Are my games "normal"?

[Spiretec]

Hello!

 

So a quick little backstory.

 

So i'm the type of person who plays game "ultra or nothing". For 3-4 years, i have been buying games on steam and such, but not playing them simply for the reason i can't run them at 1080p ultra settings at 60+ fps (i know ultra hardly makes a difference a lot of times but its just a long personal problem).

 

I have been playing fps like csgo, rainbow 6, overwatch etc all these years and some old titles, until recently i got a rtx 2080.

 

Here are the complete specs

 

Cpu : i5-4690K (4.5)
Gpu : MSI Gaming X Trio RTX 2080
Ram : Corsair Vengeance 8x2 DDR3
Mobo : Asus Rog Maximus VII Ranger
SSD : Samsung 860 EVO 250GB
HDD : Western Digital Black 1 TB, Blue 2 TB
PSU : Corsair Rm1000x
Cooler Noctua NH-U9s

 

So the day i got the gpu the first thing i did was install Forza Horizon 4 Demo. It's a game i really loved on my old gtx 960, and after hearing so much about it i wanted to see how beautiful it is. After the setup is complete i crank everything to ultra and start, but to my disappointment i was facing some cpu bottleneck. Now i knew the cpu was gonna bottleneck my gpu but i expected it to limit my max framerates (which didn't bother me cause i'll be using a 1080p 60hz monitor till i save for a 1440p 144hz one) but instead i got 100% cpu usage and 40-50% gpu usage with stuttering.

Well no problem, i guess i'll turn on vsync? And it did work, the game wasn't stuttering anymore!

 

Yay? Not really.

 

 

The game still felt really meh. At times i even felt it looked better on my 960.

 

I got really frustrated and felt i wasted my money and thought to myself "Wow people think this game is beautiful? It look so bad!" and then later "maybe since i haven't played games for so long and with all this technological advancements i imagine games to be more realistic than they actually are?" Am i being ridiculous? 

 

 

That's when i noticed, the terrain around me. It looks... ugly? The car itself looks fine and such but the terrain looked like a image from a dot matrix printer? I was surprised. I reinstalled the game, drivers, windows everything. It still looks bad? Is this how its supposed to look like? I just deleted the game out of frustration. 

 

 

Today i started playing Just cause 3. And i noticed this thing again.

 

Is this normal? Am i having unreal expectations from the modern games? Or is there something wrong? Please help me. 

The grass looks fine to me but the shrubs on the right and the trees on the right and far. Are they supposed to be this blurry/dotty/undetailed?

 

 

 

The black sploches on the right, the EXTREMELY dotted shrubs on the left and the trees in front.

 

 

The flowers and vegetations.

 

 

The tree on the left side of the road in the middle has literally half its trunk as black.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Is this normal? Am i being too nitpicky and delusional? I still remember playing the og halo and thinking to this day how realistic that thing was but seeing youtube videos now i find it having quite bad graphics (not for its time but for this point of time).

 

Please help me

 

Thank you

[Firewrath9]

It could be a cpu issue, maybe upgrade soon. What in game settings?

[Spiretec]

2 minutes ago, Firewrath9 said:

It could be a cpu issue, maybe upgrade soon. What in game settings?

As my story said, EVERYTHING is maxed out/ultra setting. That's why its bothering me so much. I Already paid a lot for my current upgrades (parts are stupid overpriced in my country) and i really don't wanna spend more until i know what the actual problem is. My cpu? ram? Monitor?

 

[SolarNova]

Lower LOD detail in games is a trick to increase performance at the cost of fidelity of distant objects. Its easier to do this than to heavily optimize a game and/or engine so that the full detail can be used at further distances.

 

Very few games look as good as they could or should. Every now and then you will get a game that is purposely made to showcase how good things can look, but the vast majority will not go this route as its time intensive and thus expensive. Quantity over quality is the way things are currently.

[HanZie82]

1 minute ago, Spiretec said:

As my story said, EVERYTHING is maxed out/ultra setting. That's why its bothering me so much. I Already paid a lot for my current upgrades (parts are stupid overpriced in my country) and i really don't wanna spend more until i know what the actual problem is. My cpu? ram? Monitor?

 

Yes they do look that bad by design.
Its something i have to deal with also, also why i havent bothered going above a 1060 6GB for 1080p gaming.

