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Another big Crimson Desert patch 1.04.01: many rendering fixes including FSR/RR quality, also XeSS Upscaling & FG. It also adds Apple’s RR-like tech. Is FSR quality better now? Read on to know this, and some exciting discoveries about this game’s weird rendering engine… 🧵

4K Max, Native, 9070 XT. 400% zoom (16:1 in pixels). Look at the reliefs in the “walkway”: that’s a mix of geometry and Displacement mapping. For example, the edges highlighted in yellow have a straight 45% chamfer in geometry (upper image, Displacement = Off).

In the lower image (Displacement = High) those chamfers are more rounded. The stones in general look worn out, weathered: way more realistic. However, look also at the parts in red circles where we can see very odd changes of color. This is not intentional, it’s a rendering bug.

So let’s go back… here I enabled FSR4.1: Top = AA-Only, Bottom = Performance. AA-Only looks great except the yellow region with the stone edge badly aliased, that’s because the grass moves a lot (possibly without fine-grained motion vectors? But even with MV it’s harder).

Worse than that is the red area in the bottom image. Performance-level upscaling does a good job in some regions like the hexagonal tiles, even the grass. But in those raised stones with Displacement = High the edges often have awful “sawtooth”, smearing, and other artifacts.

If you look at the hexagonal tiles the two images also have differences in raised blocks. Both are pixel-exact in positioning: I took a screenshot, brought the menu to change upscaling level, took a screenshot. It just changes randomly. This Displacement causes all sorts of pain.