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Today I learned why Cyberpunk 2077 image quality often looks extremely shitty on non-RT pc's and Sony consoles. SSR (and TAA) is completely fucked up.

TheGejsza

Member
So right after release of CP77 I created a post where I've shared my experience with the PS4 version of game played on PS5 ( https://www.neogaf.com/threads/cybe...oks-really-bad-on-ps5-not-a-shitpost.1581091/ ). I was mainly bitching about weird low resolution/artifacts. Well... today I learned why in many outdoors scenes the screen looks like complete shit with pixelated-noise-ants like thingy - SSR is just fucked up to another dimension. I have never seen something so bad.

Quick Example of SSR noise





More examples and credits to:



I get it that - game art direction and design is superb. I get that CP77 maxed out blows everything else out of the water. And I agree.



But without setting SSR to Psycho (or turning it off) or using RT the screen is a complete mess because of how bad the SSR is. This was my whole problem with the very "artifact-y graphic" when played on PS5 (currently playing on mid end non-RTX pc with 1440p resolution) but I could not get a grasp what was the problem. I thought that it was low resolution problems but it's SSR.

So how the fuck not a single reviewer or DF did not mention it at all? No matter the settings the noise effect is really visible especially at night in city. Hell even putting SSR on Psycho does not get rid of it but it's way less noticeable. But on low/medium/high and even ULTRA it absolutely kills image quality with this moving nose-pixel things.

Using RT reflections fixes the problem. Also maybe upping resolution would help - I got a feeling that it might scale with resolution but I am currently playing on PC in 1440p and nothing beside Psycho seems acceptable but it kills FPS.

I also got a feeling that fixing TAA, SSR and tweaking a few graphic options like volumetric fog and toning down dynamic lightning might fix the base consoles versions.
 
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TheGejsza

Member
Looks like total shit without it tho.
Pick your poison. I can't stand that noise but without SSR game looses a lot of charm. Still that SSR is killing game for me so I have to turn it off. What's interesting is that there are a lot of cubemaps reflections in the game that looks solid, so you do not loose all kind of reflections.
 
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acm2000

Member
It doesn't bother me and it's all worth it for the overall effect it has in recreating a ray traced looking world without the ray tracing
 
PS5 version hasn't released though 🤔
This person just shut down this thread.
fguCCpO.gif
 
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Kenpachii

Member
Maybe it has something to do with resolution. AC valhalla water looked great at 4k, 1080p its a shimmering shithole.
 

Rikkori

Member
It scales with both resolution and framerate, that's the key. That's a forgotten aspect of TAA scaling, which became evident with Quantum Break in particular - game is totally different 30 fps vs 60 fps just in terms of image quality due to excessive ghosting, and also affects all the "ray casting" done in a scene traditionally (SSR, GI, etc) because they all depend on the accumulated data from multiple frames. For CP2077 even on high SSR looks absolutely fine at 75% of 4K, and only on low is the noise becoming more evident - this at 60 fps. If you have effects like film grain (and also combined with sharpening), then that will also make it worse.
So from 1440p & up, it will be fine on most SSR levels so long as you get near 60 fps. At 1080p it's pretty much hopeless unless you enable psycho/RT.
 
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SSR on RE2Remake on Pro is even worse. You should see. Reflections not only are pixelated but many pixels are missing.
The SSR in RE Engine is just awful in general, it's not just a Pro thing. In RE7 there's an option to only have it on super reflective surfaces like water, which looks okay, but RE2 + 3 lack that so I just turn it off entirely. I'd rather not have SSR than the blurry, pixelated mess that appears on all surfaces with it on.
 

nemiroff

Gold Member
Well, I swear it doesn't look that bad on my computer.. And, the game actually looks worse with SSR off. So.. Yeah..
 
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Heartkiller

Member
It scales with both resolution and framerate, that's the key. That's a forgotten aspect of TAA scaling, which became evident with Quantum Break in particular - game is totally different 30 fps vs 60 fps just in terms of image quality due to excessive ghosting, and also affects all the "ray casting" done in a scene traditionally (SSR, GI, etc) because they all depend on the accumulated data from multiple frames. For CP2077 even on high SSR looks absolutely fine at 75% of 4K, and only on low is the noise becoming more evident - this at 60 fps. If you have effects like film grain (and also combined with sharpening), then that will also make it worse.
So from 1440p & up, it will be fine on most SSR levels so long as you get near 60 fps. At 1080p it's pretty much hopeless unless you enable psycho/RT.
Makes sense that it scales like that because sometimes it looks fine on PS4 Pro and sometimes it looks like the game is made up of a couple thousand grains of sand.
 
This is my number 1 issue with the game (yes, even more than the bugs). I've resorted to just turning SSR to off, but it does make the game look flat. Today however, I found something weird that might make the visuals just a tad better.

I found that while in game, if you switch on SSR to psycho, go back in-game, go back to the menu and turn SSR off, the quality of the reflections is slightly better than if you load a save with SSR off. So here are some comparison pics.

SSR on Psycho - Note the accurate reflections with minimum grain

NnS6BAw.png


Switched SSR from Psycho to off - reflections are not at all accurate but still looks kinda ok. Specular highlights are preserved. Minimal grain.
TYOzwxF.png


After reloading the game with SSR off
- In a word, eww. Everything is flat. Specular highlights are gone.


2jhPcrx.png


Weird right? Did anyone else notice this peculiarity?
 

Redefine07

Member
What do you expect ? The game itself it's fucked up the most idiotic shit to ever release hope they will delete this crap from the face of earth we don't deserve this after this shitty year , CDPR die in shit how could you have made the Witcher series and now this TURD ? >.< (and the graphics even maxed out looks cartoonish as fuck , Bioshock Infinite looks 10 times better FU).
 
