Upscaling Visual Comparison
Now, all of this sounds great, but as always, there are multiple pieces to this puzzle, and while performance and latency are arguably the most important, depending on the game you play, visual fidelity is a very important factor. There’s no point having huge amounts of performance and reduced latency if it looks like a game from the ZX Spectrum, and yes, I’m old enough to remember them.
What we find in Alan Wake 2 is actually pretty impressive, as the differences are minimal, and when comparing side by side, we can see almost no difference. Obviously, we do have a slight increase in visual noise and we lose some quality, making the image a little bit blurrier, but overall,l I have a hard time believing it’s enough that you’d notice when actually gaming. If i was nit picking then i could point out the quality of lighting not being quite as nice when upscaled, particularly when you look at the pile of garbage just underneath the flickering light, which has a slightly worse overall look here, but again, it’s not enough to really worry about and is generally what i would consider more than acceptable, though if you did drop down to 1080p, then things will likely become more noticeable.
Then in Cyberpunk, we again see surprisingly little difference to the overall image quality at first glance, but that’s not to say there aren’t any differences. At native, we can see a weird shake/shimmer to these blueish green light panels that, with upscaling, isn’t present, making it look more like it actually belongs in the environment, but it could be an intentional effect to emulate the way fluorescent bulbs flicker.
This also comes with a slight decrease in quality, as when we actually take a moment to have a closer look we realise that the textures seem just a little bit blurrier, but again, it’s honestly not enough to notice while running around and playing the game. Additionally we see a noticeable decrease in the quality of the raytraced reflection in the puddle on the ground, where at native it is a pretty decent representation of how the signs look on the building, but with some loss of detail, and we find the way it looks when upscaled far less realistic, and whilst the placement remains accurate, the actual representation of the sign is noticeably worse, ending up looking far more blurry.
