Why does the game look awful?

[[Nyxzy]]

Title. I'm on an amd 5700x, with a 3070 playing at 1440p, cut scenes look like they're rendered at 480p and the game in general seems permanently blurry.. Given all the positive reviews I was expecting good things but the game looks like ass. There anyway to improve it?

[Bun]

Graphics look good for me at 1080p max settings. Here's two suggestions:

1. Increase image sharpness using your GPU software. Something like Nvidia DSR or Radeon Virtual Super Resolution.

2. HD texture mods: https://gamebanana.com/mods/cats/19775

[Mez Koo]

It'd help to have a screen shot or know your graphics options, you could be using TAA or FXAA without a sharpening filter which would make it blurry.

Since you have a 3070 you have access to nvidia filters if you enable them through geforce experience and you have easy and instant access to a basic sharpening filter among other things.

[Duckilous]

That's TAA (Temporal Anti-Aliasing) for you.
Depending on how TAA was implemented in a game and if you're not using some form of sharpening then modern games will look blurry and bad with it enabled.

Some games use it to make hair and foliage look normal because otherwise, they may look really bad without TAA. Although some other games render hair and foliage just fine without TAA and in my opinion, Sonic Frontiers is one of these games that can still look good without TAA if you don't mind seeing some jaggies.

The prerendered cutscenes for some reason are horribly compressed for 1080p/1440p.
You have to use HedgeModManager to force 4K versions of these cutscenes which look so much better even when viewing on a 1080p/1440p monitor.

HedgeModManager also provides more graphical options than the game's own graphics menu such as Disabled Shadow Angle Limit, Disabled Framerate Limiter in Cutscenes, Forced Higher Detail Reflections, Forced Light Scattering, Forced Maximum Geometry Detail, Extended Foliage/Grass Draw Distance, and more if you wish to make the game look better.

[Aaron123]

Duckilous has the right of it. The blurriness is very likely TAA enabled for your Anti-Aliasing.