TechPowerUp Screenshot Thread (MASSIVE 56K WARNING)

[Kurt63]

Trains....................................

 

[Lenne]

Pigeons Remember Me is the game.

 

[LifeOnMars]

@Maenad Always got really bad hitching in that game, shame as it showed promise. Also, your 3600 runs really hot doesn't it for only 4100 and 25% load?

 

[Lenne]

@Maenad Always got really bad hitching in that game, shame as it showed promise. Also, your 3600 runs really hot doesn't it for only 4100 and 25% load?

My cooler is so crappy (Cryorig C7)

 

[LifeOnMars]

Ah man i thought the C7 was better than that. Oh well at least it's still under throttling temps.

 

[Lenne]

Ah man i thought the C7 was better than that. Oh well at least it's still under throttling temps.

Though I have PBO +200 as clocks. And also Define Mini C's ventilation sucks.

 

[AlwaysHope]

I can sympathize with Vicar Max from the outer worlds...

 

[AlejoZ]

Outlast 2

 

[Lenne]

Waited for over 1½ years for this. Finally FF VII Remake on PC.

 

[InVasMani]

Looks like they did a pretty good job at it too. I don't know what the frame rates are like, but if you run into performance issues you may want to consider using Nvidia Image Sharpen at 0.85x Scaling Resolution as well with 1.00 sharpen and 0.17 ignore film grain. The Image Sharpen applies a 6-tap filter that does a bit of AA an bumps up the performance due to the slightly lower than native resolution. I've found it really handy it's like a bit of free AA and higher performance. Alternatively DSR 2.00X with 50% smoothness is good if you want to up IQ, but don't mind a performance hit.

 

[Lenne]

Looks like they did a pretty good job at it too. I don't know what the frame rates are like, but if you run into performance issues you may want to consider using Nvidia Image Sharpen at 0.85x Scaling Resolution as well with 1.00 sharpen and 0.17 ignore film grain. The Image Sharpen applies a 6-tap filter that does a bit of AA an bumps up the performance due to the slightly lower than native resolution. I've found it really handy it's like a bit of free AA and higher performance. Alternatively DSR 2.00X with 50% smoothness is good if you want to up IQ, but don't mind a performance hit.

I have a 1080p60 monitor so there's no problems running any game at max details with stable 60fps.

Aerith

 

[InVasMani]

Remake looks like it turned out well. I'd like to see Phantasy Star 2 get a remake.

 

[Lenne]

Remake looks like it turned out well. I'd like to see Phantasy Star 2 get a remake.

Feels better than I thought. I skipped the console version as hell no I ain't getting an otherwise useless console just for an one game :/

And here's a kitty!

(playing with gamepad ofc, just shows keyboard controls as I took a screenshot)

Another kitty

 

[InVasMani]

I too have discovered cats upon my journeys. Squire Enix gave the game it's due respect.

 

[kurosagi01]

I've been playing Forza Horizon 4 since it was on the Xmas sale.
I am a bit of a JDM fanboy.

 

[R-T-B]

My first artificial satellite around the Mun (Kerbal Moon) in KSP at 10x game scale (so the same scale as real earth), very hard to do. Making it even harder, I have Principia installed for proper n-body gravitational mechanics. Am proud.

I also just got a probe by Minmus, Kerbins distant, small, hard-to-target-because-of-weird-orbit Moon.

It's mostly a mapping satelite, so I forbid myself from taking quality screenshots since technically the only camera on it is a grayscale POS thing, but here's the proof:

It does kinda have a early NASA-photo vibe, doesn't it?

I should start a "let's play" thread in the lounge for my Kerbal exploits.

 

[Tarte]

WW II French destroyer "Aigle"(WoWs)

 

[robot zombie]

Just dumping some FO4 screenshots from playing today, kind of arranging them in the story of the run. It started off nice over in town, outside of the old castle.

I must say, I am pretty pleased with my game when it does this.

Spoiler: I ramble about the setup behind the screenshots

What you don't see here is that I have hybrid cube/glow map reflections *with* SSR and transparency. So puddles, windows, anything smooth/reflective, just pops from out of this darkness as you look around and it ends up being kinda tense and interesting. Hits wobble the screen with blur, and it can just be tough to pick up on what you're walking into. And it might *actually* mess you up bad. Back at the end of the road there is a mirelurk, just scuttling about. I only spotted it in screenshots. All along those buildings to the left are nests of regular and hunter type mirelurks. That ghoul charged me immediately after making landfall on this spot.

