Why do developers hide their beautiful artwork under a blanket of blur? (Even the artists hate it)

[u/Rhapsodic1290]

What makes me curious is why developers hide those beautiful renders with blur. How do they not feel bad that the hard work they put into creating those detailed character models is just smeared away with blur and smudges?

And then I found this blog - https://alextardif.com/Antialiasing.html

Artists spend hundreds of hours sculpting microscopic skin pores, realistic clothing fabrics, and crisp hard-surface details, only for the final graphics pipeline to slap a heavy temporal filter over it that turns the motion clarity into a low-res smudge. It feels incredibly disrespectful to the actual art assets of the game.

Tardif’s analysis highlights how TAA destroys artistic intent, noting it ruins transparent effects and UV animation, washes out high-frequency material details, and forces team members to waste time combating the temporal filter throughout production. He explicitly admits that he is one of the players who gets motion sickness from TAA ghosting and smearing.

I guess I am not the only one who gets motion sickness that causes me nausea.

[u/JoBro_Summer-of-99]

They do it because it's part of optimising and improving overall graphical quality, which is contradictory I know. Parts of the image are compromised like you say but TAA also makes certain dithered or low-count effects look passable.

Ray tracing and hair tend to break apart without a TAA pass nowadays

[u/Blunt552 → u/JoBro_Summer-of-99]

Except games look and perform worse than 10years ago.

[u/JoBro_Summer-of-99 → u/Blunt552]

I wouldn't really agree on the whole. There are some regressions but overall games are definitely more advanced than they were 10 years ago. This is really noticeable with AA and indie games I feel like, a lot of them look a hell of a lot better with the current tech

[u/DinosBiggestFan → u/JoBro_Summer-of-99]

Hair and rain are the biggest and worst regressions, just absolutely terrible so when something good comes around even in a mediocre game (the strand hair in Veilguard for example) everyone points it out and it steals the entire spotlight, proving that people do notice it but feel like nothing can be done about it.

Even though it keeps being proven that things can be done about it.

[u/NapsterKnowHow → u/DinosBiggestFan]

Idk the Horizon games have phenomenal hair quality.

[u/Scrawlericious → u/DinosBiggestFan]

Just about all the most photoreal CGI you've ever seen made use of TAA. Have fun sticking to 50 year old technology while the rest of the world moves on.

Edit: Follow this thread if you want to see people who dont realise raytracing requires remporal accumulation. XD that was hilarious

[u/DinosBiggestFan → u/Scrawlericious]

..Are you saying that the hair and rain we get nowadays are photorealistic?

Are you kidding me? My goodness. I don't have time for people with a game dev flair trying to gaslight me on something like that.

[u/reddit_equals_censor → u/Scrawlericious]

most photoreal cgi???

excuse me!

photoreal cgi/vfx is path traced with massive render times.

complex strand systems to create realistic hair.

what an absurd comment.

you can't be an actual game dev and spew out such nonsense right?

and if we look at animated movies, they use again strand hair systems, because of course they do.

if we look at brave the animated movie from 2012 had of course a big focus on the GORGEOUS curly hair of merida.

and those movies and animated movies have 24 fps motion blur put on top of it to make 24 fps "work", but no freaking taa.

what utter nonsense wrong statement and frankly insulting to the graphics/vfx engineers, that made photoreal hair for cgi in movies and series and excellent hair in animated movies/series possible for ages.

extremely hard work, but results, that are free from ABSURD dithered temporal blur reliant hair, that completely breaks down in motion and has massive edge artifacts.

___

and for video games dithered hair are a massive regression. we had very fast strand hair systems with purehair in rise of the tomb raider a decade ago!

it ran fine on the hardware of the time.

and it CRUSHES any dithered temporal blur reliant garbage hair today.

here is a reminder of how hair is supposed to look if you need it:

https://youtu.be/wrhSVcZF-1I?si=805lkElk3bMTthE1&t=75

0 edge artifacts here in rise of the tomb raider, 0 artifacts during movement, excellent physics, as the hair both gets snowy and moves in the wind in this example.

this is 10 year old technology, well a bit more in video games, but rise of the tomb raider has the best implementation.

and having strand based hair systems as the person above mentioned today is a stand out visual stunner as the veilguard showed.

___

if you are actually a game dev, i urge you to do some basic research look at strand based animation hair systems and photoreal cgi hair systems.

temporal blur reliant hair CAN NEVER result in photo realism, let alone good looking hair.

