WEBVTT

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A lot of people hate that modern games are so hard to run and for what? So they

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can look a little bit nicer. But on the other hand, when you come across those

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photorealistic mods of games like GTA 5

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and Cyberpunk, aren't you at least a little tempted to try them out? I know I

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am. especially when ASUS sponsors a video featuring their new PG34W CDN, a

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fifth generation QD OLED beast of a monitor that is going to make these

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games look their absolute stunningest. But um question, how do we do this? I

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couldn't help noticing that the original game looks

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really not like that. >> It wasn't easy. Don't get me wrong, I

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love games and I respect the hell out of community modders who give fresh life to

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older titles, but oh my god, what is

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that? >> It's a map showing conflicts in the mod load order. Yeah, to achieve anything

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close to photo realism, you'll need ray tracing, high resolution texture packs,

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lighting mods, asset packs, custom lots, or usually some combination of all of

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them. Which raises the question, is it really worth the effort? Will it

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actually look this good when I do it myself at home? What kind of hardware do

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I freaking need to run my games like that? And is it potentially worth it to

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buy a paid mod pack so that I don't have to deal with the hassle? Or are they

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mostly just a scam?

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To find out, I volunteered Mr. David Pankratz to install as many mods as he

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could on some of the most popular photorealistic titles to try to kind of

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replicate, you know, that gaming experience that tends to go viral every

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couple of months or so. >> You want to take a look?

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>> No. See, here's the thing. My vacation

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starts now. So, good luck.

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>> This can't [snorts] be that hard, can it?

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All right, bankrats. Cyberpunk 2077 looks great out of the box, but that

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hasn't stopped modders from pushing the envelope. What are we looking at?

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>> We've got about 72 different mods running here that bring Cyberpunk from

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what you know to what you see here. >> Holy crap. I found a pretty good list on

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Nexus mods that had a whole bunch of things and focus mostly on the

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environmental mods so that you got the most effect as few as possible.

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>> There it looks like you've got a bunch of texture packs. Like this road looks incredible. The reflections too and the

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water is like perfect. Is there a bunch is is there any rate tracing or

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anything? >> A lot of that is just the path tracing

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turned on. >> Okay. Yeah. So, we turned on path tracing, and to get a decent frame rate

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in all of the different scenes, you have to turn DLSS on. But in this scene here,

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where you don't have tons going on, I mean, we're running at 111 frames per

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second with path tracing on at 3440 by 1440.

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>> And unfortunately, that's not quite enough frames because our ASUS monitor

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here can do 360 hertz, but 1440p ultra wide is a little

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over 5 million pixels. So, it's kind of hard to push those frames. What's What's

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DLSS set to right now? >> It's set to quality. So, you're getting

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>> you're getting a decent image still >> with path tracing. And you're still

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getting like 110 frames a second. That's not bad. I mean, we're getting like what

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70 high 60s for 1% lows, too. This is a

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still image, though. Right now, we are not moving. >> Do you want me to get on the bike and

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move around? >> Please get on the bike and move around cuz that's when these things kind of

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tend to break down a little bit. We grabbed a controller just so it's a

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little smoother to look around. This looks amazing. And even the

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headlights going around. >> Yeah, there was a mod that changed the

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way that the headlights worked with the

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rest of the environment around. >> That's okay.

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>> Getting so close to the ground, like that ground texture is probably the one

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of the most impressive things I've looked at so far. >> Even just the rippling with the path

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tracing on the light on the water on the stream. Another big thing was a

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immersive firsterson camera mod which goes and adds a little bit more shake

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>> and it changes the way that the camera looks around at things.

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>> Oh yeah, that's a big thing. Body cam does that. That's a super photorealistic

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game. Um it's taken forever to actually properly come out. I think it's still in

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early access. It's supposed to look like a body cam and so they've got a lot of

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motion and whatnot when you're moving around. That was so cool though, even

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watching the bike like as it landed and then watching the lights turn off

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slowly. Um it was nice. Oh my god. Like

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look at the shadows there. That looks so good. This is why in our four tech

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experts react video, I said sometimes I do think it's worth turning ray tracing

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on. Mod settings isn't always there. Hey, >> no. Mod settings isn't always there.

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Neither is mods. >> Yeah, depending on the mod packages that

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you get, they'll have different supporting menu features. It was hard to

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find stuff that all kind of went into one menu. So, you end up with a bunch of

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extras like this. >> Perfect. >> Yeah. If we go into mods and then move

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over to weathermancer here, we can

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change it. >> God, the rain looks so good. Is there a

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mod for the uh raindrops on the water or is that

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>> There is really. >> So, there's a mod for the raindrops on

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the water and there's a mod for the texture of the rain coming down as well.

