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[nkarafo]

Remember the Genesis? It used dithering to blend it to fake colors and transparencies on old TVs using composite.

Remember the Saturn? And how it also used dithering because it was hard to program real transparencies because of a hardware limitation?

It's good that modern systems have no such limitations eh?

So why this?

A lot of Nintendo games seem to use this effect lately but other devs use it to dither things that get in the way of the camera, mostly foliage, for example The Witcher 3:

I remember playing a bunch of newer games where this happens, especially in stealth sections where you hide behind stuff and that stuff gets dithered.... But i don't remember the titles at the moment.

My point is.... Why even use this archaic technique on modern games? We used to get real transparencies for this effect so what happened?

 

[The Cockatrice]

A useful annoyance.

 

[RoboFu]

its in almost every games as its still a very good way to optimize. Like the examples above it's still SEMI transparent but it's only drawing half the pixels.

 

[cireza]

Looks like absolute poop and should not exist in video-games nowadays. It is extremely distracting, and it is everywhere in Switch games.

 

[nkarafo]

its in almost every games as its still a very good way to optimize. Like the examples above it's still SEMI transparent but it's only drawing half the pixels.

It looks ugly and distracting. Why not real transparency like before?

 

[RoboFu]

It looks ugly and distracting. Why not real transparency like before?

it only has to draw and calculate HALF the transparent pixels. transparency has to be calculated for each pixel.

 

[Calverz]

Just play it on a crt and you won't see the dithering.

 

[SJRB]

Ugly as sin.

 

[Thief1987]

Yeah it looks awful but it's an optimisation for the transparency so if devs don't have other ways they are kinda forced to use this

 

[Physiognomonics]

Just play it on a crt and you won't see the dithering.

back on crt tvs there was a point on using it.

 

[RAIDEN1]

Just play it on a crt and you won't see the dithering.

So I guess that's why it wasn't a big thing in the hey-day of the Genesis and Saturn, where as when you looked at something like the 3DO and SNES they never had such issues...

 

[Portugeezer]

The DK example doesn't look like transparency at all.

 

[DaciaJC]

Yeah, it looks awful.

 

[Skifi28]

Some games that use reconstruction have such low internal resolutions that the entire image is dithered. How developers think this is absolutely fine to ship is beyond me.

 

[Bodom78]

back on crt tvs there was a point on using it.

And there is a point to using it now,, as mentioned above it's an optimization technique.

 

[AJUMP23]

Dither me timbers these colors be blending.

 

[Loomy]

It looks ugly and distracting. Why not real transparency like before?

That is way more resource intensive.

 

[nkarafo]

it only has to draw and calculate HALF the transparent pixels. transparency has to be calculated for each pixel.

That is way more resource intensive.

So older systems were fine but modern ones can't handle it?

 

[th4tguy]

It's an easy way to get some additional performance out of the engine. That's all it comes down to.
Transparencies can still be pretty expensive, especially when there are a lot on screen. This isn't a "once was expensive but now isn't" feature. It's cost scales with the complexity of what is on screen and how many pixels are being rendered. Todays hardware is much more capable of handling it today but it's still something that can cause issues if not optimized well.

 

[cireza]

That is way more resource intensive.

Older consoles could do this perfectly, yet newer consoles are more powerful but developers don't use it.

So basically :
- engines are shit and waste resources
- we don't know how to optimize anymore
- priorities concerning picture quality are wrong
- we don't give a shit lol
- all of these

 

[RoboFu]

So older systems were fine but modern ones can't handle it?

older systems were 320 x 240 and 640 x 480 with specific hardware for doing transparency a specific way . like the snes doesn't do true transparency like modern gpus. it uses two buffers and very limited blending math function.

GPUS do it how you would think it works in your head by drawing on top of previously drawn pixel and calculating the resulting color for each pixel. at 1080p up to 4k that's a lot of calculations for each pixel.

 

[Wildebeest]

For a lot of modern games they expect you to use TAA, AI upscaling, or whatever, to smear away the artefacts.

 

[Holammer]

Necessary evil, as it improves framerate.
No surprise most of the examples given are Nintendo.

 

[analog_future]

Yeah you're the only one. Everyone else loves it

 

[Imtjnotu]

Forspoken had one of the worse uses I've seen ever on foliage and particles.

 

[winjer]

It has become common in recent times due to devs rellying on temporal solutions, to hide it.
Dithering does improve frame rates.
With proper temporal upscalers, like DLSS4 and FSR4, it's barely unnoticeable.
But without these techniques, it becomes a sore sight.