Why is this game so blurry?

[cheiften98]

im running the game 1440p and the game is so blurry. The game just runs terribly...

[DarkBoolen]

Did you turn off blur effect?

[cheiften98]

Originally posted by DarkBoolen:

Did you turn off blur effect?

its not motion blur, its like everything is at a really low res even tho ive set all over the res options to 1440p. very strange.

[johnpinky7]

Glad it's not just me, game looks awful and blurry as hell. I thought it had good ray tracing too, even that looks pretty bad and I think most of the reflections are screen space anyways.

[mr munkee]

Make sure "history resolution" is set to native along with all the other resolution settings. The game doesn't seem blurry for me at all.

Originally posted by johnpinky7:

Glad it's not just me, game looks awful and blurry as hell. I thought it had good ray tracing too, even that looks pretty bad and I think most of the reflections are screen space anyways.

The ray tracing in the game is ONLY vehicle shadows, which is such a minor thing that it doesn't even matter. So shadows cast by vehicles are the only ray traced effect.

Most games that brag about "ray tracing" only have one specific effect, like only shadows, or only reflections. I think it's misleading when they advertise "ray tracing" instead of "only ray traced shadows". Very few games have full ray traced effects like Quake 2 RTX/minecraft/control/CP2077/etc.

[GobboKirk]

Oops, deleted, wrong forum :P

[johnpinky7]

Originally posted by mr munkee:

Make sure "history resolution" is set to native along with all the other resolution settings. The game doesn't seem blurry for me at all.

Originally posted by johnpinky7:

Glad it's not just me, game looks awful and blurry as hell. I thought it had good ray tracing too, even that looks pretty bad and I think most of the reflections are screen space anyways.

The ray tracing in the game is ONLY vehicle shadows, which is such a minor thing that it doesn't even matter. So shadows cast by vehicles are the only ray traced effect.

Most games that brag about "ray tracing" only have one specific effect, like only shadows, or only reflections. I think it's misleading when they advertise "ray tracing" instead of "only ray traced shadows". Very few games have full ray traced effects like Quake 2 RTX/minecraft/control/CP2077/etc.

Yup all resolution options tested at native setting and 1440p, still blurry. It's most likely the heavy TAA solution used, needs a slight bump to the sharpening filter IMO. After researching I now see that ray tracing is only shadows, and only recently implemented. The marketing trailer at the begining of release ran tracks with tons of water puddles and screenshots often show reflections, and people tossed around the word ray tracing, so I assumed they had ray traced reflections at least. I think the marketing team were banking on that confusion haha
And side note I've been playing forza horizon 3 and that looks miles better than this game, so maybe I just had higher expectations from a game with small tracks and "next-gen" marketing.

[Count Shagula]

Just started playing and came here for the exact same reason. 4K and still blurry af

[johnpinky7]

Originally posted by Count Shagula:

Just started playing and came here for the exact same reason. 4K and still blurry af

Yup, the TAA is very aggressive and I don't think there's an in-game sharpening setting. I used 30% sharpening (ignore film grain at 0%) in the Nvidia control panel and it helps clear it up a little, but wish it we could disable TAA altogether.

[Kirby]

Originally posted by lksdfhj:

it is not very good graphics quality with Nividia GTX 1050.

yeah, because that's an underpowered gpu.

[Duendi]

Originally posted by cheiften98:

im running the game 1440p and the game is so blurry. The game just runs terribly...

POSTED WRONG - SEE MY NEXT COMMENT! (This may interest you though)

First some terminology, as DIRT5 is one of the games including most of AMD/GPUOpen's technologies (see link at bottom), which is Free and Open Source and can and is used by everyone, and is by NVIDIA and Intel on Windows and Linux, and can also be used on AMD GPUs as old as Polaris (and even older), for example an RX 570:

* FSR: AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 1.0, simply known as FSR for now. Version 2.0 has been implemented in a few games with beta patches, for real life testing, but the Source Code is not yet released but scheduled to be released on GitHub, as all the others, this Q2 2022, so very soon

* (T)AA: Temporal Anti-Aliasing, or just AA if you wish.

