Guild Wars 2

I have the reflection option turned off, but I still see funky reflections in certain places. Is this feature intended to turn off all reflections? Also, the reflection looks more like double vision than reflections. In this picture the character’s reflection in theory should look farther away than the NPCs since they are further from the surface that does the reflecting.

The screen shot is at the jewling station in LA.

isn’t that option just for water surface reflections?

The tool tip did not give that level of detail. Based on the options it also was not clear to me that it only turned of a subset of reflective material. Also, I would prefer no reflections at all to the double vision that I currently get.

Isn’t the double image in your screenshot more like a bad postprocess refraction rather than a reflection effect?

There doesn’t seem to be a good way to control the refractions.

Wouldn’t mind getting a separate setting for them. I’m starting to suspect their overuse in some combat effects is a major part of why some fights slow down so badly even on hardware that can otherwise run smooth on high-ish settings.

When I moved the camera around it looked like they were trying to make the surface of the jewel case reflect things. Refractions are bending of light & I don’t see how that would create a double image.

Faux Play.6104:

When I moved the camera around it looked like they were trying to make the surface of the jewel case reflect things. Refractions are bending of light & I don’t see how that would create a double image.

Games do not actually trace light rays; current graphics hardware is just not engineered to do that.

To fake a refraction effect, they first draw the environment normally and then sample from that image while drawing the refracting object, distorting coordinates fed to the sampler to get a cheap 2D fake refraction.

Unless the refraction shader also considers image depth or the game goes through the pain of sorting everything based on depth relative to the refracting surface (and abandoning early-Z optimizations in many cases), it’s going to have these double image issues when something’s in front of the refracting surface.