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Why do modern games look so "fuzzy" (hexbear.net)
submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by doublepepperoni@hexbear.net to c/games@hexbear.net
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I rarely play anything from the past 5 years but when I do there's a noticeable difference in how the games are rendered compared to up until the early PS4 era. Transparent voluminous materials like hair or foliage have this fuzzy pixelated look to them, and there's a lot of rasterisation that looks like it's being rendered on the Sega Saturn. Then there's tons of odd shimmering going on everywhere, and I'm not sure if it's due to dynamic resolution scaling, ambient occlusion or dynamic reflections

Overall games don't look quite as sharp and defined as older games though they simultaneously have lots more detail. It's weird

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[-] FunkyStuff@hexbear.net 41 points 5 months ago

As Beaver said Temporal Anti Aliasing causes that, because it uses buffered data from the previous frame to speed up anti-aliasing calculations in the next frame. Another pretty big culprit is DLSS, though. If you render at native resolution the game will look much sharper than if you render at 66% then upscale.

[-] Beaver@hexbear.net 40 points 5 months ago

The ascendancy of Temporal Anti Aliasing is one major culprit. But it's also an aesthetic choice that the developers are leaning into.

[-] buh@hexbear.net 21 points 5 months ago

I don’t know if they’re still doing this, but in the 10s chromatic aberration was popular since it was a low cost (computationally speaking) way to make the game look “futuristic” even though in the end it just made games look blurry

[-] ChaosMaterialist@hexbear.net 17 points 5 months ago

2000s: lens flare

2010s: chromatic aberration

2020: DLSS/TAA

[-] doublepepperoni@hexbear.net 18 points 5 months ago

You forgot bloom

[-] ChaosMaterialist@hexbear.net 12 points 5 months ago

How could I forget the key feature of the 2000s? It's almost like I ~~Yellow Filter'd~~ blocked it from my mind!

soypoint-1 Bloom soypoint-2

Publishers :mystery-emote: Reviewers

[-] doublepepperoni@hexbear.net 11 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

To be fair, that was also my reaction watching Halo 2's opening cutscene in 2004

https://youtu.be/XFKoLeOXEDc?si=BO5rMVPrbfkj3eDS&t=106

So much bloom

[-] HexReplyBot@hexbear.net 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:

[-] neo@hexbear.net 7 points 5 months ago

ngl I love a good lens flare

[-] Moonguide@lemmy.ml 21 points 5 months ago

DLSS doesn't help, either. I've been playing a lot of Squad lately and it's a real catch-22. Use it, and you get okay performance but can't see shit out of scopes, don't use it, and you get a very clear picture of <60fps.

[-] EstraDoll@hexbear.net 21 points 5 months ago

oh i just thought it's because i haven't upgraded any of my PC parts in like 4 years and that it was never that strong to begin with

[-] ashinadash@hexbear.net 13 points 5 months ago

TAA, FSR, DLSS and XeSS have fuckin ruined image quality wholesale.

[-] Cowbee@hexbear.net 3 points 5 months ago

100% this. Older games at 4k look fantastic compared to newer games with TAA, designed around AI upscaling, and so forth.

[-] ashinadash@hexbear.net 4 points 5 months ago

They really did absolutely fuck it. I like how we spent the PS360 gen with QAA, FXAA and other poor smearing of sub-720p resolutions, finally got out of that with (mostly) proper 1080p framebuffers on PS4 for a sec, only to ruin that immediately with TAA and then garbage "upscaling". Real banger that.

[-] Cowbee@hexbear.net 3 points 5 months ago

Devs push graphics beyond their reasonable limits in some weird arms-race.

Hollow Knight, Celeste, hell even Cruelty Squad all look amazing in their own ways. Graphics need to be smarter, not harder to process.

[-] ashinadash@hexbear.net 3 points 5 months ago

To me the most prominent example is the start of this generation: when the PS5 and Series X came out all the games were like 4k and 60/120, but once games targeted that hardware it became joever. Jedi Survivor at like 792p FSR and sub 30fps.

