Question I'm getting bodied by terrible reflections/lighting in many of my games

WhyMe137

Commendable
Aug 24, 2020
12
0
1,510
For the last several months, I've been noticing this very grainy and ugly lighting effect that appears frequently in many of my PC games. Usually, it affects one or several objects in a scene. At times, this grainy effect covers huge portions of a scene, in varying intensity. I notice it most often when looking at shadows or reflections, especially on shiny or metallic surfaces. At other times it is not present at all. In Far Cry 5, for example, all the lighting looked good except for reflections on metal carts and similar objects - those reflections were a blurry, grainy mess.

I've been collecting photo evidence (view in full size to see the effect most clearly):
View: https://imgur.com/a/VfJjZdk


I have replicated the effect on two completely different monitors. I have spent a significant amount of time tweaking in-game settings and a few things in the Nvidia control panel, and I have yet to find anything that removes the effect or even reduces it. I have noticed that decreasing/disabling anti-aliasing makes the issue way more noticeable, but I'm not sure that means anti-aliasing is causing it. It seems to be related to screen space reflections/RTX somehow, but I can't figure out a fix.

Other things I have tried:
-rolling back Nvidia drivers
-clearing the DX shader cache
-upgrading my graphics card from a 1660 super to a 3060Ti
-moving my GPU to a different PCIe slot
-reinstalling my OS (Windows 10)

PC Specs:
RTX 3060 Ti
AMD Ryzen 5 3600
MIS MAG B550 Tomahawk motherboard
16 GB RAM
Driver Version 531.18

Does anyone have any idea what could be causing this or what I can try to fix it?
Happy to provide any follow-up information I can to help resolve this. I really don't want to go into RE4 with this issue. Thank you in advance for any suggestions/help!
 
Graininess is likely caused by a graphical artifact in one of the rendering features the game is using and not something that's a problem with the hardware itself. Two of these off the top of my head are:
  • Poor implementations of temporal anti aliasing, or it being affected by something that doesn't work well with it (such as a transparent object). See https://forums.cdprojektred.com/index.php?threads/taa-ghosting-fix-how.11038280/#post-12311198
  • Some lighting effects use ray tracing. Yes, games can use ray tracing without using DXR. For example, Star Ocean: The Divine Force isn't a DXR game, but makes use of screen space reflections which is a ray tracing technique. Normally however screen space reflections are used on smooth surfaces, but for Star Ocean, it has a grainy look to it for what I suppose is to emulate rough, yet shiny surfaces.
    OFs56nV.jpg
I'm led to believe a lot of modern games are resorting to something called Stochastic Rendering not just for reflections, but for lighting effects in general. My best guess as to why is that is they can render the lighting effect at full resolution. Rendering something like dynamic shadows requires the game to render the entire scene again from the light source's point of view. It doesn't have to of course shade the pixels, but it still has to basically get to the point of turning 3D space into 2D space so the game can find a way to bake the result onto the player's perspective. Then you'd use something like temporal anti-aliasing to clean up the noise. It's basically a hacky version of DXR + DLSS/FSR.
 

WhyMe137

Commendable
Aug 24, 2020
12
0
1,510
That looks so bad in your screenshot lol. And the issue is, I'm comparing these games to gameplay from other people and the ugly grain is NOT present in their games. Meaning it has to be something with my setup or settings.
 
That looks so bad in your screenshot lol. And the issue is, I'm comparing these games to gameplay from other people and the ugly grain is NOT present in their games. Meaning it has to be something with my setup or settings.
A quick look around tells me that the screen space reflections (and shadows, if used) option tends to be the culprit. Either they should be turned off, or if there's a quality option, set to the maximum.
 

WhyMe137

Commendable
Aug 24, 2020
12
0
1,510
A quick look around tells me that the screen space reflections (and shadows, if used) option tends to be the culprit. Either they should be turned off, or if there's a quality option, set to the maximum.

that’s the thing, everything is on ultra. I’ll try a settings comparison in Atomic Heart later and share it here
 
that’s the thing, everything is on ultra. I’ll try a settings comparison in Atomic Heart later and share it here
I tried the RE4 demo with various settings and I see the graininess too. But unfortunately that's just how the game's rendering engine is designed. I'm going on a limb and saying that's also how Atomic Heart's rendering engine is designed as well. Unless the rendering engine uses path tracing for lighting, this is the tradeoff you get with trying to make something resemble realistic lighting with a rasterization renderer.

The one game I did see where supposedly graininess goes away with screen space reflection quality cranked up was RDR2. But it's also an expensive quality setting.
 

WhyMe137

Commendable
Aug 24, 2020
12
0
1,510
I tried the RE4 demo with various settings and I see the graininess too. But unfortunately that's just how the game's rendering engine is designed. I'm going on a limb and saying that's also how Atomic Heart's rendering engine is designed as well. Unless the rendering engine uses path tracing for lighting, this is the tradeoff you get with trying to make something resemble realistic lighting with a rasterization renderer.

The one game I did see where supposedly graininess goes away with screen space reflection quality cranked up was RDR2. But it's also an expensive quality setting.

you’re going to need to trust me when I say this is not the game. RE4, for example, I did a direct comparison with someone running the same settings. His grain is almost nonexistent compared to mine. This is how my game looks on low settings: View: https://imgur.com/a/E8kfK35


It’s not normal. Yes, I understand that there is some level of grain to some games. This is different, and I’ve done the research to confirm it beyond a shadow of a doubt.
 
I see you have a similar grain as me. Yet here is my brother’s game with identical settings as me:
View: https://imgur.com/a/0NWtR0j
And what settings are those? Also what video card does he have?

EDIT: So I got to that scene in question and took some screen shots
View: https://imgur.com/a/5Fwwvl7


One of these is with ray tracing on, the other is with it off, otherwise everything is max quality. Granted they're not the same angle, but they both look similar to what your brother is getting. The only graininess I'm seeing is from the tree branches and not the general environmental lighting (which is from the bigger shadows on the car)

Also I can see hints of the graininess from the tree branches on the screenshot you provided. It's not also helping the screenshot you provided appears blurrier or interpolated.

In any case, another look around Google for either AMD or NVIDIA shadow graininess shows me that both GPUs exhibit this "problem" on a variety of games. So it's not a hardware issue, it's not a settings issue, it's simply just how the game renders shadows and/or other lighting effects.
 
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WhyMe137

Commendable
Aug 24, 2020
12
0
1,510
You’ll have to forgive me. I did a lot of in-depth research last night on modern graphics and TAA and I learned this is legit how games look now unless you crank resolution. I was able to get that grain effect basically gone with 200% image scaling.

If anyone finds this thread, it’s not your hardware. Use DLSS, use DLDSR, consider disabling ray tracing, and tweak your in-game settings and you will be able to make it playable at least.

thanks for the help Hotaru - sorry I didn’t want to listen!
 
I think the core problem with how these games use stochastic rendering is you're supposed to randomize the sample points per frame. If you notice in RE4, the shadows look nice when you move around. It's when you stand still it becomes grainy. If the sample points were randomized, then TAA/FSR2/DLSS can use previous frame data to smooth out the shadow smoothness, as it were.
 

WhyMe137

Commendable
Aug 24, 2020
12
0
1,510
I think the core problem with how these games use stochastic rendering is you're supposed to randomize the sample points per frame. If you notice in RE4, the shadows look nice when you move around. It's when you stand still it becomes grainy. If the sample points were randomized, then TAA/FSR2/DLSS can use previous frame data to smooth out the shadow smoothness, as it were.

well said. I really things change in the future and we can get a clear image while retaining the graphical fidelity everyone has come to expect, static or moving.