AMD is driving me crazy! Competitive gaming Nvidia Freestyle rant

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Nvidia has had Color Filters as part of Nvidia Freestyle for over 2 years, in all that time AMD still hasn't done anything to address this critical missing feature in their software suite. I'm a lifelong ATI/AMD fanboy but I CANNOT play games like Call of Duty 2019, Tarkov and Warzone without the Nvidia color filters, it's just too difficult to see people without them! The difference the Nvidia color filters make in competitive games is borderline cheating, they make everything easier to see, have less blur, improve contrast on player models, and completely remove shadows to make spotting players in dark areas a non-issue. If Warzone isn't your thing, look at games like Escape from Tarkov, the Nvidia color filters make a dark dingy hallway clearly visible while AMD users are stuck in the dark! Every single COD streamer and youtuber has videos on setting up Nvidia color filters for a competitive advantage and with the latest night-time mode that has been added to Warzone that filter is more important than ever. What the f' is AMD doing about this? What is so difficult about making a color filter software and chucking it into their driver suite!?!

Before anyone suggests Reshade, that software has numerous reports of players getting banned for using it in Warzone, Nvidia Freestyle doesn't have this problem despite doing the same thing because it's part of Nvidias driver suite.

I'm about to be a launch-day buyer of a Ryzen 5600x and I'd love to buy the new Radeon 6900XT for 280 FPS gaming at 1080P in games like Warzone, Apex Legends, and Counter Strike but frames only win games if you can see your target!

For competitive gamers, you could make the 6800xt cost $300 less than an RTX 3080 and have better performance and I would still buy the 3080 purely for the benefit of Nvidia Freestyle.

Here's a couple of terrific demos of Freestyle in action in Warzone:

https://setup.gg/blog/how-to-improve-visibility-in-warzone/



 
Nvidia has had Color Filters as part of Nvidia Freestyle for over 2 years, in all that time AMD still hasn't done anything to address this critical missing feature in their software suite. I'm a lifelong ATI/AMD fanboy but I CANNOT play games like Call of Duty 2019, Tarkov and Warzone without the Nvidia color filters, it's just too difficult to see people without them! The difference the Nvidia color filters make in competitive games is borderline cheating, they make everything easier to see, have less blur, improve contrast on player models, and completely remove shadows to make spotting players in dark areas a non-issue. If Warzone isn't your thing, look at games like Escape from Tarkov, the Nvidia color filters make a dark dingy hallway clearly visible while AMD users are stuck in the dark! Every single COD streamer and youtuber has videos on setting up Nvidia color filters for a competitive advantage and with the latest night-time mode that has been added to Warzone that filter is more important than ever. What the f' is AMD doing about this? What is so difficult about making a color filter software and chucking it into their driver suite!?!

Before anyone suggests Reshade, that software has numerous reports of players getting banned for using it in Warzone, Nvidia Freestyle doesn't have this problem despite doing the same thing because it's part of Nvidias driver suite.

I'm about to be a launch-day buyer of a Ryzen 5600x and I'd love to buy the new Radeon 6900XT for 280 FPS gaming at 1080P in games like Warzone, Apex Legends, and Counter Strike but frames only win games if you can see your target!

For competitive gamers, you could make the 6800xt cost $300 less than an RTX 3080 and have better performance and I would still buy the 3080 purely for the benefit of Nvidia Freestyle.

Here's a couple of terrific demos of Freestyle in action in Warzone:

https://setup.gg/blog/how-to-improve-visibility-in-warzone/




Yeah for those who don't know, It basically some hand picked shaders similar to some which are available in Reshade.I remember when Nvidia first announced the freestyle shader suite and was really surprised that something like that is now included with their official overlay. Unlike reshade, its not offered for every game. But it is very cool, for the games which it is allowed. And as you noted, some competitive games allow Nvidia Freestyle, but not Reshade. And I presume that is because freestyle allows the game developers to choose which shaders you do and do not have access to.

It would be great if AMD offered a similar suite of effects.
 
