Hey all,

I wanted to hear what you all think about the recent trend of AAA games using methods such as Temporal Filtering which Ubisoft has used in their last few games: Rainbow Six: Siege and Watch Dogs 2 or the "upscaling" mode in Quantum Break.

I'm not fully aware of the technical details when it comes to these methods, so if you have no idea what I wrote above, I leave couple of links here that will explain the process better than I ever could:

Nvidia Rainbow Six: Siege, optimization guide, anti-aliasing

Nvidia Watch Dogs 2, optimization guide, temporal filtering

Eurogamer: Has Remedy fixed Quantum Break on PC?

TL;DR: Image gets rendered at lower resolution, magic happens (Checkerboard Rendering , MSAA, ect) and the picture is upscaled back to native resolution.

This is where the problems start (for me).

When setting quality to ultra in Quantum Break, or Rainbow Six: Siege, these upscaling and filtering methods are turned on. In my eye, this turns games very blurry, muddy even. It is especially noticeable in Quantum Break, where four 720p frames are combined into one.

Good thing you can turn these options off, right? If you do, your framerate will take a very heavy hit. The picture is now sharper since its being fully rendered at native resolution, but it will be taxing even on high end hardware, depending on the game.

So this begs the question: Are these methods used to mask poor PC port optimization, since they are on by default even on ultra settings, or are these not so successful attempts at using new rendering methods? Or something else entirely?

Edit:

For reference, my specs and resolution:

EVGA GeForce GTX 1070

Intel i5-4670K @ 4.00GHz

HyperX Savage DDR3 1600 C9 2x4GB

Monitor: 1080p @ 60Hz