So, like almost everyone else, I've been very annoyed by the recent graphics changes with Season 9. I don't know if Cryptic has changed the basic graphic requirements or what, but either way, I've been doing what I can do deal with the blurry, murky universe that STO has suddenly become.
The problem is, while I've tinkered and fixed some of the issues with lack of light and poorly-defined faces, I still have a problem with fuzzy outlines everywhere. How do I fix this? Do I have to slide up rendering on my graphics card?
So, like almost everyone else, I've been very annoyed by the recent graphics changes with Season 9. I don't know if Cryptic has changed the basic graphic requirements or what, but either way, I've been doing what I can do deal with the blurry, murky universe that STO has suddenly become.
The problem is, while I've tinkered and fixed some of the issues with lack of light and poorly-defined faces, I still have a problem with fuzzy outlines everywhere. How do I fix this? Do I have to slide up rendering on my graphics card?
Under "Display" make sure your Resolution Scale is at 1.00
From what I've seen posted in ESD zone chat, you can also do this command line via "/renderscale 1" (odd that the command and the dialog box don't use the same terminology for the same thing).
Mac mini Server (mid 2011): 2GHz Intel Core i7, 8GB 1333 MHz DDR3, Intel HD Graphics 3000 512MB
OS X El Capitan 10.11.2
From what I've seen posted in ESD zone chat, you can also do this command line via "/renderscale 1" (odd that the command and the dialog box don't use the same terminology for the same thing).
This has nothing to do with that issue.
To get rid of that fuzzy appearance and that extra saturation (that is really annoying), you just need to deactivate the postprocessing. But of course, all the extra illumination and all those glowing annoying things will be reduced. What i did is, just increase a bit the brightness after that. And thats the only thing i can do. I just cant play with the postprocessing activated, to much illumination and in zones like the desert of nimbus 3, its really tedious to keep looking at the screen for more than 5 minutes. And as you said guys, those fuzzy lines drop all the details of the ships. I wonder if the devs on cryptic know what the hell are they doing since ages ago, because honestly the lack of skills they atesorate is really obvious.
I've tried everything except change my resolution, Postprocessing does not fix it. I set my cpu/gpu settings to max-medium, turned off post processing, and that far-field view thing, and turned Antialiasing up to max b/c holy pixels batman. But at low, max, posprocessing on/off... things are still blurry.
Delirium Tremens
XO of Training
Tier 5 Starbase, Tier 3 Embassy, Tier 3 Dilithium Mine, Tier 3 Spire
Join us at www.dtfleet.com
Nitpicking is a time-honored tradition of science fiction. Asking your readers not to worry about the "little things" is like asking a dog not to sniff at people's crotches. If there's something that appears to violate natural laws, then you can expect someone's going to point it out. That's just the way things are.
I've tried everything except change my resolution, Postprocessing does not fix it. I set my cpu/gpu settings to max-medium, turned off post processing, and that far-field view thing, and turned Antialiasing up to max b/c holy pixels batman. But at low, max, posprocessing on/off... things are still blurry.
Turning the antialiasing at max it is the worst thing you can do.
And its weird, since that fuzzy aspect is due to the postprocessing. If you cant fix it deactivating the postprocessing, then you are talking about anything else.
Oh wait, you talking about PIXELS??? then dude, it is another different problem. The fuzzy effect is not showing pixels, just a difuminating contour over all the ships and objects. I would say that you have your half resolution activated lol. And if it is not this, then im afraid it has no solution..
I've tried everything except change my resolution, Postprocessing does not fix it. I set my cpu/gpu settings to max-medium, turned off post processing, and that far-field view thing, and turned Antialiasing up to max b/c holy pixels batman. But at low, max, posprocessing on/off... things are still blurry.