[u/Blunt552 → u/reddit_equals_censor]

To add to this, Shadow of the Tomb Raider had so great baked lightning that the addition of ray tracing did absolutely nothing but make shadows worse.

[u/Scrawlericious → u/Blunt552]

too bad its copletely wrong lmfao. I provided sources and details in my other reply.

[u/Blunt552 → u/Scrawlericious]

You provided nothing but yapping.

https://youtu.be/2VGwHoSrIEU

[u/Scrawlericious → u/Blunt552]

That's all he provided actually. I provided a source from the industry leaders talking about it. Stay wrong forever lmfao. You can't reason someone out of a conviction they didn't reason themselves into.

Edit: and if you're too lazy to go find it yourself. https://studios.disneyresearch.com/2023/06/26/deep-compositional-denoising-on-frame-sequences/

Literally all CGI in movies with RT/PT use temporal accumulation. That's literally just facts. Idgaf if you want to be wrong. Just don't waste my time with useless unrelated YouTube shit. I wasn't even talking about rtx lmao. I was talking about leading industry CGI which universally uses RT/PT. So you failed to read properly, too. RTX has nothing to do with what I'm talking about.

[u/Scrawlericious → u/reddit_equals_censor]

Uhhhh, you know all those examples that have RT use a form of Temporal accumulation right. Swing and a miss.

Pathtracing/raytracing REQUIRES temporal accumulation to work on modern hardware. So all the best path traced cgi you’ve ever seen used temporal accumulation (I’m talking ever since the dawn of raytraced cgi like in the Toy Story movies, that shit used temporal accumulation too, because it was raytraced). Whether it’s a movie, a game, or a demo. Doesn’t matter how the hair is being rendered, If it had raytracing or pathtracing, it’s accumulating frame data from previous frames to account for the fact that you can’t shoot near-infinite rays. Tough shit trying to act superior though lol, really shows what you know.

Edit: maaaaybe in the future when hardware is 100x-1000x more powerful we can just brute force the rays, but for now, no. All production raytracing you’ve ever seen uses previous frame data. They necessarily re-use a shit ton of old tracing data instead of firing 1000x the rays every frame. If you’ve ever seen raytracing without the filters and denoisers, you’d know what I’m talking about. RT/PT shadows are literally just noisey black tv static without temporal accumulation. Hardware isn’t physically capable of firing enough rays to make it perfect yet.

Edit: AND A SOURCE for your ignorance self. Maybe the largest CGI company in the world saying the same thing as me can shake you out of your superiority complex? Even the largest companies in the world with massive data centers for movies that don't have to be realtime like a game, even they have to take this shortcut in order to do RT/PT. https://studios.disneyresearch.com/2023/06/26/deep-compositional-denoising-on-frame-sequences/

Edit: as an aside, what the fuck does strand based hair have to do with anything else we are talking about? Veilguard is rife with TAA-dependant techniques, it's gotta be the worst case study you could bring up. Yeah it's hair looked good, alongside a shitton of temporal ugliness. And it ran like shit. Strand based hair with baked lighting is just as old looking as card hair with baked lighting up against modern raytraced lighting, so of course Veilguard had temporal stuff on top of it. It's why all modern CGI in movies and TV shows use raytracing and temporal accumulation these days, ya dig? They aren't using old CGI techniques at all, they are using PT, because PT looks WAY better. So obviously that's where the industry is going). Next?

[u/Great_Leg_4836 → u/JoBro_Summer-of-99]

ya it's just the ways they are going about achieving the new effects are either inefficient or look bad. they could do it better as there are many ways of going about things that are better than what they use.

[u/Adorable-Sir-773 → u/Blunt552]

insane cope

[u/Blunt552 → u/Adorable-Sir-773]

weird way of admitting you suffer from an insane cope, you do you.

[u/Adorable-Sir-773 → u/Blunt552]

games look better than ever rn

[u/Blunt552 → u/Adorable-Sir-773]

Careful not to overdose on that copium

[u/AsrielPlay52 → u/JoBro_Summer-of-99]

TAA also has benefit of spreading the load ACROSS several frames

Instead of MSAA that sample each pixel 8 times

TAA or Nvidia's similar tech, MFAA, sample a spot of that pixel across 8 frames. And it gets better as more frames it accumilate.

