Back to Control... FO4 wears on you after a while lol. I've been meaning to get some screenshots up but man am I ever burned out on that f'in game lol. It just takes it out of me.
My god is Control a performance hog on my machine. Even with DLSS it's not that great with RTX reflections on. Running without, it's alright, but some parts still take the piss. Been racking my brain for ways around it.
But you know what is great? The built-in upscaling. No, really. I'm not sure what they're doing with it but it's much more sophisticated than what your TV or monitor does... or maybe even what a console does. I've done half a playthrough running 1366x768 internal resolution to 1080p native with the fancy reflections turned on and I honestly have about forgotten it's scaling it up. Between whatever voodoo they're working with that, the unusual post-render stuff smoothing/resolving details, and the MSAA implementation... yeah, hardly any visual difference from running straight 1080. Textures still look crisp, edges of polygons are smooth-yet-defined, volumetric light and shadows still look right (though definitely where it becomes noticable...) you really can hardly tell when just playing. Only a few things stand out, such as hair shimmering under certain circumstances... not that it doesn't always do that - it just does it a little more, probably because the MSAA already struggles to resolve the edges of those things at native resolution, so when you scale it down, blow it up, and try to make it resolve them it kind of devolves into a mass of shimmery mush. It's just not accurate enough in those situations... it looks similar to what you see in bad screen space reflections, only nowhere near as jarring as it's only certain hairs under certain lights. No biggie. Some other jaggies here and there, like those big supercomputer-sized rows of console racks... all of the metal rails and buttons look jaggy when the camera shifts. Also 'mesh' type materials that feature more alpha than actual visible material will resolve a little strangely at certain angles and distances, appearing thicker/thinner depending on how you look... I'm talking grating and chain-link types of materials.
These are things the game already has difficulties with. It's not like you run native on high settings and it all goes away. And it's all frame-to-frame. Hard to see in stills. It hates alpha maps at extreme angles. It hates volumetric lighting projected through narrow openings, as well as any faintly surfaces said lighting is cast upon. People complain about the accuracy of RTX, but the reflections actually help that a bit in this case... far less shimmer in the more accurate and nuanced reflections it gives way to under volumetric lighting. But I digress. I had to laugh because I've seen some people think it's meant to be an effect, complaining that film grain doesn't turn off or whatever. It's just the limits of the engine. You see a bit of it in any game that pushes its lighting system to the max dynamic level it can manage... it starts to stretch and become less accurate, but in exchange you get all sorts of really awesome effects and still have it run halfway decent. Since this game has specular maps for virtual every surface, it shows more. I'm not sure of the particulars of those systems, but I'll take it. Still looks super cool. If there's a way to make it to perform better with only slight degradation, I'll also accept that.
Pretty interesting graphical system to this game... full of mysteries. Funny thing is, it puts the glitchy-lookin-ass, artifacting-ass, still-sluggish DLSS to shame. I'd be curious to see the numbers on the difference, but based on what I'm seeing, the scaling performs and looks noticeably better than DLSS. By a lot, in my estimation. Really like to know what the secret sauce is. Never in my life have I ever considered upscaling viable on a 1080 display. I feel like I must be missing something, but I can't find it. It looks and runs better running medium/high settings with RTX reflections via upscaling than no RTX with everything maxed at native. For the most part it doesn't appear blurry, just smoother. I guess it's a bit of a tradeoff that you lose some of that pristine fineness in exchange for an overall more cohesive look. I'll be sure to get some screenshots of it running this way at some point. Been too immersed to really get around to it.
