Weird graphics (colors, shadows)
Hi everyone. I have a problem for which I haven't seen an answer or solution yet despite being posted regularly at Bioware's forum, and while I know it's not urgent, it's very annoying. Look, it's the color banding. Well, at least I think it's called like that. I call it "the 16-bit wallpaper syndrome", since the pictures seem to have been rendered with a lower color depth, especially on backgrounds. Background shadows also look awful. Even Shepard's armor has it. [Gallery]
Just to be clear, it seems like some users have fixed this either by turning the harmonic lighting or manually disabling the DOF. Neither of these have worked for me. RadeonPro does not have useful settings on this matter, either, but I have been able to smooth it out a little by playing with FXAA and in-game Gamma (the banding would be much more accentuated if I didn't have it on at the moment of taking the screencaps). In fact, I've fiddled around with all the settings (both ingame and MassEffect3Config), with little success. Now, I'm pretty sure this feature isn't entirely intentional, since I've even noticed banding on the elevator menus (a bit, but nonetheless), and the console versions don't seem to have this problem.
I have considered the possibility of it being an auto-setting since my computer is pretty low-end (Core Duo 2.1Ghz, Radeon Mobility 45xxHD 512mb), but there is no setting for it (no setting for textures either, which keep the standards of previous game, by the way). Since this seems to be a pretty widespread problem among both ATI and Nvidia users of a variety of models, I'd like to know if someone can at least tell if this can be fixed from the user end or if it's the way this game renders things and there is nothing to do about it. It may seem trivial, but graphics look terrible and it's really distracting. I'm not a graphics guy, mind you-- I'm always disabling advanced shadows, antialiasing and such on games because I prefer a smooth framerate, but this is incredibly annoying to me. It looks like the pre-rendered videos in old timey Win 95 games and compressed Sega CD videos.