FYI, lots of monitors with gaming features offer built in features to lift shadows, as well. I have a samsung monitor with such a feature and it does a good job of lifting blacks, but not affecting colors a whole lot. So, if you are on AMD and have a gaming monitor, you can try that.

*my monitor also has built in presets for various types of games. Drasticly affecting color saturation, etc. A sharpness booster. And of course, that's all customizeable.

If you simply want to lift shadows and increase color, sharpness, and contrast, you are actually better off doing it on your monitor (higher end TVs often include enough adjustments to do these things, as well). Nvidia's freestyle shaders and Reshade shaders all require GPU time and will lower your FPS.

The reason to use freestyle or Reshade, is if you want to add extra effects beyond that. Of if you want to record and/or stream with these sorts of effects visible on your stream.
 
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Nvidia has had Color Filters as part of Nvidia Freestyle for over 2 years, in all that time AMD still hasn't done anything to address this critical missing feature in their software suite. I'm a lifelong ATI/AMD fanboy but I CANNOT play games like Call of Duty 2019, Tarkov and Warzone without the Nvidia color filters, it's just too difficult to see people without them! The difference the Nvidia color filters make in competitive games is borderline cheating, they make everything easier to see, have less blur, improve contrast on player models, and completely remove shadows to make spotting players in dark areas a non-issue. If Warzone isn't your thing, look at games like Escape from Tarkov, the Nvidia color filters make a dark dingy hallway clearly visible while AMD users are stuck in the dark! Every single COD streamer and youtuber has videos on setting up Nvidia color filters for a competitive advantage and with the latest night-time mode that has been added to Warzone that filter is more important than ever. What the f' is AMD doing about this? What is so difficult about making a color filter software and chucking it into their driver suite!?!

Before anyone suggests Reshade, that software has numerous reports of players getting banned for using it in Warzone, Nvidia Freestyle doesn't have this problem despite doing the same thing because it's part of Nvidias driver suite.

I'm about to be a launch-day buyer of a Ryzen 5600x and I'd love to buy the new Radeon 6900XT for 280 FPS gaming at 1080P in games like Warzone, Apex Legends, and Counter Strike but frames only win games if you can see your target!

For competitive gamers, you could make the 6800xt cost $300 less than an RTX 3080 and have better performance and I would still buy the 3080 purely for the benefit of Nvidia Freestyle.

Here's a couple of terrific demos of Freestyle in action in Warzone:

https://setup.gg/blog/how-to-improve-visibility-in-warzone/




Every game, the AMD drivers can have a custom color settings, brightness, hue, contrast and so on. Brightening up, getting rid of shadows or minimizing them, more contrast is pretty easy to do. Changing the colors per game not an issue -> Sharpening to value just set for the game. Not sure what is missing here: Easy to enable in the drivers.

CustomColor.jpg
 
Every game, the AMD drivers can have a custom color settings, brightness, hue, contrast and so on. Brightening up, getting rid of shadows or minimizing them, more contrast is pretty easy to do. Changing the colors per game not an issue -> Sharpening to value just set for the game. Not sure what is missing here: Easy to enable in the drivers.

Nvidia's freestyle has several extra shader effects beyond that (obviously based on stuff you can get in Reshade). But that is still a good thing to point out for AMD users.
 
Every game, the AMD drivers can have a custom color settings, brightness, hue, contrast and so on. Brightening up, getting rid of shadows or minimizing them, more contrast is pretty easy to do. Changing the colors per game not an issue -> Sharpening to value just set for the game. Not sure what is missing here: Easy to enable in the drivers.

None of the effects in AMDs driver can accomplish what Freestyle can. It can adjust the shadows in the game at the shader level. It can remove the film grain that hangs like a dirty film over every texture in Warzone. If you watch even 60 seconds of those videos above or look at the screenshots on the guide website the results are extremely evident!
 
