by tdammers » Mon Apr 23, 2018 8:39 am
"Pixelated" sounds like one or more of the following:
- No anti-aliasing enabled. Depending on the graphics card and OS, you have to enable anti-aliasing either in the graphics card driver settings, or in the FG launcher (or command-line options). Without anti-aliasing, you get jarred edges and texturing aliases; anti-aliasing renders the scene multiple times with a tiny offset and then mixes the rendered images together. (This approach is also known as "oversampling".) This takes longer to render, but makes for a much smoother look. Even just 2x oversampling makes a huge difference; but if you can afford the frame rate, 4x would look even better.
- Wrong screen resolution. I don't know how it works on Windows, but generally, using a screen resolution other than the physical one of the monitor in fullscreen mode will lead to scaling artifacts. If the resolution is too low, the rendered image will look blocky or smudgy (depending on the scaling algorithm), if it's too high, some pixels will typically disappear entirely. Both will make things look "pixelated", though in different ways.
- Shader settings. There are 3 rendering engines ("Normal", "ALS", and "Rembrandt"); each of them comes with a bunch of settings that you can tweak, and some can have a big impact on visual quality. So you may want to play with those, too.