* I also noticed a good amount of blur, but first when I ran the benchmark on my fairly expensive 4K PC monitors, rather than my 4K TV, as the distance makes it less obvious, and having played DiRT 4, which is Linux Native (Vulkan), the benchmark gives a feeling much closer to Forza Horizon 4/5 than DiRT 4, really, so I was excited.

* Because DIRT 5 is obviusly a Console First game, no? - then the PC version is given a few very uncommonly named and very poorly described values graphics settings, and very few of them, but I guess you don't those get on a console at least (have not had one since a PS 3 for GTA5 and FIFA 14 only, so IDK, but no graphics settings was there - IT IS AS IT IS! /s).

* So thinking FSR and how MSAA works, I got rid of the blur, and since it has FSR built-in, then you have to think about that, according to the link to AMD's table at the bottom.

* For proper AA and therefore less blur, you want to think like e.g. Forza Horizon 4/5, where the the Preset Ultra uses "only" MSAA x2, meaning Double the RENDERING RESOLUTION.

* For Upscaling to happen (FSR), the Render Resolution MUST be higher than the Final Resolution. Now in the Screenshot linked to below, you see I can do Ultra High and High on all Settings, and with my entry-level mediocre RX 6600 XT, I still get 60 FPS easily, which is actually the GPU rendering 1440p but outputting it as 1080p, so it is kind of reverse of AMD's table (input/output, same principle though), although the game does the upscaling well, where 1080p looks like 1440p minimum with an expensive monitor right in front of me.

* The "weird" FSR resolutions seen in the table linked to at the bottom, are not available in this game. It only supports a few, the typical ones, but at least it does it well. On Linux you can force any game, per-game, to use FSR, unless it is already implemented this way. You can technically see it by a lot of more resolutions becoming available (all at 16:9), and physically it is pretty much impossible to separate from running the game in 4K, so you can then up the Settings.

* If you "only" gain 10-12 FPS by choosing 1080p instead of 4K, it is because FSR does a very, very good job with that game, considering what AMD's table suggests, it won't look very much better but of course give better performance with a lower resolution. Just see the description of "Performance", the "worst" where 1920x1080 to 3840x2160 lives in the table. However, it looks GREAT with Sharpening = 0 (see below), and I can up several Settings so it looks even better. I can not rule out this is some magic of Steam/Play/Runtime/Proton-GE, which translates, in this case, DirectX3D 12 Ultimate to Vulkan, which Linux then renders natively.

* Vulkan is closer to the metal than both DirectX and OpenGL. Sounds scary? As one official AMD/GPUOpen volunteer wrote on Reddit; "it's easier to write and you are less likely to make a bad mistake, like memory leaks than DirectX and OpenGL, yet closer to the metal. So of course, if you WANT to, you can crash the OS or cause the GPU to reboot with 3 lines of code, but then you have to want it...". Farily similar to Apple's Metal but much more documented, widespread and also 100% Free and Open Source. Libvulkan is therefore installed by all GPU drivers on Windows, and on Linux (including Android) at OS install, while macOS needs a manual install, because they of course want their wallet garden with Metal, however the same can be said about DirectX!

* Think about it; both today's PlayStations and Xboxes use AMD RDNA2 GPUs, bascially modified Radeon RX 6000 series GPUs for consoles, and a PlayStation does not support DirectX at all. It does however, since it runs the Linux AMD driver, full Vulkan support, and of course OpenGL (Xboxes too). So why port to DirectX when you can make a game that would work on Windows, Linux, macOS, PlayStations, Xboxes, Android, both x86 and ARM with the same code? - some tweaks for sure per OS but not an an entirely different graphics stack... That is what Proton does... make it Vulkan. Of all "Windows-only" games I've checked they perform better on Steam Play/Proton than on the latest Windows 10 Insider Program Developer Channel build (stable as heck, not buggy those, but that program is now dead and I have not booted Windows in probably over 6 months, because it says I have to reinstall it all, yeah not just reset, with a USB drive yeah, not because I had done anything wrong, but because the suddenly did not give a ♥♥♥♥ about testers, developers, and announced Windows 11 to many's surprise).

* In addition you can specify the Sharpening Strength, which is from 0 to 5, where 0 is the Most (Best) and 5 is the Least (Visibly lower). The default is 2, recommended by AMD. I don't know on Windows, if this Sharpening Scale exists (I guess then in the Radeon Software), and which type of scale it uses (likely not 0-5 but names).

