I rarely play anything from the past 5 years but when I do there’s a noticeable difference in how the games are rendered compared to up until the early PS4 era. Transparent voluminous materials like hair or foliage have this fuzzy pixelated look to them, and there’s a lot of rasterisation that looks like it’s being rendered on the Sega Saturn. Then there’s tons of odd shimmering going on everywhere, and I’m not sure if it’s due to dynamic resolution scaling, ambient occlusion or dynamic reflections
Overall games don’t look quite as sharp and defined as older games though they simultaneously have lots more detail. It’s weird
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The ascendancy of Temporal Anti Aliasing is one major culprit. But it’s also an aesthetic choice that the developers are leaning into.
As Beaver said Temporal Anti Aliasing causes that, because it uses buffered data from the previous frame to speed up anti-aliasing calculations in the next frame. Another pretty big culprit is DLSS, though. If you render at native resolution the game will look much sharper than if you render at 66% then upscale.
I don’t know if they’re still doing this, but in the 10s chromatic aberration was popular since it was a low cost (computationally speaking) way to make the game look “futuristic” even though in the end it just made games look blurry
2000s: lens flare
2010s: chromatic aberration
2020: DLSS/TAA
You forgot bloom
How could I forget the key feature of the 2000s? It’s almost like I
Yellow Filter’dblocked it from my mind!
Bloom 
Publishers :mystery-emote: Reviewers
To be fair, that was also my reaction watching Halo 2’s opening cutscene in 2004
https://youtu.be/XFKoLeOXEDc?si=BO5rMVPrbfkj3eDS&t=106
So much bloom
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
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yes
ngl I love a good lens flare
oh i just thought it’s because i haven’t upgraded any of my PC parts in like 4 years and that it was never that strong to begin with
DLSS doesn’t help, either. I’ve been playing a lot of Squad lately and it’s a real catch-22. Use it, and you get okay performance but can’t see shit out of scopes, don’t use it, and you get a very clear picture of <60fps.
TAA, FSR, DLSS and XeSS have fuckin ruined image quality wholesale.
100% this. Older games at 4k look fantastic compared to newer games with TAA, designed around AI upscaling, and so forth.
They really did absolutely fuck it. I like how we spent the PS360 gen with QAA, FXAA and other poor smearing of sub-720p resolutions, finally got out of that with (mostly) proper 1080p framebuffers on PS4 for a sec, only to ruin that immediately with TAA and then garbage “upscaling”. Real banger that.
Devs push graphics beyond their reasonable limits in some weird arms-race.
Hollow Knight, Celeste, hell even Cruelty Squad all look amazing in their own ways. Graphics need to be smarter, not harder to process.
To me the most prominent example is the start of this generation: when the PS5 and Series X came out all the games were like 4k and 60/120, but once games targeted that hardware it became joever. Jedi Survivor at like 792p FSR and sub 30fps.
Every time, haha. I miss the old days where devs pulled clever tricks, or outright didn’t increase fidelity due to the hardware, not trying to push only photorealism for every game.
The push for photorealism has been to the detriment of everything else sadly.
Depressing, really. Art style over gritty realism any day.
Weirdly I noticed that, while the really heavy games got uglier and slower, most PS4 games still have decent resolutions (System Shock remake) unlike PS360 where resolutions tanked in the latter half of the gen.
But also
I miss being excited for new hardwareYep, I have a fancy gaming PC right now but once it dies I am going for efficiency and embracing stable refresh rates at decent PPI displays without upscaling, if that means a return to 1080p 24 inches I will go that route.
I’ve heard that a lot of the issues of TAA and upscaling aren’t as obvious when you render them out at 4k and also probably when you sit farther away from the screen, so if you game on an “old” PC monitor at close distance you are just not who these solutions are made for.
Latest fad.
I’ve been playing my n64 a lot lately and its way fuzzier than I remember, maybe they are just trying to recapture that magic
I love that era, but it’s in some ways the most objectively shitty that games ever looked. Do you have an old tube TV to play it on? N64 and PS1 really do look like shit on modern TVs, unfortunately. All the raster stuff is weird looking if you don’t have scan lines.
I have a large CRT that looks pretty good but honestly still pretty fuzzy, its been years since I tried that tho so I don’t know if it would be a lot better than what I have now. Then I used a really small old ass flat screen for a while that honestly looked really good, I think just because it was so small it had to look pretty sharp. It stopped working tho :(
I have the n64 in my kitchen and use a thrift store flat screen TV I just got as both a second monitor and n64 TV. Its pretty old and has a hell of a lot of different inputs. Unfortunately the n64 looked like total shit on it… BUT I just got a s-video cable hoping it would make it a bit more bearable and at least on this TV its a huge improvement! It really fixed the image quite a bit, there’s still a bit of checkerboarding with the pixels of different colours sort of hashing together instead of blurring together as they would on CRT. But its way more playable. I should try the s-video cable with the CRT sometime just for fun, but I think the reason why its such a huge improvement is mostly because the TV interpreted the composite image terribly.
All that to say, its still fuzzy as fuck, because its an n64 lol.
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