Oh no, anti-aliasing lets you see stuff that non anti-aliased players cannot. Let's see how deep this PAY to WHINE conspiracy goes / multisampling_setting_...
DO NOT set your Shadow Quality to low, this will hide those massive shadows from construction lights. Set it to "Very High" to get an advantage on multiple spots on multiple maps, or Low to get an advantage on this specific railing only. EDIT: "High" works just as well. (I thought higher setting rendered further but it doesn't seem to in testing)
Not really, CS2 is CPU bound. Anything over a 4070 for CS2 is over the top, what's really important is you have a good CPU like a 7800x3D or 13/14900k.
Final Fantasy XIII abused this quirk of MSAA to render hair, when the PC port dropped people wondered why MSAA was forced on until they found a way to disable it and everyone’s head turned into pixel soup
The reason this happens is because the grates are using Alpha To Coverage, which is basically a way to anti-alias see-through cutoff textures. It allows you to do "half transparency", without actually making an object transparent. Allowing the graphics card to then smooth out the line between "fully visible" and "fully invisible" by abusing MSAA. This eliminates the grainy "shimmering" or aliasing that you often see on foliage or chain-link fences in certain games. Without anti-aliasing turned on, more of the grate texture will be visible and the gaps will be smaller because the texture doesn't get cut off until it goes FULLY transparent. 2x MSAA cuts off most of the texture or at least makes it half-transparent which makes it easier to see through. This is not easily fixable unless they alter these specific textures for people with MSAA off.
@@vxpdx mipmaps don't fix the issues that Alpha To Coverage aims to solve. You see the same graininess on textures that aren't mipmapped, but the grainy aliased effect remains with mipmaps when combined with alpha testing/clipping. Like this problem is definitely fixable, but it needs some special extra care in the code for these specific materials when MSAA is off.
@@Rokk_ Can't they fix the texture itself? By altering the transparent/opaque ratio ever so slightly (in near-invisible but not-completely-transparent areas), it could compound into massive changes because of what you described?
@@Rokk_ having mipmaps using appropriate minifying filters on texture creation helps alleviate the loss of precision. Because these issues exacerbate with the mipmaps themselves or their lack of. Remember anisotropy uses mipmaps, take a look at the effect on the chain link fence You don't need to touch code for handling arbitrary textures. Just have the texture create appropriate mipmaps
Hot take: Competitive players need a reason to use something other than the ugliest possible graphics settings. People who will never climb the ranks still stream the game with eye-searingly bad graphics because it's "the meta." I would be overjoyed if they all used AA because it was technically superior in 1 tiny area on a couple maps.
I remember when PUBG exploded, a lot of people using grass on low just to see better... Why buy a good PC if you will play with the same settings as before? Yes... I'm aware of the input latency when you have more FPS, but common...
Try following (it hasn't yet been fixed) Map: Nuke Location: Ramp Video Settings (recommended Low) Try using M4A1-s Standing close to wall next-to box on and looking into Radio Effect: backwall and enemy in radio should disappear
This scenario is annoying because in 99% of competitive games, the lower quality settings have at least some form of advantages, but it is impossible for high settings to give advantages due to hardware restrictions and a higher gate for competitive entry.
I remember how in DayZ you had a huge advantage by setting the foliage to low, because it removed all the 3d grass and made players stick out on the flat ground. Also cranking your gamma all the way up pretty much gave you night vision. Of course visually it looked horrible. I think that’s really not how games should be played, but exploits will always be used I guess
@@starstencahl8985Same thing happened in PUBG a while back where setting most things to low removed most of the foliage and grass making players easily visible. THis is now fixed. The other thing you mentioned is something a lot of people do in shooters. I play on a GTA V custom server and players there will open the settings in GTA 5's folder and set the Shadows to 0 making everything 100% lit at all times. It looks garbage but it gives you an incredible advantage over anyone who doesn't have it as it is much much easier to see people.
@@starstencahl8985 I cannot tell you how many times I have played overwatch and died simply because the bush I was using for cover simply did not exist for my opponent.
