I'm assuming others have noticed this and it's been discussed, but I haven't actually see the discussion anywhere, and Googling the issue is returning no results.
In short: it appears (at least on my end) that Frostbite 3 in Battlefield 1 has at least two shader related issues that are surprisingly 'solved' by implementing TAA.
The two examples I've noticed; shimmering/ghosting reflections, and excessive glow on specular maps.
For the shimmering reflections, it is almost as if the shader
without TAA updates slower or more inconsistency and less accurately than with TAA enabled. It is most noticeable on Fao Fortress. Please see this short gif below, the first half with TAA
turned off and the latter half TAA
turned on. Notice the ghosting reflects, and then more accurate shader update.
The second example, the specular, overly accentuates the twinkling shine we see on wet surfaces, mud, and steel (guns, barbed wire, etc) under direct lighting conditions. In the first image TAA is
turned on and the specular maps are rendered appropriately. In the second image TAA is
turned off and the specular twinkle is excessively blooming (see wet rocky surface and steel on gun).
As noted with TAA enabled
all of these issues are solved. For what it's worth, I'm playing on a GTX 1080, ULTRA settings, with 130% resolution scaling. I've tried tweaking my GPU OC (to check hardware error), rolling back NVidia drivers, turning off resolution scaling, reducing
all settings to low, and so on. Absolutely no changes can be noted under any circumstance, indicating that this is a Frostbite 3 renderer issue in particular with how it handles shaders and TAA.
While using TAA is an obvious solution, it's not ideal, as not everybody likes the rather huge amount of sharping TAA introduces and would prefer to play without post processing AA (and rely on resolution scaling to solve aliasing).
Is DICE aware of this, and have they addressed why? Has anybody else noticed, and do they know of a solution I'm not aware of?