Ansel

So I had originally only planned on doing the performance testing then posting up the results. Well while messing around in the game I was reminded that this is one of the few games currently with Nvidia Ansel support. Given that none of the games with support have been anything I played (ark added it after I stopped playing) I wanted to toy around with it. Now I’m not going to go completely into the details here but the short version is Ansel is a Gameworks feature that can let you pause the game and have control of your camera to take crazy in game screenshots. Beyond the camera control, you can switch to supersampling modes where it will actually re-render the frame at crazy high resolutions or even in 360 where you can toss it on Facebook as a 360 photo or view it in VR. I was able to render a photo that was over 1 gig in size. I have no idea what I would do with one that size, but it looked amazing. Here is a video with a little bit of a how-to on using Ansel.

So this is great for people who like to mess around and create cool images. Sadly it doesn’t work with you are in the game with others, it might be disruptive but I think this could be even more fun if you could do cool selfies of you and your friends in firefights or some of the other crazy parts of the game. For solo photos, I did still have some fun. The picture below was originally huge and I had to shrink it down to fit in here. But you will see with the second photo because of the high resolution I could also zoom way in and cut the photo down to something smaller. It still looks really good zoomed in.

Here is a squad photo, still would be much cooler if it was a photo of me and three friends though.

Then I ended up screwing around in a tractor in game for a while. I took a photo of my guy in his pimp new tractor, then the second photo was something I took after rolling down the mountain in the tractor.

So Ansel seems to be a cool tech. I wish it wasn’t limited to one brands GPU and it was more widely available. The current list of games is below but it does seem to be growing now with a bunch of the games only recently being added.

ARK: Survival Evolved

Conan Exiles

For Honor

Ghost Recon: Wildlands

Mirror’s Edge™ Catalyst

Obduction

Paragon

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

The Witness

War Thunder

Watch Dogs 2

Author Bio

Author: garfi3ldWebsite: http://lanoc.org

Editor-in-chief

You might call him obsessed or just a hardcore geek. Wes's obsession with gaming hardware and gadgets isn't anything new, he could be found taking things apart even as a child. When not poking around in PC's he can be found playing League of Legends, Awesomenauts, or Civilization 5 or watching a wide variety of TV shows and Movies. A car guy at heart, the same things that draw him into tweaking cars apply when building good looking fast computers. If you are interested in writing for Wes here at LanOC you can reach out to him directly using our contact form.