Cyberpunk 2078

[karaddin]

Disclaimer that I'm not familiar with this youtuber and think he's catering to the overblown hate at the start of the video, but I think this one makes a good point about why Edgerunners functions really well as a primer on Night City that makes the new player experience a lot smoother

 

[Werthead]

Enjoying this second run-through as a male Corpo (having been a female Nomad in my first playthrough), focusing a bit more on Power weapons this time around and having fun head-one-shotting enemies through walls.

It definitely feels a buggier experience this time round though. I've had my car literally vanish in front of my eyes, enemies occasionally sliding 20 feet to the right for no apparent reason (even when it drops them 50 feet to their deaths) and pulling out into traffic occasionally makes every pedestrian for 200 feet in all directions scream and start running around like lunatics for no apparent reason.

[karaddin]

Yeah I think I have had more of those bugs I'd class as minor in 1.6 than I had in 1.3.

Granted I've got a new graphics card and monitor since then so now I'm playing 1440p with ray tracing and some of the bugs do seem related to when the game is pushing your hardware further, so some of it might be down to that rather than the patch. 

They're the sort of bugs I notice but don't bother me as they don't disrupt game play really.

[Werthead]

I feel this is a bit of a "duh," article, but apparently Cyberpunk 2077 running on an nVidia 4090 is something else. 120fps at native 4K with everything (including ray tracing) cranked up to maximum.

[karaddin]

I think there's an update to Cyberpunk that needs to happen to fully unleash the 4090 as well? I think I saw that the 4### series will support multiple bounces in the reflections with an update to RTX rather than the current 1 bounce. I suspect that improvement from that is going to be harder to pinpoint in a screenshot but be really solid for the subconscious feel of the graphics.

[Ran]

16 hours ago, Werthead said:

I feel this is a bit of a "duh," article, but apparently Cyberpunk 2077 running on an nVidia 4090 is something else. 120fps at native 4K with everything (including ray tracing) cranked up to maximum.

As someone who is looking to get a new PC in the next months, it's awfully tempting to just go insane and get a 4090... but I just can't bring myself to justify it. I don't game that much, it'd be a waste. 

On a different note, RPS covered this mod which introduces cyberpsychosis into the game for players, with a straightforward police spawning mechanic for how to handle it if you go full-blown cyberpsycho. Smart.

 

[IlyaP]

18 hours ago, karaddin said:

I think there's an update to Cyberpunk that needs to happen to fully unleash the 4090 as well? I think I saw that the 4### series will support multiple bounces in the reflections with an update to RTX rather than the current 1 bounce. I suspect that improvement from that is going to be harder to pinpoint in a screenshot but be really solid for the subconscious feel of the graphics.

There's so much talk about the graphics, and yet...I am still frustrated by how hair (be it beard hair or head hair, etc.) looks nowhere near as realistic as, well, nearly everything else. Why is hair such a challenge? 

[karaddin]

4 hours ago, IlyaP said:

There's so much talk about the graphics, and yet...I am still frustrated by how hair (be it beard hair or head hair, etc.) looks nowhere near as realistic as, well, nearly everything else. Why is hair such a challenge? 

There's a specific term for what's happening with hair in it but I forget it lol. It improves a lot at higher resolution. It does improve at higher resolution but doesn't go away

https://www.reddit.com/r/LowSodiumCyberpunk/comments/xw568t/this_game_literally_makes_my_graphics_card_scream/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

[IlyaP]

11 hours ago, karaddin said:

There's a specific term for what's happening with hair in it but I forget it lol. It improves a lot at higher resolution. It does improve at higher resolution but doesn't go away

https://www.reddit.com/r/LowSodiumCyberpunk/comments/xw568t/this_game_literally_makes_my_graphics_card_scream/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

I wonder if...oh what's his face name, @karaddin? Calibear? Kalbear? The forum member here who works in videogames? I'm blanking on his name and now it makes The Ilya a sadpanda.png! :\

 

[IlyaP]

As in, like, he might know the term you're after! 

[Ran]

4 hours ago, IlyaP said:

As in, like, he might know the term you're after! 

This thread may shed some light in the issue. Without seeing what you're seeing, hard to say if there's anything more to it than that the TAA has a hard time with hair.

