frame-by-frame to see what the difference is, but having to pause and manually compare two scenes every 3~10 seconds is not a pleasant viewer experience. While I do realize that the video would be significantly longer with you elaborating each scene comparison, it would be tremendously more helpful for the viewer to comprehend and have time to understand what you are talking about and what the problems are that need to be solved, as not every viewer will recognize the differences in the shown scenes (especially regarding ambient occlusion, which is rather subtle).
Video length was definitely a concern. It's bridging a lesser know connection between two topics being TAA and fake optimization. We are currently considering doing TH-cam shorts that explain these snippets slowly showing why modern versions are so flawed compared older/faster deferred implementations. It's especially difficult when youtube compression defaults to a lower compression below the 4k quality.
@@ThreatInteractive Bro your going to have to realize video length doesn't matter anymore. You have youtubers that do 8+ hour dissertations on ONE movie. Now, you're talking about something that actually matters, so you have all the time in the world to express your evidence and clearly show each point.. drilling the details into the viewers head. You gotta realize how important getting every fact into visual detail is, especially getting people onboard for a fork of the UE game engine. Let alone get people on board to contribute to the project. All in all, I'm on your side on this issue and hope your ideas get it resolved.
Disagreed with the comments on this thread, the video was the perfect length, only improvement would be to point to more in depth videos where we can learn more
Great video, It's clear that modern 1080p games look way blurrier than 1080p back in the day. And It's visible factualy. Game devs are relaying too much on Upscalers, lighting gimmick and temporal solutions to cut cost of video developpements and cheap on effects. At this rate new triple A 4K games will be as clear as any 480p ps2 games.
@@NeovanGoth only started to be an issue with late half of xbox360 era games. The early games were all 720p with msaa and looked great. And on multiplatform ps3 games, it was more common since devs didn't know how to optimize for ps3. None of that changes the fact that on pc, players were still playing at 1024x768/ 1280x720, 768p, 900p and 1080p. Games of those times looked a lot sharper than current games. No way we are having best image quality when games not only look blurry, but has horrible smearing in motion which is the biggest problem.
@@NeovanGoth Console shit has not been cutting edge on any level post the PS2 days. The PS3 era PC games, that is DX9.0c to DX11, have some of the best art x graphical effects balance in history, with some sharp, high contrast shading, deep parallax maps, high enough polycounts and texture resolutions... etc. Again, it's mostly the console peasants driving themselves into a corner with their "TERAFLOPS! 4K AND 8K GAYMING ON A 799 USD CONSOLE!!" claims, that have resulted a new-found ""need"" to use lazy tricks and hacks to make their poorly designed, poorly optimized garbage to run even remotely passably. Hell, take 2015 games like MGSV, Witcher 3, Talos Principle... etc. Custom engines, gorgeous visuals, and all of them run smooth as butter at native 1080p, 60fps, on 1GB DDR5 GPUs.
@@NeovanGoth If Unreal Vaseline 5 is the best we got then we are truly screwed, might as well start from scratch then. Need a few more Concords to reset the industry.
This is incredible, I love the in depth explanations here with the alternative and better solutions. I can't monetarily support this project, so I will instead comment and share where I can.
so i wasnt wrong. graphics do look worse now. I kept feeling like they were "cheap" ... they "looked good" but werent actually good... this is what i was on about, i felt cheated and this is exactly what it is. Its like taking sugar out of a drink and replacing it with sweetner! Lets hope this gets lit up and they stop conning us.!
I hope you are working on an awesome game because this is exactly the kind of nerdiness the gaming industry needs right now. That and a sense of style. Get a Romero for your Carmack.
It's crazy how right bro is. The biggest example today is STALKER 2 and another is called OFF THE GRID, where if you run these games in low settings, it becomes unplayable and forces you to run at medium settings. STALKER 2 begins to look like absolute crap if you don't use all the fancy stuff. Unreal Engine 4 was the beginning of the end. There was a Unreal 3 tech demo called "The Samaritan" that shows we never even saw the complete capabilities of Unreal 3 engine alone before going right into Unreal 4... I honestly want to see what Unreal 3.8 can produce when completely utilized without all that other bloated software...
Finally someone says this. Why 720->4k ray traced, denoised, nanite image when we can have perfectly clean 4k60+ baked game with dynamic elements and SMART techniques that resolves way better image. Look at uncharted4, tlou2 or Demons Souls remake. These games do not use RT and use custom engines, so yeah... Demons Souls is 4k60fps on ps5 pro while Alan Wake 2 is 720p and 30fps with grainy, shimmering image
Why? Because if developers have to hand craft bake in everything to achieve 1:1 replica of the raytraced image it will take them 10x more work hours.. and AAA gaming corporates refuse to spend money on that.
@@damara2268 but will it take so long? Games used to take shorter time to develop with raster techniques. RT and ue5 are all about making it easier on the devs.... but games take forever to make anyway
@@HiCZoK The issue with baking is that if you make any changes, you have to press a button and then wait forever for the baking to be done to see if it actually looks good or not. Also if you want to do any dynamic scenes, you just can't, because the lighting doesn't update. And reflections depend on the camera too! You just can't bake reflections for all possible camera angles. I mean, cube maps exist, but they aren't very good.
Solid video. I made a graphics fix for Marauders that tuned TAA for a better experience, but actually turning off TAA resulted in all the awful results you've showcased here. And after a while, guess what the Marauders devs did? They disabled the ability to tweak their INI files to change TAA & Depth of Field & other graphics settings. Why? Because they literally want everyone to have a poor visual experience as a game balance mechanism. That's inexcusable when the devs FOR SOME REASON decided to apply a static amount of Depth of Field to everything just to create unnaturally blurry visuals. And now we're stuck with it. Wow.
Back in the days I treated FXAA as garbage, but now I prefer it over TAA as the latter somehow manages to be even more blurry. It's like somebody smeared my monitor with soap.
The current obsession with graphical fidelity over fun gameplay needs to go the f*ck away. We are literally being rinsed for "Pro" consoles and GPU's costing thousands of dollars with barely noticable improvements. Graphics got where they needed to be by the end of the 8th gen. We genuinely don't need them to be any better than that for another decade at least. I would much rather the technology and development was put into processing power and optimisations so that developers can do more with the game such as loading in assets, more mechanics etc whilst having the graphics we had from titles such as RDR2, Last Of Us, Cyberpunk, God of War etc. Hell even Witcher 3 and Arkham Knight still look stunning and they both came out in 2015
@HeadlessBTW Yes, but each generation before this one brought noticeable leaps forward in graphics. That has not been the case with this generation so far. There is almost nothing left to be squeezed out of current hardware. Graphics and visual fidelity for most titles are absolutely fine for another 5-10yrs. Can we please just get back to making good games instead of making games that just look good?
@@timmurray2945 How are good graphics stopping developers from making good and fun games? In big studios the people making shaders and assets are not responsible for the gameplay.
VR could be a major driving force behind TAA's decline in popularity, especially as the mobile virtual reality market grows. Alyx has a very clean MSAA look.
I don't think so. With VR you can't have fast moving action-oriented games like Metal Gear Rising since they would introduce motion sickness in the majority of players, as well as with games like Titanfall. Plus the cost of entry will always prevent the popularity of VR's mass adoption.
Agreed, because the user's camera (Head) is *always* moving, temporal effects can suffer, with something like TAA, it would get turned into a blurry mess quite fast. MSAA is the cleanest one, but also sadly super expensive. With most of VR moving to mobile hardware as well (Like the Quest 2 / 3), there needs to be a solid solution for fast anti-aliasing that doesn't look awful.
@@guybrush3000 It's ideal but in some cases not performant, believe URP in Unity on Quest is significantly hit by performance when using MSAA on Quest.
Wow, I never knew about all this! I thought I must be going crazy when I upgraded from my old GTX 1080 to a 4070 to play some new titles and couldn't shake the feeling that they somehow felt smeary, noisy, and unclear no matter what settings I would change, and that some older titles actually looked clearer. I could tell the underlying textures and models were better, but somehow the overall image looked worse. Now I know. Cheers!
there is a way to mitigate some of these issues. download Reshade and istall Clarity and Lumasharpen effects. Clarity makes the image clearer and Lumasharpen is of course for sharpening.