[-] Cowbee@hexbear.net 3 points 5 months ago

Every time, haha. I miss the old days where devs pulled clever tricks, or outright didn't increase fidelity due to the hardware, not trying to push only photorealism for every game.

[-] magi@hexbear.net 4 points 5 months ago

The push for photorealism has been to the detriment of everything else sadly.

[-] Cowbee@hexbear.net 3 points 5 months ago

Depressing, really. Art style over gritty realism any day.

[-] magi@hexbear.net 2 points 5 months ago

Ikr Unique world spaces over everything looking like reality.

[-] ashinadash@hexbear.net 3 points 5 months ago

Weirdly I noticed that, while the really heavy games got uglier and slower, most PS4 games still have decent resolutions (System Shock remake) unlike PS360 where resolutions tanked in the latter half of the gen.

But also yea I miss being excited for new hardware

[-] Cowbee@hexbear.net 2 points 5 months ago

Yep, I have a fancy gaming PC right now but once it dies I am going for efficiency and embracing stable refresh rates at decent PPI displays without upscaling, if that means a return to 1080p 24 inches I will go that route.

[-] ashinadash@hexbear.net 3 points 5 months ago

Absolutely based. My wife has an AOC AyyyyyOC 24G2 which is 24"/1080/144hz and it slaps honestly.

[-] Cowbee@hexbear.net 2 points 5 months ago

Nice! Consistently hitting that 144 FPS cap at 1080p, 24inches must be nice. Easier to hit the caps, smoother gameplay, lower power draw. I'm here for it, honestly.

4k can stick to movies, even if it can be nice, it's just too expensive to actually achieve at reasonable framerates for most games even with upscaling.

[-] ashinadash@hexbear.net 3 points 5 months ago

She tends to use 120 because A) matches her Zephyrus G14 screen refresh B) easier to hit C) 2× 60fps, but yeah it slaps. It also has freesync and gsync which are soooooo cooooool.

I have a few 4k blurays and that's it tbh, I do not see a reason to upgrade to 4K. Most GPUs still struggle yeah, so...

[-] peppersky@hexbear.net 9 points 5 months ago

I've heard that a lot of the issues of TAA and upscaling aren't as obvious when you render them out at 4k and also probably when you sit farther away from the screen, so if you game on an "old" PC monitor at close distance you are just not who these solutions are made for.

[-] NoamParenti@hexbear.net 9 points 5 months ago

Latest fad.

[-] CA0311@hexbear.net 5 points 5 months ago

I've been playing my n64 a lot lately and its way fuzzier than I remember, maybe they are just trying to recapture that magic

[-] Beaver@hexbear.net 3 points 5 months ago

I love that era, but it's in some ways the most objectively shitty that games ever looked. Do you have an old tube TV to play it on? N64 and PS1 really do look like shit on modern TVs, unfortunately. All the raster stuff is weird looking if you don't have scan lines.

[-] CA0311@hexbear.net 2 points 5 months ago

I have a large CRT that looks pretty good but honestly still pretty fuzzy, its been years since I tried that tho so I don't know if it would be a lot better than what I have now. Then I used a really small old ass flat screen for a while that honestly looked really good, I think just because it was so small it had to look pretty sharp. It stopped working tho :(

I have the n64 in my kitchen and use a thrift store flat screen TV I just got as both a second monitor and n64 TV. Its pretty old and has a hell of a lot of different inputs. Unfortunately the n64 looked like total shit on it... BUT I just got a s-video cable hoping it would make it a bit more bearable and at least on this TV its a huge improvement! It really fixed the image quite a bit, there's still a bit of checkerboarding with the pixels of different colours sort of hashing together instead of blurring together as they would on CRT. But its way more playable. I should try the s-video cable with the CRT sometime just for fun, but I think the reason why its such a huge improvement is mostly because the TV interpreted the composite image terribly.

All that to say, its still fuzzy as fuck, because its an n64 lol.

this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2024
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