Sulphur on 26/12/2016 at 09:39
Let's talk post-patch!
I, uh, dunno how it was prior to the patches because I bought it a few days ago, so let's just talk about right now instead! Dishonored 2 runs like Usain Bolt if he had to periodically pick squishy flies from between his toes. So, not as well as it could, but it's all right-ish on a 970 at 1080p, Very High, HBAO+ off.
As for the game itself, who knows! What I do know is that it is gorgeous, with much love given to lighting, architecture, and sheer incidental detail. For example: subsurface scattering. When light strikes Emily's hands, it casts a soft red glow through her skin. It's subtle, but adds to the overall effect. There's a beautiful sense of place, too. I infiltrated an Overseer office, and walking through it I could almost smell the dank musk of its smokily lit interiors, all lovingly detailed from the wood panelling to the ceiling fans to the lamp fixtures.
The little bit I've played of it seems to be good -- Dishonored But With More Stuff, the layers of which I'm looking forward to peeling back. But meanwhile, just drinking it all in, it's a damn good time to be a virtual tourist.
Slasher on 26/12/2016 at 18:58
I avoided this thread and most other literature on the game like rat plague, and I'm now regretting I did.
Underneath the performance issues, the game seems to be awesome. It's probably been said a billion times now but the world building is superb. Stepping out on the to the deck of the Dreadful Wale was more awesome than any sight I remember from the first game. After a number of hilarious screw-ups I managed to stumble through the docks with zero fatalities. I deliberately skipped some things since this game begs a second playthrough, but apparently it was a lot more than I thought because the end-mission screen said I left several thousand in loot on the table.
I made it to the interior of the apothecary before the framerate tanked enough that I decided it was time to quit. Running on a R9 390 I got barely a year ago and it looks like its day is already over. :/ For some reason, Radeon Settings don't seem to apply to the game, so maybe there's some room for improvement on AMD's side yet. But short of another patch from Arkane or some significant driver improvements, I'm thinking this one can probably go back on the shelf until the next upgrade cycle. Disappointing.
Gryzemuis on 27/12/2016 at 19:01
It seems that when you change speed (sneak, walk, run), the FOV changes to give you the illusion of speed. I find this very irritating. Is there a way to disable this ?
The game looks nice. But technically it doesn't seem very demanding. I'm running on Ultra settings. Is there anything I can do to make the game look prettier ?
I've installed ReShade. I've enabled SMAA (in combination with the in-game TXAA). I've enabled LumaSharpen (to negate the blurriness of TXAA). And I've enabled Vibrance to get a little extra color. Anything else that might make the game look better ?
Slasher on 28/12/2016 at 02:49
Have you tried disabling AA altogether and running at a higher resolution? That's the best image quality I've managed to get out of my system so far. I couldn't get TXAA's awful blurriness to go away completely with LumaSharpen, but running at a higher res introduces its own problems unless you've got a NASA supercomputer.
Gryzemuis on 28/12/2016 at 12:14
Quote Posted by Slasher
running at a higher resolution?
Thanks. That is a good suggestion. I'll give it a try.
Quote:
That's the best image quality I've managed to get out of my system so far. I couldn't get TXAA's awful blurriness to go away completely with LumaSharpen, but running at a higher res introduces its own problems unless you've got a NASA supercomputer.
I got a i5-3570K (4.5 years old now) and a gtx1080. I also got myself a G-Sync monitor, so running at ~45-50 fps should be not much worse than running at 120 fps (which is the case now). I've tried DSR with other games, but the problem was often that the GUI gets smaller. I wouldn't mind making the health-bar (circle) smaller. But when letters get twice as small, it might be hard to read the UI or the books and messages. I'll see.
Slasher on 29/12/2016 at 00:22
You might also try disabling the game's AA and enabling it externally through nvidia's tools if you can. With any luck you won't see a big FPS hit and it won't be horrible like the game's own AA.
Radeon users aren't so lucky.
Gryzemuis on 29/12/2016 at 01:30
Quote Posted by Slasher
You might also try disabling the game's AA and enabling it externally through nvidia's tools if you can. With any luck you won't see a big FPS hit and it won't be horrible like the game's own AA.
I already did that. ReShade is an external tool (a so-called injector). And SMAA is the anti-aliasing it can do. I prefer SMAA over FXAA, TXAA any day. Although right now, TXAAx1 with SMAA and LumaSharpen gives the best result. And indeed, the fps impact is very small.
I prefer MSAAx4, or even SGSSAAx4 if possible. But most games don't support that anymore. E.g. The Witcher 1 with SGSSAAx4 looked amazingly sharp and clear. And still high fps.
I tried running DH2 at 4x DSR. (That means twice the pixels horizontally and twice vertically, for 4x more pixels). It didn't really improve quality much over SMAA+TXAA+LumaSharpen. FPS dropped from 140+ to ~50. And even though I'm using G-Sync, it did make the game feel a lot more jittery. So I'm gonna keep running at my native resolution (2560x1080). There is certainly a positive side to running your games at 100+ fps.
I wish I could change the opacity of the markers. I'm not sure I want to play with without markers, especially not during the first levels when I don't know what I'm doing. But it would be nice to have them a lot less visible.
Sulphur on 29/12/2016 at 05:09
FYI, TXAA is MSAA plus a temporal pass to smooth out shimmer. Vanilla MSAA might get rid of the blur if it were an option, but then you'd have specular aliasing to contend with. Try setting the sharpness value higher in DH2 and see if that gets you results.
As for SGSSAA, it's possible to enable it via nVidia inspector for some games. You may want to check that, I know it worked in DH1. If you've got adaptive resolution turned on, that's also something to disable.
Renzatic on 29/12/2016 at 07:39
What the hell is up with all these acronyms? Did Sesame Street blow up or something?
Judith on 29/12/2016 at 07:49
Today's episode is sponsored by letters H, G and S, as in Huge Graphics card Syndrome.