A few comments...
antialias IS a BLUR. What it does is take the issue of pixelization of straight lines at a slight angle (looks like this ----____ sorta) and blur the pixles around the gap to make it a smoother angled line. The number of passes used improves the quality of the blur slightly (and how many pixels are affected by it). Its not a bad thing to do, but it does blur things.
Second, your screen is a grid. Circles, curves, everything is made up of straight lines. Kinda like calculus, an approximation of a curve with a bunch of short line segments... anything curved, rounded, or even straight along any angle except a multiple of 90 degrees has some issues if you zoom in enough or have good enough eyesight. One way to zoom in is to have a low screen resolution; the higher the res the more pixels used and the closer together the approximating lines are so the effect all but vanishes. Therefore increase your resolution to max; if using the windowed mode, increase your desktop res to max.
Third, a little blur is required for realism. If you take away the "added" blurring effects, everything looks like a plastic toy. Realistic graphics have "fog" and blur, same as the real world --- its why you cant stand a mile away from a city and see the individual windows and bricks on the buildings, particles in the air and lighting tricks and so on smudge details away (on top of distance fading of detail).
All that to say, I found the season 9 update graphics resettings (it seemed to reset my graphics entirely) to be totally wrong and spent about 45 min poking at it until it looked reasonable. Mostly, as already said, the effects are from post processing (which is one of the worst things in almost every game that has them... blech). It is, unfortunately, a trial and error process and not every change seems to 'take' right away. I would start with *everything* maxed out and turn off the post processing. If it still looks blurry, mess with the lighting effects next.
Third, a little blur is required for realism. If you take away the "added" blurring effects, everything looks like a plastic toy. Realistic graphics have "fog" and blur, same as the real world --- its why you cant stand a mile away from a city and see the individual windows and bricks on the buildings, particles in the air and lighting tricks and so on smudge details away (on top of distance fading of detail).
Yes, and it was really good before the patch. But now, that "blurry" effect is excesive, and it throws away all the detail of the screen. But the antialiasing has nothing to do with the problem. I see the fuzzy aspect even if i have AA at 8k or deactivated. As i said, the problem is the postprocessing. It should be activated, to grant that aspect of "realism" but i dunno what the hell cryptic touched in the postprocessing, that they made the graphics to appear 100 times worst than before the patch.Not to mention the extra saturation and illumination, that makes some zones impossible to play. But since cryptic will never fix this, or we stop playing (i dunno, i really feel that playing without the postprocessing is giving away a lot of color and shape details) or we get used to it. But our eyes.. well, i suposse cryptic doesnt care at all about our eyes.
It is clearly not right as released. Settings help some, but my suspicion is that lighting is hosed up and the effects of *that* made an overwhelming side effect to post processing, but its all guesswork from the client side.
My comment was just in case the OP does not understand graphics work. When everything is 100% crisp and at full detail, it is so obviously fake that it looks awful. A lot of people do not understand that.
Now with the Start of Season 9, I found that my frame rates would drop during the heat of battle, and they didn't do that before Season 9...
While examining my graphics setting yesterday, I discovered that the 'Quality' sliders which before, defaulted to 'Medium' quality, with the start of Season 9, now defaulted to 'High' quality. Setting them back to 'Medium' restored my combat frame rates to a reasonable level of performance...
btw why are shadows under cpu not gpu part of setings how much i know shadows are gpu intensive in games?
Im sure 99% it is a cryptic's mistake (actually i think i saw something like that when i was playing with the graphics options). , unless the engine uses some way to send the shadow managing to the cpu, something really really weird lol. I mean, of course the cpu can be used to manage the shadows, but i dont think any decent game nowadays uses that method. Unless you have a crappy gpu but then.. it does not really matter too much since you will have to lower almost all your settings..
btw why are shadows under cpu not gpu part of setings how much i know shadows are gpu intensive in games?