0:01 if you change your video resolution to 8K and turn off Anti-Aliasing you can clearly see the face of a GIGACHAD. Great video thanks for making this, I hope this gets more traction than it already has, you are the voice we need in this slop infested industry.
Well done! I'm glad you're launching a crusade against bad optimization in games. I don't have an issue with TAA or upscaling, I strongly prefer it to FXAA and SMAA. What I DO have a problem with is when they are used to hide artifacts, are too soft, or hide bad performance with upscaling/frame generation. I praise games that have options for sharpening so I can clearly see details whether still or in motion. The most common issue I see with TAA is smearing/ghosting, BY FAR. I'm glad you showed Metal Gear Solid V and The Division 1 as games with gorgeous visuals and good optimization. I loved The Division 1 on my old potato PC, I was shocked at the visuals.
subscribed... i've been gaming for over 20 years and i've been complaining about many issues such as these and i'm so relieved to see that someone has made a very clear video with evidence to call this out
I'm not especially knowledgeable about this subject, but this video encapsulates the nagging feeling I've had over the past few years from my user experience. Appreciate you putting all the work you have into sorting out the causation and connective threads that explain it. Seems like another case of something that should be a specialized application becoming normalized/standardized because big companies want blanket solutions and push their solution to obviate their monetary/development costs onto the consumer with a cost to their experience. Looking forward to your proposal and will likely support it. Good luck and speedy recovery.
Thank you for shedding light on these abhorrent practices that have had me frothing at the mouth for more than 5 years now and were always overlooked by 99% of the population.
Holy shit. So I am not crazy. I went and switched TAA to SMAA or FXAA in a few games and they look either as I remembered years ago or better than they ever have. I hope this blows up more.
The whole thing is just a great way to sell the idea to the investors by even reducing cost while at the same time financing R&D to improve GPUs for AI computing. They move the industry. Everyone wins. Except the consumer. They're doing business. Not games.
Incredible video! Thank you for sharing, and in a technical capacity no less, what many of us feel empirically has been happening. As soon as we started dropping the usage of CRTs the concept of "fluidity" and "clarity" in games was gradually destroyed in the name of "realistic" graphics. And this synced really nicely with the rise of the dominance of marketing within game development and releases. Marketing just cares about having great screenshots and trailers. All of that can run at 30fps and with a lot of effects. But gameplay wise, we have been losing more and more features that actually support better the core part of any videogame: the gameplay.
I cannot understate how much this sort of thing has annoyed me for YEARS. I always swore that _something_ was off, but passed it off as a result of my lesser hardware. When I went from the One S to the Series X and _still_ noticed these issues, I was miffed. Good to know I’m not crazy, and I really hope this information takes off.
Well said - definitely went over my head but I appreciate someone who is able to understand and explain these topics. Keep up the fight. I'm wondering if this is one reason why I find myself playing older games - I just like the way they look/feel more than the modern ones.
I've grown to hate UE5. Majority of games that use it release unoptimized and remain unoptimized because of lazy developers. Silent Hill 2 had to be my breaking point with this issue. It's almost been 2 months since it launched and still no update to it's performance. Thanks for your videos in calling it out.
This is something i have noticed for years, so glad you are talking about it and teaching others cause it genuinely ruins my experience on a lot of games.
Oh god i HATE TAA!!! I'm on a 1080 monitor and it ruins visuals so much. I noticed it instantly first time i've seen it and happy that ppl understand my pains I had like 10 year ago. Let's pushback this nonsense!!!!!!!!
I love how indepth this video is! Could you perhaps increase the time between each sentence and maybe add subtitles as well, that would help a lot for those of us who do not have English as their first language!
Hope Kevin is doing ok! I'm an older gamer and have noticed over the decades that games came from sprites into more and more advanced graphics. But once mesh fidelity hit a plateau then texture manipulation started coming into it and at first, the two worked well together as a way to improve fidelity. Other options helped with overall rendering performance (culling etc), and it was all pretty good. I'm not sure at what point things started getting blurry though but it went from just turning on AA to having several AA flavors, then motion blur (seriously fuck motion blur), and I can't even keep track from there. And it has always boggled my mind that some games looked really good even when you pause them or watch them in slowmo like BL3 etc, yet more modern titles have ghosting and smearing so bad that it's ugly. My only question here, after watching the whole thing, is how does someone who only has a layman's understanding of all this, adjust their games to look better? Are there some common settings in a checklist that will help? I don't mind reading up on it but a nice to-do list would help a lot.
Dude. As someone who has been noticing this industry trend for 20 YEARS I salute you for finally putting together a comprehensive piece that people listened to. I think you're the first person who has ever gotten the message across in such a concise way.
i don't have the tech knowledge to know why but this video feels very validating to how I have felt about many of the new games I have played. I keep seeing people acting wowed by modern game visuals but then I try them and think "its good but everything looks sort of fuzzy or blurry". Last game I played, and I don't play tons anymore to be fair so I probably am missing some, that really impressed me visually was DOOM Eternal. I haven't seen a game whose visuals I am more impressed by since playing it
Regarding ghosting in TAA, 90% of those cases are improperly implemented TAA, the motion vectors not being reliable in those cases. For example the Guns leaving behind ghosting is because the Motion Vectors are ignoring the gun, they are drawing the gun on a separate camera ontop of the main camera which is used to prevent the gun intersecting the world. Blurryness can also be significantly mitigated with "unjittering" the textures in screen space which a lot of implementations don't do, so that way only the edges of geometry jitter, not textures. Another big thing is using Bicubic sampling for the reprojection instead of hardware bilinear which helps much more with sharpness than using a sharpness filter. Just those things alone bring TAA quality up a significant amount, its just for some reason the standard implementations don't really do these things, probably because its a little tricky to implement the texture "unjittering" specifically in an engine like Unreal/Unity because every shader that samples a texture to the screen would need to implement it.
We really appreciate your high effort comment. There is the argument that these are "improperly implemented" but at the same time you can find hundreds of games that display these issues from AAA to indie. And what legitimizes them is the standardized abuse of these flaws in the name of "optimizing" several effects when that is now clearly an invalid excuse and has no significant impact on 9th gen. RE: "hardware bilinear which helps much more with sharpness than using a sharpness filter." Guessing you mean better clarity? You can add a sharpening filter to a game with or without TAA. We strive for clarity since you can't add a "clarity" filter to either 😉👍(we'll look into it) We looked into the counter-jitter technique from textures but didn't have too much concern over it. Since we are big fans of the sample pattern found in the Decima AA research and it stated some information about the samples being so close, that texture alteration wasn't necessary. But maybe we should still test it ourselves considering their standards at the time (releasing with no motion vectors & causing severe ghosting). We don't have an official chat or online group but you might be interested in joining the r/f***taa discord server which has a channel dedicated to developers looking for improvements in this area: discord.gg/W7bWWfF5RW We always like to remind people we are not anti-TAA, only against flawed TAA that can be abused for covering hideous issues with other pipeline steps.
@@ThreatInteractive Regarding the bilinear you can instead use Bicubic another interpolation algorithm instead of Bilinear which is the default in hardware. It reduces the blurriness significantly, bilinear by nature is very inaccurate and blurry. I completely agree with how TAA gets abused through effects like SSR, SSAO, and SSGI they are generally poorly implemented then they rely on TAA to temporally blur it together to effectively denoise it. Even in deferred rendering some people opt to use Stochastic transparency and TAA to blend the pixels to implement transparency. And things like TAAU while the idea is honestly great its yet another thing abusing TAA, Temporal upscaling is "fake performance", not an optimization its a great option to have, but DLSS and other things shouldn't be the standard they should be an option for those with incredibly old/poor hardware. Optomizations in modern games does bother me a lot, things like Unreals Nanite shouldn't ever be used for games. It doesn't improve performance hell it hardly even improves quality, it just enables developers to just slap in 500 billion polygon models consuming a billion gigabytes of data. Even things like lumen, why do we need such a degree of dynamic lighting when lightmaps can look even better support changing daylight cycles and is almost free to render.
@@pakumies By default when you sample a texture the GPU uses Bilinear sampling, You can instead in the shader write your own Bicubic sampler to use instead, which generally produces better results.
@@michaels851 You talk about Lightmaps looking better, but I have never seen that before... not in cyberpunk or any game that gives ray tracing or path tracing
We have three things to ask:
1. Watch this video in 4K as in streaming settings as any lower compression will drastically hide visual issues we are trying to demonstrate.
