Cyberpunk 2077: Let's Find A Way To Disable TAA

[Jinx 2]

There is by default no way of altering the anti-aliasing settings in the game. It uses TAA which I think is why the visuals feels so blurry and unstable to me. And who knows what the performance hit is. I feel like it's worth putting some effort into trying to disable it.

Anyway I've been messing with config files and found that they disabled AA from showing in the PC settings menu. However there are no options to choose from when you do enable it, so further alterations probably have to be done to get it actually working.

You enable it in this file, maybe you have to add the possible settings to the regular config file?

\Steam\steamapps\common\Cyberpunk 2077\r6\config\settings\platform\pc

[Jinx 2]

Someone figured out how to do it with a hex editor but I'd still like a more optimal solution
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Cyberpunk_2077#Anti-aliasing_.28AA.29

[zareal 0]

Does anyone have updated offsets for 1.04?

[mega_corvega 0]

23 minutes ago, zareal said:

Does anyone have updated offsets for 1.04?

How would one go about finding that? I have HxD, but not sure what to look for.

[hyperslayer72 0]

Definitely hoping well see cdpr give us a functional AA toggle. However from seeing the footage of TAA disabled its got me worried.  Seems that the TAA was masking a handful of messy visual artifacts.  Stuff like hair has a very dithered appearance, metallic surfaces have tons of dark noise and firefly's in them.  This makes the game look far more aliased than it actually is. Its very possible that cdpr would need to offer higher graphics settings for pbr material rendering and remove every instance of dithering in order for TAA off to look presentable.  Getting scary that we've all but lost AA methods that don't blur textures or cause ghosting. Many games are being developed with TAA enabled resulting in developers not noticing flickering/bugs in visuals.

[Jinx 2]

Have any of you tried forcing FXAA in the Nvidia/AMD control panel to replace the TAA once you disable it? Wondering how that would work out. I'd try it myself but I can't afford to put any more time on my playtime because I'm requesting a refund on Steam.

[zareal 0]

6 hours ago, Jinx said:

Have any of you tried forcing FXAA in the Nvidia/AMD control panel to replace the TAA once you disable it? Wondering how that would work out. I'd try it myself but I can't afford to put any more time on my playtime because I'm requesting a refund on Steam.

Doesn't do anything, just applies the FXAA over the TAA. There's a mod on the Nexus to remove the TAA but honestly the game looks absolutely AWFUL without it and no other AA comes close, which sucks. This game was clearly designed with TAA on the ENTIRE time because without is the most aliased game I have ever seen.

[Jinx 2]

8 minutes ago, zareal said:

Doesn't do anything, just applies the FXAA over the TAA. There's a mod on the Nexus to remove the TAA but honestly the game looks absolutely AWFUL without it and no other AA comes close, which sucks. This game was clearly designed with TAA on the ENTIRE time because without is the most aliased game I have ever seen.

Ugh that sucks 😞  The only other option that might work is supersampling/downsampling. Like if you ran at 1800p maybe 1440p would look decent, or 1440p scaled down to 1080p. But that's a pretty steep performance cost so it's not going to be viable for most.

[hyperslayer72 0]

2 hours ago, Jinx said:

Ugh that sucks 😞  The only other option that might work is supersampling/downsampling. Like if you ran at 1800p maybe 1440p would look decent, or 1440p scaled down to 1080p. But that's a pretty steep performance cost so it's not going to be viable for most.

While its no doubt that supersampling the image would soften it slightly (SSAA/MSAA blur is the only type of blurring ill tolerate) it really won't come close to doing what we need it to with hiding flickering. The Witcher 2 had similar issues with shadow dithering making everything look super aliased, running the game with ubersampling enabled did help but it wasn't enough of an improvement to warrant the performance hit.

What we hopefully will see is cdpr go back in and retune the TAA which I am confident could be improved to offer less ghosting.  We need to see TAA profiles (TAA Sharp, TAA Balanced, TAA Filmic) and they need to be tuned properly. Normally stuff like forced TAA would be the thing that only pc graphics purists would be ticked off by, however it seems that across all platforms at the moment TAA is problematic. Digital Foundry has notated that TAA in its current implementation degrades the experience on PS4, PS4 pro, XBONE, XBONEX, PS5, and all Series X consoles.

Lets keep talking about this, however we likely will need to have a good bit of patience before we see anything revolutionary take place. 

[Jinx 2]

4 minutes ago, hyperslayer72 said:

Lets keep talking about this, however we likely will need to have a good bit of patience before we see anything revolutionary take place. 

I'm hoping modders will manage to crack into this game sooner rather than later. Also, it's really frustrating that so many settings are hidden from us in Red Engine now; with The Witcher 3 pretty much anything you wanted to tinker with was exposed in the config files. Now the config files just mirror the in-game settings with no opportunity for further tuning.

I think supersampling would work, it's the brute force way of doing things, though, so you might need a really high resolution to get the results you want. Or perhaps combine it with an FXAA pass or something. More TAA settings would definitely be welcome. Right now the game feels way to blurry; and it really is kind of a temporal blurriness, too, that adds a sense of latency to the graphics/controls for me.