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>> Oh my god, that's so good. Even with like the weather changing and whatnot,

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this still looks kind of different. What else are you doing? One of the heavy

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lifters in the mod packages is a L, which stands for lookup table. What it

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does is pulls different values from the

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lighting and the tone mapping and pushes

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you're able to change the entire scene with very very little performance hit.

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Actually, if I pull open Cyber Engine Tweaks here, we have what's called a L

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switcher where I can change the color grading on the fly.

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>> Yeah. What's vanilla look? Let's let's look at vanilla first. >> Yeah, vanilla looks like this here. So,

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everything is a bit oversaturated is kind of the biggest difference.

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>> When you're in different weather, you get a lot of a yellow tone to everything

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as well. We've got a whole bunch of different ones that we can choose from here, though. Like supernova is another

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more stylized. >> That's really cool. >> And then they've got hypnov

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sort of thing. Yeah, a lot of optimization too is done by just like

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using smaller, lower res textures on stuff that you don't think people are

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going to care about as much. Like obviously your main character has super

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high poly, super high res. Um, but then NPCs or a random side character you'll

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meet once or twice. Like it's funny how you look at old PS2 games and like you

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can tell who the main characters are almost right away.

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>> I'm also using a plugin called Reshade, which is what a lot of modders will use

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for pro post-processing as well. What I'm mainly using it for though is that

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depth of field you were seeing before. >> Oh yeah. Well, it makes a huge

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difference. Thank you, NVIDIA. God, that looks so looks so good when you do that.

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>> But you can see that it even like blurs a bunch of the UI elements.

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>> I will say now that you're just walking around Night City, um it doesn't look as

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good. Like a lot of the time when you see those videos of like millions of views of, you know, GTA or Cyberpunk

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looking photorealistic, um, they're cherrypicking certain spots and weather

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patterns and like models that they know that they've, oh, I've got this car

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that's got the high-res texture pack, so that's what I'm going to drive for the video. But then you go into an area

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that's like not necessarily set up. Like this still looks really good, don't get

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me wrong, but it doesn't look quite as good as the canal that we were driving

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in earlier. But man, yeah, some of this still looks amazing, though. Again, the

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it's it's funny how much the ground textures are kind of what impressed me

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the most. >> The ground the puddles. >> Yeah, the puddles. The puddles cuz the

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puddle formations look a lot more real. They don't just look like, you know, in a lot of games they just look like

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circles basically or like ovals and oblong shapes. These look a lot more

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natural. >> One of the reasons I loaded up this scene was to show you what happens to

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your VRAM though when you start >> What do we add? >> In the previous scene, for reference, we

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had about 12 gigs of VRAM used. Now that we're in the middle of the city, we're

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over 16 >> and this isn't even 4K. That's wild. If we're at 4K, this would probably be

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almost capping out like 20 gigs or something. Probably maybe 18.

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>> Yeah, I think it came out to about the 18 mark. >> Yeah. Well, there you go. Another reason

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to cry when uh VRAM prices go up in the

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new year. And I've got to say, the text and Cat Frame X actually looks really

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impressive thanks to this fifth gen QD OLED panel because now they're doing

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what just about everyone wanted them to. They've gone to an RGB stripe sub pixel

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layout. So that should mean a lot less text fringing for those of you who are

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sensitive to it. I don't see like any on this like sharp black white-on-black

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text here in Cap Frame X like at all. >> One of the highlights that a lot of

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modders put into their games are these custom cars that they do a lot of work

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on to make them look really good. So I found a tyan. [laughter]

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>> It's not wrapped though. >> It's not wrapped. >> Where's the Dbrand wrap? It looks really

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good. It does look really good. And then we got a Ford GT.

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>> Yo. >> And then a 240 SX. >> Yo.

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>> Like, okay, so modding games, sometimes it's really easy, sometimes it's very

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hard. What kind of hurdles? Like, did you Were there any issues when trying to

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get all this loaded up into Cyberpunk? >> Cyberpunk was pretty clean. If you go

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and take your time, watch the requirements. You have to put the

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requirements in there if it calls for it. And some of the mods have

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installation instructions. And again, you have to follow those installation

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instructions. You cannot skip steps. But if you take your time, pay attention to

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the details, Cyberpunk was pretty seamless. I stuck to the method of

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install two or three mods at a time, boot the game up, and make sure that

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things work because there are times where you go and load 15 or 20 mods at

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once and you come back, you load up the game, everything's broken, and you got

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to pick and choose what, okay, what did I put in there? and figure out what to

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disable to get back to a working state again. >> I've been waiting for this for like

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months. I've been so excited to see this with my own eyeballs.

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>> I think you're going to be impressed. >> Oh, that looks good. >> It looks so good. Eh,

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>> it looks Here's the problem with realistic things.

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>> Uh-huh. >> It looks more real, but it doesn't look

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better. To me, the most impressive things is just the shadows on the boxes.

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Like, they look like there's real boxes. Oh, the depth of field is so aggressive.

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>> That's It's so good, though. >> It It It's tough. I had a big period

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where I would take old games and put them into reshape and add rate tracing and do depth of field stuff and you can

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get these incredible shots, but to make a game playable is hard because you

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don't really want that much depth of field when you're really playing a game.

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>> Ray trace reflections ARE AWESOME. >> I KNOW THIS IS WHY I'm team pro ray

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tracing. >> Like why aren't you just playing the game? >> Why would you like, oh, look at this car

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when you could just get in the car and go? >> Our next game is GTA 5. this uh it looks

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pretty good, but it just looks like GTA V. >> Yeah. So, what happened with GTA 5 was

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it didn't update and when it updated it

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broke a bunch of the mods. >> That happens all the time. And the worst

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part is unlike an older game or even one that's just not got any kind of live

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service aspect to it. This one's getting updated all the time. You're going to

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run into that. You're going to install mods, the game is going to break when they update it, and then you got to

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wait. Is there like one specific pack that's broken or what are we waiting

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for? or what hasn't been updated yet. >> The main piece that's broken is a

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injector called script hook v. That piece needs to be running with the game

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version that it's matched to. Otherwise, it just doesn't work at all.

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>> You know what? You don't need script v hook to look great in the RGB sweater

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from ltstore.com. I love this thing. I bought like eight

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of these. All my Christmas shopping is done. [laughter]

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Well, the timing sucks. But you know what's old and doesn't get updated all

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that frequently? The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim. One of the most moddedest games

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of all time. Maybe a little too modded,

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but we'll let you be the judge of that at the link below. Not safe for work.

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Don't click this if you're at work. Pancrats, I see that we're using Vortex

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from Nexus Mods. >> This game gets involved enough that you

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actually need to launch Skyrim through a completely different launcher. Otherwise, you don't have the tools to

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make a bunch of the mods work. >> So, I know that Skyrim does have a mod

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manager typically. Is that just not good enough for this? And we have to use

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Vortex. >> The experience that I had, yes. [laughter] >> Okay. Okay. Um, if you guys have ever

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modded an Elder Scrolls game before, there's a lot of options and a lot of

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them conflict. I see that we've got a pretty extensive list. >> The list we have here is actually

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shorter than what we had for Cyberpunk. We didn't want to spend days and days

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modding this because you can just go off the deep end on this. The list I found

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was called Ultimate Immersion and they have again hundreds of mods in a page

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that you can go and load and it will give you a great effect on there. We

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picked and chose the ones that we felt would be the most impactful. Let's take

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a look. Whoa. Okay. I'm guessing you've

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mostly gotten environmental assets because like the foliage uh never looks

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this good. And the water is surprisingly

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very pretty as well. >> Yeah, the assets that were completely

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replaced are a lot of the foliage. A bunch of the trees, some of the pathways

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and the water got a complete overhaul. The lighting got a complete overhaul.

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The things like these posts here with the lamp on it, that's completely that's

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completely modded as well. >> Yeah, those look really high-res. Why I

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chose the scene here is it does showcase a bunch of those environmental effects

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that we just talked about. We've got the water, we've got the trees, we've got

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the flora. And if we look over this way, we've got a bunch of the mountain here

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where we used a mod called dindul that

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goes and recompiles all of your LOD textures and makes it so

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you see better versions of those models further away.

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>> LOD stands for level of detail. So, if something's high LOD, it's a high level

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of detail. That's also why you get like LOD pops where something looks uh low

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res as it's in the background and then as you get closer and closer, you'll see

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it like pop and morph into the higher res uh version or the higher level of

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detail version of itself. So, that's actually really cool. Um because yeah,

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the mountains look great here. >> And the detail around the tower here

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where you can see the steps going up too. Yeah. A lot of the times that

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basically gets turned into like a really simple flat texture. This all looks

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really good. Those mountains look super highdetailed. [music] Are we doing anything again with reshade

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or with lots? >> We're using a program called ENB. It

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does a lot of the same sort of thing that you would be able to do with a reshade, but it's more configurable and

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it can do more things. >> What was the hardest part of this? Was it really just the load order or were

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there a bunch of different conflicts or what? >> Load order conflicts were definitely a

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problem. One of the things that still exists now though, even though this is

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running properly, is if we go and we take some time to

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warp into the future and make it night, the lighting gets to be incredibly dark.