2. Please excuse the audio issues as our studio founder Kevin was recently hit by a drunk driver and is still currently recovering.
He did not want to delay the release of this video any further.
Very few people can view it on a 4K monitor though
@@nzeu725 as in streaming quality since it's a youtube compression issue. You'll be able to view the issues on 720p monitors as long as you have the streaming setting set to 4k.
@@ThreatInteractive oh ok
CDPR is actually rewrite core of Unreal. IK because I have contacts there.
Best wishes to Kevin, I hope he does alright.
So I wasn't tripping all these years!
It wasn't my eyesight :')
Thank you for bringing all of this to light. I'm more than happy to donate to see a change in the industry.
Thank you for the support! Very appreciated!
1500 thats crazyyy
@@Saujas That's 1,500 Indian Rupees. That's equal to 17.72 dollars.
@@Saujas yeah but like what currency is that lmao
@@theboywiththeblackeyes6563lmao
Sick of modern games looking like they have Vaseline smeared all over them, and lazy optimizations. Make graphics great again, and I'm here for it.
Thank you so much!
No ray tracing, no increases in fluff effects to muddy up the screen, graphics peaked in like 2015 now they are just laying more nonsense into games to justify hardware innovations(which are mostly just slightly higher horsepower and AI algorithms, horsepower gains are decreasing as ai upscaling is more and more normalized)
@mal-avcisi9783 no
When you have to run 8K resolution for a game to look as good as old games did on 1440p, you know something is very wrong.
LITERALLY
old ???
They want us to buy the newest Geforce and Radeon gpus. You can't run Ray Traycing? Buy our new Gefore RTX 666 now for $3000. Then you find out it only runs at 40fps. But wait you forgot about Frame generation! Let's double the framerates!
I game on a 4:3 1440p CRT monitor from 2002, what is aliasing?
@@saricubra2867 *"I game on a 4:3 1440p CRT monitor from 2002, what is aliasing?"*
Come on, man! I gamed on an FW900 (2304x1440) until late 2014, and then a 22" FP1350X (1920x1440) until mid 2018 when I couldn't find a suitable CRT replacement and bought a 55" 4K OLED.
If you think there's essentially no aliasing on a CRT, you either have a really cruddy CRT or really cruddy eyesight, or both! Sure, aliasing may inherently be a _bit_ less annoying on a CRT but it's still aliasing. If it weren't visible at all, it would mean the display is extremely blurry --- which is the subject of this video after all. And why I have always despised FXAA and all of the other screen-space blur filters.
I've always used 4x MSAA on CRT no matter how high the resolution. After all, it comes down to _angular_ resolution, and not _display_ resolution --- how large the pixels actually appear to your eye. Which is a function of screen size and viewing distance. I've always had my face right up against my monitors in order to maximize Display FoV and thus maximize immersion.
I grant that if you sit quite far from your display, your angular resolution will be higher, and any aliasing will be relatively less annoying. But that's no way to game!
P.S. If you're reading this and you are into maximizing immersion, ask me about High FoV Gaming --- it's probably not what you think.
Yes, You have convinced me. I kept telling the same thing to my friends. The only thing that should take more resources is better physics and not this trash rendering.
Thank you so much! It's very appreciated!
Ayo wasn't expecting a indian bro here
@@sunrisevideosgamingandmuch7791ayo wasn't expecting one of the 1.4 billion+ people to be here
can you guys even afford graphics cards over there? lol
@@igotlotiononit lol, I have a RTX 4080 and a 9800X3D
Asmongold sent over the entire rat ranch in support. Keep up the awesome work.
Rat ranch 😂
I'm not a rat, I'm a raccoon. A "spicy rat", if you will.
@@Fra_Sausageball*ratcoon
wat
Roach ranch* 😂
Optimization has gone down the drain. There were 720p 60fps games on the original Xbox and 1080p60 on the PS3, and now almost two decades later we are told 540p on series S is just fine thanks to upscaling.
Very few games actually ran at the "full" 720p/1080p resolution on the PS3/Xbox 360. Eg Halo already ran something like 500p, and it couldnt even hold 30fps. Killzone 2 reached
@@termitreter6545 I know that there were cases of games running badly since the beginning of time. No much sense in mentioning it, as those are infinite.
Look up digital foundry's list of 1080p games on ps3. There are many doing at least 1080p 30fps solid. The key here is that those show what can be done on a 200 gflops machine. Then on Ps4 there were much more complex games doing 1080p 60fps, and some even got to 1440p 60fps on PS4 Pro, and now on Series S. One X had a few 4k 60fps games, mostly racing and sports. Ps5 and Series X also got 4k60 on some cases.
By now, 4k60 native with a simple aa like FXAA on PS5 pro should be par for the course.
The problem is pointless, insanely high graphical fidelity.
@@rattlehead999 I think it goes beyond that.
Let's say a PS5 Pro has about 1.000 times the power and capacity of a Nintendo Wii. Do games have 1000X more polygons, higher res shadows and so on? I really don't see it. There is progress, no doubt about it, but it looks as if to get 10X more of anything, you need 100X more power, and I blame it on optimization.
Look up the games that managed at least 1080p 30fps on PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii U. They hold up surprisingly well.
@@SalveMonesvol Yup, that's very true and developers should really go back to PS3 and very early PS4 graphical fidelity, but with modern rendering tech like ray tracing and such, until engines become good enough to render crazy high fidelity.
Basically TAA is implemented to mask all the graphics effects flickering like hell, with a soft blur that's almost literally like playing without glasses
what you described is fxaa, taa is a tad bit more complex than that
yes, they basically "Blur it until no jaggies = better".
@@eon96 Idk man TAA on Monster Hunter World gives me ungodly amount of flickering while FXAA just gives me a clean image.
@@eon96 You're righ, TAA also causes trails behind moving objects
Really reminds me of the low quality FXAA days of PS3/360 games/PC ports. Also motion blur, because somehow devs thought 20fps is made better when you add motion blur.
Me watching with 750ti: "Yeah you tell them!"
That garbage
@@xr.spedtech give me money for a new one then
GTX 750Ti 🤝 R9 380X "Yeah 4gb vram should be able to run anything!" In all honesty too many games nowadays ask for WAY too much considering what they visually produce. And more accessible games means more sales for publishers which makes these incredibly demanding games make absolutely no sense to me
Me watching with GT 620 : :)
Don't worry. Games aren't worth shit these days and it's even worse with the DEI crap.
I hope this comes to fruition one day. Thank you for such a detailed analysis and bringing all of this to light even if all of us common users don’t comprehend every technical detail. Good luck!
Thank you so much!
So it wasn't my hardware... good to know. I have a pretty decent setup with an i9 and rtx 3070 ti, 32 ram, and still struggle to run modern games at 60fps on 1080p without it being a blurry mess (its a ROG zephyrus laptop but still..). When I could run Batman: Arkham Knight in my previous setup with a gtx1080 (also a laptop) flawlessly and that game looked beautiful, way better than the games I'm running now. Hope this issue gets resolved in the future.
Thanks you so much for the support!
It's very appreciated.
Tbh a laptop 3070 TI is quite shit its about the equivalent of a 3060TI on a desktop which itself is basically a med level 1080p gpu (for last gen games) + that I9 cpu you have in your laptop I'm almost certain is thermal throttling hard and bottlenecking your gpu even more.
While its right that modern videogames suck huge balls due to shitfaced optimisation, its also true that laptops will become ancient quite quickly due to limited thermal mitigation and weaker overall hardware.
But the biggest issues laptops have is losing heat, high thermals throttle your gpu/cpu which bottlenecks it even more. Try undervolting both your gpu and cpu if you know how and you'll most likely get a much faster laptop as a result of that.
@@itsme12305 I have a 3090ti and 10850k; games still look like trash and have problems running that are modern. The over reliance on software "tricks" to make games look better or smoother is not working. the 50xx series isn't promising big gains in raster, they want to give us more fake frames, that look messy in motion.
Danke!
bruh you cannot seriously do crowdfunding only through youtube ;P
Damn!
They take a huge cut
Thank you for the support!
It helps alot!
We don't want to crowd fund on YT, we just want to get some more information out first before we go through with a full on crowdfunding page.
Let people learn about our goals etc.
@@ThreatInteractive Yeah, you'll lose a lot of money that way.
