Yeah, the only option worth the effort was SSAO, and only because the default option is **** poor. Basic basic shading like that was being done years ago without much work. The game looks SHOCKING for something that performs that slow even the performance level on AMD hardware. Tesselate background shadows thats not noticeable that NO ONE IS LOOKING AT, thats not interesting, and cost us performance for it, what kind of morons would do that.
This isn't Oblivion, I can't run up to that mountain in the distance and see whats on it so I literally have no reason to look at them, and 90% of the game is based in the town. DOF effects, sure, blur half the screen again in another unrealistic effect. Heres a clue, in REAL LIFE I can choose where to focus with my eyes at any time, when its done for me, in a game, I can't any longer choose where I can focus, its laughable, its a joke, anyone, and I mean anyone who thinks DOF as implemented in DA2 or Metro, is a fool.
Again I'll say, in a decade, when theres eye tracking camera's in EVERY monitor and the eye tracking in real time checks where I'm focusing and changes the focus in game to match, DOF might work, while that can't be done, blurring a piece of the screen I physically want to look at, is one of the single worst graphical ideas anyone EVER came up with.
Textures, ouch, the other thing with the DOF thing, look at the picture, aveline's hair already looks, when in focus, like hair in games a decade ago, DOF turns it into hair from a game 15 years ago, the distant DOF goes from horrible horrible quality distant textures, to blurry horrible horrible distant textures, it looks even more blocky, and awful.
DOF simply massively reduces IQ, and it hurts performance again.
Dev's are all getting hooked on crack pipes it would seem. Metro 2033, DOF is horrifically poor quality, a move AWAY from realism, makes the screen blurry and utterly destroys performance, tesselation killed performance, though at least it was used on things someone would look at, but was also virtually un-noticeable.
At the very least Metro 2033 without DOF or tesselation ran better and looked pretty damned good, DA2 can't even claim that on either count, it looks pretty woeful as standard and looks significantly worse with DOF, tesselation is pointless(literally, in two ways
) and SSAO is good, a decent effect, but somehow feels like way to much performance for frankly, shadows we've had for years and years in games, shadows around a freaking column, seriously, theres very little dynamic lighting in the game, they could frankly have prebaked the shadows onto the textures, looked identical and cost zero performance. Though maybe it was more apparent in more places than the screen shots suggest, without SSAO looks what I would feel is worse than "standard" shadowing could achieve in previous games.
:
