Sons Of The Forest – Workaround / Fix for The General Blurriness

Applying this settings will improve drastically how the game looks, even at 1080p resolution.

The Problem

Note: Credit goes to S.H.O.D.A.N

I’ve been trying to setup the game for a couple of days in order to find the best looking configuration, but the results were not what i was expecting.

The issue is with the anti-aliasing methods, super sampling techniques, and game resolution limitations.

Anti-Aliasing

SMAA

Powerful solution but not enough since you can’t decide the amount of “passages”, it slightly adds some acceptable blurriness to the image but it doesn’t get rid of all the aliasing especially on the vegetation (literally 90% of the game). An 8x alternative would most likely mitigate the aliasing at the point where it wouldn’t be a problem anymore but it would tank the performance at the point where it would be not worth anymore.

FXAA

Obviously faster performance compared to SMAA but basically usseless.

TAA

A blurry mess, and since is a temporal solution when i move around i get motion sickness in less the 2 minutes.

Super-Sampling

Any SS solution between TAAU, FSR1.0, DLSS is just not a viable option. TAAU and FSR1.0 still have a considerable amount of aliasing and flicker that break the immersion instantly, and DLSS that its usually the best option in therms of graphic and performance in almost every title looks like having a pair of dirty glasses while looking at melted plastic.

Resolution

This is probably the thing that i’ve found the most annoying so far. Usually, as a last resort for this kind of situations i artificially change the resolution to something higher then my native using downscaling solutions.

The issue is: Sotf doesn’t allow you to use ANY resolution setting higher then your native resolution or to be precise… your desktop resolution (even if it appears under the display menu in the game settings, it will still output your native).

The Fix

So here we are, finally at the end of this purgatory. The following solution is a workaround, waiting for the downscaling to be officially supported from the game.

(For this solution anything lower then a RTX 3070 or an AMD RX 6800 XT will be really hard to run at an enjoyable frame rate with high/ultra settings, but you can still try and let me know witch GPUs you’re testing this with)

NVIDIA

• Locate your Nvidia control panel (you can also right click on the desktop top find it) and open it
• Click on Menage 3D Settings
• On the list enable “Image Scaling” (should be the first)
• Then scroll down and enable “DSR factors” (i enable them all just to have more control over the different resolutions)
• Set the “DSR smoothness” to something below 20% otherwise the blur will be excessive
• Select now on the left “Change Resolution”
• Choose a “Dynamic Super Resolutions” (i suggest to not to select anything lower the 3840 x 2160 or the improvements will be minimal)
• Go back to your desktop and select a higher DPI setting under the display settings, in other to scale up all the applications and interface size (in my case since i started with a 1080p and scaled up 4 times i’ve chosen 200% scaling)
• If your destop still looks blurry after the resolution change and dpi scaling go back to nviadia control panel and lower the “DSR Smoothness”
• Open the game and select the new resolution, go under graphics settings a enable the DLSS to regain some performance back, still maintaining a HUGE improvement over the visuals

AMD

• Locate AMD Radeon Settings (you can also right click on the desktop top find it) and open it
• Select the “DISPLAY” tab
• Turn on “Virtual Super Resolution”
• Now go under the display settings of your OS and choose the new resolution.
• Go back to your desktop and select a higher DPI setting under the display settings, in other to scale up all the applications and interface size (in my case since i started with a 1080p and scaled up 4 times i’ve chosen 200% scaling)
• Open the game and select the new resolution, go under graphics settings a enable the FSR 1.0 to regain some performance back, still maintaining a HUGE improvement over the visuals

Conclusions

As stated before this is a workaround, and still has its flaws. Like for example issues on displaying correctly some applications in desktop mode, visual bug, blurry text etc…

Once finished playing the game i’ll suggest to just change back to your native under display settings and then use the downscaling before launching the game. Now that it is setted up it will take you a second to change it back.