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Testers and reviewers wanted: BFG-style vertex cache


cabalistic

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Update 15 is here:

 

https://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dark-mod/downloads/tdm-206-vertex-buffer-beta

 

Shaders have been cleaned up to match their actual OpenGL profile requirements. (Most are now 120)

 

A new single-pass shadow map mode (experimental): r_ignore2 1

 

(note, this cvar does not save values on restart so you'll either need to change it in the console,

add it as a launch flag, or add it to autoexe.cfg)

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A new single-pass shadow map mode (experimental): r_ignore2 1

 

I changed that to r_shadowMapSinglePass (on by default to force testing)

Of course, it requires r_shadows 2 to affect anything

If you encounter anything glitchy, try r_shadowMapSinglePass 0 and see if that helps

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Tested the new 15 update and i most say in my case the shadow map performance with that has improved leaps and bounds and they look very good, now I don't see any reason for me to play with stencil shadows on. :)

 

my settings:

 

r_shadows 2

r_shadowMapSinglePass 1

r_softShadowsQuality 24

r_softShadowsRadius -0.65

r_shadowMapSize 1024

Edited by HMart
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Tested the new 15 update and i most say in my case the shadow map performance with that has improved leaps and bounds and they look very good, now I don't see any reason for me to play with stencil shadows on. :)

 

my settings:

 

r_shadows 2

r_shadowMapSinglePass 1

r_softShadowsQuality 24

r_softShadowsRadius -0.65

r_shadowMapSize 1024

FWIW Single pass shadow maps are still too slow for me on AMD.

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FWIW Single pass shadow maps are still too slow for me on AMD.

 

That is strange, i'm on a AMD GPU?! To be exact i'm on a entirely AMD PC.

 

 

Ok after testing this more, it seems duzenco is right, I went to a place that brought fps down enough from constant 60fps so i could see well the difference, with single pass off fps were ~56, with single pass on, it was constant 50fps with some occasional deeps to 48/9fps, but one really strange thing happens, even tho the fps's are lower, it feels smoother! That was what made me think the performance was better even tho it was not really...

 

Reminds me of this:

 

https://medium.com/@alen.ladavac/the-elusive-frame-timing-168f899aec92

Edited by HMart
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Comparing the CPU/GPU load with MSI Afterburner, in one example scene I got 64% GPU / 8% CPU with soft stencil shadows, but 83% GPU / 7% CPU with shadow maps. I'm on Intel/Nvidia setup.

 

I'm not sure but is not that expected? Afaik shadow maps are more GPU heavy by design they are just textures after all.

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Performance is awesome on a 2014 medium-tier VGA! All other options are maxed out. NO lightgem tweaks (so you can gain some other FPS).

Just don't use MSAA (it's a performance killer on old GPUs -> 7 FPS in the same scene with 4x value :ph34r: )

 

How about a future implementation of FXAA/other morphological AA techniques?

Edited by lowenz

Task is not so much to see what no one has yet seen but to think what nobody has yet thought about that which everybody see. - E.S.

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Comparing the CPU/GPU load with MSI Afterburner, in one example scene I got 64% GPU / 8% CPU with soft stencil shadows, but 83% GPU / 7% CPU with shadow maps. I'm on Intel/Nvidia setup.

It boils down to shadow map resolution and relative overdraw in player vs light views.

There are edge cases when stencil shadows take LOTS of fillrate (staircase in Old Habits 2, wine cellar in St Albans Cathedral), though that's more of the mapping/testing issue, but that still happens.

And, stencil cost goes up when you crank up the AA.

 

 

Good performance on a 750 Ti GPU! (all maxed out, no MSAA)

You're probably too high on the SS quality?
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You're probably too high on the SS quality?

?

 

Just don't use MSAA (it's a performance killer on old GPUs -> 7 FPS in the same scene with 4x value :ph34r: )

Task is not so much to see what no one has yet seen but to think what nobody has yet thought about that which everybody see. - E.S.

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The r_shadowMapSize is 1024, r_softShadowsQuality is 24, and r_softShadowsRadius is 1.

 

Just tested several scenes in Volta 1 and 2. The CPU load is like 1% lower and the GPU load is much higher with r_shadows 2.

Your CPU can probably power through most Stencil shadows scenes but how are the numbers here:

 

Rightful Property

 

post-3763-0-40647300-1497586062.jpg

 

?

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Yeah, after changing to more recent CPU, the numbers went down quite substantially. In RP, the longest view actually tanks the framerate, and GPU is at 99% load. With shadow maps it goes down to like 67%, and FPS goes up to 60. No idea how shadowmaps sometimes make GPU work harder, and other times they somehow make it easier.

Edited by Judith
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That sounds like fillrate vs memory bandwidth.

 

A rough guess is that the scenes that do well with Stencil Shadows have lots of smaller lights

whereas the scenes that do well with shadow maps have fewer but larger lights.

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http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

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Your CPU can probably power through most Stencil shadows scenes but how are the numbers here:

 

Rightful Property

 

post-3763-0-40647300-1497586062.jpg

 

?

 

To me that part was ~50fps with single pass on a AMD Ryzen 1800X CPU, didn't tried with single pass off but i assume would be 6 fps or so faster.

 

Btw a got a warning about aas96 or something being out of date when starting that mission.

Edited by HMart
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That sounds like fillrate vs memory bandwidth.

 

A rough guess is that the scenes that do well with Stencil Shadows have lots of smaller lights

whereas the scenes that do well with shadow maps have fewer but larger lights.

 

Maybe I should check this on an older laptop. Memory bandwidth should not be a problem right now, as I have 3000 MHz RAM and 8000 MHz VRAM.

 

Also, my WIP scenes, which are 100% custom assets (unwrapped models with 1-2 materials max, some models using the same material via texture atlases) and big shadowcasting lights also seem to fare better with stencil shadows. Generally the stuff that is better optimized than TDM stock assets (and resulting in scenes having several hundred DCs instead of several thousand) seem to be less GPU-heavy in r_shadows 1 than in r_shadows 2.

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I'm not sure but is not that expected? Afaik shadow maps are more GPU heavy by design they are just textures after all.

 

In theory, yes, but here they're somehow generated on the fly, right? So while they may not drain CPU, but they're expensive enough that they drag performance down, in both my old MSI GP60 laptop, and in my new rig. I tried scaling down the shadowmap size and quality by half, and it still didn't do much. My guess is that they're fairly unoptimized right now. Maybe adding them to dmap, or storing them in a static file (like lightmaps) would help a bit?

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