Crysis Remastered

[DalekFlay]

It will be hilarious if it actually ends up looking worse than 2007 version when they finally shit it out.

I'd say more likely to be a mixed bag than outright worse. There are reasons to prefer the remasters of Doom 3, Bioshock, etc... just also reasons not to.

 

[aweigh]

Here's what a new entry in Crysis (or a next-gen remake) could look like:

 

[agentorange]

Looks like Crysis 1 but less sharp and with a bunch of honey-glaze applied to it. Crysis 2 looked significantly worse than Crysis 1 because of all the post-effects which also made the game run worse.

Things I will be impressed by: more responsive and natural AI, larger amounts of enemies on-screen, destructible environments, effects that have some tangible gameplay application like spreading fire or in the case of Crysis if there was some kind of dynamic freezing mechanic
Things I do not give a shit about: more lighting and reflection effects

 

[JDR13]

Definitely needs better anti-aliasing, or maybe it just wasn't turned on in that demo. There was some pretty nasty temporal aliasing in some scenes.

 

[aweigh]

"Post-Effects Bad" isn't the whole story, tho.

I also agree that Crysis 1 looks way better than its sequels, but let's not pretend Crysis 1 didn't have post-effects coming out the wazoo, they were just done better and more subtle. The game as a whole also had a more pleasing realistic aesthetic with a more neutral look to it than the over-saturated and overly-warm sequels.

I've taken to thinking of "post effects" the way I do about CGI in modern movies: good tool but it's all about how you use it. The best CGI is the kind you don't even notice, and I think the same applies with video game FX.

EDIT: Personally, the only thing that I didn't like about that tech reel footage is the noticeable aliasing and noticeable texture crawl and shimmering. Needs much better temporal anti-aliasing, otherwise it will look bad.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Ever since they launched Crytek 3.x, they screwed up the lighting system. Don't know, it just looks like any other modern game engine out there.

Crysis 1/Warhead running on Crytek 2 had this very realistic "feel" to its lighting. They have screwed it up ever since.

 

[Van-d-all]

Ever since they launched Crytek 3.x, they screwed up the lighting system. Don't know, it just looks like any other modern game engine out there.

Crysis 1/Warhead running on Crytek 2 had this very realistic "feel" to its lighting. They have screwed it up ever since.

Essentially this:

from

to

 

[Multidirectional]

Ever since they launched Crytek 3.x, they screwed up the lighting system. Don't know, it just looks like any other modern game engine out there.

Crysis 1/Warhead running on Crytek 2 had this very realistic "feel" to its lighting. They have screwed it up ever since.

Doubt it has anything to do with engine version, Kingdom Come has same kind of photorealistic style as Crysis 1 and pretty sure it doesn't run on older version.

EDIT: Personally, the only thing that I didn't like about that tech reel footage is the noticeable aliasing and noticeable texture crawl and shimmering. Needs much better temporal anti-aliasing, otherwise it will look bad.

And of course since it now will run on DX11/12 forcing SGSSAA on Nvidia Inspector won't be possible anymore.

 

[aweigh]

Speaking of Kingdom c00m, I adore the game but it had a really bad temporal AA implementation... one of the worst implementations I've seen in a while. I wonder if that was an engine deficit or if the devs just didn't get it right.

EDIT: This is me speculating but I think the artifacts/errors/blurriness/general shittiness of the TXAA in Kingdom c00m is because of the voxelized global illumination that Cryengine uses. You can actually sometimes count the voxels in kingdom c00m, in certain instances, and it looks really bad.

 

[AW8]

I've seen several graphical overhauls for Crysis, and all of them are trash that makes the game look worse. Unfortunately, this remaster falls into the same category.

The oversaturated colors make it look like some toyland, just look at this shit. It looks like a Lego game!

All the colors have been turned up to 11 with some blur on top.

Look at the horizon in the second comparison - it has been blurred out to the point of non-existance.

Item 1: Korean ship in the water against the horizon.
Item 2: Korean ship floating in the air! They turned it into a fucking ghost ship!

 

[aweigh]

looks like shit when the comparison is side-by-side like t hat.

womp womp

 

[soulburner]

Colors saturation/vibrance increased... and the nanosuit suddenly became made of shiny chrome to increase visibility by the enemy... makes sense alright. Either you're cloaked or screaming "here I am!". I also love how the distant vegetation looks like - in the original, the fact that they are flat sprites is not immediately obvious, but in the remaster it jumps right at ya.

 

[DalekFlay]

I think a happy medium would be good. Tropical areas are pretty fucking green when the sun's shining bright.

The blur is what it is, MSAA basically doesn't exist anymore. You either play without AA, use blur AA or use blur AA and sharpen it like a madman. I'd take back every benefit of deferred rendering to have MSAA again, but one man can't change the world.

 

[JDR13]

The water is definitely improved, and I think the lighting/shadows look slightly better as well.

For a remaster coming more than a decade after the original though, it's not overly impressive.