[hyperslayer72 0]

2 minutes ago, Jinx said:

I think supersampling would work, it's the brute force way of doing things, though, so you might need a really high resolution to get the results you want. Or perhaps combine it with an FXAA pass or something. More TAA settings would definitely be welcome. Right now the game feels way to blurry; and it really is kind of a temporal blurriness, too, that adds a sense of latency to the graphics/controls for me.

I avoid FXAA just as much as I avoid TAA. Combining the two wouldn't do very much as TAA already softens the image, fxaa would just make things even blurrier further skewing the image accuracy. No doubt that TAA makes the game feel sluggish, Only way to combat that is to run higher framerates. Everyone's tolerance is different but this is a game that i'd need to play at a consistent 90fps for it to feel decent.

[Jinx 2]

30 minutes ago, hyperslayer72 said:

I avoid FXAA just as much as I avoid TAA. Combining the two wouldn't do very much as TAA already softens the image, fxaa would just make things even blurrier

No no never do that I mean a light pass of FXAA to combine with downsampling. FXAA + TAA would be a terrible idea lol

With these post-process aa solutions the quality really depends on the implementation rather than the type. Stuff like FXAA got a bad reputation because early implementations weren't that good (nevermind MLAA which was atrocious). I really don't notice any difference in clarity in modern titles, I can zoom in on a detail and it doesn't change with FXAA on or off generally. They're very good at finding the *real* edges without blurring anything else now, the algorithms or whatever have improved over the last 10 years. Plus you can add a sharpening filter now on top of it. I really love the Nvidia sharpening filter at around the 30-40 setting in just about any game.

TAA quality, though, still seems to vary wildly from game to game. The stuff in Cyberpunk is just godawful.

[infogram 6]

On 12/11/2020 at 4:48 PM, Jinx said:

Someone figured out how to do it with a hex editor but I'd still like a more optimal solution
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Cyberpunk_2077#Anti-aliasing_.28AA.29

I found a way to do the same through INI files instead, it disables the AA in mostly the same way though so it'll still look just as bad, at least it won't need hex editing/updating for each patch/etc though: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Topic:Vzhialkw8toyk3pq

Seems there might be a lot more options that can be edited through INI files too (more than the 30 or so boolean ones that were in CyberpunkTweaker), you can browse through the existing INI files to find some of them, but ideally we need a way to get a list from the EXE itself...

(E: managed to dump a list of ~1107 of them, you can find that here: https://pastebin.com/mg5Mh3sV)

[BONKERS 32]

Glad you guys are figuring out a way to turn it off. The TAA in this game is so obnoxiously bad in quality it's almost offensive this is coming from an ultra high budget release.
Just having seen some of the footage of the game and screenshots I was honestly shocked at not only how bad the resolve is (Ultra blurry resolve to hide how bad your TAA actually is =/= filmic. Coming from someone who has spent the last decade chasing the best AA for hundreds of games where ultra sharp =/= ground truth. Sharpen a bad resolve and you will reveal what's under the mask. Sharpen a good, but soft resolve and you can recover real information. ), but the abundant amount of artifacts and false positives that the TAA is creating that results in some cases worse than no AA at all. (Clamping artifacts, ghosting artifacts, depth discontinuity artifacts, no pixel history artifacts, noise breakup and poor resolve artifacts, surface smearing in motion compounded by motion blur,etc)

Not only that but they are trying to rely on the TAA to filter and clean up low quality effects used elsewhere that just compounds the problem. The biggest problem being the Screen Space Reflections. (In the posted screenshot above of the hub cap on the tire. That's what you are seeing alongside the breakup artifacts on the silhouette of the car body)They look almost as if they are using some sort of primitive software based path/ray tracing but at a very very low RPP without any real denoise/filter step (Which would bring it's own problems) but instead try to use the TAA on it's own to filter it and that results in the massive amounts of point/high frequency noise (And accompanying temporal artifacts)on so many surfaces in the game.

There are some cases where TAA is so bad , even on console it'd be better to have a toggle not to use it. You could always account for it on PC usually,but it's shocking they lock you in to using something so horrendously poor in quality without a choice for a higher quality solution (If they can waste 50% of your render budget optionally on RT effects, they could do the same with AA. No developer ever chooses to do so) or a toggle to turn it completely off.

Hope you can find an elegant solution to disable it.

[Drahsid 0]

I've been playing with TAA disabled for a bit, and while I prefer the game without TAA, I did notice a couple issues with the current method of disabling it.
As mentioned before, there are visual issues which we could speculate are caused by simple oversight from cdpr, but for me this is something I can get over.
The bigger issue at hand is that with the current method of disabling TAA, it seems that it also silently disables DLSS. I didn't realize this until I reenabled TAA for testing purposes, and my framerate nearly doubled. I don't believe that DLSS relies (or is derivative of) TAA, so this just seems to be a negative side effect, and nobody seems to be talking about or have mentioned it.

I'm hoping that there will be a solution that disables TAA, but not DLSS.