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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.

This was covered already by reviewers, like Digital Foundry showing how this interacted badly with DLSS/RR. The game was patched to improve those problems somewhat and also to add an option to control the level of Displacement because it still causes all sorts of artifacts.

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.

Now let’s enable FSR Ray Regeneration. It works great, e.g. note the shadow stripes in the left half. The top image still looks like shite but it’s not because of the denoiser; compare to the lower image which is FSR/AA+RR and also setting Displacement = Off: awesome result.

For a fair comparison, here’s two fullscreen images with FSR/AA and Displacement = Off. The only difference is FSR/RR enabled in the second shot, and the difference of quality is big (it’s not just denoising; this game does its better RT only with some AI denoiser enabled).

That kind of artifact looks like nitpicking but it’s common and noticeable when there's more sharp detail and contrast. I observed this previously: only with a static camera there’s something off with FSR’s temporal accumulation (and I’m 100% sure it’s the game’s fault not FSR).

See also in the red area a halo around the bow string, only with moving camera. This is a common artifact of upscalers, even the best. It illustrates how upscaling quality should ALWAYS improve in a static scene. The opposite occurring like in the yellow area is HIGHLY abnormal!

CONCLUSIONS. I didn’t have time for a full analysis of FSR/RR denoising quality but it definitely looks better, even if not yet as good as DLSS/RR. FSR upscaling quality also looks better than before but it still degrades with the static camera, this is a game integration bug.