None of the effects in AMDs driver can accomplish what Freestyle can. It can adjust the shadows in the game at the shader level. It can remove the film grain that hangs like a dirty film over every texture in Warzone. If you watch even 60 seconds of those videos above or look at the screenshots on the guide website the results are extremely evident!
Well if that is important, buy a Nvidia card. I just don't play games all washed out and bazar color schemes and no shadows and so on. I could careless for these options but that is just me.
 
I will say the filters thing is cool, but, it is basically a cheat. When you are not supposed to see someone, then you should not see them. Wonder when real gamers will try to game w/o cheats or graphical things to gain an upper hand? Like, how it used to be....OI I'm old... One thing I like about it is to get the colors right since not all games offer proper color-blind settings like I need. I seem to remember back in the HD 4800 days the drivers for AMD having color filters, in driver. I remember a black and white filter that was fun to use. Wonder what happened to that?
 
This reminds me of when I would turn up digital vibrance in the nvidia control panel to have less dull colours in Day of Defeat years and years ago.
 
Radeon Image sharpening gives a HUGE boost to COD MW visibility. I use it all the time. It's already in the driver.
 
When I read this, I'm reminded of people who play War Thunder on ultra low "moonscape" mode for the competitive edge.

Then I wonder why devs even bother making these games look pretty.
 
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I will say the filters thing is cool, but, it is basically a cheat. When you are not supposed to see someone, then you should not see them. Wonder when real gamers will try to game w/o cheats or graphical things to gain an upper hand? Like, how it used to be....OI I'm old... One thing I like about it is to get the colors right since not all games offer proper color-blind settings like I need. I seem to remember back in the HD 4800 days the drivers for AMD having color filters, in driver. I remember a black and white filter that was fun to use. Wonder what happened to that?
Yeah I'm surprised to hear that these shader effects are available in Call of Duty and probably some other competitive games. One of the things about nvidia's freestyle effects filters, is that devs can request they don't allow those effects to be active in their games.

However, its probably the case that the CoD team is ok with it. Whereas they block Reshade. Because Reshade has tons of other effects possibilities, beyond adjusting colors, shadows, gamma, black level, etc.

They also probably figure you can do it with most gaming monitors anyway. So why not allow it in your GPU driver, too.
 
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It'
Nvidia has had Color Filters as part of Nvidia Freestyle for over 2 years, in all that time AMD still hasn't done anything to address this critical missing feature in their software suite.
If its so critical, then why have I never used it? I don't know anyone else who uses it either.

I understand you want to improve straight up visibility for competitive reasons but that side by side video looks like shit. I didn't spend a ton of money on gaming hardware for it to look like I'm running the game on a potato. For the record, I can see just fine without the Freestyle feature.
 
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To me the deal breakers are v-sync control and non-functional anisotropic filtering setting. Good luck for Navi users trying to fix the horrible/broken anisotropic filtering in Horizon Zero Dawn for example...

Also they should do something about their MLAA. It's turd compared to NVIDIA driver FXAA and Intel CMAA.
 
Nvidia has had Color Filters as part of Nvidia Freestyle for over 2 years, in all that time AMD still hasn't done anything to address this critical missing feature in their software suite. I'm a lifelong ATI/AMD fanboy but I CANNOT play games like Call of Duty 2019, Tarkov and Warzone without the Nvidia color filters, it's just too difficult to see people without them! The difference the Nvidia color filters make in competitive games is borderline cheating, they make everything easier to see, have less blur, improve contrast on player models, and completely remove shadows to make spotting players in dark areas a non-issue. If Warzone isn't your thing, look at games like Escape from Tarkov, the Nvidia color filters make a dark dingy hallway clearly visible while AMD users are stuck in the dark! Every single COD streamer and youtuber has videos on setting up Nvidia color filters for a competitive advantage and with the latest night-time mode that has been added to Warzone that filter is more important than ever. What the f' is AMD doing about this? What is so difficult about making a color filter software and chucking it into their driver suite!?!

Before anyone suggests Reshade, that software has numerous reports of players getting banned for using it in Warzone, Nvidia Freestyle doesn't have this problem despite doing the same thing because it's part of Nvidias driver suite.

