I don’t think it’s a filter... (Destiny)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Wednesday, June 05, 2019, 11:07 (2016 days ago) @ Robot Chickens

Likewise, what’s up with the new shader icons? On one level they are much better, because it actually shows you when a shader is going to change a material texture. But they all look like they’ve been run through a bad Instagram filter. Now they all blend together on the page. It’s much less readable overall, even if the icons are better individually.

This. A thousand times this. That filter actually obscures the differences so whatever gains they may have added by showing textures get immediately negated because people are viewing them next to others. It's like they designed them on a macro scale, decided they looked good, shrunk them, and never thought about how they would function when viewed as a group.

To me, the new shader icons look like they’re suffering from a bad case of low grade JPEG compression. It makes them look dirty and messy and strangely unreadable.

On a related note, I’ve actually noticed a similar effect, although far more subtle, across all the in-game graphics. There’s an ever-so-slightly gritty, dirty look to the textures that wasn’t present before the update. It’s not a filter-effect (like the film grain effect in the Mass Effect games), because the light and glow effects are as clean and clear as ever, far as I can tell. But there is something going on with the textures and/or polygon modelling. It’s especially apparent on your equipped weapon, when you sweep past a strong light source. The lines around your gun model stick out in a way that they didn’t use to. Overall, there’s just a slightly dirty, messy look to everything now.

It’s SUPER subtle, but I noticed it right away. My totally uninformed guess/hypothesis is that they’ve tweaked something in the rendering, possibly to improve performance/load times. But that’s 100% speculation.