• Hey Guest. Check out your NeoGAF Wrapped 2025 results here!

Graphical Fidelity I Expect This Gen

Yes, indeed. This was also clearly visible in the DF video. The PS5 Pro subreddit also mentions a lot of pop in.
But DF said this is "normal". They do videos where they zoom in 200% to see artifacts and say the image quality is bad but a game with massive pop in is normal... It's clear they didn't want to piss of the developer so they could get games early in the future. Same as their high on life 2 video where it's clear the game is broken but they say "Nah..., it's ok".
That post captured the essence of DF perfectly
 
Im just speechless regarding the technical presentation of Crimson Desert, this game is absolutely beaitiful and a technical masterpiece, without a question the most beautiful Open World game in the market right now, and its hard to think that future games can exceed that. Especially with Ray Reconstruction it looks fantastic, almost like a movie. The lightning, the asset quality, everything looks superb, every material looks real.

Here some screenshots I made in 4K DLDSR Ultrawide, max settings, Ray Reconstruction and Reshade:

NOmZuIX.jpeg

IxH6k49.jpeg

dUNphXc.jpeg

05PN661.jpeg

BA0SJOv.jpeg

N30z0ua.jpeg
 
Pop-in is always disregarded when it's imo the worst visual flaw.
Not just pop-in. Draw distance. For the longest time, i was the only one pointing out just how bad the draw distance in Horizon FW could get. DF made no mention of how 99% of the map is blocked by fog.

Cyberpunk also has really bad pop-in especially when driving. Silence from DF.

They need to fix the pop-in up close in Crimson Desert, but at least they have a phenomenal draw distance for distant objects. I have no idea how you get that part right and completely fuck up whats right in front of you.
 
Im just speechless regarding the technical presentation of Crimson Desert, this game is absolutely beaitiful and a technical masterpiece, without a question the most beautiful Open World game in the market right now, and its hard to think that future games can exceed that. Especially with Ray Reconstruction it looks fantastic, almost like a movie. The lightning, the asset quality, everything looks superb, every material looks real.

Here some screenshots I made in 4K DLDSR Ultrawide, max settings, Ray Reconstruction and Reshade:

NOmZuIX.jpeg

IxH6k49.jpeg

dUNphXc.jpeg

05PN661.jpeg

BA0SJOv.jpeg

N30z0ua.jpeg
omfg
 
No one is disagreeing that lighting makes a huge difference, that's why this forum is basically us wanking off to how good path tracing looks and how disappointed we are with lighting tech in most games this gen. Applying a dumb 2d ai filter isn't improving lighting if it can't access the actual game pipeline, it's literally just guessing and looks stupid and out of place. This tech is clearly too early, if it could plug-in to the game engine and actually access geometry, material and lighting data correctly I think we would be much more impressed by it. Where has Nvidia said it would be able to do this when running on a single card, that's just pure hopium. Yes, perhaps in future versions, but you're telling me they decided to demo it so poorly but everything will be fixed later this year with half the gpu power.
its not hopium, nvidia told Digital Foundry and other journalists that they already have this running on a single 5090 in their labs.

I have no doubt they will be able to get this to run on a single GPU. they already said it scales with compute so other GPUs will simply scale down with resolution and settings.

The real problem is that the tech in its current state is guessing like you said. And its guessing because its poorly implemented. It's not done at the engine level. it does not have access to the zero LOD models. Concept art. It simply looks at whats on screen and hallucinates an image based on what its trained on. Hence, the massive completely different lighting and character models.

I would never play a game like this for the first time. Maybe i will for shits and giggles because i love me some photorealism, but this is a poor man's vision of the future. It is bastardization of what gaming and art is about. If Nvidia was serious, they wouldve released an AI model that takes regular games and applies path tracing to them even if GPUs cant afford to run them. But that would require integration into each game's engine and training on the path tracing model.