I'm about to be a launch-day buyer of a Ryzen 5600x and I'd love to buy the new Radeon 6900XT for 280 FPS gaming at 1080P in games like Warzone, Apex Legends, and Counter Strike but frames only win games if you can see your target!

For competitive gamers, you could make the 6800xt cost $300 less than an RTX 3080 and have better performance and I would still buy the 3080 purely for the benefit of Nvidia Freestyle.

Here's a couple of terrific demos of Freestyle in action in Warzone:

https://setup.gg/blog/how-to-improve-visibility-in-warzone/





I very much agree, as a competitive Warzone player the FreeStyle filters are invaluable. I tried adjusting the settings recently with 5700 XT and I could kinda get close but ONLY because I have a Zowie XL2746S monitor which has Black Equalization that does as good/better job than NVIDIA freestyle filters do. Otherwise yes, you would be at a competitive disadvantage.
 
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If its so critical, then why have I never used it? I don't know anyone else who uses it either.

I understand you want to improve straight up visibility for competitive reasons but that side by side video looks like shit. I didn't spend a ton of money on gaming hardware for it to look like I'm running the game on a potato. For the record, I can see just fine without the Freestyle feature.

Pretty much every COD streamer and content creator uses it so I don't know what to tell you. It's legal in every Warzone tourney!
 
don't most competitive gamers play with the lowest settings possible for max frame rate and ease of seeing enemies?
 
don't most competitive gamers play with the lowest settings possible for max frame rate and ease of seeing enemies?

From what I've seen, generally the answer would be yes. Frankly, competitive gamer's opinions are about as worthless as a Formula One driver's on road cars or pickup trucks. There is a huge disconnect between what a Formula One driver experiences and cares about in a race car and what we care about in road cars we have to live with on a daily basis. Similarly, what professional gamers do and what we do are quite far apart. I'd never fuck up my color settings or run my games in potato mode.

Games are fun for me. They are not a job. There is a distinct difference in what that means for priorities.
 
They have a dramatic impact on you and I, in what genres are given budget, a shift in online multiplayer (moving away from skill to hardware and tweaking software for maximum advantage), the biggest names influence game patches and changes, dictating hardware features often to the detriment of high IQ gaming in favor of faster with ancillary features, and they massively drive the microtransaction model.

Combine it with the fact that yes, it is a job for many of these people, and we end up with many titles driven by competitive gamers, patched for their pleasure, and ultimately a shadow of an ideal experience for everyone else.
 
The fun part about all of this (beyond the fact that it is in no way a "critical" missing feature) is that AMD effectively did this WAYYYYYY back starting with the 9000 series, I think. Not sure where it went, but obviously nobody really missed it.
 
I'm about to be a launch-day buyer of a Ryzen 5600x and I'd love to buy the new Radeon 6900XT for 280 FPS gaming at 1080P in games like Warzone, Apex Legends, and Counter Strike but frames only win games if you can see your target!
If you were a true gamer, you would be playing at 768p on a 4:3 CRT, not at a casual 1080p peasant LCD. Not witnessed!
 
Well the easy solution for OP is just buy a Nvidia card with the feature he wants. At 1080p, reduce settings etc. 3060 might be overkill even. Latency between AMD and Nvidia has to be seen, I would think that would be one of the top priorities as well.
 
From what I've seen, generally the answer would be yes. Frankly, competitive gamer's opinions are about as worthless as a Formula One driver's on road cars or pickup trucks. There is a huge disconnect between what a Formula One driver experiences and cares about in a race car and what we care about in road cars we have to live with on a daily basis. Similarly, what professional gamers do and what we do are quite far apart. I'd never fuck up my color settings or run my games in potato mode.

Games are fun for me. They are not a job. There is a distinct difference in what that means for priorities.
Ya, I like to play with settings as high as possible so the game looks as good as it can.
 