This is why they insist on the awful film grain, depth of field, and chromatic abomination effects.

To hide the visual ugliness, in an otherwise beautiful game.

Yeah, this to be honest.

I played with film grain and chromatic effects turned off at first, but after the performance took hits once the open world section opened and had to turn down some settings and oh boy, the game is pretty ugly on lower settings without them.

Hurts your eyes, really.
 

Zuzu

Member
I was wondering the same thing last night and I looked into it. Like the OP, I also found out that the grainy image is due to the terrible SSR. This is some of the worst SSR I've ever seen and it ruins a lot of the image quality of the game. Even though the Series X (which I'm playing on) is running at a fairly high resolution in quality mode, the game still often looks blurry and gross because of this SSR (& TAA).
 
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Soodanim

Member
I immediately thought of the RE engine broken SSR.

I’d much rather have good IQ and performance than reflections and effects so it’s good that this has been identified.
 

kraspkibble

Permabanned.
What do you expect ? The game itself it's fucked up the most idiotic shit to ever release hope they will delete this crap from the face of earth we don't deserve this after this shitty year , CDPR die in shit how could you have made the Witcher series and now this TURD ? >.< (and the graphics even maxed out looks cartoonish as fuck , Bioshock Infinite looks 10 times better FU).
i take it you don't like this game? /s

if you aren't trolling then i have to ask why you're getting so mad? if you bought it and hated it so much you had the option to refund it and move on to something else. if you bought it, ignored the reviews, and didn't refund it then that's on you. this is of course assuming you actually bought and played it? if you haven't then you don't really have any right to criticise the game or maybe you're just hating on it cause it's the cool thing to do now? you on that bandwagon?

it's a video game. chill. don't get so angry/upset over it.
 
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TheGejsza

Member
Isn't the whole idea with a console that you don't have to change all these things?
That's what I kept hearing over the last couple of years.
But I also heard 30 fps didn't matter until people experienced 60+ fps so there's that.
I am no for a graphic settings but good lord they should allow to change most post-processing. Hate chromatic aberration, dirt-lense effect, camera motion-blur (per object is cool tho), grain etc. I don't even understand why some cinematography imperfections are used as SFX in video games...
 

Kuranghi

Member
The SSR in the RE2 & RE3 remakes looks like ass as well, so best to just disable it to gain GPU usage back to push more frames or increase the res/other settings. All the most important reflections are still shown using older methods anyway.
 

b0uncyfr0

Member
Yap, i found this extremely distracting when playing. Every shadow had this greyish grainyness to it and its just looks shit. Good that you can disable it but CDPR should really be fixing this.
 

Alexios

Cores, shaders and BIOS oh my!
I don't think it's a bug, it's just how it is, lower precision and quality for the effects for a lower performance hit. On Ultra/Psycho settings + high resolution native rendering on PC it's largely fixed for most surfaces and situations but of course it requires a lot of power for that.

I prefer SSR off myself, the game still looks great (at times), but I don't understand how DF could recommend the "low" setting in their optimized settings guide for non RT hardware claiming there's little difference between that and higher settings to justify the performance.

I said this in the thread with the DF awards for best graphics:

Eh, Cyberpunk has many flaws, almost like a Bethesda game. Maybe you can capture some great vistas often enough but when actually playing and going through its world you will notice, regardless of your PC power (and aside from bugs that aren't consistent like T-pose and floating NPCs and objects), a lot of shit like pop in, flickering textures/distant assets, distant traffic effects looking completely different to when you approach the area (and clearly cardboard cutout 2D that only looks convincing if you don't pay attention), bad water surface/underwater effects (especially for a game that lets you swim), occasional super low resolution shadows, random hitches and a lot of NPC related crap that ruin the overall look. Maybe it's not a real graphical flaw that traffic & npc characters fully reset/disappear/get replaced with other stuff as you turn around and it has more to do with the game logic and how most is just background fluff but it counts to the overall visual result. Their often bad and mismatched animations are definitely another flaw while many of the random filler objects are of pretty bad quality too, whether it's food items or garbage bags that litter certain areas. I also don't think much of the city is designed very realistically, it just looks very off and also breaks the effect when you have stores, buildings and structures that make no sense, futuristic architecture or not. Very juvenile design essentially, sort of what a toddler may think a store looks like and how it functions (Yakuza does this so much better) and it's similar for their off putting fashion design. Anyway, I prefer how more consistent games look by far, even if their moment to moment visuals can be lesser technically (and in that case you can probably max out their view distance, resolution and framerate with super slick results).

Also, in their own Cyberpunk optimized settings guide, I don't understand how Digital Foundry can recommend, for non-RTX rigs, reflections set on low claiming a small difference compared to the visual quality and performance hit of higher settings. I'd rather have them off at that point, low gives a very grainy look almost like you're using CAS or aggressive DLSS and it applies to so many surfaces in the game, from roads, floors and walls to the car you drive and many of your weapons so it's often evident everywhere. It's mostly fixed on Ultra and Psycho settings but yeah, that's pretty taxing, obviously (but you can probably still use it if you don't mind playing with the settings and locking at like 40 fps which isn't hard to get used to, especially with VRR, for a single player shlooter like this).
 
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Barnabot

Member
when i was a kid i was used to consume a lot of sugar and then i developed myopia. Then when I got my lasik when I was already a grown man then I got back to gaming after a year or so of hiatus. Started playing PS2 games again. the sub 30fps ones.

I guess I've started the cycle myopia again.

/s
 

MadYarpen

Member
It was the first thing I noticed, I was playing corpo life path - a lot of that in the tower. I thought something was wrong.

Eventually I played with SSR on ultra and I was able to get used to that. But anything less was rather bad. Psycho was a bit to much for the GPU I think.
 
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