He has been growing so fast! he is definitely on the right track and is going to fix this shit!
We have gotten to a point where firing up a game from 2006 and running it in 4k looks better than latest UE5 titles
I can run Crysis 3 in 240 FPS native 4K, while Wukong struggles to get 60 FPS in 1080p and looks like smeary shit
Even UE3 games from 2006 look better than most UE5 games today
any care to compare gmod w/ and w/o TAA for us???
I had this experience with DoA on og Xbox (emulator) I was impressed on how good they looked on a system 20 years old
No joke - perfect example are Xbox One X enhanced games from Xbox360 (9x resolution with increased AF and in some cases textures and maybe LOD).
Ninja Gaiden II or Gears of War 3 are perfect examples. I highly suggest checking comparisons.
Crazy? I Was Crazy Once. They Locked Me In A Room. A Rubber Room. A Rubber Room With Rats. And Rats Make Me Crazy
Thank you so much for the donation!
Thank you for bringing attention to such an important issue
Thank you so MUCH!
0:00 Intro
0:26 Creativity
1:26 Performance
2:30 TAA On Issues (Visuals)
6:10 TAA Off Issues (Visuals)
7:28 TAA "Optimizations" (Visuals)
9:05 DLAA & TSR (Visuals)
11:25 TAA Design Requisites
11:41 Epic Games & UE5 Problems
19:09 Threat Interactive Info
Aah hybred love your mods dude ❤
Thanks for the video, it explained and confirmed what I had been feeling about graphics settings in recent video games. I have been playing retro games for some time and came back to 'current gen' titles in 2023, bought an RTX4 series GPU for it. My enthousiasm had mainly sparked because ray tracing seemed an actual cool innovation. When I started playing, the video settings (upscaling, AA, sharpening) were a puzzle. I like tweaking settings, but still I noticed it was very hard to just get a decent, clean picture. I thought that shaders and effects (let alone ray tracing) had just deveoloped to a point that hardware couldn't keep up and that the upscaling and resulting blur were a necessary evil. This did not explain the various and all bad AA options though; I was used to AA that actually made the picture better, 10 years ago.
Now I learned it's what I hoped it wouldn't be: lazyness in optimization and a wrong direction in innovation.
Thanks for speaking so clearly about it and starting something that looks like a new direction!
Thank you so much for the support!
People need to realize that more computationally powerful hardware in the last 10 years has not made games look better, it has enabled developers to dump more of the cost of development onto consumers. By listing more powerful hardware as required, developers make sure that, instead of paying for someone to optimize their game, they can make YOU pay for hardware that can run poorly optimized software. CONSUMERS ARE ESSENTIALLY PAYING A HIDDEN FEE ON MODERN VIDEO GAMES WITHOUT NECESSARILY GETTING ANYTHING IN RETURN.
And this is beneficial to everyone else than the end consumer. Hardware companies get more revenue because they get to sell you more hardware.
in have been saying this for years they are gaslighting us
Very good.
The so-called "game developers" act under the directives of big capitalist corporations.
The entire production takes place according to principles of usury and the international - exploiting system of the matrix (in the literal term).
The world is "wired" to perform the "loosh" from the major to the disputed matters in our lives thanks to the malignant technology of parallel dimension, which powers the simulation and implements distraction and oblivion daily, i.e. global abduction.
They are doing these things because they can.
People accept this and become slaves to it because they are bodies of this technology and have no free will.
They don't know anything different and don't want to know how and when all this started because they are biological machines, aka automatons. Therefore, they continue to consume.
In an evolved civilization, which foremost sprouts from the "consciousness of the body" and through the body, video games would not exist, as much as 95% of the habits and "work" we conduct in our daily lives.
I hope this did not intrigue anyone.
I agree on this. Most newer games are unoptimized as fck.
I hope you'll reach this goal
Edit: didn't know this will be visible as a comment, thought it will be only visible to the video poster. So, since it's public: I thought I'm going insane with TAA ghosting, so glad it's not my sanity that's wrong
Thank you so much!
The highest donate i've seen here, but people don't know polski złoty.
@2MichalChojnowski2 it's his money. Let him do whatever he thinks is right.
And did you even understand what this video is about? You sound like you don't.
Glad to see more coverage on this!
Thank you so much! It's very appreciated!
The fundamental problem here, and the reason the mainstream has adopted TAA as default for a decade now, is that most effects in modern games happen per pixel, not per vertex. This means MSAA can only be the first step in a long pipeline of ALIASING AVOIDANCE. After MSAA gives you clean geometry you have to watch out for every new pixel shader effect not to add noticable aliasing to the image once more.
Yes, over the last decade we're also seeing a lot of noisy temporal sampling, but these techniques have been invented because TAA is the standard, not vice versa! For flawless image quality without supersampling you have to PREVENT aliasing at the shader level. By moving some effects back to the vertex shader you can leverage the additional samples MSAA gives you. And then pixel shaders can still be used for effects that create smooth gradients or are generally subtle (low contrast, low frequency).
The only alternative I can imagine is sort of the opposite extreme, an engine built around supersampling. You minimize the cost of each pixel so you can render at least 4x, then apply some kind of post-process-AA (SSAAx4 is still visibly flawed), then scale back down to the screen resolution. Maybe this could get you *close enough* to 8x quality, but performance will be a problem.
I'd appreciate the video creator's input on this
One root cause of the problem is that everyone uses deferred shading. There is some weird mindset that drives developers to use that.
I prefer forward rendering pipeline. That allows high performance and good MSAA and no need to recompile shaders. So it is actually simpler. You only need to take care overdraw having occluders in scene and have some logic to handle what dynamic light sources lit what assets because there is that 8 light source limitation per mesh.
The video doesn't talk about MSAA at all. It mentions SMAA, a per pixel, post-process antialiasing that works with pixel-shaders.
@@gruntaxeman3740 Devs largely switchrd to deferred shading because it scales better with multiple light points and with open world games and games in general becoming larger traditional forward rendering is a problem and the 8th gen consoles had a big memory increase allowing deferred to become the standard.
@@lordanonimmo7699
I'm confident that most cases that is huge misstep. Light source limitation is not "8 light sources per scene". It is "8 light sources in fixed pipeline".
So what is required is to light source states every area in 3D-space, based on light sources influence. So in reality we are talking max 8 eight light sources per mesh. There are really no issues to have plenty of light sources in scene.
It is not only AA what suffers in deferred shading. In performance point of view, the issue is memory bandwidth. Forward rendering pipeline requires much less of memory bandwidth and that is the bottleneck. It was bottleneck in 8th gen consoles and it is still, because memory is shared to CPU and GPU.
I have been absolutely losing my mind trying to explain this phenomenon to my friends and family over the past few years and never knew what the actual issue was. I've noticed a significant decrease in the average performance of AAA games and they all have that weird see-through "everything looks fuzzy or blurry" effect and no amount of decreasing the graphics settings even helps performance. I am so glad to have stumbled upon a video like this that explains the reasons behind what I noticed about games in this regard. Thank you so much
Thank you for your work.
This forced TAA practice must be end.
60-70 fps in 1080 in modern games on 1000$+ videocard is not normal, it's scam.
thank god i found somebody talking about this. people kept gaslighting me and blaming my monitor. but how could it be my monitor if i can capture the issue in a screenshot/video.
for the longest time i thought i have a broken monitor or something.
Yeah, it's still an issue with 480hz 1440p OLEDs (so with perfect visual clarity). Save your money and wait this to be fixed.
Now shove this entire video at whoever told you this.
I have a 4k 48" OLED and can see what you are talking about clearly lol. Keep in mind most noobs run upscaling blurry messes so dont' really see artifacts, just frames. Sigh.
Seriously, Kevin Jimenez is a genius! He is so serious about fixing this shit.
THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I've been complaining about this stuff for a very long time now and everyone kept telling me I'm the problem and I am wrong, and I've always been mindblown that people weren't seeing it, I'm like how can you not see these issues
Thanks! You're doing amazing work. Hoping you find some great investors and sponsors.
Thank you! It's helps so much with our goals!
The TAA and upscaler part made me throw my fist in the air. You put it into words so elegantly, far better than I could have. I also love how you sound progressively angrier and angrier as you talk about this issue.
Honestly, it's a fucking joke that it came to this, that developers can just do this mess instead of real optimisation... What a tragedy.