* As you can probably guess, I am not a gamer, but a developer/programmer, system and network administrator, so what I spend the LEAST money on is my GPU, therefore the RX6600 XT, which I upgraded to from an RX 5500XT from an RX 570! - because I went all in on Zen2 when it was announced, because it was, come on, leaked results of my Ryzen 3950X (last to launch) showed it performed better than both Xeon and Intel CoreXE CPUs while costing 2-3 less, still well above $1,000 at launch though. And all the other goodies vs my previous Intel build. Just needed a dedicated GPU for this one.

AMD FidelityFX Open tech in Games - scroll a little down and choose between tech and you will see DIRT 5 has MANY: https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/radeon-software-fidelityfx-supported-games

AMD FidelityFX FSR 1.0 Table: https://support.system76.com/_nuxt/image/7d4c4f.webp or read more here: https://gpuopen.com/fidelityfx-superresolution/ and there is info about FSR 2.0 too, if you look.

My current DIRT 5 Settings: https://www.olejon.net/files/Benchmarks/DIRT%205%20-%20Settings%20-%20Linux.png and the Benchmark at 1440p rendering with 5K (T)AA: https://www.olejon.net/files/Benchmarks/DIRT%205%20-%20Linux.png

[cheiften98]

Wow, thanks for the really in depth comment. I dont have the game installed anymore, maybe ill come back to the game in the future. The gameplay was pretty boring as well. :(

[Duendi]

EDIT / IMPORTANT CORRECTION:

* I of course meant CAS and NOT FSR. One can not scale 1080p to 1440p by using FSR. In fact the only resolution one can upscale from 1920x1080 is to 3840x2160 (4K). However, 4 resolutions can upscale to 2560x1440, and they are in order of Quality: 1970x1108 becomes 2560x1440 (Ultra Quality - Indistinguishable or even better in blind tests despite doing nothing with the colors/contrast!), 1706x960 (Quality), 1506x847 (Balanced) and 1280x720 (Performance) all become 2560x1440, with the 2 first ones being indistinguishable unless you have played it a lot and look hard, but not from a couch.

* So the point is to lower the resolution so you can either reach your Target FPS or up the Quality Settings in the game that you can not do in the resolution you want it in. 4 different resolutions can also upscale to 3840x2160 (4K), with the lowest being 1920x1080 (Performance). Despite AMD/GPUOpen writing that Performance "visibly impacts" image quality and should only be selected in situations where needing additional performance is critical".

* However a great looking game in DirectX3D-Ultimate, like say Forza Horizon 5, will look darn good if set to 1920x1080 on a 4K monitor, and it is evident as e.g. I with my mediocre RX 6600 XT only get about 12 FPS free to up Settings, but exactly those I want, BUT most important is that it looks like 4K, of course, despite the Game's Settings.

AMD FidelityFX Contrast Adaptive Sharpening (CAS) is different in that it does not upscale, but it may look like it in a way, especially still photos, while games are about restoring details lost, like sharpness, colors and contrast. GPUOpen summarizes it easy to understand:

QUOTE: "FidelityFX CAS is designed to help increase the quality of existing Temporal Anti-Aliasing (TAA) solutions. TAA often introduces a variable amount of blur due to temporal feedback. The adaptive sharpening provided by CAS is ideal to restore detail in images produced after TAA. CAS' optional scaling capability is designed to support Dynamic Resolution Scaling (DRS). DRS changes render resolution every frame, which requires scaling prior to compositing the fixed-resolution User Interface (UI). CAS supports both up-sampling and down-sampling in the same single pass that applies sharpening".

THIS EXPLAINS THE 3 RESOLUTIONS IN DIRT 5 AND WHY THERE IS ONE WITH TAA IN IT: As said, it should be double of the RENDER RESOLUTION, so if that is 2560x1440, the HISTORY RESOLUTION for correct result must then be 5120x2880, as you can see in my Screenshot at the bottom. NOTE: I have updated the previous ones.