I like it when games encourage having a decent computer instead of making everyone play with potato settings and resolutions for insane competitive advantages, like turning off the foliage as some others here mentioned. fuck that noise.
@@starstencahl8985 that’s why playing online games on consoles is the best choice 😁 you can’t change anything except for brightness/contrast(unless you are playing F76)
This makes me almost wonder. Competitive advantages from graphics settings are nothing new in games but I’m kind of surprised no games have implemented a “competitive standard” setting. Standard modes you run your own settings but all competitive matches would use the same settings. I guess it might make things troublesome for players as you now have Min hardware requirements to run the game but if you want to play competitive you’d need to also meet the min competitive standard requirements as well
I always turned off AA, because I figured it made polygon edge detail easier to distinguish from texture detail. Good to know there are disadvantages as well.
Note that the graphics options will sometimes *have FSR enabled by default*, which can make you game look drastically worse. do yourself a favor and disable it
The issue with the fencing (and grilles) is that they're *technically* not transparent textures, but cutout textures. This allows them to still be rendered like normal opaque textures, and without any of the drawbacks of rendering transparency. I don't think Valve is going to change them to be rendered differently.
Technically, this isn't MSAA per se, but rather an additional optional, fixed-function-hardware feature called "alpha-to-coverage". At the GPU level, MSAA rasterizes geometry at a greater level than outputted, but keeps the shader execution at a lower rate, simply outputting their results to fragments the triangles touch. The idea is that whenever there's geometry aliasing, those will be smoothed because in those situations the output "lowres" pixel will contain properly blended samples/results from both triangles. Alpha-to-coverage abuses this mechanism in order to output its alpha as a mask, dictating which "hi-rez pixels" should be filled and which should not. If you inspect it closely on the video, the 2X version shows a noticeable flaw: there are just 2 "hirez" samples per pixel, so the shader can only output either 100% visibility, 50% visibility or zero.
There are things they can tweak without making core changes to the engine. I'm not familiar with this version of the source engine but tipically there are texture settings they can adjust (aniso level, trilinear filtering, extending mip map distance), but they'd have to take into account how things look and perform at every AA setting, transparent textures at a distance are always a compromise between performance/quality. And now you also have to take into account visibility.
The fix for alpha tested geometry rendering is called "alpha to coverage". It's what we use to prevent alpha tested foliage like grass/trees from disappearing when the mipmap LOD levels are higher - which is caused by the basic hardware mipmap generation simply averaging alpha values - which just results in the whole texture becoming semi-opaque and failing the alpha test, causing it to disappear entirely. You need to manually calculate alpha values for mipmaps in a way that conserves opacity where it's needed most, rather than relying on the hardware mipmap generation. For static textures it's fine to run them through a manual mipmapping scheme, even on the CPU across available cores.
Wait, so we should run shadow quality on low? This won't affect the drawing distance of the shadows? I thought we did the highest one to see players' shadows more clearly in a lot of places (I think I saw some good exampeles with the construction lights on Ancient, decon on Nuke etc. Am I missing something or is it just this example on Vertigo that benefits from having them on low?
I've always kind of had the thought that people who play at really low resolutions like 1280x1024 surely have to have lower visibility of certain things in game compared to 1080p or 4k players
Turn off FSR 1.0 in settings, you can tell that it is being rendered at a lower internal resolution. would reccomend keeping it off as there is no true benefit to using it (until FSR 2.1 is added).
the tongue vaseline analogy is actually great because it encourages people to never put on the obviously inferior disgusting version and to instead either use no AA at the very least or MSAA
I wonder how this will apply to pros trying to get as many frames as possible (I thought many of them just went 4:3 and max all other settings but apparently not)
This has been a thing since atleast 1.6.. Had same thing in cpl on inferno. With correct settings you could´t see tho the blinders on the side of the window
Theres another bug at ct spawn we discovered today where you can slow you fall by about 5sec or so. Unfortunately we cant check why that happens since we didnt find a way to show clupbrushes in cs2
@@Algodois you must have skipped the word "another". Tiny detail that makes all the difference ;) And if it wasnt obvious enough, is there another ct spawn in cs2 where you can fall for over 5 seconds? :)
There's no real simple fix for this. With higher graphics settings you do more computation for more precision, no way around that if you are using a potato.