It's great to be in the 'active' sections of sprawl with this atmosphere. This is a custom weather of mine that I pair with a patchwork ENB shader suite - all of the latest and greatest graphical tech available for the game. I've been on it for a while, playing with other people's stuff and unraveling the ideas I like to put in my shaders and weathers. Tons of good ideas, but I can't get with the sensibilities the popular, refined visual mods always go with. They like to fake dynamic range that just isn't there, go for this gritty, high-contrast stalker look. That or a vibrant, vivid fantasy-like look.

I embrace some organic murk and detail loss for more effect and coherence, with all of the weathers cooperating with ENB without extensive script-based imagespace layer trickery with the engine's adaptation, gamma and contrast. Let it be dark and hazy and let the cake go. It just winds up cleaner, as well as being less prone to glitching and conflicts, if you can just avoid piling on excess visual processing from the game engine. You don't need that with ENB. You cook-out more information than you think stacking those things and ENB is more betterer. You *feel* like you see a lot when you push the game, but it's much rougher after ENB and the actual range of parameters that don't go over the edge is just so much narrower. Banding, burning, dodging... blech.

Something happens in this region (as well as a few other spots where the land juts into the ocean) with some other weather and environment related scripts, or some baked-in imagespace stuff that adds extra murk and gloom. I DO want to tap into that and bring it elsewhere. It just completes this arrangement I have cobbled-up. This is still pushing 50-60 fps most times. It's one of the darker weathers, during very early morning, but in-game there are 6 or 7 different functional headlamps to use, as well as unlock-able nightvision/detection optics that make everything navigable. Just need to work out the paths you want to take, observe the defense points as you go. It's all quick death/quick kill with my setup, if I play well.

An OG weather mod called TrueStorms has optional ghoul spawns for radstorms like either of these in this spoiler - they spawn a bit out of sight, beyond a couple of fog layer boundaries, and you'll hear the echoing cries in the distance, with directionality, finding their way to you if you don't have a good hiding spot. I feel like I wanna steal that for what I have. Not like I'll be publishing it anytime soon anyway. Imagine the fog rolls in and a hoard of ghouls comes flying down that alley, and then you piss off the mirelurks fighting them.

I like sickly, almost paranatural colors for 3D Fallout games. I think they actually should look a little drab, for how run-down the environments often are. I tone down the colors of the radstorms a bit, less drama to them behaviorally, too. But more rads. Mr. Handy eyes are set up to light-up when it's dark enough, as seen here.

Spoiler: the rest

I wanted to take on The Forged. It's a minutemen settlement quest spot that I nabbed the quest for. Or, it nabbed me. The crazy thing is, you can get it as low as like, level 3, as your first random radiant for the MM. You're stuck for a while with the minutemen stuff, then! It's a very tough raider spot compared to most, with enemies rocking the heavy spike armor and mean flamethrowers. I smack them in the chest with 4 cranks on the legendary mighty laser musket with that nasty damage boost... and they have 33% health left. A mini-nuke would *just* kill one. Cruel. I took it at level 13 with that laser musket and the two-shot combat rifle, and lvl2 ballistic fiber armor, and it was still rough. I was able to stealth 4/5ths of it with that laser musket, though.

This is approaching their foundry from the rear-side entrance - a straight shot from the farm where you get the quest. I sniped 4 on the roof right from this rock. I thought that was all of them, but when I cleared the place and made it to the roof, I found one still sleeping in a temp unit up there

Can I just say how much better this game is with leaves on the damned trees?! Not only does it look better and feel much bigger, but there's some more mystery and stealth options approaching a big challenge area like this. I was chillin back with that musket, medium scope on it. I can just barely spot them up there, waiting for them to pop out. I have the detection optics to help me spot them. Impossible otherwise. I can't get closer and have a vantage with the trees. Fun way to hunt, lil more brain-on.

After finishing up there, I took the flank left of those trees.

This is why these environments need trees. It's a functional thing as much as it is a 'feel' thing. I basically just have that fire for reference. I see that it probably drops to a low area from a rise by the spread of light. The trees are blocking me from sizing up this spot further and forbidding easy stealth kills from this nice, safe spot. But at the same time, they give me some new stealth opportunities in exchange for the risk of getting closer.