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the biggest names influence game patches and changes, dictating hardware features often to the detriment of high IQ gaming in favor of faster with ancillary features, and they massively drive the microtransaction model.
Combine it with the fact that yes, it is a job for many of these people, and we end up with many titles driven by competitive gamers, patched for their pleasure, and ultimately a shadow of an ideal experience for everyone else.
I think there is a little too much credit (is that the right word?) given here, to pro gamers.

A. a competitive game should be relatively easier to run. and graphics are so good nowadays, stuff which isn't cutting edge still looks great.

B. Being easier to run means that more people can play them. There is then a complimentary effect that you will probably have a larger player base and also audience. I think its great that we have games like Apex Legends, which runs over 100fps on 1080p medium, with an RX580. Or Soulcalibur VI which runs at 60fps high settings at 1080p on a Radeon HD7870. Fortnight runs over 60fps at 720p low on Intel graphics. Having games like this is important.

C. patching can be a reaction to pro-gamers (as they are flexing game mechanics in ways which some regular gamers are not). But just as much, it can come from the fact that there are so many people playing these games (people who are relatively good at the game). Issues are revealed more quickly and in higher numbers.

D. maybe I missed your intended meaning but, I do not think that pro gamers have much to do with the micro-transaction model. That stuff is all think tanked by people who's job it is to figure out exactly how to brain wash people into spending money. There are videos out there showing seminars detailing this stuff. Its really gross.

E. There aren't that many pro gamers. Especially ones with sponsorships. and I think we are lucky to have them, honestly. Especially in fighting games, which aren't nearly as popular as some of the RTS, MOBA, and shooters. and with Twitch and Discord and Youtube and all of this stuff: its easier than ever to follow the official competitions and even feel like you kind of know something about the contestants. and its really cool how international it is.
 
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Registered just to say this. Freestyle filters is the killer feature for me. With new Radeon cards coming up I've searched for AMD alternative to Nvidia freestyle and stumbled upon this forum. I'm so used to playing with filters and making games look how I want them to look I'm afraid I can't ever go back. Hopefully AMD comes up with something.
 
From what I've seen, generally the answer would be yes. Frankly, competitive gamer's opinions are about as worthless as a Formula One driver's on road cars or pickup trucks. There is a huge disconnect between what a Formula One driver experiences and cares about in a race car and what we care about in road cars we have to live with on a daily basis. Similarly, what professional gamers do and what we do are quite far apart. I'd never fuck up my color settings or run my games in potato mode.

Games are fun for me. They are not a job. There is a distinct difference in what that means for priorities.

While that statement is generally true, it heavily depends on the game. For 'competitive' games (e.g. games that have a ranked ladder system), there are a lot of wannabe pro players that want to emulate the actual Pro's because they believe it'll help them achieve higher ranks. And I think that train of thought heavily trickles down to the general population for those games.

For games that are focused on the single player experience, I would imagine those players want visual fidelity at acceptance frame rate.
 
The difference the Nvidia color filters make in competitive games is borderline cheating, they make everything easier to see, have less blur, improve contrast on

Before anyone suggests Reshade, that software has numerous reports of players getting banned for using it in Warzone
OK, so it IS cheating
 
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I don't think I could live without Freestyle either! In some games like Red Dead Redemption 2, the game looks so much better with some tweaking using the built in filters. Hopefully this is something AMD considers adding to their software suite as the 6000 series cards look great so far!
 
So, what all this means, with all the things being said, those who compete with nVidia cards that can use the filters have, truly, an unfair advantage compared to anyone that uses the RX 570 series (highly popular for the 1080P crowd of comp players!) since there are not the same filter options as well as any comp player that uses ANY AMD GPU. I would categorize that as 'cheating'. Gaining an unfair advantage since you can see something that someone else cannot, that is why comp tourneys usually have specified settings for every player to have on/off so all have the same thing, with exception of the filters...very bias towards nVidia users, really. Modified configs etc have made people get banned, not necessarily CoD WZ, as I do not play often to speak of that game, however, it has happened. Removing fog/mist in PuBG is one of the comp games that does that (eg: https://mp1st.com/news/pubg-bans-for-editing-config-files-in-playerunknowns-battlegrounds ) which is a way w/o filters to improve visual distance, etc. Both operate in similar fashion in that they can be used to gain unfair advantage. So, why ban for a config change and not a filter, which is a direct draw layer or injection into the games engine/dlls (depending on method ReShade or nVidia filter)? Would be nice if AMD truly had a filter system like nVidia's so it can be on the same footing as nvidia.
 
