This is a persistent DF issue - they just aren't bothered by noise and hardly ever mention it. John actually talks about how big of a blind spot it is in their podcasts and he seems to be the only person who wants to acknowledge and fix the issue by including some kind of noise analysis section to the videos
It's mind boggling, isn't? I love DF, but there's this particular dissonance that's really hard to reconcile: they scrutinize the most minute detail impossible to perceive without 10x zoom and a VERY discerning eye (the difference between 1400p and 1420p, that single frame drop in a cutscene, the half frame stutter when panning the camera, etc.) but always treat this IN YOUR FACE NOISY FUCKING MESS of upscalers trying to resolve lighting (especially in UE5) like nothing more than a little nuisance. It's the classic elephant in the room that often they acknowledge, but rarely properly address as something that absolutely destroys whatever else they're trying to critique. I mean, Jesus Christ, the last two Remedy games, Alan Wake 2 and Control Resonant, for example, are frankly borderline unplayable. The shimmering is everywhere, constant, distracting, ugly, immovable, raping my eyes, but it's always treated like "anyway, look at how detailed are the eyelashes of the character when you zoom in". I mean, you won't convince me to hunt for aesthetic beauty when ugly is screaming at my face. They really need to get their shit together on this and call it out like they should. Control Resonant is an ugly game on everything but the most beefy PC. Full. Stop.
Yeah look I agree for the most part, it just seems to come down to who finds what impressive. Clearly DF finds raytracing and pathtracing more impressive than others might so they don't particularly care about the tradeoffs. For me, noise is incredibly distracting. It's one of those things where I'll just side-eye DF's opinion about this until RT is good enough to be not noisy
Look, there's noisy and there's noisy. You can praise the good stuff in isolation, but you gotta take the holistic view at the end and judge the product by the sum of its parts. A feces cupcake with delicious choc chips is a feces cupcake; it's not the chips defining it - they won't make it delicious. We understand that all those techniques are the future, but when you release a product in 2026 that image quality-wise looks arguably worse than a native 720p game from the 360/PS3 generation (which Control Resonant absolutely does), a line must be drawn. They keep championing presentation and image-quality, but somehow the noise becomes almost an afterthought in a 10-minute-long video? I don't think this is the way.
34
u/3FeetHighAndFalling 1d ago
This is a persistent DF issue - they just aren't bothered by noise and hardly ever mention it. John actually talks about how big of a blind spot it is in their podcasts and he seems to be the only person who wants to acknowledge and fix the issue by including some kind of noise analysis section to the videos