You have to wonder why they went with this AI model thats trained on photorealistic assets instead of path traced versions of games that exist today. It's because they are too busy smelling their own farts.
 
Crimson desert has pretty good NPC models for such massive open world game (and they all have Ai unlike many other recent games where they are just static objects). The worst thing about them are materials and polycounts on clothes.

FhHsyGsvsC93dZDV.jpeg
RroHldCFwXFWzisI.jpeg
76ZVGpc.jpeg
rKM6hYE.jpeg
MX3PmE6EcQofK5EC.jpeg
y8Jlmzz0Sa40fYC6.jpeg


MCs are much better:

jXq3DVM.jpeg

ZQ89sVrHXtMokHND.jpeg


Kliff looks badass here :messenger_heart: Outside of that clipping on cape...

For random side characters, I'm impressed:

k1p9T49vyOwuSFFJ.jpg
SB4sxDzGBgitH0Ao.jpg
pz0rVCrdjOdzTiDi.jpg


Sorry for awful too bright/too dark pictures. Capturing HDR screenshots is fucking pain on PC.
 
Last edited:
I'm playing on base ps5 idk if that makes a difference

Base PS5 version has image quality problem in performance mode. Game can't really show you details under TAA blur with 1080p base resolution.

If you have 120Hz tv - try balanced mode.

I think they could have limit some graphical options and try to Force FSR3 1080->4K reconstruction on base console, even FSR3 would look much better than what they have used here...
 
Last edited:
I genuinely dont understand why so many ppls are amazed by and praising the graphic of Crimson Desert, even calling it "next-gen". Have they actually played other open world game? Compared to ACS, and especially RDR2, which has a fairly similar environment CD falls far behind, by a huge margin.

My feedback of the graphics after more than a dozen hours of playing at 4K, max settings (without RR):
- The AA is extremely poor. I haven't tried native resolution yet, but I've tested all DLSS modes and none of them fix the aliasing. For a game with this much vegetation, it becomes even more of a disaster. Why is no one talking about this?
- Pop-in and pixelated everywhere, all the time.
- The water physics looks next-gen, but the water surface textures are blurry af, waterfalls also look very bad.
- The weather effects are underwhelming. Rain, in particular, is honestly terrible, like something from a PS3 game. At first I thought it was a bug, but after watching a few clips on youTube, it looks just as bad there.
-The lighting uses advanced RT, but it still falls far short of the baked lighting in RDR2. Moonlight, light rays filtering through forest canopies, sunrise, sunset, storms, lightning in RDR2 are truly stunning, but here, they feel extremely lackluster.
- Why is the contrast so fking high? Even during the day, shadows are pitch black like its the blackhole. The green of grass and foliage looks artificial, almost like plastic with LED lights inside.
- Torch and fire lighting at night is overly red, almost as if it's trying to burn your eyes.

The only thing truly worth praising is its top tier optimization.
Previously, there was another game praised as "next-gen" and "CGI-level" that I couldn't understand either: FF 16.
 
I genuinely dont understand why so many ppls are amazed by and praising the graphic of Crimson Desert, even calling it "next-gen". Have they actually played other open world game? Compared to ACS, and especially RDR2, which has a fairly similar environment CD falls far behind, by a huge margin.

My feedback of the graphics after more than a dozen hours of playing at 4K, max settings (without RR):
- The AA is extremely poor. I haven't tried native resolution yet, but I've tested all DLSS modes and none of them fix the aliasing. For a game with this much vegetation, it becomes even more of a disaster. Why is no one talking about this?
- Pop-in and pixelated everywhere, all the time.
- The water physics looks next-gen, but the water surface textures are blurry af, waterfalls also look very bad.
- The weather effects are underwhelming. Rain, in particular, is honestly terrible, like something from a PS3 game. At first I thought it was a bug, but after watching a few clips on youTube, it looks just as bad there.
-The lighting uses advanced RT, but it still falls far short of the baked lighting in RDR2. Moonlight, light rays filtering through forest canopies, sunrise, sunset, storms, lightning in RDR2 are truly stunning, but here, they feel extremely lackluster.
- Why is the contrast so fking high? Even during the day, shadows are pitch black like its the blackhole. The green of grass and foliage looks artificial, almost like plastic with LED lights inside.
- Torch and fire lighting at night is overly red, almost as if it's trying to burn your eyes.

