It seems that every time I come back to play after a hiatus there has been a major update and everything is so changed that I usually have to reinstall the game and start from scratch. I usually find graphical problems- sometimes the same problems I had already fixed in a previous version, but I have forgotten how I fixed them the other time.
This time around I actually changed card (from old to a bit less old), I used to have a 1660 which couldn't handle a lot of stuff but the game looked and performed fine. Now I have a 2080 and while after tweaking it overall looks better, it has not so good performance and also some things that look terrible.
One is volumetric fog. This is supposedly a great thing. The game defaults to "high" which causes a haze to be seen everywhere, even interiors, which becomes terrible where smoke or vapor actually occur and around all light sources. I finally figured how to disable volumetric fog and volumetric cloud, it can't be done entirely from in-game but must be done by an ini tweak. With volumetric fog off, fog, vapor and smoke in the game actually looks 100% better and realistic, like real life. Go figure.
Then there's ray tracing which supposedly is a great novelty. After tweaking all the settings to my taste, I still was having a bad problem with faces, which looked pasty and stiff, like zombies. Johnny, Mama Welles, the vendor in V's building, Delamain, all looked terrible. I kept tweaking and trying stuff without luck and wondering why this could be, until I thought, what is really new in this update? Ray tracing. I disabled it and magic! Faces returned to normal. Overall the whole world looks cleaner. Go figure again.
New and more advanced isn't always better.
This time around I actually changed card (from old to a bit less old), I used to have a 1660 which couldn't handle a lot of stuff but the game looked and performed fine. Now I have a 2080 and while after tweaking it overall looks better, it has not so good performance and also some things that look terrible.
One is volumetric fog. This is supposedly a great thing. The game defaults to "high" which causes a haze to be seen everywhere, even interiors, which becomes terrible where smoke or vapor actually occur and around all light sources. I finally figured how to disable volumetric fog and volumetric cloud, it can't be done entirely from in-game but must be done by an ini tweak. With volumetric fog off, fog, vapor and smoke in the game actually looks 100% better and realistic, like real life. Go figure.
Then there's ray tracing which supposedly is a great novelty. After tweaking all the settings to my taste, I still was having a bad problem with faces, which looked pasty and stiff, like zombies. Johnny, Mama Welles, the vendor in V's building, Delamain, all looked terrible. I kept tweaking and trying stuff without luck and wondering why this could be, until I thought, what is really new in this update? Ray tracing. I disabled it and magic! Faces returned to normal. Overall the whole world looks cleaner. Go figure again.
New and more advanced isn't always better.
