Pixel Boost is our weekly series devoted to the artistry of games, and the techniques required to run them at high resolutions. Gallery by James Snook.

I've been looking forward to Lords of the Fallen ever since I saw the initial screenshot reveal. The art style screamed "generic fantasy" at first, but it was clean and graphically stunning. That said, at some point between the release of those screenshots and the release of the game, the developers added the strongest chromatic aberration I've ever seen in a game. After receiving countless complaints about it, the devs mentioned during a live stream that they intend to add a toggle for this feature. As of now, that toggle is not available, so the chromatic aberration is present in the game and in these screenshots.

Chromatic aberration is what causes the fringes of red and blue on the edges of some objects. In photography, this is considered a defect and steps are usually taken to fix or reduce it. In this game, it has the nasty side effect of making the game appear a bit blurry and hard to focus on things. It's actually a bit straining on the eyes and makes it difficult to play for long periods of time (at least for me). You can disable it by turning off post processing via the in-game menu, but that will also disable volumetric light rays, color correction, AA, and other post processing effects.

That said, I still enjoy this game's visuals quite a bit. So the first thing I did when I got my hands on it was to use Cheat Engine to hack in control of the camera, field of view, and timescale. I also managed to find the individual timescale used for NPCs. Using that, you can freeze enemies in place and still run around. That can be great for posing enemies for screenshots, but also for cheating your pants off. I've uploaded my table here, and I'll be writing a guide on how to use that.

I captured all of the screenshots with SweetFX with SMAA injection. Lords of the Fallen is DX11, so tools like GeDoSaTo can not be use to achieve resolutions as high as 8K. Driver downsampling and DSR could be used if you have a 4K monitor (with 2x scaling), but my monitor is 2560x1440. The highest I can go is 5120x2880. To achieve 8K, I ran the game in borderless fullscreen and used a program called SRWE to change the size of the game's window. That trick only works for games that render at any window size.

The in-game HUD can be removed by adding "gui_area_size = 2" to the game's settings file (set to read only afterwards).

Want to download the full-resolution 8k images? Click the "enlarge" button in the top-right corner, then right-click and save as.