The only thing truly worth praising is its top tier optimization.
Previously, there was another game praised as "next-gen" and "CGI-level" that I couldn't understand either: FF 16.

RDR2 looked like PS4 game when it launched and it still looks like PS4 game (just with high resolution and frame rate on pc).

I don't get why people are so obsessed about visuals of 2018 title. It's not in the same league as crimson desert (or AC shadows).
 
Last edited:
Man, this game is such a disappointment graphically. Not because it doesnt look excellent, it does! But its image quality and shadow flickering just ruins the immersion for me. It just feels like a very unstable image and i hate it. the lighting, the foliage, the art design, the NPCs, the materials on the NPCs, ray tracing, all are top notch but i saw these weird squiggly line artifacts when i went to the abyss and moving from performance to quality didnt exactly fix anything.

the open world trees and foliage doesnt resolve that well either with dlss performance. interiors are just amazing looking and feel path traced. this is way better interior lighting than anything ive seen from avatar and ac shadows. there is so much to like here. i love how detailed the world feels. i love the NPC routines. this feels like a rockstar game with just how much NPCs do in towns, villages and around the open world.

but not having rt sun shadows is causing a very unstable image that dlss performance just cant fix. i went down to 30 fps and dlss quality and its still not clean enough. its not bad, but just not clean like other games ive played this gen on consoles including UE5 and snowdrop games. for a game thats supposed to be super optimized, i am disappointed in just how poor it runs even at dlss performance and looks far worse (image clarity wise) than mafia did at 720p internal resolution.

lpbo7G9uYps2v5Uh.jpg
 
RDR2 looked like PS4 game when it launched and it still looks like PS4 game (just with high resolution and frame rate on pc).

I don't get why people are so obsessed about visuals of 2018 title. It's not in the same league as crimson desert (or AC shadows).
So let me remind you what RDR2 actually looks like.
These are images I took from a thread on ...Era, captured on November 6, 2019 just a day after the PC version launched. So these are definitely from the base game, with no additional graphics mods ( or possibly with a simple ReShade preset )
49026764548_c67105bf2a_3k.jpg

49026729713_b731915d15_3k.jpg

49044425683_e6e25cc524_3k.jpg

49047023282_e0bd4b37dd_3k.jpg


49031937917_628a0fb19c_3k.jpg

49031941152_8f6f03ac77_3k.jpg

49052158967_996c708744_3k.jpg

49051439083_28b569c39c_3k.jpg

49052160307_83084092e7_3k.jpg

49057251071_f7936ef6da_3k.jpg

45156d9e-03c2-4278-aa71-be256b9c76d2.JPG

db69afb6-f728-40aa-829c-644535511f8b.JPG

a2245545-f11b-425e-a80a-2ec171a66673.JPG




Now compare them to the CD images above, doesn't CD look rather ordinary? Keep in mind, these are still shots. During actual gameplay, CD reveals quite a few shortcomings (pixelated, pop-in, underwhelming weather systems/ lighting, cheap-looking color grading). A longer draw distance or sharper textures doesn't automatically make a game look better.
 
Last edited:
Uh oh, some players have discovered that Crimson Desert may have been using some AI-generated art here…





Time to get extremely worked-up & pretend it's the end of the world. 😱

What proof is there that they are AI geneated. We have similar pictures in World of Warcraft Vanilla in 2004
 
0d9c582b-6657-49a3-a96e-c5e2bab0bfc6.png

7f2fd318-84db-4d2b-8453-2ab8350652dc.png

793db5be-3fc2-4080-a574-4db39bd000fe.png

f9938523-2a09-4b5d-8d27-2cca5a9aedb8.png

13_48429f09.jpg


6_ae5071f5.jpg

7_993e63fb.jpg

8_357cc445.jpg

15_74367af1.jpg



When it comes to pure visual fidelity. I think this game and Hellblade 2 will duke it out for tops this gen.