I cant make much out of your question, but a cryptic employee described shadows in another thread, they use mapping instead of polygons. So textures are (possibly?) 5 dimensional now (RGBA + S) and the S component (my name for it) would be the "height" of the "surface"'; the surface is really flat and textured and the "depth" for lighting is "faked out". This work would be done by the GPU normally; a cpu cannot handle the sheer number of flops for all the vector multiplications.
This is much more efficient than having true polygons and shining a light on them for shadows (ray tracing). But it still a lot of multiplications per second when you are talking 40-70 frames a second or whatever is "normal" on various hardware, across the huge resolutions and all the textures in play at any given instant.... its a lot.... even a quad core cpu would struggle with it, but gpus can do all this in parallel (architecture differences).
I think (fairly certain) this mapping trick is the current standard way to handle shadows and lighting -- not 100% up on it, been a few years since I did heavy 3-d.
Well, it can be more efficient, but the results are far from being good.. lol.
That reminds me when the MMX cpus were launched and they used their properties to develop realistic shadows in real time, and i must say they were great, but the performance was terrible. This must be the opposite case lol. Hmm, i think i saw that method in the game "Outcast" or something like that? of coure that was hmm, about 15 years ago? or even before.. lol.
At least, shadows in STO are really crappy compared with so many games... sigh. Ray tracing was and is one of the best methods to obtain the best quality with decent performance, and its used in a lot of games. Its obvious that the devs didnt want to get realistic and good quality shadows. I dunno what other methods are, but im used to see shadows projected with the ray tracing method, and they are always really great.
I also did 3d modelling just about 1-2 years ago (in fact i have some federation custom ships i made as a hobby lmao, as well as the breen warship, the krenim warship and the timeship xD). And by then, ray tracing was one of the most used methods. I dunno why do you think it isnt now. At least it was in a professional way (of course i dont have the skills of a pro that works on that for a living, but i really did a extend research then).
Comments
Under "Display" make sure your Resolution Scale is at 1.00
Romulan Institute
D'Galan - Engineer
OS X El Capitan 10.11.2
This has nothing to do with that issue.
To get rid of that fuzzy appearance and that extra saturation (that is really annoying), you just need to deactivate the postprocessing. But of course, all the extra illumination and all those glowing annoying things will be reduced. What i did is, just increase a bit the brightness after that. And thats the only thing i can do. I just cant play with the postprocessing activated, to much illumination and in zones like the desert of nimbus 3, its really tedious to keep looking at the screen for more than 5 minutes. And as you said guys, those fuzzy lines drop all the details of the ships. I wonder if the devs on cryptic know what the hell are they doing since ages ago, because honestly the lack of skills they atesorate is really obvious.
XO of Training
Tier 5 Starbase, Tier 3 Embassy, Tier 3 Dilithium Mine, Tier 3 Spire
Join us at www.dtfleet.com
Joined January 2009
Turning the antialiasing at max it is the worst thing you can do.
And its weird, since that fuzzy aspect is due to the postprocessing. If you cant fix it deactivating the postprocessing, then you are talking about anything else.
Oh wait, you talking about PIXELS??? then dude, it is another different problem. The fuzzy effect is not showing pixels, just a difuminating contour over all the ships and objects. I would say that you have your half resolution activated lol. And if it is not this, then im afraid it has no solution..
A few comments...
antialias IS a BLUR. What it does is take the issue of pixelization of straight lines at a slight angle (looks like this ----____ sorta) and blur the pixles around the gap to make it a smoother angled line. The number of passes used improves the quality of the blur slightly (and how many pixels are affected by it). Its not a bad thing to do, but it does blur things.
Second, your screen is a grid. Circles, curves, everything is made up of straight lines. Kinda like calculus, an approximation of a curve with a bunch of short line segments... anything curved, rounded, or even straight along any angle except a multiple of 90 degrees has some issues if you zoom in enough or have good enough eyesight. One way to zoom in is to have a low screen resolution; the higher the res the more pixels used and the closer together the approximating lines are so the effect all but vanishes. Therefore increase your resolution to max; if using the windowed mode, increase your desktop res to max.
