What setting changes the "macroblocking" of colors on planets?

This macroblocking (planets looking like very low-quality compressed JPGS) was a problem on PS4 that I hated, and I thought I escaped that when I switched to PC. But now I'm seeing it again in VR. Specifically what setting or GraphicsConfiguration.xml entry do I adjust to make this go away? I've been fiddling around with certain terrain settings to no avail.

Thanks!
 
Morbad has done a lot of work regarding improving shadows etc on the PC, he's also tweaked up the texture settings that affect things like planet details.

Have a look, page 10-13 should help.
 
Have long felt that in VR, in outstanding particular with landable planet surfaces, the LOD and mipmap bias feel both one and two notches too thrifty, for a visually pleasing experience.

Of course, raising them would greatly increase both rendering and terrain generation load, and I can't say I rate my computer's ability to shoulder it, but man, do things look soft and indistinct the way it is...

Still wonding about the viability of offloading procgen (and physics, as our demands grow rapidly, on all of how much of the virtual world is physics enabled, how complex the interactions, and how high resolution both the of collision meshes are, and the update tick) to a second graphics card - maybe one's old, last generation one - even without SLI, although I reckon that would be quite a bit of data to shunt around (EDIT: textures and geometry from the card that generated it, to the one that's going to render it)...
 
This is what I'm talking about. I cranked the gamma so you can see it better. Notice the "Minecraft texture" on the planet surface. Here's the thing, the planet details (ridges, geometry, etc) looks fine, it's just the new color mapping that's all blocky. I don't see this on all planets all the time, but when I do see it, it's pretty ugly. It is an exact replica of what I was experiencing on PS4, but now it's happening on my PC, even when I set terrain features to Ultra!

As stated above, various settings seem "downgraded" in VR compared to those same settings on a 2D display, shadow quality being another example. I don't understand this - let ultra be ultra and if the framerate tanks, we the user can downgrade the settings ourselves.
 

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Planet texture resolution has some impact on this issue, but I don't know of any cure. It's been around since 2.1, when they decided to downgrade and fake geometry with texturing, for the purpose of improving performance...which it did, but I'd imagine the performance of the average GPU running Horizons has improved significantly in four years.

Edit: This is from February 2016...planets, especially on approach, don't look this good now, even with much higher texture resolution settings.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEONdwMToxw
 
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This is what I'm talking about. I cranked the gamma so you can see it better. Notice the "Minecraft texture" on the planet surface...

Gah! I've seen low texel density when looking down at the ground at times, but never anywhere near that bad.

Although I seriously doubt the game renders down ground textures into larger terrain textures at that point: What is your render/generate load balance setting like? Not too much LOD popping, too late?

There seem to be a bit of variety in how detailed and rich different ground texture sets are, too -- the extremely visible tiling on those yellow-y ones is particularly jarring. :7
 
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