Some history: Killzone on PS4 was the first big game with temporal reprojection pipeline. They rendered odd/even scanlines and reprojected the previous frame with motion vectors for missing pixels. This technique allowed 60Hz multiplayer in a game with 30Hz single player campaign. Which was great for gamers. None of these long smear artifacts existed as pixel was fully refreshed every other frame. And there was no noise based optimizations.
PS4 Pro was the big reason for these techniques to get popular. It was heavy marketed as 4K console and 4K sticker on the box required 4K framebuffer. But Ps5 Pro only has 2x faster GPU for 4x higher pixel count. Checkerboard rendering was invented. It was an improved version of the scanline technique of Killzone. 50% pixels refeshed every frame.
I’d say modern temporal AA was first used by Ubisoft’s For Honor in 2017. It was basically a modified TAA shader that was accumulating into a native res buffer. This solved some of the checkerboard issues like sawtooth pattern in occluded areas. UE4.19 TAA was similar to this algorithm.
When people got used to 4K rendering with checkerboard and TAAU, they didn’t want to spend half of the PS5 GPU gains by disabling these PS4 Pro 4K tricks. Thus temporal reconstruction become the standard way to render 4K on consoles.
Meanwhile people had started to use TAA (no upscaling) as their general filter for everything. This was needed because games were moving away from static baked lighting to dynamic solutions. Dynamic solutions were more expensive and lower quality. TAA helped hiding the issues. There still isn’t enough performance to calculate high quality fully dynamic GI and reflections without any tricks. That would be even slower without TAA. If you want dynamic stuff that’s the cost. UE5 forcing dynamic stuff to all users is not great. Not all games need fully dynamic lighting and reflections.
TAA also made it possible to add competely new effects. Such as volumetrics and volumetric clouds. Horizon Forbidden West had game play inside volumetric cloud caves for example. For most games it’s not worth to use that many GPU cycles for volumetrics rendering. Clouds can be faked using existing techniques just fine if you are not flying inside big cloud caves. Their new volumetrics tech leans heavily on temporal accumulation. Was it worth to Horizon Forbidden West to have reprojected volumetric could render tech? That’s up to players to decide. It made new gameplay possible. However if UE5 introduces similar tech and forces it to all users, then we have a problem. Simple efficient solutions are still useful and don’t require temporal accumulation.
I just wanted to emphasize that people don’t do temporal jitter because they are lazy. It’s super difficult to make these algorithms fully real time. Added GPU cost is huge and you have to compromise.
All of this is especially true for ray-tracing. You are tracing thin rays. Each gives you very little data. Randomizing the rays randomizes memory access patterns which hurts caches. You want to minimize the amount of rays you cast. Temporal accumulation is required for acceptable quality. Even offline ray-tracers use temporal techniques and denoisers. If we want to go there, we have to accept this. I personally feel that ray-tracing is too expensive right now compared to the gains. On RTX 4090 it’s usable due to HW advances and sheer HW power, but still far from efficient. Raster algos (and baking) provide similar results for much cheaper GPU cost.
Baked lighting is great for runtime (if your content is mostly static), but it has other issues.
AAA games today have big game worlds and lots of content. Game downloads already are hitting 100GB. Baked lighting takes a lot of storage space. Dynamic solutions don’t.
Baking lightmaps for small game levels was fine. But today’s massive BR maps require too long baking times to make the iteration time fast enough for level designers and lighting artists. Dynamic solution allows developrs to see lighting changes immediately. Productivity is better.
Developers want to patch these big BR maps in production, which would require new light bake -> massive patch to all uses. That’s not really feasible for games like Fortnite that are constantly updated.
There’s a lot of developers waiting for a future where you don’t need to bake any lighting. Super fast workflows and iteration time. The downside of this future is higher HW requirements for players (temporal makes perf hit more bearable). It’s a compromise, but many believe it’s a necessary compromise to produce more and more complex and polished content. Team sizes are massive today. Productivity is a real bottleneck.
i would rather have visual clarity & FPS than ray-tracing and the promise of 8K at 5FPS
So if I follow you correctly, Console "gamers" have kept on shitting on all of us.
its sad that killzone didnt really continue and multiplay servers shutdown
So your essentially saying that we have ended up in this spot because consoles keep promising resolutions and framerates that they aren't capable of. Thus developers have to cut corners just so little timmy can tick the 4k box in the settings despite his image looking only marginally better than 1080p.
The real issue is that with better HW, devs these days just put in less effort for same results, rather than same effort for better results. Called this out in 2020 when people said that the new consoles will give us better-looking games due to the faster loading - I called out they'll just start using less optimized textures, which is exactly what happened.
Basically ever generation of better consoles it just allows devs to be lazier because they don't have to spend time optimizing.
Oh its been going on far longer than that, just not for Graphics. The storage space requirements for these games has ballooned to such a degree because of the advancement in storage space. They thought "well storage is cheap now so we dont need to optimize the size of the game to save space". But that got so out of control, that storage had to advance to increase access speeds. Now we're on NVME and the sizes are once again ballooning up (see CoD's 250~some GB install size). It will only go two directions from here.
1. It will continue until the size of the games overrides the performance of the drives, causing increased loading times.
2. 'Cloud' gaming will be pushed where publishers will start hosting the games themselves, realizes how bloated and unoptimized their games are, and start cutting corners.
I miss the days when games *had* to be on Physical media, because it forced devs to optimize the size of the game for the media it was going to be on, lest it increase the cost of distribution. And even further back than that, up until the mid 90's they ALSO had to worry about how much of the systems Memory was taking up, so they had to really optimize what was on screen at any given time. THAT is why that era was the golden age for gaming. Because Devs pushed hardware, as well as their development skills to their limits to get as much game as possible within their limited operating budget (time and resources).
Thats why, even for all their faults, i still appreciate that Nintendo still works to optimize their games to keep costs down (Their games are significantly less resource intensive than Sony's or Microsoft's.. or most other 3rd-party AAA publishers).
It'll eventually even out, but it's going to take damn near 10 years and insane electric bills
@@Methos_ Will it? We're getting the same frame-rate today as 4 years ago on new games. The requirements go up in lockstep with technology.
Unless you turn on DLSS and frame-gen. They're relying on cheats to give you better performance as they optimize the games less and less.
@@tundranocaps idk there's plenty of games released in the 2020s that I'm getting 200-700+ fps on.
Single player games rarely need more than 120fps anyways.
Technology will improve, faster hardware will become cheaper, and they'll rely less heavily on these solutions with time. It's a transitional thing
My biggest complaint with modern graphics is the horrible transparency methods we have now that lean towards dithering
True transparency or single layer transparency has many disadvantages. Sorting, shader cost, clipping, culling and and and. Temporal dithering is a simple opacity mask technology. It use small noise tilling tex and multiply this with a gradient fade. It need TAA for no flickering or showing pixled dithering. Advantage? Fast, low shader cost, no switching model for blend.
Yeah, that was my #1 complaint too, on par with ugly ssr, until unreal additionally ruined every game with ghosting and ugly ai lighting
it's 2024 and the standard for transparency is: doing what super mario world for the super nintendo did for its water effect
@@UlrichThümmler You forgot the downside: it looks absolutely shit. Subtle things that need transparency like hair, for example, have been completely ruined and not only do they need TAA to look even remotely acceptable, but even with TAA the hair looks like total crap compared to any game from 10 or sometimes even 15 years ago. Yeah, hair in the old days with its transparency had problems too, such as the interaction with depth of field which was totally flawed (hair goes out of focus even if the character's head is in focus), but even with these drawbacks, the end result was still so absurdly better than the garbage we have today that it's one of the best arguments as to why the industry is going down the wrong path: characters hair.
In a highly stylized game, like Genshin Impact, I think it's appropriate and, IMHO, actually adds to the charm, but in a game going for realism, it's wholly inappropriate.
As an Unreal developer i'd say you said right things. I wish i could add support for SMAA or optimize TAA/TSR, but these are forgotten topics that have no support on the forums, no documentation and no tutorials. And trying to learn it from scratch is an expensive task that will cost even me as an indie thousands of dollars and months in R&D. But why don't huge AAA studios do it i have no idea honestly
Geez...
don't we have open source implementation of these kinda stuff like smaa? should be able to reference those stuff when implementing smaa in unreal
Simple, because it costs time and money that publishers would rather not spend. And considering how long it takes games to come out these days, I really can't blame them in the slightest. They're practically getting death threats for already spending 5 plus years per title. And from a corporate perspective, what kind of fool spends time and money on something that doesn't immediately make them more money back?
