Brian Fargo · @BrianFargo
12th Oct 2018 from TwitLonger
Technical breakdown of compatibility issues
The game wasn’t well optimized at launch. We received a lot of feedback that things were running slowly and during Patch 1, we implemented a hardware auto-detect on load feature that would set your default quality level based on hardware. There were a few issues with this. First is that the Nvidia Control Panel defaults to optimal and not performance. This will lead to it reporting a lower score from the autodetect unless the user has manually changed to performance mode. Second is that since we weren’t optimized great, we further reduced the scores to choose a lower quality setting that would run at a decent framerate.
The second major issue is that when it did auto-detect and select a quality setting that was not Ultra, the lower quality settings had turned off things like anti-aliasing (which makes the game look jaggy) and also applied a resolution downscale (which makes things look blurry). Some objects on lower quality settings didn’t render or looked bad when they did (hair, beards…). Our non-ultra quality settings were less than desirable visually.
As we’ve been making performance and optimization gains, we’re starting to increase the visual quality of the non-ultra quality settings. Adding a sharpness filter to the post process helped quite a bit too as it clears up some blurring caused by Temporal Anti-Aliasing and makes the normals “pop” a lot more on objects.