 

[aweigh]

I think a happy medium would be good. Tropical areas are pretty fucking green when the sun's shining bright.

The blur is what it is, MSAA basically doesn't exist anymore. You either play without AA, use blur AA or use blur AA and sharpen it like a madman. I'd take back every benefit of deferred rendering to have MSAA again, but one man can't change the world.

Devs can use MSAA if they want to, lots of modern games use MSAA with deferred rendering like:

- Assassin's Creed: Unity
- Assassin's Creed: Syndicate
- Dragon Age: Inquisition (This should also mean ME: Andromeda can use it, though I haven't checked)
- Red Dead Redemption 2
- Grand Theft Auto 5
- Forza Horizon 3 and 4
- The new Tomb Raider games
- Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
- Prey (2017)

They tend not to bother with it tho cos MSAA doesn't cover all jaggies/shimmering/crawling, it only affects geometric edges which nowadays is only half the screen (or less), but plenty of games with deferred renderers have it. It's down to the devs on whether they think it's worth implementing it or not, i.e. if they're designing their graphics around temporal reconstruction or not. Like, for example, The Outer Worlds' devs probably could have included MSAA if they wanted to (no technical reason they can't), they just would never because the game's geometry is designed around temporal reconstruction from the ground-up.

EDIT: Though to be fair it might be an Engine thing now that I think about it, since I can't recall offhand any Unreal Engine 4 games with MSAA. Dragon Age 3: Inquisition, the Assassin's Creed games and Red Dead Redemption 2 are all on their own different proprietary engines.

EDIT 2: Oh, another modern AAA game series that uses MSAA are Forza Horizon 3 and 4. Another custom/propietary engine. The nuTomb Raider games also offer MSAA. Plenty of games have it. Hell, TR: Rise Of The Tomb Raider even offered sparse-grid super-sampled MSAA, something I hadn't seen in years. Another case of a custom/propietary engine.

EDIT 3: Seems I was right, a quick google search for "UNREAL ENGINE 4 MSAA" returns some stuff saying it is only supported in extremely specific scenarios and not for general purpose. The version of Cryengine used by devs for Lichdom: Battle Mage and for Kingdom c00m also doesn't support MSAA either.

Still, seems to be an issue. General purpose "engines" (more like toolkits tbh) should offer as many options as possible, not less. Rockstar's RAGE engine can do both MSAA and TXAA (even at once!) and it does both superbly. No reason other engines/tech can't do the same either.

Just another reason why Unreal Engine 4 sucks ass.

 

[aweigh]

The one thing I honestly don't understand is why devs don't include a sharpening filter. Unreal Engine 4 actually has a built-in sharpening filter that's pretty good, you control it by adding one of the 'r' variables in the Engine.ini of an UE4 game, think it was r.tonemapsharpen or something like that.

The only game I can think of right now that had a sharpening slider was Witcher 3, I think (and it sucked, better to use one of the reshade sharpeners).

EDIT: Just read this and it sounds reasonable

Consoles lack of memory bandwidth is a big problem with an antialiasing technique that uses a lot of samples and hence memory bandwidth. Since deferred v forward+ is a fundamental rendering choice it ends up impacting all games that are ported as well.

MSAA is hugely memory hungry, it can easily double the VRAM consumption, whereas other AA solutions are not like that. This could definitely have a lot to do with the current state of AA. With the push to 4k now standard it's even more doubtful we'll see memory-hungry AA solutions like that in the future.

 

[Black]

Remastering a game that still looks better than most AAA games and runs fine on modern hardware (besides the CPU fucker)/os is bizarre.

 

[Multidirectional]

Rockstar's RAGE engine can do both MSAA and TXAA (even at once!) and it does both superbly.

Even at once? TXAA literally is MSAA+temporal AA, it cannot even work without MSAA. Try enabling in it GTAV without MSAA. It's way more costly than TAA and in most cases doesn't look better on top of being Nvidia exclusive feature so no wonder it's not used anymore.

 

[Egosphere]

I've seen several graphical overhauls for Crysis, and all of them are trash that makes the game look worse. Unfortunately, this remaster falls into the same category.

The oversaturated colors make it look like some toyland, just look at this shit. It looks like a Lego game!

They Far-Cry-1'd it

 

[tritosine2k]

Deferred Shading with MSAA
Introduction
MSAA has always been a major drawback of deferred shading, since the geometry for lighting (in this sample, a full-screen quad) is separated from the scene geometry. Therefore we don't get the benefit of hardware determining which pixels are edges as it does in traditional forward MSAA rendering. In the deferred scenario, we have to be able to determine which pixels are complex and only shade them on per-sample frequency, with the least computation and in the least divergent way possible.

Complex Pixel Detection
The first important task in doing MSAA with deferred shading is to detect complex pixels, which are pixels containing more than one unique fragment. This sample implements two approaches to do this. The first one uses SV_Coverage, which computes the pixel samples covered by the current fragment. The following figure shows an example of SV_Coverage.

https://docs.nvidia.com/gameworks/c.../d3d_samples/antialiaseddeferredrendering.htm

Control does that afaict. It's kinda band-aid (irregular).
TXAA in itself is supersampling "wannabe", on a good day if celestial bodies are just right constellation :D.