You can barely tell from here, but this is that same fire, and I'm looking towards the front entrance from behind it. I was able to draw the rest of the enemies into this choke point without direct conflict. And enter through this side gate.

I'm glad it went this way. If the roof enemies had spotted me, they'd have become almost impossible to get an angle on, while scoring good damage on me. Meanwhile, the enemies on the ground can quickly end me if they all attack at once. I'm cooked. I tried. I don't have anything nearly good enough to make up for the level/HP difference without a lot of waste. It's hard to get around a get shots between the elevation breakups, obstacles like junk piles and car frames, and smokey fires obscuring view. This spot really sucks. They are extra-aggressive, just maniacal terrorist assholes. They are posted right off the main road, right before the only bridge granting access to the top right section of the map, and they fuck up everything that even approaches the intersection at that front gate with prejudice.

This is a pretty cool looking place, though. You can tell it's going to be a little different. There's a big vat of molten metal you can jump in to see what happens in there. You miss out on the upgrades particle/smoke/fire effects - it all feels placidly-foreboding with the smoke and fire among the raider haberdashery outside.

After clearing out the place and making it to the top, I tried to climb this walkway up to the giant vat of molten metal up there but right as I got smacked by a missile, I heard the whistle of a mini-nuke coming down on me and it was over. Assholes on the overpass nearby.

That's another hardcore spot. There's a legendary named gunner over there with a mini-nuke, another high-level with a missile launcher, a couple of others with tough guns. And then further below is a junkyard maze with twice as many gunners and some robots. All skulls next to their names. It's the most unassuming spot to die instantly outside of Quincy. They pace *right on both sides of the break in the overpass - that's their built-up semi trailer bridging them. It's another unique spot - there's a crane you can work to get a path to the overpass. I've only found one other working crane in the game - a random thing in the woods. Running it makes it drop a vehicle, which then explodes as it rolls down a steep hill. It killed me immediately, then. And I'd gladly pull the lever all over again, now.

At least it was a nice, chill morning returning this farmer's sword... and son. I'll have to deal with those gunners next. I'm surprised they aren't considered more of a threat by these people. Peel a little left out towards the water, wrapping around the shack here, and you can see the shipping crates piled up on the edge of that very gunnerdome not 50m out on the water. That overpass is straight up the far-right end of the very same one from the last screenshot. You can practically skip rocks over to there. I don't really care, I just want the loot - I think there's a mag or bobblehead there. Just saying... weird living choices, these farmers make...

 

[GamingLove]

Just chill out

 

[Lenne]

I'm not ready for this yet, even with lvl99 party.

-

 

[InVasMani]

I'm not ready for this yet, even with lvl99 party.

View attachment 244442-

Valhalla awaits only those worthy of a honorable death...if you're to die on the battlefield make it a death worthy of the chocobo gods...magic blazing let the inferno fire and brimstone rain down final on your fantasy enemies. If all else fails escape and run for the hills to the metal gods.

 

[s3thra]

Started playing today.

 

[robot zombie]

Still messing with FO4 weathers.

I mean... it all starts with trees. I can't see this game without trees anymore.

But then, you get yourself a simple weather mod like Polluted Climate and start tinkering with it. Build new weathers off of that. Play with the popular algo's for ENB shaders until they have the features you need to accentuate what you want in the image. Give your game a totally one of a kind look from the beginning to the end of processing. Realize that nobody's weather or ENB mods can ever satisfy you again. Man, graphical settings in ALL games SUCK next to what ENB does in real time! It spoils you rotten.

Spoiler: ENB is neat

I run different LUTs for different conditions - there are several ways to accomplish this in a shader, along with a lot of different ways of processing color and luminance (anything that say... photoshop could do to an image, can *technically* be coded into an ENB shader - it's just a matter of power to throw at it.) I plugged-in kawase blur bloom... 25-stage gaussian bloom that just looks so much cleaner. Classic McFly DOF. log2 scale eye adaptation I found in a random repo. Sometimes if you dig around, you can find interesting stuff that's ready to add to a shader you already have (what people develop for Skyrim is batty... next level graphicval functionality... entirely new types of lighting and materials.) I pull stuff from the bigger modder groups, too - a lot of them are running heavily customized shaders - and if you understand how they go together, it's sort of like splicing HTML.