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>> Oh, you know, you know, in a way it's a little more realistic in that the sense

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that, you know, night is actually really dark if there's no stars or moonlight

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out, but this is uh this is pretty black. And it looks so black thanks to

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ASUS's black shield film that gives you

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not only um a lot less of that magenta look when bright studio lights or

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overhead lights are shining on your monitor, but they've also increased the

00:15:26.240 --> 00:15:32.880
surface hardness by 2.5 times, which

00:15:30.480 --> 00:15:36.639
these things are very very delicate. Uh my own cat has scratched them actually

00:15:34.480 --> 00:15:39.600
multiple times and uh it's a bit of a problem, but no longer.

00:15:38.079 --> 00:15:43.920
>> Here's another nice scene where you can really see the lighting pop off.

00:15:41.839 --> 00:15:47.279
>> Yeah. And with the high load on the mountains, like it's such a minor thing.

00:15:45.920 --> 00:15:54.240
And don't get me wrong, normally it's totally worth getting the higher performance um by lowering the detail,

00:15:51.680 --> 00:15:58.560
but like it's Skyrim. It's old. We're still getting what 60 FPS is. It's

00:15:56.240 --> 00:16:02.079
locked to lock. Yeah, it's locked to 60. >> There are mods that you can unlock it,

00:16:00.639 --> 00:16:06.079
but you start running into physics problems unless you put more mods in.

00:16:04.240 --> 00:16:08.880
>> I love the creation engine. It's a great engine that should never get updated or

00:16:08.000 --> 00:16:16.240
fixed ever >> because it is an older game. those texture packs that bring textures up to

00:16:12.880 --> 00:16:18.399
4K and 8K go up much longer ways. So

00:16:16.240 --> 00:16:24.320
that's why you can see things like down in the grass there's a lot more detail.

00:16:21.120 --> 00:16:26.079
>> Yeah, this is incredible. Oh man, the

00:16:24.320 --> 00:16:30.240
detail on all of those little branches and leaves and twigs and stuff and like

00:16:28.399 --> 00:16:33.199
it still looks stylized. Okay, what does vanilla look like though? Because like

00:16:31.759 --> 00:16:36.480
I'm probably thinking of Skyrim through rose tinted glasses. You know, it's been

00:16:34.880 --> 00:16:40.079
a pretty long time. I I think my last playthrough was at least 5 years at

00:16:38.079 --> 00:16:42.800
least 5 years ago. So, let's take a look at vanilla and just see how much we've

00:16:42.079 --> 00:16:48.639
improved things. >> Here we are at the same river scene that we had before, and you can see

00:16:46.720 --> 00:16:51.519
immediately the water. >> The water looks very different.

00:16:50.399 --> 00:16:57.680
>> This looks awful. >> One of the things that I'm getting reminded about just now is one of the

00:16:55.199 --> 00:17:00.800
mods installed and the other one has the flora and whatnot reacting to the wind a

00:16:59.920 --> 00:17:04.640
lot more. >> Everything is super static here. It's moving a little bit,

00:17:03.680 --> 00:17:09.280
>> but not a whole lot. >> Not a ton. >> Is there denser foliage as well or no?

00:17:08.000 --> 00:17:14.559
>> Yes. Yeah, that's what it seems like cuz this really is kind of sparse looking,

00:17:12.640 --> 00:17:17.120
especially in like the hills up there and just even just these ferns or

00:17:16.160 --> 00:17:21.039
whatever. >> Yeah, the ground textures are okay, but

00:17:19.360 --> 00:17:25.919
you can tell that they're much less detailed. >> Especially the rocky parts of it. Like

00:17:23.439 --> 00:17:29.360
these just look like, I don't know, garbage rocks.

00:17:27.360 --> 00:17:32.480
>> I want the good rocks. This doesn't look bad. But as much as I'm poo pooing it a

00:17:31.200 --> 00:17:36.559
little bit because I've seen the new hotness, um there was something

00:17:34.720 --> 00:17:40.799
absolutely amazing and groundbreaking about walking into Skyrim and actually

00:17:38.559 --> 00:17:44.160
getting out into Highgar and like taking a look at everything and it looked

00:17:42.480 --> 00:17:47.039
amazing for the time, but like the water especially like it's another one of

00:17:45.760 --> 00:17:53.039
those things where I kind of want the style of um the classic look, but I want

00:17:50.880 --> 00:17:56.799
everything in higher resolution and I want better water effects. I want better

00:17:55.360 --> 00:18:00.320
like I want ray tracing. Well, technically this is the higher resolution because this is the

00:17:59.200 --> 00:18:03.200
anniversary edition. >> Oh, this is anniversary edition.