I'm sure there are many papers out on reference implementations for FXAA and SMAA. My first place to look would be ReShade shaders that are commonly available. I'm assuming if you know how to code UE pixel shaders, you can port it over.
@@NighttimeJuneau Like 90% of ue devs only code in blueprints. 4% knows they can code shaders 2% know how to do it
I don’t have much, but I believe in your vision brother lol
Thank you so much! So interesting to see your use of the word "vision" because it's very prominent in our upcoming video!
This should have millions of views , I was wondering why games were struggling with crazy hardware.
I remember back before TAA was being implemented you wouldn't use the only valid AA implementation out at the time, SMAA, at all if 1. you wanted better performance and 2. You wanted a clearer image.
What a sour taste left in my mouth when not only did TAA start showing up as a performance hogging visual mess, but it eventually became forced in every new title being released past a certain point. I remember this dread washing over me every time I launched a new game.
Thank you for voicing this issue in detail. I always thought I was the only one who cared as much, but it's nice to see effort being put towards scolding and cleaning up developmental laziness of the past many years of video game industry.
A video like this should get viral, people need to start making game devs accountable, they're charging more and more for less and less effort.
it's not that simple. I'm working in gamedev industry as a QA specialist. And i'm working closely with render teams, and the stuff they are doing is insane. It's just we're so limited in technology, that it's currently impossible to have native 4k resolution quality without using AAs at decent performance.
So is ue 5 forcing you or is it you dont have the graphics card for it(not saying this rudely)blaming the engine is easy atleast say the truth @@maxcr1t
@@maxcr1t then don't have native 4K resolution. so simple. best selling gpu is 4060 followed by 3060, so the overwhelming majority of gamers are playing at 1080p. not even 1440p. and you're talking about 4K. what??? completely out of touch with reality. no wonder gaming goes to sh1t.
@@maxcr1t
You literally have no idea how any of this works. You're clueless.
@@TheJohn_Highway this is literally part of my profession, dude. I know how it works, and i know what i’m talking about
20:24 YES YES YES!!! FINALLY SOMEONE AGREES WITH ME!!!!!
Thank you! So appreciated!
The note that youtube's 4K is more akin to uncompressed 1080p is absolutely true and the reason I watch in 4K even though I have a 1080p monitor.
i think it's also important to note that a lot of the examples of ghosting with taa shown here come from the fact that the velocity vectors for those pixels are not being correctly calculated. if this is correctly done and inusable samples from previous frames are correctly discarded then ghosting becomes a much smaller issue, of course some blurryness and artifacts still remain because of it being a temporal method (which the video mentions in detail) and i agree that taa is probably not ideal for visual clarity.
Is it even realistic to expect the velocity vectors to be calculated correctly? The examples are extreme, but this effect appears all the time. At first I thought my monitor is shit, but then I noticed that not every game has that ghosting. Personally, I'd take a grainy image over those artifacts any day.
@@tofunoodles it's more image stability than grain that TAA fixes
Which remains the source of this problem. Fake optimization, and those methods being used to hide the lame work.
When you say "velocity vectors for those pixels are not being correctly calculated", do you mean the standard game motion vectors? Would solutions like optical flow help? I know that optical flow is expensive for real time, I'm just asking because I am interested in what you said.
@@Croftmaniac05 So yeah normally for taa (and other effects) games create motion vectors for every pixel on the screen, basically the offset of that pixel from where it would have been in the previous frame to the current frame. at 4:33 for example you see ghosting of the gun, multiple transparent guns sort of overlaying. if the motion (velocity, used interchangeably ) vectors get calculated correctly (or at all since it doesn't look like there are any velocity vectors here) then this ghosting does not occur. you can still have other artifacts, where there is a big occlusion difference for example. Taa normally filters most these cases out and doesn't use them.
Some constructive feedback : At many points you really pass over points way too fast without actually elaborating what the issue is. At pretty much every point you barely give us, the viewer, any time, without pausing the video, to comprehend what the actual issue is, let alone recognize differences in the shown scenes. It would be better if you narrate what exactly the issue is and let people recognize what you are showing, instead of switching to a completely different scene every 5 seconds (exaggerated). I do realize that it's possible for the viewer to stop the video, rewind, and step through each part manually frame-by-frame to see what the difference is, but having to pause and manually compare two scenes every 3~10 seconds is not a pleasant viewer experience. While I do realize that the video would be significantly longer with you elaborating each scene comparison, it would be tremendously more helpful for the viewer to comprehend and have time to understand what you are talking about and what the problems are that need to be solved, as not every viewer will recognize the differences in the shown scenes (especially regarding ambient occlusion, which is rather subtle).
Video length was definitely a concern. It's bridging a lesser know connection between two topics being TAA and fake optimization. We are currently considering doing TH-cam shorts that explain these snippets slowly showing why modern versions are so flawed compared older/faster deferred implementations.
It's especially difficult when youtube compression defaults to a lower compression below the 4k quality.
@@ThreatInteractive Bro your going to have to realize video length doesn't matter anymore. You have youtubers that do 8+ hour dissertations on ONE movie. Now, you're talking about something that actually matters, so you have all the time in the world to express your evidence and clearly show each point.. drilling the details into the viewers head.
You gotta realize how important getting every fact into visual detail is, especially getting people onboard for a fork of the UE game engine. Let alone get people on board to contribute to the project.
All in all, I'm on your side on this issue and hope your ideas get it resolved.
i had to reduce the playback speed to properly see everything and not feel overwhelmed
@@dothex agree with this. take your time and explain well
Disagreed with the comments on this thread, the video was the perfect length, only improvement would be to point to more in depth videos where we can learn more
This is phenomenal. The first thing I do in a new UE5 project is disable TAA. This effort would be greatly appreciated. Best of luck!
Here because of asmond. Thanks for finding this guy! Subbed up and following!🎉🎉🎉
I am all for it if games can run enough FPS on my 3050 mobile 💀
Thank you for the donation!
Great video, It's clear that modern 1080p games look way blurrier than 1080p back in the day. And It's visible factualy.
Game devs are relaying too much on Upscalers, lighting gimmick and temporal solutions to cut cost of video developpements and cheap on effects.
At this rate new triple A 4K games will be as clear as any 480p ps2 games.
@@NeovanGoth only started to be an issue with late half of xbox360 era games. The early games were all 720p with msaa and looked great. And on multiplatform ps3 games, it was more common since devs didn't know how to optimize for ps3.
None of that changes the fact that on pc, players were still playing at 1024x768/ 1280x720, 768p, 900p and 1080p. Games of those times looked a lot sharper than current games. No way we are having best image quality when games not only look blurry, but has horrible smearing in motion which is the biggest problem.
It's a tradeoff for a bit more blur we get better and more realistic lighting
@@NeovanGoth Console shit has not been cutting edge on any level post the PS2 days. The PS3 era PC games, that is DX9.0c to DX11, have some of the best art x graphical effects balance in history, with some sharp, high contrast shading, deep parallax maps, high enough polycounts and texture resolutions... etc.
Again, it's mostly the console peasants driving themselves into a corner with their "TERAFLOPS! 4K AND 8K GAYMING ON A 799 USD CONSOLE!!" claims, that have resulted a new-found ""need"" to use lazy tricks and hacks to make their poorly designed, poorly optimized garbage to run even remotely passably.
Hell, take 2015 games like MGSV, Witcher 3, Talos Principle... etc. Custom engines, gorgeous visuals, and all of them run smooth as butter at native 1080p, 60fps, on 1GB DDR5 GPUs.
@@NeovanGoth If Unreal Vaseline 5 is the best we got then we are truly screwed, might as well start from scratch then. Need a few more Concords to reset the industry.
Mind blown, this feels like pulling the curtain back in the Wizard of Oz.
Absolutely!!! It blew my mind as well. My eyes are open now.
Thank you, I absolutely hate how new games look. I miss the days when the resolution was crisp and 4k actually meant something
Thanks!
Thank you for the support!
Glad someone's doing something about it instead of just complaining
Thank you so much for the support!
This is incredible, I love the in depth explanations here with the alternative and better solutions.
I can't monetarily support this project, so I will instead comment and share where I can.