China is going to cook next gen. I think it will be the most interesting and refreshing gen of our adult lives because of them finally getting into the AAA space.

We have a whole other region to ancitipate games from now, and they will develop their own style. Seems to be they care about visuals on a whole. The West can be hit or miss, Japan as a whole doesnt give a shit about graphics. South Korea and China seem to place them at high level of importance.

Cant wait to see what these new age devs cook up on next gen hardware.
 
Last edited:
I genuinely dont understand why so many ppls are amazed by and praising the graphic of Crimson Desert, even calling it "next-gen". Have they actually played other open world game? Compared to ACS, and especially RDR2, which has a fairly similar environment CD falls far behind, by a huge margin.

My feedback of the graphics after more than a dozen hours of playing at 4K, max settings (without RR):
- The AA is extremely poor. I haven't tried native resolution yet, but I've tested all DLSS modes and none of them fix the aliasing. For a game with this much vegetation, it becomes even more of a disaster. Why is no one talking about this?
- Pop-in and pixelated everywhere, all the time.
- The water physics looks next-gen, but the water surface textures are blurry af, waterfalls also look very bad.
- The weather effects are underwhelming. Rain, in particular, is honestly terrible, like something from a PS3 game. At first I thought it was a bug, but after watching a few clips on youTube, it looks just as bad there.
-The lighting uses advanced RT, but it still falls far short of the baked lighting in RDR2. Moonlight, light rays filtering through forest canopies, sunrise, sunset, storms, lightning in RDR2 are truly stunning, but here, they feel extremely lackluster.
- Why is the contrast so fking high? Even during the day, shadows are pitch black like its the blackhole. The green of grass and foliage looks artificial, almost like plastic with LED lights inside.
- Torch and fire lighting at night is overly red, almost as if it's trying to burn your eyes.

The only thing truly worth praising is its top tier optimization.
Previously, there was another game praised as "next-gen" and "CGI-level" that I couldn't understand either: FF 16.
Yeah i'm liking the game but i'm mostly unimpressed by the graphic.

Best i can say is that it feels almost like a rockstar game in terms of npcs and animations variety, the cities feel alive.

Btw 4k native look even better than dlaa so in the end i went with that.
 
Last edited:
Not just pop-in. Draw distance. For the longest time, i was the only one pointing out just how bad the draw distance in Horizon FW could get. DF made no mention of how 99% of the map is blocked by fog.

Cyberpunk also has really bad pop-in especially when driving. Silence from DF.

They need to fix the pop-in up close in Crimson Desert, but at least they have a phenomenal draw distance for distant objects. I have no idea how you get that part right and completely fuck up whats right in front of you.
I'd rather have poor draw distance than crazy pop in tbh because there are more ways to hide bad draw distance. But I hate when these journalists say 'the game looks phenomenal' and there's pop in everywhere.
They won't be able to fix it in CD, it's inherent to the engine I guess. I hear it's even much worse in their MMO.
 
0d9c582b-6657-49a3-a96e-c5e2bab0bfc6.png

7f2fd318-84db-4d2b-8453-2ab8350652dc.png

793db5be-3fc2-4080-a574-4db39bd000fe.png

f9938523-2a09-4b5d-8d27-2cca5a9aedb8.png

13_48429f09.jpg


6_ae5071f5.jpg

7_993e63fb.jpg

8_357cc445.jpg

15_74367af1.jpg



When it comes to pure visual fidelity. I think this game and Hellblade 2 will duke it out for tops this gen.