00:18:02.880 --> 00:18:08.799
>> Yeah. >> And another thing to mention is we're running all of these games like maxed

00:18:07.039 --> 00:18:12.960
out just in the normal settings. So, this is if you're not modding, literally

00:18:11.280 --> 00:18:17.120
as good as it's going to get. How much time have we spent? like re like

00:18:15.200 --> 00:18:21.520
realistically with all the research and then trying to load mods and then

00:18:19.520 --> 00:18:24.720
failing to load mods and then going back to the start and just because I know

00:18:23.600 --> 00:18:28.160
that sometimes you have to just fully nuke the whole directory and start from

00:18:27.200 --> 00:18:32.640
scratch. Yep. >> How how much time do you think it took

00:18:30.240 --> 00:18:34.400
to get just Skyrim to this level? Well, not this level, but the other one we

00:18:33.840 --> 00:18:40.640
were looking at. >> Just Skyrim was probably about a day,

00:18:37.360 --> 00:18:43.280
day and a half. That included probably

00:18:40.640 --> 00:18:49.760
four game wipes. It takes time. Is it worth it? Maybe.

00:18:47.679 --> 00:18:56.240
All right, I think we've got one more game. This was a Lionus request.

00:18:53.280 --> 00:19:03.039
Can the audience guess what it is? 5 seconds and then I'm going to tell you.

00:18:59.919 --> 00:19:05.520
>> Will it run? [laughter]

00:19:03.039 --> 00:19:08.640
>> If you guessed Crisis original, you're correct. I can tell that we're running

00:19:06.960 --> 00:19:13.840
the modded version before we even get out of the menu because we're eating up

00:19:10.720 --> 00:19:15.200
almost 11 and a half gigs of VRAM. I

00:19:13.840 --> 00:19:19.840
mean, this came out in what, like late 2007? >> Yeah. >> How much did cards even have? All right.

00:19:18.080 --> 00:19:23.280
Well, show me. I want I got to see I got to see if this lives up to the hype. And

00:19:22.000 --> 00:19:25.440
remember, this is original. This is not remastered, right? >> This is original.

00:19:25.039 --> 00:19:29.200
>> Wow. >> I can already tell you the foliage is

00:19:28.240 --> 00:19:34.480
super dense. >> Yeah. >> Oh, and all these textures actually look like pretty good. And the models like on

00:19:32.559 --> 00:19:38.320
that fern. Oh, I love this. Yeah. Ultra wide crisis. This is a problem. Crisis

00:19:36.400 --> 00:19:40.720
doesn't like ultra wide. It wasn't made for it. All right, what have we

00:19:39.520 --> 00:19:46.320
installed this time? >> This one's actually a full replacement pack called Crisis Enhanced. It was

00:19:44.320 --> 00:19:50.080
super easy to deploy. It had really straightforward instructions. Didn't

00:19:47.840 --> 00:19:52.480
have any issues at all. I thought I was going to be getting into a lot more

00:19:51.360 --> 00:19:55.600
because it's an old game. >> Yeah, >> Crisis was made with modding in mind,

00:19:54.799 --> 00:20:00.960
though. >> Uh you do have a native mods menu inside

00:19:58.720 --> 00:20:05.440
the game itself. The ground again, the ground and the rocks look pretty solid.

00:20:03.679 --> 00:20:10.080
And even the trees and foliage. Like I know that this probably doesn't look

00:20:06.960 --> 00:20:11.600
nearly as good as the uh Skyrim stuff

00:20:10.080 --> 00:20:14.320
even that we were just looking at, but it's like kind of close. It's pretty

00:20:13.280 --> 00:20:18.960
good. >> The water looks a lot better as well. >> It really does. I love how you can see

00:20:17.280 --> 00:20:21.919
the rippling of the waves and whatnot and the and the seafoam. We're also

00:20:20.640 --> 00:20:27.280
getting like pretty good performance like 137 140 FPS. 1% lows aren't bad

00:20:25.840 --> 00:20:30.559
either. We did have some hitching earlier as uh I guess some textures or

00:20:29.280 --> 00:20:36.480
assets were loading in, but it's actually pretty solid at like 100 now.

00:20:32.640 --> 00:20:38.080
To be fair, this is a 5090 at like 1440p

00:20:36.480 --> 00:20:42.320
ultrawide. You'd hope that it would do a little more than 61% lows, but uh

00:20:40.400 --> 00:20:46.320
crisis, that's all I got to say is crisis. Well, you know what else I have

00:20:44.400 --> 00:20:51.440
to say? Actually, that sun looks incredible.