EDIT: Omg I just found the reel with all of the spare footage for Darling's videos... basically a compilation of all of that footage of people awkwardly standing around and doing things that run in the background of his insufferable little clips... plus a few other things that got edited out. It's called "Spare Footage" and it's only that... the awkwardness is so real and really says a lot about what kind of workplace The Bureau is. It's almost like everybody involved is actively
trying to make sure they don't derive any enjoyment from any of it, because they might actually hate themselves for it, haha. Well... everyone except Dr. Darling himself, of course, who's loving it all. It's one of 'those' kinds of jobs. Y'know... the kind that push you into doing these terrible, soul-sucking, unrelated, unproductive things thanks to some airhead in a cubicle trying to "spritz things up around here" from 12 floors away. I don't know what it was about that video, but I
felt it man... that feeling of working a job you hate and all of the stupid crap that you get pulled into because you have this stupid asshole boss who's always trying to be relatable and "bring forth that
human element" in spite of his blatant lack of even a rudimentary understanding of how ordinary people work.
It's like,
Fargo-style, base-level human awkwardness, man. It's amazing. There's a part where this man and woman are forced to smush together side by side, front-and-center for the camera, as they rather uncomfortably try fruitlessly to work up sincere smiles beaming straight towards you, as though they're quite happy to be just
terribly awkwardly pressed against each other in this cramped research lab, just as close to one another as can be without merging, eyes darting around the room and occasionally locking for excruciating seconds, with the implication that this will be on display in the Research Center lobby, for all of their colleagues to see. Yes... completely ecstatic and very obviously in love with their work. "I mean, just look at how close those two researchers are! Literally! And they're smiling! Look at how happy they are!" Just... oh god it's so mortifying to see. The body language and eyes just scream "PLEASE help!"
Well... reading into it,
he actually kind of might've enjoyed it a little... something about his rapidly shifting facial expressions towards the end said he did... at least he was conflicted about it, right up until the moment ended and she darted the other way completely dejected, as if to say "thank god that's over!" At this point he looks forward vacantly, glances ambivalently in her direction, and turns to lower his head in shame before returning to his work off-screen. Oooo... the cringe is so strong in that moment. So much weird tension to it all. It's like the footage they were supposed to get was thought up by a machine fed little tidbits of actual human interaction... and these are the ideas it spit out for it's unwitting victims to try to act out. Don't think they managed to capture the vision!
It oh so perfectly answers the question "What if you had a serious and dedicated scientist write and film your internal HR flicks? Do something fun for once!"
The whole place is like the epitome of a soulless dystopian bureaucracy and it's great. I'm loving everything I find that shows more of how the organization operates on the micro scale, and what the people in it are really like. The paranatural happenings there are far from the strangest parts of the goings on in This Old House! Sometimes I think the people, their systems, and ideas are far stranger. I'm talking thier interactions with the new reality and ways of dealing with it. They just aren't all there. There isn't a single normal person working there. And yet they're all completely normal about it, like all of this weird shit with all of these weirder people is just another day... like any other at any other job. It's ordinary to them. And that's what makes them completely nuts. Even the way they try to study things and make sense of them is just wacky... like something people strung-out on meth might envision before taking apart the VCR. Only instead of the VCR they're deconstructing reality as we know it. People get hurt or even die in strange ways all of the time and all they get is a mention in an arbitrarily redacted internal report and some doctored words of sympathy for their loved ones to digest. And the reports all read like "Well "X" crazy thing and Jim died gruesomely. A geometric astral virus embedded itself in his brain. Here are the unflinching details of the event. We'll have to note this possibility moving forward. Guess we were wrong about that. Let everyone know to be careful around those things! Failure to follow these protocols will result in termination and/or death. And hey, don't forget about book club tomorrow night! Tell Sally I haven't forgotten she still owes me for her tab! - John"
It's such a low-key brutal place to work. It's all about the little things. Nobody seems to give a shit.
It is a place that is both human as can be and yet also completely stripped of all humanizing/relatable elements. I love the world laid out in this game. At first it seems vacant and just... vague. But it actually has a lot of character to it.
It's cool to see all of these little touches thrown in. So often I find myself thinking "And these people actually work in this place."
. Also liking spreading out over three screens. Gives me more room to keep stuff open