Better tracers and graphic improvements
Commanders, the "Operation Neptune" major update is getting closer and closer, we just need a little more time to polish it, but in the meantime, we still have a few things to show you!
Tracers
You all know what they looked like. They used to be drawn as uniform cylinders: same thickness from tail to head, no real silhouette. We reshaped them into a teardrop, so the tail is thin and wispy, the body swells toward the front and the head is the thickest, brightest part of the trail with a soft bloom on top. Caliber now drives the thickness consistently along the whole trail instead of being flattened out at the head, so small-caliber rounds read as genuinely slimmer than heavy ones, the way you'd expect. The head also got a small visibility boost when viewed from behind, so your own outgoing rounds read about as clearly as incoming ones and the start- and end-of-life transitions got smoothed out to remove the old hard cutoffs.
Xbox One, PS4, PS4 Pro antialiasing and resolution update
We have updated the presets on these consoles to improve the visual quality, while still keeping the same FPS target. PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 4 Pro have enough performance headroom to allow for this upgrade while still reaching the targeted v-sync frame rate. We are also in the process of phasing out rendering without motion vectors (outside of bare minimum preset), since the engine relies on many temporal accumulation techniques for high quality effects and the lack of motion vectors frequently results in artifacts on them. This also includes our Temporal Hyper Resolution antialiasing.
Xbox One: High Quality preset changed from 900p rendering resolution low THR to 720p upscaled to 1080p with high THR.
PS4: High Quality preset changed from 1080p low THR to 1080p high THR.
PS4 Pro: Both presets now output a 4k image instead of 1800p. High Quality preset keeps the old rendering resolution, but upscales to a higher resolution. High Performance preset keeps the old rendering resolution, but statically upscales with Catmull-Rom algorithm to 4k.
Unfortunately the Xbox One is not powerful enough to use high THR without compromise, but with motion vectors the better antialiasing should still result in better overall image quality.
Ray Tracing CPU optimizations
We have made many under the hood optimizations for ray tracing. These do not result in any visual changes, however we managed to significantly reduce the CPU time with better multithreading and improved caching, which should give a significant performance boost on PCs with a weaker CPU and a strong GPU.
All of this and the things we already showed you in previous devblogs will be waiting for you in the upcoming update!