Comment on Weekly Recommendations Thread: What are you playing this week?
Drasglaf@sopuli.xyz 4 days ago
I keep advancing in Cronos: The New Dawn:
spoiler
I’m at the hospital and already have the 3 chemical compounds needed for the antigen. I also just got the double barrel shotgun, exploring does pay off in this game. I’m expecting a boss fight almost immediately, and I don’t think I have much longer left before I finish the playthrough. One thing I’ve forgotten to mention is the cats you encounter around while exploring. I find it funny that they all seem to have fuzzy hair, like one of my cats, I’ve always considered this to be kind of uncommon for cats.
I started Alan Wake 2:
spoiler
I haven’t played long but the game seems interesting, I like the detective stuff, but I’m worried about how long Alan Wake will actually be playable in this game. I’ve read he has less play time than Saga, which I find a bit underwhelming. The game is poorly optimized, it runs mostly ok without ray tracing except while traversing Bright Falls, where it drops to 50s and even 40s sometimes, and it also stutters a bit every now and then. I find baffling that FSR is mandatory, what in the world were they thinking? I don’t want to attribute it to laziness, but I don’t now what else it could be. Maybe I’m CPU-bound for this one, I should just try it on my IPS monitor and see how it performs.
I’m confused by the claim that FSR is mandatory in Alan Wake 2. I played with DLSS but you can play in native if you want unless a recent patch changed it. What platform are you on? It is a very demanding game though, although funny enough I found the forest to be more demanding than Bright Falls. It does look amazing though, especially in HDR and with ray tracing.
You have also read wrong about the protagonist split, it’s more or less an even 50/50.
I’m curious to hear what you think of the double barreled shotgun in Cronos. I actually preferred the first shotgun that you can charge. Also, how intense was that hospital level? The morgue was such a tough fight, at least for me.
Drasglaf@sopuli.xyz 4 days ago
I’m on Fedora. Unless I’m mistaken, playing in native resolution still uses FSR/DLSS for anti aliasing, there are no other anti aliasing options. I would have liked to have a choice like in most games. The game isn’t a smooth experience, even in areas where I’m at 60 fps. Every turn of the camera makes it go 1-2 fps down breaking vsync, which is quite noticeable playing on A CRT. I also tried on my IPS monitor and the performance is more or less the same at 1440p. I miss HDR, I had an HDR monitor but it started breaking and got a refund, and I spent that money to partially fund my 9070 XT.
I haven’t played Cronos today yet, the hospital was quite tense, but for some reason for me the game isn’t as unnerving as say Silent Hill 2 remake or first person survival horror games. Still the atmosphere is incredible. I survived the morgue quite well, but I spent a lot of ammo and I was left with very few bullets, which is going to be a problem really soon. I already had to punch a mid-boss to death before arriving to the hospital lol.
To be honest, I find DLAA to be quite a good form of anti-aliasing, almost as good as DLDSR. I don’t have much personal experience with FSR though as I have an Nvidia card.
I guess that screen tearing is a result of CRT and being locked into Vsync? I used G-Sync and never had any screen tearing issues.
Shame about your monitor, HDR is addictive when you get used to it.
Yeah, Cronos is a survival horror that emphasises survival over horror in my opinion. It isn’t really too scary, just atmospheric and with cool lore and story. It’s more about scraping by on the edge of resources and ammo than it is scaring the shit out of you.
Drasglaf@sopuli.xyz 2 days ago
FSR 4 is fine, but since I’m playing on a CRT, it’s upscaling from lower resolutions, which is less than ideal. That’s why I prefer other AA solutions for my use case. I think the hiccups came from the DP to VGA adapter. I bought a high-end Startech in anticipation to receiving my new CRT monitor, but when I received the monitor it turns out the adapter only gave me the option to use 60hz refresh rate at any resolution (it wasn’t the case with the other, smaller monitor, strange). I swapped it with an older Startech adapter I was using until now and I can set higher refresh rates at any resolution with my new monitor and the hiccups are gone. Speaking of which, I might have gone a bit too far, it’s a 20 inch monitor and it’s huge 😅