Your sub and sharing ability is still extremely helpful.
so i wasnt wrong. graphics do look worse now. I kept feeling like they were "cheap" ... they "looked good" but werent actually good... this is what i was on about, i felt cheated and this is exactly what it is. Its like taking sugar out of a drink and replacing it with sweetner! Lets hope this gets lit up and they stop conning us.!
Finally someone brought this to light, thank you.
Thank you!
I hope you are working on an awesome game because this is exactly the kind of nerdiness the gaming industry needs right now. That and a sense of style. Get a Romero for your Carmack.
Hello from TheDRZJ channel! This is optimization war and we, gamers from all world will win this war!
I knew something was wrong with modern games lately, but I had no idea this was the cause. Thank you for shedding light on this industry-wide problem.
It's crazy how right bro is. The biggest example today is STALKER 2 and another is called OFF THE GRID, where if you run these games in low settings, it becomes unplayable and forces you to run at medium settings. STALKER 2 begins to look like absolute crap if you don't use all the fancy stuff. Unreal Engine 4 was the beginning of the end. There was a Unreal 3 tech demo called "The Samaritan" that shows we never even saw the complete capabilities of Unreal 3 engine alone before going right into Unreal 4... I honestly want to see what Unreal 3.8 can produce when completely utilized without all that other bloated software...
not mentioning stalker 2 is absolute bloated game, there's nothing in game that is worthy 155 gb.
Finally someone says this. Why 720->4k ray traced, denoised, nanite image when we can have perfectly clean 4k60+ baked game with dynamic elements and SMART techniques that resolves way better image. Look at uncharted4, tlou2 or Demons Souls remake. These games do not use RT and use custom engines, so yeah... Demons Souls is 4k60fps on ps5 pro while Alan Wake 2 is 720p and 30fps with grainy, shimmering image
Why? Because if developers have to hand craft bake in everything to achieve 1:1 replica of the raytraced image it will take them 10x more work hours.. and AAA gaming corporates refuse to spend money on that.
@@damara2268 but will it take so long? Games used to take shorter time to develop with raster techniques. RT and ue5 are all about making it easier on the devs.... but games take forever to make anyway
@@HiCZoK The issue with baking is that if you make any changes, you have to press a button and then wait forever for the baking to be done to see if it actually looks good or not.
Also if you want to do any dynamic scenes, you just can't, because the lighting doesn't update.
And reflections depend on the camera too! You just can't bake reflections for all possible camera angles.
I mean, cube maps exist, but they aren't very good.
@@janisir4529 Good cube map is better than normal crappy ssr. look at tlou2 or uncharted 4. But yeah, of course it's more work than just RT
@@HiCZoK If by "better" you mean static, totally in the wrong place, and low resolution then sure...
Solid video. I made a graphics fix for Marauders that tuned TAA for a better experience, but actually turning off TAA resulted in all the awful results you've showcased here.
And after a while, guess what the Marauders devs did? They disabled the ability to tweak their INI files to change TAA & Depth of Field & other graphics settings. Why? Because they literally want everyone to have a poor visual experience as a game balance mechanism. That's inexcusable when the devs FOR SOME REASON decided to apply a static amount of Depth of Field to everything just to create unnaturally blurry visuals. And now we're stuck with it. Wow.
This is 100%. It feels so good to find someone say everything that’s been boiling in me for years now. Subbed.
Back in the days I treated FXAA as garbage, but now I prefer it over TAA as the latter somehow manages to be even more blurry. It's like somebody smeared my monitor with soap.
fxaa is not bad, its not a good anti aliasing but lets say if you can't run normal antialising fxaa is better than nothing.
@@gabrielandy9272 I always preferred nothing over FXAA, it was just too blurry for my liking.
@@edga7490 I really dislike the blocky edges
The current obsession with graphical fidelity over fun gameplay needs to go the f*ck away. We are literally being rinsed for "Pro" consoles and GPU's costing thousands of dollars with barely noticable improvements. Graphics got where they needed to be by the end of the 8th gen. We genuinely don't need them to be any better than that for another decade at least. I would much rather the technology and development was put into processing power and optimisations so that developers can do more with the game such as loading in assets, more mechanics etc whilst having the graphics we had from titles such as RDR2, Last Of Us, Cyberpunk, God of War etc. Hell even Witcher 3 and Arkham Knight still look stunning and they both came out in 2015
There is nothing current about it. Pushing graphics to their absolut limits has always been a thing since the beginning of digital game creation.
@HeadlessBTW Yes, but each generation before this one brought noticeable leaps forward in graphics. That has not been the case with this generation so far. There is almost nothing left to be squeezed out of current hardware. Graphics and visual fidelity for most titles are absolutely fine for another 5-10yrs. Can we please just get back to making good games instead of making games that just look good?
@@timmurray2945 How are good graphics stopping developers from making good and fun games? In big studios the people making shaders and assets are not responsible for the gameplay.
Nobody listens to me when I say games look poor these days. You proved my point
I really love everything about this channel. This medium passive aggressive style. I love it. :D
Fascinating stuff. Good luck!
VR could be a major driving force behind TAA's decline in popularity, especially as the mobile virtual reality market grows. Alyx has a very clean MSAA look.
I don't think so. With VR you can't have fast moving action-oriented games like Metal Gear Rising since they would introduce motion sickness in the majority of players, as well as with games like Titanfall. Plus the cost of entry will always prevent the popularity of VR's mass adoption.
Agreed, because the user's camera (Head) is *always* moving, temporal effects can suffer, with something like TAA, it would get turned into a blurry mess quite fast. MSAA is the cleanest one, but also sadly super expensive. With most of VR moving to mobile hardware as well (Like the Quest 2 / 3), there needs to be a solid solution for fast anti-aliasing that doesn't look awful.
@@Barbaroossa thats just not true. People play high speed games all the time in VR. You are literally making things up
@@Camobiwon Most VR already uses MSAA. Standard setup for Quest games is to use 4x or 2x MSAA
@@guybrush3000 It's ideal but in some cases not performant, believe URP in Unity on Quest is significantly hit by performance when using MSAA on Quest.
Wow, I never knew about all this! I thought I must be going crazy when I upgraded from my old GTX 1080 to a 4070 to play some new titles and couldn't shake the feeling that they somehow felt smeary, noisy, and unclear no matter what settings I would change, and that some older titles actually looked clearer. I could tell the underlying textures and models were better, but somehow the overall image looked worse. Now I know. Cheers!
there is a way to mitigate some of these issues. download Reshade and istall Clarity and Lumasharpen effects. Clarity makes the image clearer and Lumasharpen is of course for sharpening.
This guy deserves more than a million subs! WTF! These studios are ruining the gaming industry! Competing so hard af, disregarding quality!
0:01 if you change your video resolution to 8K and turn off Anti-Aliasing you can clearly see the face of a GIGACHAD. Great video thanks for making this, I hope this gets more traction than it already has, you are the voice we need in this slop infested industry.
Awesome video, learned so much and can finally identify the things that have been bothering me.
Well done! I'm glad you're launching a crusade against bad optimization in games. I don't have an issue with TAA or upscaling, I strongly prefer it to FXAA and SMAA. What I DO have a problem with is when they are used to hide artifacts, are too soft, or hide bad performance with upscaling/frame generation. I praise games that have options for sharpening so I can clearly see details whether still or in motion. The most common issue I see with TAA is smearing/ghosting, BY FAR. I'm glad you showed Metal Gear Solid V and The Division 1 as games with gorgeous visuals and good optimization. I loved The Division 1 on my old potato PC, I was shocked at the visuals.
subscribed... i've been gaming for over 20 years and i've been complaining about many issues such as these and i'm so relieved to see that someone has made a very clear video with evidence to call this out
Great and informative video. Thanks for your work. Like deserved (25k btw 😁). The troublesshooting in modern gaming can be really annoying.
I'm not especially knowledgeable about this subject, but this video encapsulates the nagging feeling I've had over the past few years from my user experience. Appreciate you putting all the work you have into sorting out the causation and connective threads that explain it.
Seems like another case of something that should be a specialized application becoming normalized/standardized because big companies want blanket solutions and push their solution to obviate their monetary/development costs onto the consumer with a cost to their experience.
Looking forward to your proposal and will likely support it. Good luck and speedy recovery.
Thank you for shedding light on these abhorrent practices that have had me frothing at the mouth for more than 5 years now and were always overlooked by 99% of the population.
