I like DoF as it actually has a purpose in framing a subject. The rest are just lazy attempts at making the game "look better" by just slopping on more and more effects.
Current ray tracing sucks because its all fake AI bullshit.
this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2025
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The only game with Raytracing I've seen actually look better with RT on js Cyberpunk 2077. It's the only game I've seen that has full raytraced reflections on surfaces. Everything else just does shadows, and there's basically no visual difference with it on or off; it just makes the game run slower when on.
But those reflections in CP are amazing as fuck. Seeing things reflect in real time off a rained on road is sick.
I agree with this. That makes it even more jarring to me that mirrors inside of safehouses don’t work until you specifically interact with them. It seems so out of place in a game that has all of these cool raytraced reflections except for a mirror you directly look into.
I just don't see them as mirrors. They are video screens with a camera in them. ;)
It's also connected to a performance feature. They can load lower resolution textures for faraway objects. You can do this without the blurring effect of DoF, but it's less jarring if you can blur it.
The cost of DoF rendering far outweighs the memory savings of using reduced texture sizes, especially on older hardware where memory would be at a premium
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Bad effects are bad.
I used to hate film grain and then did the research for implementing myself, digging up old research papers on how It works at a scientific level. I ended up implementing a custom film grain in Starfield Luma and RenoDX. I actually like it and it has a level of "je ne sais quoi" that clicks in my brain that feels like film.
The gist is that everyone just does additive random noise which raises black floor and dirties the image. Film grain is perceptual which acts like cracks in the "dots" that compose an image. It's not something to be "scanned" or overlayed (which gives a dirty screen effect).
Related, motion blur is how we see things in real life. Our eyes have a certain level of blur/shutter speed and games can have a soap opera effect. I've only seen per-object motion blur look decent, but fullscreen is just weird, IMO.
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raytracing's the cool kid, keep him in