So today I finally decided after many crashes on the series S to upgrade to the Series X. Oh my the complete difference in the game, the colours seem more vibrant and all the routes including those from way back look so much better.
Welcome to the full fat console club, now you can indulge on everything that can be achieved with your fully fat Xbone. Diet consoles will always have a good few sacrifices attached to them that will impact your gaming experience in my personal opinion........
Let me guess, you played in HD mode on Series S and now on 4K mode on Series X? The HD mode actually screems for improvement and I really hope this will be the case in TSW6. The routes of TSW, TSW2020 and TSW2 are playable on 4K on Series S and are looking fine, but routes with TOD4 lighting are very stuttery and low FPS in 4K. I really don't know what to say about the colors, as I can't imagine DTG is making different versions of the game colorwise.
The HD is absolutely awful on my 1440p monitor — like everything is a blurred mess. I have no idea why, any other game is absolutely fine.
I can imagine that, I'm playing on a FHD monitor and it's already awfull. It's like 720P or lower with no AA.
I’m on a different console (PS5), but have also noticed the huge difference between HD and 4K modes, even though my TV only goes up to Full HD resolution. I guess it has to do with the different quality of textures, rendering, anti-aliasing etc. depending on the resolution mode. Once you enable 4K mode, the game does many of these processes with higher quality, so you’ll notice massive differences even if you don’t have a 4K screen. For me, I can notice improvements in sharpness (better ani-aliasing quality), colors (better textures) and reflections (especially on top of the rails).
The difference between HD and 4K modes is the render resolution - regardless of what actually makes it to your TV/Monitor and what resolution that is. It's basically the same as going to a PC and ramping the Screen Percentage up to 200% on a 1080p system, if you run in 4K on a HD system. The game will fully render a full 4K image each frame then scale it back to 1080p - and use the extra information from the much bigger image to get a far better approximation on each of the pixels in the smaller image. 200% scaling (or 4K on HD) means that from the rendered image, 4 pixels determine the colour and brightness of each single pixel in the smaller image, so the anti aliasing comes out much smoother and generally a much nicer image. When you run in HD, we use the standard TAA (temporal anti aliasing) on the image (PC users can choose which one they want, console users its forced to TAA as, tbh, its all most people use and the only other option is not as nice) - TAA tries to make up extra information out of thin air, by looking at multiple frames sequentially and how they change in order to add extra detail to the image. It does a pretty good job, but thats why at lower frame rates you might see ghosting, it's TAA causing that. Obviously making data up out of thin air is never going to be as good as coming down from lots of detail to average out a smaller image. The downside is that the render cost is MUCH higher for the 4K image than the HD image. It uses a ton more graphics memory and can contribute to the "out of video memory" problems in concert with all the other tons of things going on in the game, it also hits the GPU a lot harder. On the Series X you'll have a bigger texture pool, more video ram, and a faster GPU which makes 4K a much better fit, and on a Series X or PS5 i'd certainly recommend hitting the 4K option even if you're not on a 4K monitor as it absolutely makes a big improvement. If you run into any video memory issues (they'll still happen on the really complex routes like Frankfurt) drop back to HD to keep things manageable - but the vast majority of routes and content will run well in 4K and look fantastic. Not aware of anything we're doing to affect colours, but it's possible the console itself is doing that. Matt.
Thanks for the explanation Matt. I can totally understand downscaling a 4K image to 1080P gives better picture bacause then a render at native 1080P. However other games are having a much better picture when rendered at 1080P. TSW in HD mode is really hurting my eyes, while other games do look very acceptable. Can FSR maybe give a better picture? From what I found, there is a FSR plug-in for UE4. A game like Snowrunner uses FSR for AA, and it actually looks good on Series S. Another option is to implement a 2K mode, is this something to consider?
I use AMD’s VSR (which is similar to Nvidia’s DSR) to upscale my games from 1440p to 4K, without adjusting the in-game screen percentage slider. That slider stays at 100%, and the image looks extremely crisp. The GPU’s upscaling process also applies image sharpening, which improves visual quality beyond what the in-game screen percentage setting can achieve. This does increase GPU usage significantly, but the result is absolutely stunning.
I have just remembered, RDR2 also looks quite bad on my 1440p monitor. I put it down to the fact that it’s not X/S optimised but perhaps it’s not. Clearly it’s something to do with now the visuals have been set up
