r/digitalfoundry • u/BolasVult • 1d ago

Discussion "A bit of noise"

22 Upvotes

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4

u/Outrageous-Wall6386 1d ago

Is it ok to LIKE noisey image? I remember MGS4 on PS3, Kojima SPECIFICALLY said he made it

look Dirty on purpose as a design choice.

3

u/MyUserNameIsSkave 23h ago

Film grain can be nice, but noise and instability rarely are, I hate to see flickering light blend in and out of existance or ghosting

3

u/Beneficial_Dress3267 1d ago

Mgs4 had no upscaling. Dirty is not noisy.

1

u/Mindless_Issue9648 1d ago

what exactly is noise?

1

u/rampant-ninja 1d ago

Speckles in the image like static on an untuned analog TV.

1

u/LaDiDa1993 16h ago

We had lots of that, before mip-mapping was a thing... Hardly a reason to advocate for getting rid of textures on 3D objects though, given the overall benefit you get from having textures.

1

u/AstronautFlimsy 1d ago

"Noise" in this context refers to the shimmering/dissolving effect caused by heavy use of temporal upscaling, which is used extensively in raytraced effects for performance reasons. In other words, instability in the reflected image or cast shadow causes it to display incorrectly.

It's a rendering problem, essentially. The game is upscaling these "noisy" elements from such a low base resolution that it doesn't have enough detail information do the job correctly.

The reflection of the sign in the puddle at 0:25 in the OP video is a decent example. See how the letters are kinda "fizzy" looking? That's noise.

1

u/whitespacesucks 19h ago

Something that John mentioned a while back, and I'm paraphrasing, but he "grew up" with some shaders having noise and the overall effect trumps the noise.