00:20:48.240 --> 00:20:53.280
And that's partly thanks to HDR because

00:20:51.440 --> 00:20:57.280
this is obviously just Windows auto applying HDR, which hey, you can do that

00:20:55.600 --> 00:21:02.799
to most games. And if it's got native support with our PG34WCDN

00:20:59.760 --> 00:21:05.280
here, it's got a true black 500 Vasa

00:21:02.799 --> 00:21:09.120
rating. And it's also going to get bright as heck. So any HDR content

00:21:08.159 --> 00:21:13.520
you're going to watch is going to absolutely pop on this thing. Let's take

00:21:11.360 --> 00:21:19.039
a look at vanilla and just see where we're starting from. We're using 2 gigs

00:21:15.760 --> 00:21:20.640
of VRAM, baby. The foliage density, I'm

00:21:19.039 --> 00:21:24.320
surprised by how much is still here, actually. Like, the details are

00:21:22.320 --> 00:21:28.720
definitely way worse. Um, but there's just as many plants as there were

00:21:26.480 --> 00:21:32.000
before. I wasn't expecting that. They really crushed it with the lush jungle

00:21:30.480 --> 00:21:38.480
scene. Oh, but yeah, like the water doesn't look as good. The ripples don't look as

00:21:36.720 --> 00:21:44.080
good. Even the ferns, they don't look nearly as detailed. This still looks

00:21:40.559 --> 00:21:47.760
great just because Krytek did such an

00:21:44.080 --> 00:21:50.400
incredible job on building this game.

00:21:47.760 --> 00:21:53.919
Well, I've got my own mod right here. A little bit of height adjustment. Uh

00:21:52.320 --> 00:21:57.360
Pancrats, you know, you've really kind of struggled through this for the last

00:21:55.760 --> 00:22:02.799
at least couple of weeks, but even earlier in the year. Now that you've

00:21:59.520 --> 00:22:06.000
done all of this, would you go home and

00:22:02.799 --> 00:22:07.440
mod your own games to this level of like

00:22:06.000 --> 00:22:12.720
photo realism or even just beautifification? >> For a first playthrough, I don't think

00:22:10.000 --> 00:22:16.000
I'd actually touch mods uh just to get the experience. There is a lot of

00:22:14.480 --> 00:22:20.640
artistic direction that was put into these games. And like David was saying

00:22:17.760 --> 00:22:24.559
earlier, you miss out on a lot if you go and just start jumping into the modding

00:22:22.480 --> 00:22:27.840
right aways. If you're coming back for a second playthrough or a third

00:22:25.679 --> 00:22:32.720
playthrough or a playthrough a decade later for some of these games 100% go

00:22:30.400 --> 00:22:36.480
ahead and give these things a shot. >> One thing that we kind of didn't explore

00:22:34.320 --> 00:22:39.760
as much as we would have liked to, you know, largely because of GTA not

00:22:38.080 --> 00:22:44.720
working, you see a lot of those like paid mod packs and community members

00:22:42.400 --> 00:22:48.400
where you have to get paid access to their list of specific mods and stuff.

00:22:46.720 --> 00:22:53.039
How much research do we look into that and do you think it's worth traveling

00:22:50.640 --> 00:22:58.960
down that rabbit hole? We did actually go into buying a couple Patreon based

00:22:56.720 --> 00:23:03.200
mod packs. A lot of them were just a list of mods that were readily available

00:23:00.960 --> 00:23:07.520
off Nexus mods already and a ReShade preset. >> Ah, it's the ReShade preset that you're

00:23:06.240 --> 00:23:11.760
really paying for. Hey, >> there are a lot of tweaks and tunables

00:23:10.000 --> 00:23:16.720
that you can play around with in ReShade, but they are all things that

00:23:14.320 --> 00:23:20.480
you can go and do a bit of research and kind of make your own preset as well.

