Thing is, that if you set your slider detail slider to the right, hoping for the best quality, in my opinion, you dont receive that. Because one setting lower looks better.
This change is IMO only about shadows, rest stays the same.
Modern games have - thanks god - got rid of the approach that the more defined shadows are, the better.
So now we have a bit softer - filtered - shadows, to give us more natural feel. This filtering comes with a performance hit, nothing big.
Now lets look at the maximum setting in daggerfall:
- Max.jpg (502.14 KiB) Viewed 2656 times
Hmm, so we have this super sharp shadow which looks very unrealistic.
Now, lets save us cca 5% of performance and lets move the slider to the left by one part:
- one less than max.jpg (498.66 KiB) Viewed 2656 times
Another bad thing about the MAX detail is, that these super sharp shadows work only in very close range. So if you pay attention, you will see the dividing line cca 3m infront of you. Where this high res shadow changes in the softer one. This again is distracting, and this problem doesnt exist when you set the slider one bellow max.
- top.jpg (406.15 KiB) Viewed 2198 times
The bottom line is, that the not-maxed shadows look better, perform better, and you dont have a dividing line in between high res/lower res shadows in your face.
This leads me to the conclusion, that the max setting should be either somehow improved, or removed. Because in fact, its not the best quality. That setting does not make sense to me atm, unless Im missing something here.
Im open to discussion on this topic. As it is now, Im for the removal of this setting, because it simply does not look better IMO and costs some performance at the same time
Opinions?
I know it's a Unity thing but it doesn't tell me what it does at all, I'd definitely like more control over what is and isn't activated.
I'll just stick to that for now and hopefully we'll have some more control in the future.