[karaddin]

4 hours ago, IlyaP said:

I wonder if...oh what's his face name, @karaddin? Calibear? Kalbear? The forum member here who works in videogames? I'm blanking on his name and now it makes The Ilya a sadpanda.png! :\

 

You're not blanking on his name, he's just changed it lol. The poster formerly known as kalbear currently goes by @Kalnestk OblastOblast

Ran got the term I was trying to think of, the TAA stands for temporal anti aliasing and apparently it does poorly with large numbers of somewhat transparent strands that are all on top of each other and moving constantly. So I guess a case of trying to do it better (ie actually rendering individual hair strands) can result in worse initial results on some measures than the easier options games have often used.

[IlyaP]

4 hours ago, Ran said:

This thread may shed some light in the issue. Without seeing what you're seeing, hard to say if there's anything more to it than that the TAA has a hard time with hair.

Thank you Ran! <3 

[IlyaP]

3 hours ago, karaddin said:

You're not blanking on his name, he's just changed it lol. The poster formerly known as kalbear currently goes by @Kalnestk OblastOblast

Ran got the term I was trying to think of, the TAA stands for temporal anti aliasing and apparently it does poorly with large numbers of somewhat transparent strands that are all on top of each other and moving constantly. So I guess a case of trying to do it better (ie actually rendering individual hair strands) can result in worse initial results on some measures than the easier options games have often used.

So this explains why even in games like, say, Dragon Age: Origins, even when running 4K textures, the beards and hair still look...insanely awful. 

@Kalnestk Oblast, what would it take, in your professional opinion, to get hair in videogames to look as authentic and real as they do in, well, real life? Is this the final frontier of realism in videogames? 

[Ran]

@IlyaP

Here is a thread on Reddit discussing TAA's downsides and what alternatives are and why they aren't being used right now. In a related thread, someone suggested the following: "About TAA blur, go into GeForce Experience with Alt + F3 and add a sharpness filter with 50%, and maybe 20% ignore film grain. It look way better." Personally, I suspect how well that works is entirely dependent on the individual's tastes, but maybe that's something to try.

 

The first thread revealed there's even an entire subreddit devoted to complaining about TAA called FuckTaa. Heh. Also, from there, there's a method of disabling TAA entirely. Beware the jaggies...

[Secretary of Eumenes]

Isnt the problem that you have to render each strand of hair and all of its physics, including the physics of its physics with the physics of other hairs?

 

[Ran]

Honestly, the physics part isn't so bad, they've done a lot with hair effects to make it move more naturally and all.  To my understanding, the real issue is that long hair like that tends to need lots of alpha masking of textures and that rendering engines have a tough time with handling lots of layered alphas, so you get that flicker effect at times.

I suspect a move to Unreal Engine will help for the next games out of CDPR, I've seen some pretty nice hair in UE.

[Werthead]

I'm glad to see they fixed the races so the cars don't constantly teleport in and out of existence as a way of keeping up with you artificially.

Less pleased that they otherwise haven't fixed the races at all, so you can still outgun sports cars in the Beast and leave them in the dust (!), and now without the teleporting trick you simply win each race by around 30 or 40 seconds.

Also, I'm trying to work out how the difficulty works (playing on the second-hardest difficulty this time, pretty sure I played on the second-easiest first time). I definitely feel more fragile than I did in my first playthrough but so do the enemies, much less bullet-spongey than before, so it kind of just evens out rather than actually is more difficult.

Bit odd this time around to have Panam as the love interest and Judy as best friend for life, which is the reverse of how it went down in my first playthrough.

Edited October 15, 2022 by Werthead

[Werthead]

Mike Pondsmith talking about cyberpsychosis, how it works, how David was able to handle it and why it wasn't really a problem for V.

[IlyaP]

10 hours ago, Ran said:

@IlyaP

Here is a thread on Reddit discussing TAA's downsides and what alternatives are and why they aren't being used right now. In a related thread, someone suggested the following: "About TAA blur, go into GeForce Experience with Alt + F3 and add a sharpness filter with 50%, and maybe 20% ignore film grain. It look way better." Personally, I suspect how well that works is entirely dependent on the individual's tastes, but maybe that's something to try.

 

The first thread revealed there's even an entire subreddit devoted to complaining about TAA called FuckTaa. Heh. Also, from there, there's a method of disabling TAA entirely. Beware the jaggies...

*gasp*

Ran, I am SO hugely appreciative that you went and found all this for me! Seriously! It's something I've long wondered about but lacked the knowledge to even know how to research properly! Thank you so very very much! I'm hoping this didn't take up too much of your personal time to look up! Either way - a beer on the house from yours truly!