00:23:18.640 --> 00:23:23.679
So, as much as you know these guys aren't necessarily scamming people or

00:23:22.159 --> 00:23:27.679
lying to anyone and they're doing a service that someone can pay for, we

00:23:26.240 --> 00:23:32.240
encourage you to do your own research and just try modding yourself. You're not going to break your computer. You

00:23:30.480 --> 00:23:35.840
might break your game a little bit. But that's why you always back up your files

00:23:33.840 --> 00:23:38.720
first. Before we see Lionus' reaction to all this stuff, let me just tell you a

00:23:37.280 --> 00:23:44.320
little bit more about this monitor, cuz there's a few things that we haven't mentioned yet. There's OLED Pro with a

00:23:42.400 --> 00:23:48.320
neoproximity sensor that automatically detects when you step away. dimming or

00:23:46.559 --> 00:23:52.320
blacking out the screen to protect the panel. For settings, the display widget

00:23:50.400 --> 00:23:56.159
center handles your firmware updates and lets you export and import

00:23:53.679 --> 00:24:00.400
configurations. There's also ROG Gaming AI, which has a whole suite of features

00:23:58.240 --> 00:24:04.240
like AI visual and dynamic shadow boost to pop the colors and details. Last but

00:24:02.640 --> 00:24:10.720
not least, this monitor has all the ports you could ever dream of with

00:24:06.320 --> 00:24:13.840
DisplayPort 2.1, UHBR20, HDMI 2.1, and

00:24:10.720 --> 00:24:16.240
USBC with 90 watts of power delivery.

00:24:13.840 --> 00:24:20.480
I'm back from vacation and it's time to experience photorealistic

00:24:18.320 --> 00:24:24.400
cyberpunk. Um, [music]

00:24:21.760 --> 00:24:27.279
whoops. No amount of photorealistic mods will make you good at driving.

00:24:25.760 --> 00:24:30.720
Unfortunately, it doesn't look that different to me. Am

00:24:29.120 --> 00:24:36.159
I missing something here? >> I think you're not looking at the small

00:24:33.120 --> 00:24:38.559
details like the shadows in the rubble,

00:24:36.159 --> 00:24:41.679
the ground texture, some of the wall textures. You're just like flying by it

00:24:40.080 --> 00:24:46.880
at like high speeds. Path tracing. >> Don't worry, I can't see. Well, path

00:24:44.559 --> 00:24:53.039
path tracing um on all the >> Oh my god, look at these towers.

00:24:51.039 --> 00:24:57.440
They're like broken. They have like a weird halo around them.

00:24:55.760 --> 00:25:01.760
You see that? It looks like it's selected. That's my mission indicator.

00:24:59.967 --> 00:25:05.840
[laughter] See, this is why I stopped modding games. Did I ever tell you about

00:25:03.440 --> 00:25:10.720
the time that I modded Oblivion? I applied so many damn mods to my Elder

00:25:08.080 --> 00:25:14.480
Scrolls 4 install that when I went to reformat my computer because I got a

00:25:12.400 --> 00:25:18.559
virus or something and I went to load my game again, it couldn't because I had so

00:25:16.240 --> 00:25:22.240
many mods. And then that was in the days before like convenient mod workshops and

00:25:20.799 --> 00:25:27.039
stuff. So, I couldn't even remember what all the mods were. So, I lost like tens

00:25:24.880 --> 00:25:34.080
of hours of progress. And then I resolved to never mod anything again.

00:25:30.080 --> 00:25:38.159
No way. You guys put my car in the game?

00:25:34.080 --> 00:25:40.640
That's crazy. Okay, that's pretty cool.

00:25:38.159 --> 00:25:46.480
My car's faster, actually. No, I think this does have like the acceleration of

00:25:42.720 --> 00:25:49.840
it. Who took the time to do all of this?

00:25:46.480 --> 00:25:52.080
This is crazy. This is like sitting in

00:25:49.840 --> 00:25:56.320
my car. Even like the interface is there. It definitely feels like the

00:25:54.159 --> 00:25:58.000
showcase videos are very cherrypicked, though.

00:25:57.200 --> 00:26:04.320
>> They are. >> All right, let's move on to Skyrim. How

00:26:00.640 --> 00:26:06.720
is this game this old? It has no right

00:26:04.320 --> 00:26:12.320
to look this good. Like there's areas where you can clearly see that, you

00:26:08.960 --> 00:26:14.640
know, this is not a modern texture.

00:26:12.320 --> 00:26:17.039
>> It probably has been replaced, though. A lot of the textures in the game have

00:26:16.159 --> 00:26:21.360
been replaced. >> You know, I never played Skyrim, and if

00:26:19.520 --> 00:26:26.559
I was going to play Skyrim today, I don't think I would have any choice but

00:26:22.799 --> 00:26:28.159
to do this to it because this looks just

00:26:26.559 --> 00:26:34.400
2025 play ready. Like, this looks awesome.

00:26:32.080 --> 00:26:38.640
Okay. Is all the god rays stuff modded? >> The lighting was overhauled by a program

00:26:36.400 --> 00:26:41.600
called ENB, and it gives you a lot of tunables on what you can do with the

00:26:40.240 --> 00:26:47.600
lighting and a bunch of the post-processing. >> Wow.

