Nvidia Ansel Now Snapping In Mirror's Edge Catalyst
Video game photography
Mirror's Edge Catalyst [official site] is the first game to receive support for Ansel, Nvidia's fancy new tool for taking good-looking screenshots. Ansel's basically a photo mode, letting players pause games to reposition and adjust the camera, only it also supports post-processing effects, creating 360° panoramas, and more. It looks mighty handy for amateur video game photographers. Two problems: it's only for Nvidia cards; and games must be patched to support it. But hey, for all its flaws, Catalyst is certainly a pretty enough game to start with. The Witcher 3's coming too, you know.
So! As is typical for photo modes, Ansel offers camera controls to move around, pick a position, rotate, zoom, and all that. You can also apply filters to adjust the contrast, colour it, and apply all sorts of Instagram-y effects - including ones you create yourself. It supports saving regular screenshots up 4.5 gigapixels in size - pretty dang big - and 360° panoramas, even panoramas for cybergoggles.
To start snapping yourself, you'll need to update to the latest Nvidia driver, update Mirror's Edge Catalyst, then follow these instructions.
This here video shows a bit of Ansel in Catalyst:
Ansel looks better than most (all?) photo modes I've seen developers create for games themselves so sure, I like that it'll be coming to some pretty games I'd like to take nice screenshots in. I have an Nvidia graphics card, mind. It's less fun for AMDers.
It's weird that it's 2016 and we still have game features exclusive to one type of graphics card. I remember thinking in the '90s, when the 3D graphics card wars kicked off, that surely this would all blow over soon. Weird.
The Division, The Witness, Lawbreakers, The Witcher 3, Paragon, No Man's Sky, and the new Unreal Tournament are all due to get Ansel support too.