The games will let you download 40 fucking GB of game files and it still looks like a game that used to be only like 4GB.
Its absolutely incomprehensible why its still so damn ugly. Btw increasing the resolution works a bit but still meh.

Its like the game developers are stuck and are not able to make the game textures look any better then they did back in fucking 2009.

[Firewrath9]

3 minutes ago, Spiretec said:

As my story said, EVERYTHING is maxed out/ultra setting. That's why its bothering me so much. I Already paid a lot for my current upgrades (parts are stupid overpriced in my country) and i really don't wanna spend more until i know what the actual problem is. My cpu? ram? Monitor?

  

How much ram? 16GB or more is prob best, monitor doesn't affect anything, and your CPU is maxed out, so that's my guess. Perhaps wait till AMD releases their 7nm processors, and upgrade to something like a 6c12t for ~120-150$.

[Crunken]

It's an old CPU, you have a bottleneck, it's using 100% of your cpu and can't use any more GPU resources. If you upgrade to a 7'th gen i7 for example you'll get way more fps, and since your CPU is an i5 you have less threads and it can lead to stuttering in demanding games.

Nothing is wrong with your pc nor your games, but you'll get better FPS if you upgrade CPU (that's why lowering settings don't get you more fps since it's a CPU bottleneck, it's using 100% CPU no matter what settings you use since the game engine needs CPU power, if you try older/less cpu intense games you'll see a big difference from your 960

[Spiretec]

13 minutes ago, SolarNova said:

Lower LOD detail in games is a trick to increase performance at the cost of fidelity of distant objects. Its easier to do this than to heavily optimize a game and/or engine so that the full detail can be used at further distances.

 

Very few games look as good as they could or should. Every now and then you will get a game that is purposely made to showcase how good things can look, but the vast majority will not go this route as its time intensive and thus expensive. Quantity over quality is the way things are currently.

Thank you for the answer. While i do realize this, isn't it true for distant objects?

 

Like in the first picture, the trees on the hills (furthest away) can be as potato as they want i get that.

 

The trees and bushes in the middle tho (in that traingulish area). Like kinda bad to me, maybe im being nitpicky? but seeing how close it is to the road it should've been rendered more better given my cpu and gpu usage ain't even close to max.

 But the bushes RIGHT BESIDE ME? They look so bad. 

 

I can't even compare it with other videos since youtube compresses tf outta them but for the last picture, i saw on youtube the tree was fully brown while mine looks black with like a few pixels of brown.

 

 

 

 

[Spiretec]

14 minutes ago, Firewrath9 said:

How much ram? 16GB or more is prob best, monitor doesn't affect anything, and your CPU is maxed out, so that's my guess. Perhaps wait till AMD releases their 7nm processors, and upgrade to something like a 6c12t for ~120-150$.

16 gb DDR3 (is ddr3 the issue?). The cpu is no where close to maxed out when vsync is on in forza tho but still even the bushes RIGHT BESIDE ME look sooo poor. 

[Spiretec]

15 minutes ago, Crunken said:

It's an old CPU, you have a bottleneck, it's using 100% of your cpu and can't use any more GPU resources. If you upgrade to a 7'th gen i7 for example you'll get way more fps, and since your CPU is an i5 you have less threads and it can lead to stuttering in demanding games.

Nothing is wrong with your pc nor your games, but you'll get better FPS if you upgrade CPU (that's why lowering settings don't get you more fps since it's a CPU bottleneck, it's using 100% CPU no matter what settings you use since the game engine needs CPU power, if you try older/less cpu intense games you'll see a big difference from your 960

The fps isn't the issue here, i'm fine with anything that is more than 60+ while running the game at ultra setting. 

 

V sync was on in forza horizon 4 since unlocked gave me 120 but 100% cpu usage and i thought that was causing the poor render issues, but even after vsync it looks bad. And in just cause 3 i'm getting easily 100+ fps but the game still looks ass sometimes. If i turn down vsync it will surely drop the cpu usage to 50-60% but i don't think it will fix the poor rendering issue (jsut like it didn't in horizon 4)

[Crunken]

14 minutes ago, Spiretec said:

The fps isn't the issue here, i'm fine with anything that is more than 60+ while running the game at ultra setting. 