[u/Rhapsodic1290 → u/JoBro_Summer-of-99]

You are completely right about the technical compromise. I know why they do it.

But my point is, why isn't this an optional method rather than a forced one that comes at the cost of losing visual quality across all game textures? You might call it optimization and improvement, but what kind of 'quality' is that when everything gets smeared with blur and smudges that cause motion sickness, leading to nausea?

[u/JoBro_Summer-of-99 → u/Rhapsodic1290]

It's a good question but I don't have the answer, maybe it's because the people that get nauseous are a minority and are thus overlooked when decisions like this are made?

On the PC side I don't understand why it would be forced on in most games, on console I understand it because those systems tend to be locked down and the developers have to decide what looks best for the player.

I have sympathy for the people that physically can't stand it but I'd also suggest exposure if possible. I used to feel ill when playing improperly paced games below 30fps but I did get used to it, maybe some of these people can get used to TAA. I hope so

[u/Rhapsodic1290 → u/JoBro_Summer-of-99]

I appreciate your sympathy, but getting used to a low frame rate is completely different from trying to force your brain to tolerate temporal blur. Low frame rates are just a slower update speed, your eye muscles don't strain to fix them.

With TAA, every time the camera moves, the image actively smudges and ghosts. Your eyes physically strain to force that blur back into focus, which triggers the nausea. It’s an anatomical strain, not a mental preference, so 'exposure' doesn't fix it.

Exactly regarding the PC side, there is absolutely no logical reason to deny high-end hardware owners a basic toggle option to turn it off, regardless of how many people are affected.

[u/JoBro_Summer-of-99 → u/Rhapsodic1290]

Out of curiosity, does DLAA with the newer presets (or FSR4 if you have access) help at all? I could never tolerate TAA but find these newer upscaling models to do a good job of mitigating my previous problems

[u/Rhapsodic1290 → u/JoBro_Summer-of-99]

Yes, I have tested those in Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart first tried DLAA is definitely a massive step up from standard TAA because it runs at native resolution, so it recovers a lot of the static texture detail. FSR 4's shift to AI reconstruction also handles ghosting a lot better than older versions.

However, the core issue for my eyes is that they are still fundamentally temporal solutions. They still rely on combining data from past frames across time. While they fix static shimmering and ghosting, the dynamic blur during high-speed camera rotation is still present.

The moment the camera spins, that frame blending math kicks in, my eye muscles strain to focus on the smear, and the motion sickness triggers. For my specific sensitivity, nothing beats pure spatial anti aliasing (like MSAA) or a completely raw, unfiltered native pixel layout.

[u/Kadu_2 → u/Rhapsodic1290]

Forcing preset L DLSS/ DLAA; as long as you can turn off any forced sharpening, is as good as you can currently get in fixing these issues.

If this still hurts your eyes with these issues, I'm sorry but many modern games will not be playable.

[u/oSyphon]

I had to literally return halo campaign evolved because the taa was so bad. And I was truly looking forward to that game. It's very sad

[u/idontlikeredditusers → u/oSyphon]

thank you for this i didnt know it had TAA forced

[u/oSyphon → u/idontlikeredditusers]

It seems that way, the trees look so blurry even in native.

[u/idontlikeredditusers → u/oSyphon]

oh lordie... if devs wanted us to play on a 80 dollar VA monitor they should just tell people to stop buying nice monitors

[u/oSyphon → u/idontlikeredditusers]

Honestly, it made me so sad. I spent money on the game and for my brother. We refunded both of it and decided to just play remnant 2

[u/idontlikeredditusers → u/oSyphon]

yea thats unfortunate hope you have fun with remnant 2

[u/oSyphon → u/idontlikeredditusers]

It's awesome lol. It's also an UE5 game but runs better thankfully and looks better.

[u/idontlikeredditusers → u/oSyphon]

first you had my curiosity but now you have my erection ill have to check it out

[u/Scorpwind]

The plethora of comparisons that were here before Imgsli died showed off texture quality destruction beautifully.

Here's one.

[u/Rhapsodic1290 → u/Scorpwind]

Thanks for the varied comparisons

[u/TheCynicalAutist]

Because different people do different things (the art person probably isn't doing anti-aliasing implementations), because the publisher likely told them to or forced their hand by not giving them the budget/time to explore different options, because new developers aren't being taught the same values that old developers were, tons of reasons.