As a gamer that mostly stepped away for a few years and recently returned. Thank you for explaining why everything looks like ass now.
Holy shit. So I am not crazy. I went and switched TAA to SMAA or FXAA in a few games and they look either as I remembered years ago or better than they ever have.
I hope this blows up more.
The whole thing is just a great way to sell the idea to the investors by even reducing cost while at the same time financing R&D to improve GPUs for AI computing. They move the industry. Everyone wins. Except the consumer.
They're doing business. Not games.
Incredible video! Thank you for sharing, and in a technical capacity no less, what many of us feel empirically has been happening. As soon as we started dropping the usage of CRTs the concept of "fluidity" and "clarity" in games was gradually destroyed in the name of "realistic" graphics. And this synced really nicely with the rise of the dominance of marketing within game development and releases. Marketing just cares about having great screenshots and trailers. All of that can run at 30fps and with a lot of effects. But gameplay wise, we have been losing more and more features that actually support better the core part of any videogame: the gameplay.
I cannot understate how much this sort of thing has annoyed me for YEARS. I always swore that _something_ was off, but passed it off as a result of my lesser hardware. When I went from the One S to the Series X and _still_ noticed these issues, I was miffed. Good to know I’m not crazy, and I really hope this information takes off.
We need more Developers and Investors in the industry that is passionate for quality good games
Great video to release about this topic
Well said - definitely went over my head but I appreciate someone who is able to understand and explain these topics. Keep up the fight. I'm wondering if this is one reason why I find myself playing older games - I just like the way they look/feel more than the modern ones.
Important this is called out. The current state of gaming industry is worst I have seen it.
Now THIS is investigative reporting.
Great video! It answered so many questions I had about graphics on my computer! Thank you
I hate the effects that have been used to hide bad graphics. Never knew this was why it was happening
Finally, I am sick of unoptimized games! Hopefully this will help.
Edit: I meant unoptimized, I'm not sick of optimized games.
Thank you so much! It's a major help!
I've grown to hate UE5. Majority of games that use it release unoptimized and remain unoptimized because of lazy developers. Silent Hill 2 had to be my breaking point with this issue. It's almost been 2 months since it launched and still no update to it's performance. Thanks for your videos in calling it out.
Thank you for bringing this issue to light. I hope that more people see it.
Thank you for making such a video, I'm writing about this in every game trailers and but devs don't care...
What a shame!
This is something i have noticed for years, so glad you are talking about it and teaching others cause it genuinely ruins my experience on a lot of games.
Oh god i HATE TAA!!! I'm on a 1080 monitor and it ruins visuals so much. I noticed it instantly first time i've seen it and happy that ppl understand my pains I had like 10 year ago. Let's pushback this nonsense!!!!!!!!
No wonder I felt like everything past The Division is a devolution in terms of engine optimizations. Thank you for exposing the reason for that!
I love how indepth this video is! Could you perhaps increase the time between each sentence and maybe add subtitles as well, that would help a lot for those of us who do not have English as their first language!
This video deserves so much more attention. Amazing vid, thank you for this investigation.
THANK you. FINALLY someone speaks up about this, I've been on about this since 2018 and I can't say it enough.
Hope Kevin is doing ok!
I'm an older gamer and have noticed over the decades that games came from sprites into more and more advanced graphics. But once mesh fidelity hit a plateau then texture manipulation started coming into it and at first, the two worked well together as a way to improve fidelity. Other options helped with overall rendering performance (culling etc), and it was all pretty good. I'm not sure at what point things started getting blurry though but it went from just turning on AA to having several AA flavors, then motion blur (seriously fuck motion blur), and I can't even keep track from there. And it has always boggled my mind that some games looked really good even when you pause them or watch them in slowmo like BL3 etc, yet more modern titles have ghosting and smearing so bad that it's ugly.
My only question here, after watching the whole thing, is how does someone who only has a layman's understanding of all this, adjust their games to look better? Are there some common settings in a checklist that will help? I don't mind reading up on it but a nice to-do list would help a lot.
This should be a fucking manifesto, great video. Everybody in the gaming industry should watch this
Having my woes explained to me in such detail feels so validating, you have no idea. Instant binge sub.
Dude. As someone who has been noticing this industry trend for 20 YEARS I salute you for finally putting together a comprehensive piece that people listened to.
I think you're the first person who has ever gotten the message across in such a concise way.
FINALLY SOMEONE SAID IT. I KNEW I WAS NOT CRAZY. I love you m8
i don't have the tech knowledge to know why but this video feels very validating to how I have felt about many of the new games I have played. I keep seeing people acting wowed by modern game visuals but then I try them and think "its good but everything looks sort of fuzzy or blurry". Last game I played, and I don't play tons anymore to be fair so I probably am missing some, that really impressed me visually was DOOM Eternal. I haven't seen a game whose visuals I am more impressed by since playing it
Regarding ghosting in TAA, 90% of those cases are improperly implemented TAA, the motion vectors not being reliable in those cases.
For example the Guns leaving behind ghosting is because the Motion Vectors are ignoring the gun, they are drawing the gun on a separate camera ontop of the main camera which is used to prevent the gun intersecting the world.
Blurryness can also be significantly mitigated with "unjittering" the textures in screen space which a lot of implementations don't do, so that way only the edges of geometry jitter, not textures.
Another big thing is using Bicubic sampling for the reprojection instead of hardware bilinear which helps much more with sharpness than using a sharpness filter.
Just those things alone bring TAA quality up a significant amount, its just for some reason the standard implementations don't really do these things, probably because its a little tricky to implement the texture "unjittering" specifically in an engine like Unreal/Unity because every shader that samples a texture to the screen would need to implement it.
We really appreciate your high effort comment.
There is the argument that these are "improperly implemented" but at the same time you can find hundreds
of games that display these issues from AAA to indie. And what legitimizes them is the standardized abuse
of these flaws in the name of "optimizing" several effects when that is now clearly an invalid excuse and
has no significant impact on 9th gen.
RE: "hardware bilinear which helps much more with sharpness than using a sharpness filter."
Guessing you mean better clarity? You can add a sharpening filter to a game with or without TAA.
We strive for clarity since you can't add a "clarity" filter to either 😉👍(we'll look into it)
We looked into the counter-jitter technique from textures but didn't have too much concern over it.
Since we are big fans of the sample pattern found in the Decima AA research and it stated some
information about the samples being so close, that texture alteration wasn't necessary. But maybe
we should still test it ourselves considering their standards at the time (releasing with no motion
vectors & causing severe ghosting).
We don't have an official chat or online group but you might be interested in joining the r/f***taa
discord server which has a channel dedicated to developers looking for improvements in this area:
discord.gg/W7bWWfF5RW
We always like to remind people we are not anti-TAA, only against flawed TAA that can be abused
for covering hideous issues with other pipeline steps.
@@ThreatInteractive Regarding the bilinear you can instead use Bicubic another interpolation algorithm instead of Bilinear which is the default in hardware.
It reduces the blurriness significantly, bilinear by nature is very inaccurate and blurry.
I completely agree with how TAA gets abused through effects like SSR, SSAO, and SSGI they are generally poorly implemented then they rely on TAA to temporally blur it together to effectively denoise it. Even in deferred rendering some people opt to use Stochastic transparency and TAA to blend the pixels to implement transparency.
And things like TAAU while the idea is honestly great its yet another thing abusing TAA, Temporal upscaling is "fake performance", not an optimization its a great option to have, but DLSS and other things shouldn't be the standard they should be an option for those with incredibly old/poor hardware.
Optomizations in modern games does bother me a lot, things like Unreals Nanite shouldn't ever be used for games.
It doesn't improve performance hell it hardly even improves quality, it just enables developers to just slap in 500 billion polygon models consuming a billion gigabytes of data.
Even things like lumen, why do we need such a degree of dynamic lighting when lightmaps can look even better support changing daylight cycles and is almost free to render.
@@michaels851 You mentioned using bicubic sampling, can you give more context on this? How do you change the reprojection type?
@@pakumies By default when you sample a texture the GPU uses Bilinear sampling, You can instead in the shader write your own Bicubic sampler to use instead, which generally produces better results.
@@michaels851 You talk about Lightmaps looking better, but I have never seen that before... not in cyberpunk or any game that gives ray tracing or path tracing