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Why do modern games look so "fuzzy"

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

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

      • 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.

        • 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.

          • 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.

            • 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.

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

              • 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

                • 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.

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

                    • 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.

                      • 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...

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