FO4's ENB already comes with enhanced SSR for water and any texture tied to a material file with a wetness flag (set by rain,) now. FO4 is notoriously almost completely without SSR, though the engine supported it. Boris, the author of ENB basically just expanded it to be accurate enough to not be totally unsightly when enabled, and then allowed that. That alone brings it to a new level. ENB water physics kill any water mod out there, add full reflections and it's over for those old mods. Even puddles get the full transparency and SSR treatment. You may still want a classic water mod for imagespace edits they add to color, or maybe textures it has, but not much else. ENB rain cancels out the rain texture, though. FO4's engine only has flat jizz globs, doesn't matter what texture you use. ENB allows you to use nicer textures, and gives the droplets transparency and diffraction. That's not even mentioning the options you have for AO/IL, and the weather settings. You can disable the game's HBAO+ and have comparable quality with the right ENB config. The HBAO+ is like, the one native FO4 setting outside of ultra godrays that makes a big visual difference, but it's really heavy. I stack it with the ENB AO... higher IL settings offset the doubling. So much power over the image is contained in that little injection rig. It gets really interesting when you're working on it from both ends, with ReShade and ENB in-game, and in the CK on the back end.

I dunno if the results I get are for everyone, but I like them. This game is pretty endlessly customizable in the visual department. I've combined elements of a radstorm I had with a non-radstorm 'radioactive' weather that is fairly bright orange, yellow, red, violet, and cyan. I really want it to look 'toxic' without necessarily being too cartoony. Maybe something leaning a little more on the surreal end. I think the orange is a little too strong. Might go for something more muted with this one. Polluted Climate had this one weather that looked like a deadly creamsicle that I love/hated from the beginning. It's just kinda jarring. But here is yet another twist I did on that exact weather.

I like it best at ground level, this is how it usually appears when playing. This is part of why trees matter. This is graded to give a two-tone color spectrum to the fog, it's in the weather itself, too. From the fog layers to the color of the god rays and direct sunlight. The saturation and shift also change over distance. "Lit" fog appears orange while fog in shadows takes on greens and even blues as it goes darker/further back. Under light, it goes from yellow-orange to a clay red. I can't remember the name for this kind of grading, but to me, it conveys a lot more depth when you have lots of volumetric light. You'll almost always see it done in movies, as well as landscape photography. It just adds another 'hidden' dynamic to the image. The trees block more of the light, casting shadows that set off that color dynamic. Without them, there's less for this dynamic to 'hit' on and play with - no darkness for the sicker tones to wrap around. You need things that are gonna throw contrast to all of the fog and godrays. Especially for pseudo-monotone themes.

 

[s3thra]

I've been playing Elden Ring offline using some of the mods here which:

1. unlock the refresh rate,
2. gets rid of the (IMO) horrendous chromatic aberration, and
3. gets rid of the vignette which makes the edges of the screen dark.

Looks much better to me now:



Sure, I can't summon people in offline mode, but at least I don't see "Try finger, but hole" messages scattered everywhere in the environment now.

 

[robot zombie]

I'm thinking of calling this one something like "Cherenkov's Bubblegum"

Just as a side note... this particular cabin is the only place in the game where you can find a disassembled mini-nuke ordinance. There's radioactive stuff on the property, everyone there apparently turned to ghouls, which attack you when you come close. Dude carved out a basement bug-out room before the war - there's one ghoul in there, which I presume is him. He was a paranoid anti-govornment guy, tinkering with his defenses. There's a whole manifesto in his terminal. You can collect the mini-nuke parts as junk items and keep them stashed. Completely useless, but you only get 4 of them in the whole game.

Spoiler: mods and FO4 engine TED talk

One big thing that helps a lot with this whole look where the fog and godrays *really* blanket and curtain over landscapes is a mod called Sun Alignment Tweak. The exterior directional light doesn't follow the sun well in FO4. It follows a much narrower radius up in the center of the skybox. At dawn, it brings in more of that bright directional light that courses its angle on that small circular radius, with intensity culminating in the afternoon. So it gets brighter, and the shadows that do cast are more apparent. From that point in the day on, the balance shifts away from direct light and back towards the dimmer global light that essentially reveals 'shadowed' areas in the day, which is itself getting darker. They just tweak the light source balancing to give a rough impression of sunlight traversal. It's a bit silly, if not also clever. If you have godrays on, the haze further obscures it. The skybox itself is lit by the position of the sun - you see a glow around it and a gradient across the sky, fooling you into thinking it's the same on the ground. Not actually the case, though. You don't realize how bad it is until you run the mod for a bit, turn it off, and see how stark and weird it really is. There is a constant separation between the sky and the ground that becomes confounding to look at. It appears as a treadmill stage with a scrolling sky backdrop. It just gives everything this 'playset' vibe.

