Especially with details like fur or hair. I'm used to older games having blocky and angular (more or less depending on when they were made) models with jagged edges due to aliasing with simple transparency effects used for stuff like hair.

Modern games just look less defined up close. Is it a bunch of post-processing effects? Does my monitor have especially chunky pixels?

  • culpritus [any]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    As beanyor mentioned, there's a lot of shaders that exist now that are used for these types of animated effects, and they are not usually made to look detailed necessarily.

    Shaders can provide all kinds of interesting effects, but I think many devs want to have a 'cinematic' look, so this leads to a lot of shaders that simulate things like lensing effects, depth of field, vignetting etc. This ultimately degrades the sharpness of the image compared to older games that didn't do these kinds of things. It can look cool in specific instances, but when you want to look at some arbitrary element of the game, it really can get in the way as well. This is part of the reason chasing photo realism doesn't make a lot of sense for many games. Having an art style that is not trying to look like a movie can be very engaging and evocative without looking oddly blurry or smudged.