Beta Testing 2.08

[SuaveSteve]

Would it be feasible to set r_fboColorBits to 8?

[cabalistic]

5 hours ago, SuaveSteve said:

Would it be feasible to set r_fboColorBits to 8?

No, there is no matching format, and even if there was, it would look horrible.

Although I wonder if what you actually mean is what r_fboColorBits 32 gives you, anyway. The bits are a total number, not per channel - so r_fboColorBits is 32 bits for RGBA, meaning 8 bits per channel. Perhaps that's what you wanted, anyway?

[Spooks]

Hey i've not been testing, RL is too busy. I fired TDM up with the latest patch to take some screenshots and noticed a warp bug. checked the last two pages the bug tracker but I haven't seen it mentioned:

It's the old "stuff rendering in front" bug, even those curved posts in the background are because of it. I don't think any of my cvars have changed in any meaningful way for this to be on my side, at any rate if someone could check for themselves I'd appreciate it, it should be easy to spot.

[nbohr1more]

The "blurry" water shader was never fixed the same way the clear ones were. Perhaps it will be easier now that it is in GLSL...

[Spooks]

It's not specifically that water shader, I originally saw this on one of my window surfaces. It should be  fragmentProgram heatHazeWithDepth.vfp, but there's no depth now. Just checked some of the windows in king of diamonds and it's the same.

[nbohr1more]

Hmm. Same thing after deleting Darkmod.cfg?

I will test tonight.

[Spooks]

Yeah, that didn't seem to fix it.

[nbohr1more]

Here is what I see in King of Diamonds 2.08:

 

 

The window has a proper heat-haze style distortion.

 

The sword in the foreground has a small halo of distortion artifacts around it that are part of SteveL's detection mechanism to repair

things directly behind the foreground object.

 

Can anyone on Windows replicate what Spooks is seeing?

@Spooks do you still have reshade or another shader injection tool installed?

[Spooks]

Nope, it's been off for the whole beta test phase. It must be something on my side then, maybe some leftover file I tested for cabalistic... Let me delete my glprogs folder and run the updater again, see what happens.

Yeah, what do you know, the problem's no longer present. I completely forgot I had to put up custom shaders when we were testing the parallax corrected cubemaps/ssao. Phew.

[Pascal8888]

 

Hello everybody. I registered here again because I need your help. I played with version 2.07 so far. Laptop is a CoreDuo with 2.5 Ghz, 8 GB Ram and an 8800M GTS Nvidea. I always had between 40 and 60 frames in all mods. Since version 2.08 I only have about 15-30 frames, which is very jerky and not a pleasure. Native resolution 1680x1050 is set with 70% renderscale, everything else off (Bloom, AA, Soft Shadows). The two new missions are unplayable. What can I do ? Do I have no options to play the new games with 2.07? Please answer and thank you in advance !! Greetings

[lowenz]

Please delete darkmod.cfg and let the game recreate it.

After that we'll see how to optimize.

8800M GTS = 2015 Windows (10?) Update drivers, right?

For the resolution scale set it to 0.76 (~1280x800 - the parameter value is referred to X or Y not to the total area X*Y)

Edited July 7, 2020 by lowenz

[Pascal8888]

I've deleted the cfg before. No difference. Windows 10 Pro with latest driver for the 8800m GTS (relatively old card now, but 2.07 went very well)

[lowenz]

Please use the x64 exe and disable the HRTF if you're using a 5.1/7.1 speaker setup in the Windows Mixer

First batch of suggestions!

 

1) AA off ! AF can be set to 16x but 8x is enough

2) renderscale set to 0.76 (you can manually input via console r_fboresolution 0,761904 to achieve 1280x800 / do not modify it with the slider)

3) Vertical Sync off OR on but first enable triple buffering in a TDM-dedicated profile in NVCP (15-30 are submultiples of 60 Hz so of course you get those value is VSync is on when the frametime > 17 ms)

 

 

Edited July 7, 2020 by lowenz

[lowenz]

Errata Corrige:

r_fboresolution 0,761904

pardon

Edited July 7, 2020 by lowenz

[lowenz]

The Bloom shader is not so heavy on performance, but remember to disable the Ambient Occlusion and the Soft Shadows.

About the Shadows you can switch back to the "classic" Doom3-like Stencil technique (Stencil <-> Maps) and see if you can get a better performance.

Set the color precision to 32 (64 solves every banding problem but maybe old GPUs with old drivers can't handle it very well)

Edited July 7, 2020 by lowenz

[Pascal8888]

Thank's for the Tipps.
-A.-occlusion off
-Shadows: Stencil
-Bloom off
-Colour 32

With
r_fboresolution 0.761904, strangely enough, I have even fewer frames.

At "Crucible of Omen" I started with 55-60 frames in the starting room. Only about 15 on the big stairs.
At "Painters wife" 10-15 frames at the beginning.
Since my GPU only has 512 MB of GDDR3, I almost believe that the card can no longer do this.
However, older maps are almost 50-70% faster at 2.07

[lowenz]

It's expected, 0.76>0.70 you used.

But using that value you can compare to 1280x800 resolution 1:1

Of course you can lower the resolution scale to 0,609523 (1024x640).....but please disable the VSync as first step.

 

Those 2 FMs are killer cases :D, please try the "classic" mansion FM: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/20416-fan-mission-a-night-of-loot-one-mans-treasure/

Edited July 7, 2020 by lowenz

[Pascal8888]

Do I have to set the resolution 1280x800 after changing to "r_fboresolution 0.761904"? If yes how? Is not saved in the menu

[peter_spy]

First thing that came to my mind is that 512 megs of VRAM is very little, not only these days, but like 5-7 years ago. The intended resolution for this card was 1024 x 768. 

[Pascal8888]

However, it ran without AA, e.t.c, under 2.07 smoothly with 40 to 60 frames under 1680x1050

[Dragofer]

Try deleting the darkmod.cfg, that file sometimes gets corrupted after an update and we've seen betatesters describing a similar performance drop that was solved by regenerating the cfg.

[cabalistic]

I'm pretty sure 2.08 does require more VRAM than 2.07, due to mandatory FBOs and a few other things. I don't know if the increase is enough to make a difference, but peter_spy might have a point.

Also, be sure to enable multi-core enhancements in the options, that should help performance a bit.

[lowenz]

45 minutes ago, Pascal8888 said:

Do I have to set the resolution 1280x800 after changing to "r_fboresolution 0.761904"? If yes how? Is not saved in the menu

In Fullscreen mode you can't change the resolution, that's the catch (to preserve the HUD @maximum quality)  So you must use r_fboresolution (or the slider)

Resolution choice only works for windowed mode (and in that  case you set r_fboresolution to 1)

Edited July 7, 2020 by lowenz

[lowenz]

27 minutes ago, peter_spy said:

First thing that came to my mind is that 512 megs of VRAM is very little, not only these days, but like 5-7 years ago. The intended resolution for this card was 1024 x 768. 

It's why I've suggested the "1024" value for the resolution scaling related to a 1680x1050 native resolution.

It's (1024/1680)=0,609523 if it can't handle 1280 (0.76.....)

 

I'll test with my 9600M / 512 MB VRAM  + 1280x800

Edited July 7, 2020 by lowenz

[lowenz]

Results in "A New Job"

Penryn-era dual core + 4 GB RAM + 9600M @1280x800, minimum graphics

 

Penryn-era dual core + 4 GB RAM + 9600M @1280x800 + scaling set to 0.5 (so 0.5*0.5=0.25 total pixels -> 640x400)

Edited July 7, 2020 by lowenz