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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).

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.