Don't worry everyone I emailed cs2 team the exact thing a month ago and they only completely ignored it :). Maybe now that theres a video on it then valve will actually do something
Bro I was about to say the same thing... They don't give a single FAK... I was emailing for the Name Tag on the Stiletto Knife which looks absolutely vommiting.... 🤮🤢🤢🤮
How about you do a video on the bullet penetration through that grate there, compare it to CSGO and how it is now. You're mind will be blown. Also test in both directions to see how messed up it actually is.
@@MareksKing Sounds like a lot of overhead for little gain. Why not train it to dynamically alter settings as it deems them advantageous? Up the detail when still and sniping, lower it when rushing, change aliasing when there are known patterns to see thru, shadows when there are corners with light coming that way, etc. Sure you'd need a 2nd pc and would be fully cheating at that point but sounds interesting. In conclusion: I don't believe you.
What are those railings like in CSGO? I swear I had multiple moments where I'm watching from that angle and my friends are screaming at me "YOU SEE THEM! THEY'RE RIGHT THERE!" when I cant see shit 😭
FSR at 1080p just always makes games look like shit and especially grills and fences always have these aliasing and moiré issues, in every game. I mean of course you can see less if you render at a lower resolution, that's a fundamental truth in every game, not something Valve can change. You should really just upgrade to a PC where you can afford to not use FSR. FSR and the lower settings in general in this game seem to be only there to make it playable at all on lower end hardware, it doesn't look good, in fact it often ends up looking worse than CS:GO. At least in a few years hopefully everyone will have a PC powerful enough to run this at highest settings. I think it's pretty much impossible to make sure that no setting gives a competitive (dis)advantage, the best you can do is when the best looking settings are also the best ones competitively and pretty much everyone can run at those settings. This should probably be reflected by the recommended specifications. If your PC is an absolute potato, you are always gonna be disadvantaged anyway.
This reminds me of warzone 2, I had outdated drivers and for some reason that caused some stuff to dissapear for some frames (most of the time were ladders or some type of plataform) and sometimes I got kills by using this as some sort of "wallhack" xD
I do want to say that adding the same fade out without anti aliasing would make a performance difference since drawing transparency is quite expensive. We should probably be ignoring these highly competitive issues at these low settings since if you need to play this low you’re probably not going to be playing that competitively anyways
I think they could change anisotropic texture filtering to make this look better on much lower settings so when they average pixels when mipmapping they look semi transperent.
Nope. The MSAA is doing exactly what you described to cheat in semi transparency. It's using texture filtering to determine if the texture is semi transparent and using that to then ratio between it's opaque and transparent multi pixel samples to fake it. The more MSAA samples you have the better it fakes. So MSAAx2 gives one semi transparency, MSAAx4 gives three, MSAAx8 gives seven. Not everyone is going to run MSAA obviously so a dev should decide if they eventually want that texture to filter down to fully opaque like in the video above or fully transparent as to never block on every setting.
Tech artist here. This is a common problem with alpha testing (alpha clip). It allows to have awesome detailed sharp edges (especially with SDF), unlike alpha blend, but mipmaps become either fully opaque of fully transparent at low enough scale. However just using alpha blend is not an option, because unlike alpha blend, alpha test (clip) is not really a transparency effect. So it's much cheaper to render, doesn't have depth sorting issues and can cast proper shadows. I suppose a solution to this problem could be introducing alpha hashing to maintain semi-transparency at distance or grazing angles. I should test that. I wonder if Valve is going to attempt a fix here, and what is be...
PS: MSAA / SMAA should help because alpha tested surfaces have edges that these AA techniques can resolve more detail about and average out the resulting opacity, giving best of both worlds.