China is going to cook next gen. I think it will be the most interesting and refreshing gen of our adult lives because of them finally getting into the AAA space.

We have a whole other region to ancitipate games from now, and they will develop their own style. Seems to be they care about visuals on a whole. The West can be hit or miss, Japan as a whole doesnt give a shit about graphics. South Korea and China seem to place them at high level of importance.

Cant wait to see what these new age devs cook up on next gen hardware.
Now this is some actual impressing graphic :messenger_open_mouth:
 
SlimySnake SlimySnake did you even tried native or dlaa to check the resolution bug?

Even with rr and dlss quality the textures get muddy at anything different than native res.

If i have time i'm gonna post a comparison rr vs native res.
 
Last edited:
So let me remind you what RDR2 actually looks like.
These are images I took from a thread on ...Era, captured on November 6, 2019 just a day after the PC version launched. So these are definitely from the base game, with no additional graphics mods ( or possibly with a simple ReShade preset )
49026764548_c67105bf2a_3k.jpg

49026729713_b731915d15_3k.jpg

49044425683_e6e25cc524_3k.jpg

49047023282_e0bd4b37dd_3k.jpg


49031937917_628a0fb19c_3k.jpg

49031941152_8f6f03ac77_3k.jpg

49052158967_996c708744_3k.jpg

49051439083_28b569c39c_3k.jpg

49052160307_83084092e7_3k.jpg

49057251071_f7936ef6da_3k.jpg

45156d9e-03c2-4278-aa71-be256b9c76d2.JPG

db69afb6-f728-40aa-829c-644535511f8b.JPG

a2245545-f11b-425e-a80a-2ec171a66673.JPG




Now compare them to the CD images above, doesn't CD look rather ordinary? Keep in mind, these are still shots. During actual gameplay, CD reveals quite a few shortcomings (pixelated, pop-in, underwhelming weather systems/ lighting, cheap-looking color grading). A longer draw distance or sharper textures doesn't automatically make a game look better.

Better art style but technologically, Crimson Desert beats in handily in just about everything. RTGI & geometry alone puts it far ahead of RDR2.
 
I've been fucking around with this DLSS 5 meme AI filter to approximate what the RE9 DLSS 5 implementation might look like.
First of all, this filter has a hard time interpreting zombies:

p2AN7vBatnugYC0A.jpg


But I like the extra details added. Properly done, this will be a game changer IMO, also for shadows, since even path tracing is struggling here (or isn't applied to the zombies' hair at all):
C9HAJfcxljkguVtI.jpg


Already highly detailed models don't benefit that much. In addition, the environmental lighting has been completely changed in this example:
LHVyGxUI74GJfCfs.jpg


Consistency does not seem to be an issue. The reimagined singer is pretty much the same person in each shot. It fits the path-traced template reasonably well, though she's been transformed into a human again:
pFYHFLJFRa6a6Ub8.jpg

NzJT5zSqtvwlbibF.jpg

zDRVKFEZsTAz8OaX.jpg

I'm excited to see what Capcom is going to do with this.
For low-fi side characters, this tech will be revolutionary. The only question is how long it will take to implement it correctly into games.
 
SlimySnake SlimySnake did you even tried native or dlaa to check the resolution bug?

Even with rr and dlss quality the textures get muddy at anything different than native res.

If i have time i'm gonna post a comparison rr vs native res.
I did but the frame rate was like 20 so it was impossible to get a sense of the image quality with how laggy it was.
 
I did but the frame rate was like 20 so it was impossible to get a sense of the image quality with how laggy it was.
Nah dude you have to disable rr for the comparison.

Even if rr introduce "better settings", it is no use when everything get blurrier.

Try dlss 4.5 dlaa or even better native and everything else maxed out except rr, your pc should be able to handle it, at worse go from lighting from max to cinematic.

I can't go back from native, no matter how much the ao is better with rr.
 