The CAS scaling can be used to make photos look like they have a siginificant higher resolution than they have, if shown side by side in original side, or printed. See e.g. the MOON in the first link scrolling a little down - and the difference is huge (use Ctrl + in your web browser to zoom to see even better, and Ctrl + 0 to return to 100% scale) and read more here about CAS if wanted. It is used in many games, like DIRT 5, but has existed for a long time, e.g. it is an option in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and for any GPU since it is Free and Open Source (All the FidelityFX tech uses the MIT License which is standard for Libraries meant to implement in others, even if closed sourced/binary). So support must just be in the card's driver, which it is in e.g. NVIDIA's driver if it is not super old.

https://gpuopen.com/fidelityfx-cas/ has about the tech and all the MAJOR games using it can be found by clicking the Link-Tab here called "Contrast Adaptive Sharpening" https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/radeon-software-fidelityfx-supported-games

AMD QUOTE: "Turning off Radeon Image Sharpening in Radeon Software to avoid over-sharpening is recommended"

CAS vs FSR:

* FSR does not punish your FPS, but instead helps you increase it, or perceived resolution, or both, but does nothing with the colors/contrast or AA
* CAS may lower your FPS depending on the Render Resolution you set, which can be the Output Resolution too, which it is in most games using CAS, like Shadow of the Tomb Raider simply has the Setting as On/Off and 1 single resolution slider
* So from the Quote above, CAS restores detail lost and sharpens over-blurred parts of the frame, especially noticable is CONTRAST - hence the name Contrast Adaptive Sharpening - and does so after TAA has been applied to the frame, which is typically either to the sides or a certain distance from where you are in the game, e.g. people in what would be peripheric view in real life, or landscape like nature, trees, mountains, houses etc. some good distance from you.

* So e.g. Perfect for Shadow of The Tomb Raider. It is pretty visible on a good monitor from 1080p or more from 1440p and up, on a good monitor with good contrasts and viewing angles, as CAS makes the contrast lost in TAA come back. A little strange for DIRT 5 I must say, as Forza Horizon 5 with its support for FSR allows a much better picture only GAINING both FPS and Quality because you can Up the Settings.

* I can only speculate that it is a cheap Console port, where those Settings are dynamically adjusted based in the performance of the console, temperature etc. You typically have zero control, at least last I used a console. Or do you have a similar Setting Screen on a console that officially runs DIRT 5?

* So you may never be able to know for sure on a console if the render resolution gets dynamically adjusted down all the time, or the frame rate capped etc because e.g. the console is heating up or something. In fact a known YouTuber, after having tested the SteamDeck at Valve as a VIP asked Microsoft over chat which something like "what temperature makes the Xbox having to throttle down, and what does it to compensate, cap the framerate here and there for a while or?" and just got back "I don't understand your question, I don't know what you are talking about". LOL...!

* The SteamDeck uses Gamescope too, so you can see all the details, like FPS, CPU usage, temperatures and more, toggle FSR on/off, cap to 30 FPS etc, something the mentioned guy pointed out as a serious step forward, just allowing people to see standard details one always can on a PC. Good example of Valve, who makes so much Free and Open Source software everyone can use, and publish it all on GitHub and GitLab, like AMD, using someone else's project specifically for Steam, and (X)Wayland. Well you can read what it is and what it does by a simple google search

WELL HERE ARE THE NEW SCREENSHOTS:

* Settings is a little weird mix but is what consistently gives me an average of over 80 FPS and does not drop below 60 FPS: https://www.olejon.net/files/Benchmarks/DIRT%205%20-%20Settings%20-%20Linux.png
* A result of this 2560x1440 Render + Output but 5120x2880 for TAA: https://www.olejon.net/files/Benchmarks/DIRT%205%20-%20Linux.png

* The game has no setting for Motion Blur, which is one of many that lack and I always disable it. The little blur I see is namely like 45-90 degrees right to one or both sides of the car, towards the plastic protections blocks etc, which can be a bit blurry when in the middle but up close they are well detailed. Generally there seems to be less work on the edge of the roads than the landscape, because the landscape for me now looks really good in fact.

[KimiKemaw キミケマウ]

Set history resolution higher than your render resolution it will help a bit and not too much use gpu power

This my setting
Final resolution (UI) = 2844 x 1200
History resolution (TAA) = 5688 x 2400
Render resolution = 2560 x 1080