A lot of things that mods improve, I could understand not being utilized at launch, when hardware was a bottleneck. But there are a lot of other little-but-not choices that I'm realizing are down to poor sensibilities with the visual side of their engine. They just don't think their choices through past getting a passable result. They could do a lot more with little performance cost. But I've known that since I got deep into this side of it with Skyrim. Skyrim has the ability to look absolutely gorgeous with nothing but the right weather and lighting mods, which have next to no performance cost. But the changes those mods make rebalance the images so drastically that it looks like a semi-next-gen upgrade from the original. Bethesda has no zest for the art in visual presentation. There are things about aesthetic they are borderline willfully ignorant of. They have developed the means, only to under-utilize them in their execution. They build great enviornments, but their lighting and processing are like A1 sauce to all of it.

That mod makes the angle of exterior light follow the sun, casting far more aggressive shadows and godrays across the land... and REALLY upping the impact. It's a very dramatic shift. You finally understand why everything always looks so flat. It's not the psuedo-3D lods, primitive lighting/shadow/material systems, or low polygon counts... it's the angle of the light! It is basically around high noon at all hours, with different amounts and colors of light before a posterboard sky. You are missing half of the day/night dynamic. No gradients over distance. No real cascading shadows.

It's another big part of lighting dynamics that Bethesda intentionally eliminates. I guess they didn't want too many dark alleys or something... more gets lit when all of the sunlight still comes from straight above when the sun is on the horizon. But half of the beauty in a sunset is the light running parallel to the horizon. That dynamic is a big part of what lets me play with such unusual colorways and have it make any cohesive visual sense. Imagine if I tried to do this with light and shadow uniformly distributed from a top down source. You can't, because you wouldn't see these colors even emerging in this way. Especially in that last one, where the pink light is 'catching' on the trees before the drop into the blue lake. I make it a point to have that separation between elevation points. The angle facilitates this whenever light is blocked by a higher elevation area. When you have an engine with such primitive features, that one simple aspect makes depth intuitive. You get a grand sense of scale, without detail to even back it up. The beauty in composition is that good utilization of the principles can make even silhouettes appear to be so much more than they really are.

And I think that last part is really key to visual immersion in games driven by exploration. I can say for sure that when I am playing, this whole vibe is far more engrossing. It goes perfectly with the soundtrack and ambience. You have those trees blowing and rustling in the wind. You're always in these pockets with mystery around you. I really wanna experience a setup like this in VR. It also looks wayyy cleaner in game. I've got TAA with pretty heavy sharpening. In game, half of the sharpening is lost to temporal artifacts, so it looks pretty smooth. The nasty color banding and splotching also isn't a thing. See... I actually set up my ENB to yield max color and luminescence parameters by using its color correction profile. FO4's is more apparently vivid and contrasty, but the more neutral one ENB can override with gives you better shadow detail and more leeway before gradients stretch and dither into bands. In photo and video editing you NEED the neutral profile before grading, or you will cook out a lot of detail and get a harsher image. The more processing you want to do, the more headroom you need to start with. It's quite a lot like digital clipping/distortion in audio production. I get really fine color graduation in-game, which I use every bit of. Jpeg compression can't handle that shadow detail, or the amount of small color shifts. It looks 1/4 resolution next to lit things, while it is clear in-game. Tiny blotches become monochromatic, obscuring detail in high-color zones. I also utilize noise - I think noise should ideally be a part of ALL volumetric light processing - it helps give it that impression of 'volume' and in game just makes things look organic. But it's another thing the jpeg algorithms famously hate, and I can only apply it globally.

The quality of my screenshots suffer quite a lot. I'm betting TPU's compression doesn't help, either. But you know? I started doing this out of a dissatisfaction with the handful of full-featured visual overhaul mods that all looked great in screenshots, but significantly rougher in game. Mine just stays solid in-game. I can just play and there's no point where it suddenly goes over the edge and looks awful where I happen to be at such and such time. I took the time with a few weathers and my own ENB to make sure everything is smooth at all times, under all of the common conditions. A lot of what I personally like about it is in the subtleties. This is a game you play for hours and hours. It doesn't need to beam into your eyeballs 24/7. Sometimes I need a break from that sort of thing.