00:26:44.559 --> 00:26:50.080
And that Oh, that's an outstanding bokeh

00:26:47.600 --> 00:26:55.360
effect. Like, it doesn't look like, you know, crappy lowresolution assets at a

00:26:52.559 --> 00:27:00.720
distance. It looks like a painting. What the hell?

00:26:57.919 --> 00:27:05.600
That is some last gen water if I've ever seen it. But Way better than the uh way

00:27:03.840 --> 00:27:11.360
better than the original water. >> Everything else about this though is

00:27:08.000 --> 00:27:13.440
incredible. Look at these trees.

00:27:11.360 --> 00:27:16.480
>> There's still some problems like this floating tree right here.

00:27:14.720 --> 00:27:19.760
>> No, whatever. Whatever. Trees float. They float. Have you ever tried it? Put

00:27:18.080 --> 00:27:24.559
a tree in the water, it floats. >> One of the mods that we put in here uh

00:27:22.640 --> 00:27:29.840
recompiled your level of detail distances. So, you get much higher level

00:27:27.279 --> 00:27:34.159
of detail at further further away. So, I'm not getting like a three polygon

00:27:32.159 --> 00:27:39.200
tree over here. Exactly. It's just rendering the full quality tree because

00:27:36.880 --> 00:27:43.760
I mean, we've got the GPU horses for it. Look at that. If you told me this was a

00:27:41.840 --> 00:27:47.760
picture and you were like, you know, and you didn't let me look at it for too

00:27:44.960 --> 00:27:52.159
long, I'd be like, "Yeah, and why'd you take it away so fast?" You know, like I

00:27:49.039 --> 00:27:53.360
wouldn't be Look at these rocks.

00:27:52.159 --> 00:27:58.720
>> The rocks are really good. >> They rock. Look at the sun off the top

00:27:56.480 --> 00:28:03.039
of the freaking tree here. the way it's handling the the HDR here, too. It has

00:28:01.520 --> 00:28:06.640
it doesn't even have it baked into the engine. It has no right to be this good.

00:28:04.640 --> 00:28:10.159
Like you you could see the highlights and that everything else is like black

00:28:08.159 --> 00:28:15.120
against the bright sky like it's supposed to be. That was incredible.

00:28:13.360 --> 00:28:18.399
>> Enhance mod. >> Not to be confused with Crisis

00:28:16.720 --> 00:28:23.200
Remastered, which ended up being a bit of a flop. You know what? This is

00:28:20.480 --> 00:28:28.000
actually pretty good looking Dusk. This one I feel like my nostalgia goggles are

00:28:25.840 --> 00:28:32.960
on a little bit though because I remember the game looking this good and

00:28:30.399 --> 00:28:38.799
I know it doesn't. All right, let's try vanilla. Yeah, I got to say this one

00:28:35.200 --> 00:28:40.720
just is not as transformative. Man, how

00:28:38.799 --> 00:28:42.880
does this game look so good still? And we just have it cranked, I assume.

00:28:42.399 --> 00:28:48.320
>> Yeah. >> Yeah, >> we had to edit some config files to be able to get the right resolution because

00:28:46.799 --> 00:28:52.960
it didn't actually support the resolution we're running at. >> Sure doesn't.

00:28:50.320 --> 00:28:55.840
>> But beyond that, this is vanilla. So, I guess this is the part where we shout

00:28:54.320 --> 00:28:59.360
out ASUS for sending over this incredible monitor for us to experience

00:28:57.760 --> 00:29:04.799
these games on. If you want to learn more about the new RGB QDLE PG34WCDN,

00:29:03.520 --> 00:29:09.120
make sure you check it out at the link in the video description. And also check

00:29:07.279 --> 00:29:12.800
out the incredible communities that contribute to keeping these old games

00:29:10.799 --> 00:29:17.600
not just playable, but enjoyable [clears throat] for new generations of

00:29:14.080 --> 00:29:20.399
gamers. And I mean, Skyrim, you really

00:29:17.600 --> 00:29:24.159
can't say that the game is that old. If you guys like this video, why not check

00:29:22.000 --> 00:29:28.399
out the last time we enjoyed games at super high fidelity? Although it was

00:29:26.559 --> 00:29:33.600
more like just super high resolution, 8K. Honestly, not as impressive as

00:29:31.760 --> 00:29:37.440
improved lighting and improved assets if I'm being honest with you. Feel like I

00:29:35.039 --> 00:29:42.080
have enough resolution these days. Might just be my eyes going. 40s coming for