I haven’t played more than about 30 minutes of a Borderlands game. But from clips I have seen of all of them over the years, they all look exactly the same. Sounds to me like it’s just a poorly optimized game, as is standard for new AAA slop releases.
I am a premium gamer; if you want me to play your premium game, you’ll need to subscribe to me for $29.99/month or $324/year (that’s a 10% discount from the month to month!)
From my experience graphics doesn’t matter much in VR if FPS is fine. You can play HL Alyx on a what was sometime ago affordable gpu and get almost the same experience as with 5900.
You made this statement by using the most optimized high end VR title in existence. And the creators of the game their own engine!
Graphics do matter. That’s why you cited Alyx. Right? Because the game is impressive in many ways, graphics being a really big one. Graphics in VR have generally stagnated for the past 5 years since Alyx came out.
Graphics are why the interactions with bottles in that game are so impressive. Just to highlight one small thing.
You have a good point about Alyx. My opinion using VR is that there’s a point with graphics when it feels comfortable, any better doesn’t give much to the experience like if you see pixels your brain just thinks that’s how the world is. I don’t include objects being interactive into graphics here, but what people generally perceive as graphics ie textures, lighting and other stuff you need gpu for. Also there are very few such interactive objects in beat saber or superhot though you still feel being in vr.
That’s nice, he is kind enough to tell us that we should not buy his game if we do not have a monster gpu. He is only excluding a very small portion of gamers after all !
I’m still not convinced the engine is the problem. Maybe it’s not helping, sure, but heavy reliance on upscalers to achieve nominal performance is probably a bigger issue.
That, and shipping before proper optimization passes is probably more profitable in the short term, so publishers will push for that.
Yes, the engine could be used well, but it's used for it's out of the box "good" graphics, lighting and such. Which then yes, devs slap on shitty DLSS, frame generation or whatever at the end to reach a somewhat playable framerate (or "framerate number" should I say with the way things are going. Fuck you Nvidia).
No developers are going to spend ages tweaking the engine to get good performance when people will just buy the game regardless. I've yet to see a good performing UE5 game with good fidelity and I probably never will because it's entirely reliant on TAA as it's deferred rendering as standard. I hate seeing developers abandoning their own in-house engines just to swap to shitty UE5. I know, I know, it's all about the money...
The engine is a plague, as every developer is seemingly moving to it. Chasing "upgraded" graphics that no one asked for. All games consolidating onto one engine is very bad.
It's good for movies, bad for games. Give us good raster performance back, no TAA, no upscaling, no frame gen.
I partly agree with you in that everyone using the same UE5 engine is bad
But I really don’t agree that deferred rendering techniques are inherently bad. Maybe they cause negative incentives for developers that lead to worse games in the long run, but you might as well blame capitalism at that point
I like techniques such as TAA because they do work better as anti-aliasing in my experience. I’ve multiple times had the choice between TAA and traditional AA and I think TAA simply does what it sets out to do better. Upscaling and frame generation are also nice to haves as optional features people can enable. Sometimes I use them, sometimes not. But it is bad that companies use these techniques as a crutch, indeed, but I don’t want to see them gone
I really dont mind solutions like upscaling, but it should be for people with older hardware, so they can run newer games better.
Instead it is used as a crutch by developers to gain some "performance" out of their poorly made game (Not blaming devs individually here, they are all probably overworked on titles like this and they wont have much of a say in what tools or timeframe they have). You are right, it's a capitalism issue too.
TAA just looks like I have grease smeared over my monitor... the only acceptable AA for deferred rendering is SMAA honestly, but I still think it's a misused technique in most cases, I have only seen a few games look good with it. Games with it usually have lots of visual flaws, that they hope TAA smears over. But then you just get a blurry game.
I’m becoming more and more convinced it is the engine honestly. It is probably harder to optimize and devs not having enough time to do so if I had to guess.
UE5 can run well, but all the defaults that Epic suggests devs use are really quite bad for performance. They improve performance on horribly unoptimized scenes, but actually optimizing the scene would allow a 10x performance improvement at no reduction in visual fidelity. But devs don’t tend to optimize much anymore because those Epic-suggested defaults “take care of optimization”.
It’s mostly not UE5 exactly. UE5 just let’s devs turn on features that are performance hogs easily. Squad, for example, just upgraded from UE4 to UE5 but they took their time and did things in a smart way (like not using Lumen), and performance increased for a lot of people, with much higher detail too.
UE5 isn’t the issue. It’s devs who turn on all the features they can and ignore optimization because “the engine just handles it.” It’s got some really impressive technology, but it’ll ruin your game if you let it.
What? Some systems have worse performance, primarily if you don’t have enough VRAM, but artifacting and blur? What do you mean? Sure, there’s blur with TAA/FSR/DLSS, but that’s always true and cam be toggled.
You cant toggle it, or you get loads of shimmering, you cant use it because you get loads of blur. There's ghosting even without AA. This is the exact problem, there's no good implementation if you are relying on TAA and/or DLSS as anti-aliasing. Squad suffers it, the same as any UE5 game.
I guess I will stick to my “non-premium” games made by devs who actually care about providing experiences worth experiencing, instead of a checklist-driven, committee designed and overpriced games that are most AAA games.
I sunk 90 hours into Silksong since launch, and now I’m going through Nine Sols and playing PoE2 on and off. I won’t lie I’m hearing good things about BL4 minus the performance, but I’m not giving Randy a single cent and I’m far happier not engaging in AAA dogshit.
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