So, I do a great deal of photography in this game because it is absolutely stunning, and have noticed an annoying issue regarding screen shots.
It would seem that the X2, X4, x8 Etc options do not actually produce screenshots of higher quality as they scale up the images from your current resolution, resulting in blurry edges upon zooming.
Now, I would like to have screenshots that are actually X2, X4, X8 times as sharp.
I have tried a myriad of solutions however have found none that can give me screenshots of sufficient sharpness.
I run my game at 1980X1080, with X24 Antialiasing and X16 antistropic filtering to squeeze every last pixel of sharpness out of my screenshots in game, but still get blurry edges at high resolution screenshots.
Also, I forgot to mention this. It may seem counter intuitive, but when upscaling from lower resolutions, like 1080p or even 1440p, a lower starting resolution is harder to upscale because it is now filling the empty space with grey pixels, causing it to become blurred/pixelated on blow-ups. Its putting data in a space that doesn't really exist, which is why image enlargements of smaller pictures become blurry. You can't take small images and make them bigger (you can, but quality degrades very quickly), but you can take bigger images and make them smaller. Yeah, kinda weird. XD
And having tons of AA enabled like you said doesn't actually help to make your image sharper, it is doing the reverse.
Think of it this way, anti-aliasing is meant to eliminate the stair-step effect of objects, from sharp corners to curves, by filling in those spaces with more pixels, hence why they call them AA samples. Anti-aliasing is nice on lower resolutions because we can improve the image quality with a lower res. However, when you want to use a high resolution, AA is pretty much not needed. A high resolution already has those "filler" pixels, the image is already sharpened. Native 4K would not need AA.
So in the case of your screen shots, you would probably get better results be reducing or completely disabling AA when you want to upscale screen shots. The reason I say this is because the in-game upscaling for US2 will also take your 24x AA setting and "double" it too. For example, a 2x upscale shot while running the game with 24x AA is actually making it 48x AA, which would severely make it blurry while at 1080p. 48 AA samples on a 1080p monitor is insane. Furthermore, a 4x upscale screen shot with 24x AA would make the actual image 96x anti-aliasing, this is just getting more blurry as you go up higher.
That is just my theory, I guess you can try it and see if that's what happens. As an experiment, disable AA, use a narrow field of view in-game, and try 2x and 4x upscales for screen shots and see how they come out. If they look better, then that was your culprit.
I hope this was of some help to you.
Topic: Quality of in-game Screenshots (Read 4162 times)