Last edited:
Btw i started noticing the pop in, i was looking for distant things but it mostly happen with the ground clatter under your feet while walking, very distracting when you finally notice it.

They need to squash all these weird stuff if they want the game to shine, the resolution one is fucking terrible because if make all dlss except dlaa worthless in term of iq.
 
Last edited:
Btw i started noticing the pop in, i was looking for distant things but it mostly happen with the ground clatter under your feet while walking, very distracting when you finally notice it.

They need to squash all these weird stuff if they want the game to shine, the resolution one is fucking terrible because if make all dlss except dlaa worthless in term of iq.

Set foliage to medium. It fixes the problem
 
its not hopium, nvidia told Digital Foundry and other journalists that they already have this running on a single 5090 in their labs.

I have no doubt they will be able to get this to run on a single GPU. they already said it scales with compute so other GPUs will simply scale down with resolution and settings.

The real problem is that the tech in its current state is guessing like you said. And its guessing because its poorly implemented. It's not done at the engine level. it does not have access to the zero LOD models. Concept art. It simply looks at whats on screen and hallucinates an image based on what its trained on. Hence, the massive completely different lighting and character models.

I would never play a game like this for the first time. Maybe i will for shits and giggles because i love me some photorealism, but this is a poor man's vision of the future. It is bastardization of what gaming and art is about. If Nvidia was serious, they wouldve released an AI model that takes regular games and applies path tracing to them even if GPUs cant afford to run them. But that would require integration into each game's engine and training on the path tracing model.

You have to wonder why they went with this AI model thats trained on photorealistic assets instead of path traced versions of games that exist today. It's because they are too busy smelling their own farts.
I meant that it could access the game pipeline data instead of just motion vectors. Nvidia don't talk about that at all.
 
its not hopium, nvidia told Digital Foundry and other journalists that they already have this running on a single 5090 in their labs.

I have no doubt they will be able to get this to run on a single GPU. they already said it scales with compute so other GPUs will simply scale down with resolution and settings.

The real problem is that the tech in its current state is guessing like you said. And its guessing because its poorly implemented. It's not done at the engine level. it does not have access to the zero LOD models. Concept art. It simply looks at whats on screen and hallucinates an image based on what its trained on. Hence, the massive completely different lighting and character models.

I would never play a game like this for the first time. Maybe i will for shits and giggles because i love me some photorealism, but this is a poor man's vision of the future. It is bastardization of what gaming and art is about. If Nvidia was serious, they wouldve released an AI model that takes regular games and applies path tracing to them even if GPUs cant afford to run them. But that would require integration into each game's engine and training on the path tracing model.

You have to wonder why they went with this AI model thats trained on photorealistic assets instead of path traced versions of games that exist today. It's because they are too busy smelling their own farts.
I imagine they went this road with DLSS 5 (for now) because they want to gain a competitive advantage over AMD & have broad support for any given engine out there. But I don't think they expected this kind of backlash, a backlash which I don't agree with, I agree with some criticisms, but still, we'll see what its final form will be.

At this point, I don't think we can rule out a DLSS 5 delay to 2027, maybe they'll work real hard for it & release it around the 60-series cards.

Zorah CES 2025 demo used Nvidia's Neural Rendering solutions& they were baked right into the engine (it's UE5), not like DLSS 5 now, but that will take time until other developers get up to speed.
 
I genuinely dont understand why so many ppls are amazed by and praising the graphic of Crimson Desert, even calling it "next-gen". Have they actually played other open world game? Compared to ACS, and especially RDR2, which has a fairly similar environment CD falls far behind, by a huge margin.

Your memories of RDR 2 are rose tinted

Huge sun flare or dramatic overcast is not an argument. Congrats, you spent more time setting up for a screenshot than he did randomly looking at NPCs in Crimson Desert 🤷‍♂️

Having played it recently on PC, Crimson desert wipes the floor with it.
 
Last edited:
Top Bottom