 

V sync was on in forza horizon 4 since unlocked gave me 120 but 100% cpu usage and i thought that was causing the poor render issues, but even after vsync it looks bad. And in just cause 3 i'm getting easily 100+ fps but the game still looks ass sometimes. If i turn down vsync it will surely drop the cpu usage to 50-60% but i don't think it will fix the poor rendering issue (jsut like it didn't in horizon 4)

The screenshots look alright to me, haven't played Horizon 4 nor JC3 myself so can't tell if graphics are the way they should be, perhaps try a newer release? Resident evil 2 and Metro exodus are the best looking games out right now imo (metro is kinda boring imo, RE2 is amazing :D)

[Spiretec]

2 minutes ago, Crunken said:

The screenshots look alright to me, haven't played Horizon 4 nor JC3 myself so can't tell if graphics are the way they should be, perhaps try a newer release? Resident evil 2 and Metro exodus are the best looking games out right now imo (metro is kinda boring imo, RE2 is amazing :D)

 

i don't want to believe this is normal

[Paul Rudd]

3 minutes ago, Spiretec said:

i don't want to believe this is normal

Post a 30 second video of some Just Cause 3 gameplay and I'll tell you if what I'm looking at is normal. Screenshots are tough to judge.

[Crunken]

1 hour ago, Spiretec said:

 

i don't want to believe this is normal

Could be some driver issues, did you use DDU when you replaced your graphics card? Otherwise clean install video card drivers with DDU and install fresh ones from nvidia's website

link:
https://www.guru3d.com/files-details/display-driver-uninstaller-download.html

[Spiretec]

23 minutes ago, Crunken said:

Could be some driver issues, did you use DDU when you replaced your graphics card? Otherwise clean install video card drivers with DDU and install fresh ones from nvidia's website

link:
https://www.guru3d.com/files-details/display-driver-uninstaller-download.html

yep did use ddu (twice. first for 960 then again for 2080 when i reinstalled windows)

 

[Spiretec]

2 hours ago, Dr. Historic Low said:

Post a 30 second video of some Just Cause 3 gameplay and I'll tell you if what I'm looking at is normal. Screenshots are tough to judge.

I can surely make clips with shadowplay at max bitrate but where do i upload it to prevent loss of quality? i'll put just cause 3 and forza 4

[Crunken]

40 minutes ago, Spiretec said:

yep did use ddu (twice. first for 960 then again for 2080 when i reinstalled windows)

 

Only in forza and JC? might just be the graphics in the games, as i said haven't played them though. Watch nick930 or something on youtube and see if they have same graphics in those games

[Paul Rudd]

1 hour ago, Spiretec said:

I can surely make clips with shadowplay at max bitrate but where do i upload it to prevent loss of quality? i'll put just cause 3 and forza 4

YouTube. You won't lose quality either. When you first upload it, it starts at a low quality. Give it like 30 minutes to an hour to get to its original resolution.

[Spiretec]

12 hours ago, Crunken said:

Only in forza and JC? might just be the graphics in the games, as i said haven't played them though. Watch nick930 or something on youtube and see if they have same graphics in those games

The foliage looks less dotty in them

[Spiretec]

11 hours ago, Dr. Historic Low said:

YouTube. You won't lose quality either. When you first upload it, it starts at a low quality. Give it like 30 minutes to an hour to get to its original resolution.

Ah i meant the compression. Due to that even at higher resolutions small details like this look bad but i'll surely upload them soon

[Crunken]

2 hours ago, Spiretec said:

The foliage looks less dotty in them

Did you reinstall the games when you reinstalled windows?

[Paul Rudd]

6 hours ago, Spiretec said:

Ah i meant the compression. Due to that even at higher resolutions small details like this look bad but i'll surely upload them soon

The sooner you upload, the faster you'll have the answer to this topic. The compression won't change anything at all.

[Princess Luna]

You went from Maxwell to Turing, did you DDU in safe mode to reinstall the drivers fresh new?

 

Yeah if all is fresh then it's a CPU/Memory bottleneck.

[Spiretec]

On 4/7/2019 at 5:37 PM, Crunken said:

Did you reinstall the games when you reinstalled windows?

Yes, Sorry for the late reply, family issues.

[Spiretec]

On 4/7/2019 at 9:37 PM, Princess Cadence said:

You went from Maxwell to Turing, did you DDU in safe mode to reinstall the drivers fresh new?

 

Yeah if all is fresh then it's a CPU/Memory bottleneck.

but cpu isn't being even used to 100% when v-sync is on. Can it still bottleneck? Sorry for the late reply, family issues.