Third, a little blur is required for realism. If you take away the "added" blurring effects, everything looks like a plastic toy. Realistic graphics have "fog" and blur, same as the real world --- its why you cant stand a mile away from a city and see the individual windows and bricks on the buildings, particles in the air and lighting tricks and so on smudge details away (on top of distance fading of detail).
All that to say, I found the season 9 update graphics resettings (it seemed to reset my graphics entirely) to be totally wrong and spent about 45 min poking at it until it looked reasonable. Mostly, as already said, the effects are from post processing (which is one of the worst things in almost every game that has them... blech). It is, unfortunately, a trial and error process and not every change seems to 'take' right away. I would start with *everything* maxed out and turn off the post processing. If it still looks blurry, mess with the lighting effects next.
Yes, and it was really good before the patch. But now, that "blurry" effect is excesive, and it throws away all the detail of the screen. But the antialiasing has nothing to do with the problem. I see the fuzzy aspect even if i have AA at 8k or deactivated. As i said, the problem is the postprocessing. It should be activated, to grant that aspect of "realism" but i dunno what the hell cryptic touched in the postprocessing, that they made the graphics to appear 100 times worst than before the patch.Not to mention the extra saturation and illumination, that makes some zones impossible to play. But since cryptic will never fix this, or we stop playing (i dunno, i really feel that playing without the postprocessing is giving away a lot of color and shape details) or we get used to it. But our eyes.. well, i suposse cryptic doesnt care at all about our eyes.
My comment was just in case the OP does not understand graphics work. When everything is 100% crisp and at full detail, it is so obviously fake that it looks awful. A lot of people do not understand that.
While examining my graphics setting yesterday, I discovered that the 'Quality' sliders which before, defaulted to 'Medium' quality, with the start of Season 9, now defaulted to 'High' quality. Setting them back to 'Medium' restored my combat frame rates to a reasonable level of performance...
Im sure 99% it is a cryptic's mistake (actually i think i saw something like that when i was playing with the graphics options).
I cant make much out of your question, but a cryptic employee described shadows in another thread, they use mapping instead of polygons. So textures are (possibly?) 5 dimensional now (RGBA + S) and the S component (my name for it) would be the "height" of the "surface"'; the surface is really flat and textured and the "depth" for lighting is "faked out". This work would be done by the GPU normally; a cpu cannot handle the sheer number of flops for all the vector multiplications.
This is much more efficient than having true polygons and shining a light on them for shadows (ray tracing). But it still a lot of multiplications per second when you are talking 40-70 frames a second or whatever is "normal" on various hardware, across the huge resolutions and all the textures in play at any given instant.... its a lot.... even a quad core cpu would struggle with it, but gpus can do all this in parallel (architecture differences).
I think (fairly certain) this mapping trick is the current standard way to handle shadows and lighting -- not 100% up on it, been a few years since I did heavy 3-d.
That reminds me when the MMX cpus were launched and they used their properties to develop realistic shadows in real time, and i must say they were great, but the performance was terrible. This must be the opposite case lol. Hmm, i think i saw that method in the game "Outcast" or something like that? of coure that was hmm, about 15 years ago? or even before.. lol.
At least, shadows in STO are really crappy compared with so many games... sigh. Ray tracing was and is one of the best methods to obtain the best quality with decent performance, and its used in a lot of games. Its obvious that the devs didnt want to get realistic and good quality shadows. I dunno what other methods are, but im used to see shadows projected with the ray tracing method, and they are always really great.
I also did 3d modelling just about 1-2 years ago (in fact i have some federation custom ships i made as a hobby lmao, as well as the breen warship, the krenim warship and the timeship xD). And by then, ray tracing was one of the most used methods. I dunno why do you think it isnt now. At least it was in a professional way (of course i dont have the skills of a pro that works on that for a living, but i really did a extend research then).