More Shadows For The Shadow War

Tuesday is patch day for EVE Online, which usually is accomplished in 5-10 minutes. Yesterday's patch notes included some news about improved graphics.

• Anti-aliasing has been upgraded. You will see smoother edges and the elimination of specular aliasing, which eliminates the 'shiny' effect that occurs in some situations.
• The shadow system has been entirely overhauled. Previously, there was a limit of 16 shadows in a scene, for casting and receiving. Shadows also look much sharper, and there is now no limit!
• The film grain effect has been refactored, reducing the 'grid' pattern that would sometimes be visible.

In addition, station hangars will no longer turn green when a specific advertisement runs on the large display. But that was just a bug. The other bits of news are enhancements.

An article went on to describe the exact graphical improvements down to the settings level.

How the client implements the graphical settings for shadows has also been reworked. Shadows will now always be rendered at all settings other than ‘disabled’, with the filtering of shadows being adjusted to allow a balance between quality and performance. Your entire visual experience will now also be much smoother thanks to new anti-aliasing techniques that smooth edges and improve textures for ships, stations and the landscape across New Eden. It also puts an end to "specular aliasing" which manifests itself as shimmering pixels, so you’ll now be able to appreciate the contours and textures of your spectacular ship in all its glory when flying around in space. The new anti-aliasing implementation moves us away from an older method which included MSAA (Multisample Anti-Aliasing) to a pure TAA (Temporal Super Sampling Anti-Aliasing) approach.

Due to an entire rewrite of how anti-aliasing is calculated and with several optimizations, performance is around the same as before, even with this better image quality. However, due to the change in how anti-aliasing is generated, it does come with a small caveat: low / medium AA is no longer available when using low / medium shader settings. This is currently a technical limitation due to how the game is rendered at the moment but will be revisited at a later date.

I really do need to upgrade from the computers I purchased in 2016 to run the Oculus Rift when EVE: Valkyrie came out. My best computer right now is the laptop I purchased after I had to move into a hotel when my condo flooded. I didn't log into EVE last night to check out the new graphics because I was installing GEForce Experience because I finally got tired looking at the washed out graphics in Final Fantasy XIV. With Freestyle freshly installed, I should log into EVE and update my settings so I am not using the same ones for both games.