So, what all this means, with all the things being said, those who compete with nVidia cards that can use the filters have, truly, an unfair advantage compared to anyone that uses the RX 570 series (highly popular for the 1080P crowd of comp players!) since there are not the same filter options as well as any comp player that uses ANY AMD GPU. I would categorize that as 'cheating'. Gaining an unfair advantage since you can see something that someone else cannot, that is why comp tourneys usually have specified settings for every player to have on/off so all have the same thing, with exception of the filters...very bias towards nVidia users, really. Modified configs etc have made people get banned, not necessarily CoD WZ, as I do not play often to speak of that game, however, it has happened. Removing fog/mist in PuBG is one of the comp games that does that (eg: https://mp1st.com/news/pubg-bans-for-editing-config-files-in-playerunknowns-battlegrounds ) which is a way w/o filters to improve visual distance, etc. Both operate in similar fashion in that they can be used to gain unfair advantage. So, why ban for a config change and not a filter, which is a direct draw layer or injection into the games engine/dlls (depending on method ReShade or nVidia filter)? Would be nice if AMD truly had a filter system like nVidia's so it can be on the same footing as nvidia.
its technically not cheating, because the CoD devs allow it. They could easily tell Nvidia to not have the freestyle filters active, during their games.

Likewise, some of these same games will also ban for use of Reshade.

And they do that for a couple of reasons:

1. Reshade has WAAAAAY more shaders and options for effects. Freestyle is a fairly compact suite of shaders. A dev knows exactly what to expect, there. Reshade has 100's a of shaders that you can possibly use. And some of them go beyond the utility of freestyle.

2. It also may be difficult (in terms of detecting what gamers are injecting) to differentiate someone who is ONLY using reshade, from someone whom is ALSO using some other, much more cheaty injections. So they may ban if they detect anything at all.
 
its technically not cheating, because the CoD devs allow it. They could easily tell Nvidia to not have the freestyle filters active, during their games.

Likewise, some of these same games will also ban for use of Reshade.

And they do that for a couple of reasons:

1. Reshade has WAAAAAY more shaders and options for effects. Freestyle is a fairly compact suite of shaders. A dev knows exactly what to expect, there. Reshade has 100's a of shaders that you can possibly use. And some of them go beyond the utility of freestyle.

2. It also may be difficult (in terms of detecting what gamers are injecting) to differentiate someone who is ONLY using reshade, from someone whom is ALSO using some other, much more cheaty injections. So they may ban if they detect anything at all.
More like Nvidia payed the developer to ignore it. I would expect the game to include filters if they saw fit to include them. How can one compete in the same game on a fair playing field if it is modified outside to allow better viewing distances? How does the developer ensure or control that to prevent cheating and penalizing others who go by the rules? In any case a none issue for me and just thoughts.
 
More like Nvidia payed the developer to ignore it. I would expect the game to include filters if they saw fit to include them. How can one compete in the same game on a fair playing field if it is modified outside to allow better viewing distances? How does the developer ensure or control that to prevent cheating and penalizing others who go by the rules? In any case a none issue for me and just thoughts.
As I said, they ban use of injectors. Which are pretty easy to detect with anti-cheat software.

Freestyle and stuff built into monitors such as adjustments to black level/shadow details, are much more limited in their utility and predictable. and that's probably why they are allowed.

A potentially big one, which would not be able to be prevented unless physically attending an event: are monitors which ad an adjustable crosshairs overlay to the screen. Such a thing can potentially make no-scoping a lot easier.

and on that topic: physical events will often impose other limitations.
 
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