I’m tired of every game having ghosting and soft images because of TAA, DLSS, motion blur, LoD pop-in, and low res textures. What are some good games with high visual clarity? Bonus points if it runs at high fps.
You could just turn those off. I do.
Otherwise, you can always play older games. Half-Life will look sharp as hell and run plenty fast.
Sure, but aliasing isn’t great either. There has to be at least one game with perfect visuals.
You’re looking for vector graphics. You could try Asteroids or Lunar Lander.
Aliasing is a byproduct of trying to draw a curved line across square pixels. It’s a deficiency of raster graphics, not the fault of the game.
Use supersampling. Either at the driver level (works with nearly all 3D games - enable the feature there, then select a higher than native resolution in-game) or directly in games that come with the feature (usually a resolution scaling option that goes beyond 100 percent). It’s very heavy on your GPU depending on the title, but the resulting image quality of turning several rendered pixels into one is sublime. Thin objects like power lines, as well as transparent textures like foliage, hair and chain-link fences benefit the most from this.
Always keep the limits of your hardware in mind though. Running a game at 2.75 or even four times the native resolution will have a serious impact on performance, even with last-gen stuff.
Emulators often have this feature as well, by the way - and here, it tends to hardly matter, since emulation is usually more CPU-bound (except with very tricky to emulate systems). Render resolution and output resolution are often separate. I’ve played old console games at 5K resolution, for example. Even ancient titles look magnificent like that.
While a costly option, once you reach a certain resolution and texture quality you’d likely be able to disable AA entirely.
For DLSS/FSR/other upscalers: Unless the game is optimized like shit or your hardware is getting on in years, you can literally just not use those. They’re only meant to give you a little boost if needed. If you can run the game at high frame rates on the settings you want without them, they’re not even going to do anything but make the experience worse.
DOF, motion blur Chromatic Aberration, lens flares, bloom, etc: These are the first things I would disable in any game, ever made to use them, because they suck anyway.
I do hate how often in newer games, the only AA options are some bullshit that just smears vasoline on the edges of everything, though. But you could simply turn off AA in the game and force enable it via the GPU settings. Loads of standardized options are available from the GPU control panel on both AMD and nVidia cards and you can always force those and disable the game’s methods entirely.
Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal are both detailed games that are optimized really well.
Celeste, Hollow Knight, Ori and the Blind Forest
Quake 3 Arena
Unironically, Dissidia 012 for the PSP, maybe? Been some years since I last played it, but I remember that graphics seemed pretty sharp, even on a PSP screen.
Disable those effects in the settings then? And Reshade’s LevelsPlus filter “removes” the gray/blue layer which most games have.
Xonotic, (Valkyria Chronicles 1, 4)
