Properly establishing color tones and lighting in a game is as necessary to its success as the gameplay itself. A game with stunning graphics will entice players to buy it and make the game a more enjoyable experience overall, with post-processing playing a part in that too.
Post-processing allows for helpful screen effects to alter the game’s graphics. This improves the visual aspects of the game and makes the images more life-like and vivid.
Post-Processing Explained
Post-processing applies filters and effects to a game’s images. It’s applied at the end of shading, meaning a game will render the images, and before the images are sent to the monitor, a separate rendering process will occur to enhance the original image, allowing effects and filters to be applied directly onto it.
Post-processing fine-tunes the renders, making the game’s graphics more authentic and even changing the scene’s mood. Whether the graphics are cartoon or realistic, post-processing allows them to reach their full potential.
Overall, post-processing changes a game’s graphics for the better.
Different Effects Related to Post-Processing
Game developers strive to create games with visually stunning graphics that bring their creations to life. There are several effects grouped into post-processing that allow developers to achieve this. These effects are applied in a specific order, starting with SSR and ending with Grain:
- Screen Space Reflections (SSR): allow for the reflections of objects to be shown in real-time.
- Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO): determines how much ambient lighting an object is exposed to.
- Depth of Field (DoF): simulates distance by blurring far away scenery.
- Bloom: produces brighter, slightly blurry points of light
- Chromatic Aberrations: create light spectrums around objects and are useful in intoxicated scenarios.
- Color Balance: allow color tint to be adjusted.
- Tone mapping: modifies the image’s contrast, brightness, saturation, and exposure.
- Vignette: darkens the edge of the screen, highlighting the center.
- Temporal Anti-Aliasing (TAA): reduces aliasing when an object is moving.
- Sharpen: enhance the definition of the model, revealing more details.
- Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing (FXAA): smooths edges and reduces pixelation.
- Supersampling: averages colors of nearby pixels to improve edges.
- Grain: simulates film grain and helps models to appear less synthetic.
Vignette can happen at two different points in post-processing, being eighth or twelfth, depending on background and other applied effects.
Does Post-Processing Affect FPS?
Post-processing improves the general visual quality and is performed after a game’s rendering is completed. It has a rather high impact on FPS when maxed out but provides a fairly minimal effect on the visuals compared to lower settings.
Many gamers prefer to keep the post-processing setting low, with medium sometimes being an option, too. A lower post-processing setting allows for better FPS with very little compromise to the graphics quality compared to a higher setting. Unfortunately, the post-processing setting affects all of the visual effects mentioned above, so it’s all or nothing when adjusting the setting levels.
READ NEXT: What Is Variable Rate Shading?
Some of the coverage you find on Cultured Vultures contains affiliate links, which provide us with small commissions based on purchases made from visiting our site. We cover gaming news, movie reviews, wrestling and much more.