 

[aweigh]

DalekFlay

This might interest you, here's some peeps in the UE4 forums discussing how to minimize ghosting/smearing with (UE4's) specific brand of TAA:
https://forums.unrealengine.com/development-discussion/rendering/106829-sharp-temporal-aa/page2

EDIT: They also talk about using the built-in UE4 sharpener. I haven't personally tried it out as I always just use ReShade's SmartSharp but hey, might as well try it out. Easier than having to install ReShade per-game.

The two main variables they are changing are r.TemporalAACurrentFrameWeight and r.TemporalAASamples. The lower the Frame Weight the less "ghosting" and "smearing" (and thus a sharper looking image) however at the expense of actual AA'ing (i.e. you get more aliasing); as for the AASamples variable the higher it is (0 - 32) the higher the amount of AA'ing (less aliasing) however at the expense of judder and jitter (things move around onscreen even when you're standing still).

You can play around with those to find what works best, though it seems most in that thread agree that a r.TemporalAACurrentFrameWeight=0.2 and r.TemporalAASamples=2 (or 4) are the sweet spot for retaining actual anti-aliasing and minimizing the ghosting, though obviously it comes down more to taste than anything else.

Obviously this is only applicable to UE4 games, so other games' TAAs are a different matter entirely, though I tend to find that UE4's TAA is the worst of all, tbh.

EDIT: The variables go in the UE4 game's Engine.ini file. All UE4 games have one either in My Documents or in AppData. Or somewhere else. Create a [SystemSettings] column and then put the variables below it; or just check that specific game's PCGamingWiki and they'll have an example to what specific tweaking method that particular game uses.

 

[DalekFlay]

Devs can use MSAA if they want to, lots of modern games use MSAA with deferred rendering like:

They tend not to bother with it tho cos MSAA doesn't cover all jaggies/shimmering/crawling, it only affects geometric edges which nowadays is only half the screen (or less), but plenty of games with deferred renderers have it.

My statement that "MSAA basically doesn't exist anymore" includes the fact that when it's used it's not really effective because of modern rendering. I just replayed Dragon Age Inquisition and yes it has MSAA, but without also having FXAA on it is a jaggy mess. Similarly recent games like Red Dead 2 and Doom Eternal are so built around TAA being used that if you turn it off the games look like a crazy mess, and Red Dead's trees look weird because they rely on TAA to do some kind of blending. So... it is what it, you either deal with jaggies, blur or sharpening and you pick your poison. I know your poison is sharpening... it's mine too, in some games. I just wish this wasn't the case.

 

[Melcar]

...Similarly recent games like Red Dead 2 and Doom Eternal are so built around TAA being used that if you turn it off the games look like a crazy mess, and Red Dead's trees look weird because they rely on TAA to do some kind of blending. So... it is what it, you either deal with jaggies, blur or sharpening and you pick your poison...

New games should just have TAA on by default and optimize performance with that on.

 

[aweigh]

You're right about MSAA not being used effectively even when it's available. Modern way of doing graphics just doesn't lend itself to real anti-aliasing, the only options in town is either a vaseline injection (FXAA), or a vaseline-injection that at least actually works (TAA).

As much as I love TAA it is extremely hard for devs to get right (apparently), and when they get it wrong the side-effects can be terrible: extreme blurriness, polygonal jitter, lights and other bloom effects flicker or show through walls, noise in the image, and of course the ghosting or "smearing".

The absolute worst SMTXAA I've ever seen is the one in Kingdom Come: Deliverance, it doesn't work 100% (still plenty of aliasing) and it fucks up the game's voxel-based global illumination and you see freaky shit every time you turn a corner like a piece of geometry warping or scaling into itself.

From what I read the game didn't even have it when it shipped, it was added later in a patch, and it shows.

EDIT: One game I've been playing recently that has superb anti-aliasing is Trials of Mana. Ironically an Unreal Engine game. I don't know what they did but that game has an almost perfect image with basically zero aliasing and zero shimmering or crawl. Could have to do with the simpler nature of the game's geometry, perhaps, as it is a "budget" game.

Haven't tried it Control yet but LowSpecGamer's video on the game showed off the game's built-in temporal reconstruction option for scaling the resolution and apparently it works orgasmically, making even a 576p resolution look clean, which is pretty crazy.

 

[DalekFlay]

Haven't tried it Control yet but LowSpecGamer's video on the game showed off the game's built-in temporal reconstruction option for scaling the resolution and apparently it works orgasmically, making even a 576p resolution look clean, which is pretty crazy.

Yeah, Control's AA solution is pretty great. At native res the game looks super sharp and detailed, but also very free of jaggies. It has an additional MSAA you can turn on but it barely makes a difference, because the post-process AA is so good. DLSS 2.0 though... to me that looks like an oversharpened mess, but some people love it.