Beta Testing 2.09

[lowenz]

Suggestion: move "Bloom" from "Advanced Experimental" to "General" section.

Add FXAA or SMAA or CMAA or another kind of morphological postprocessing AA to the game.

 

Sharpening filter implementation is the best I have seen in 10 years.

Perfect with 50% (0.25x) resolution, just missing a postprocessing AA now!

Edited December 16, 2020 by lowenz

[MirceaKitsune]

4 minutes ago, lowenz said:

Suggestion: move "Bloom" from "Advanced Experimental" to "General" section.

Add FXAA or SMAA or CMAA or another kind of morphological postprocessing AA to the game.

Just yesterday I noticed that AA isn't working for me. I don't know if it's specific to the new version, I had issues with it in the past though sometimes it worked. I posted a separate thread to debug this here as it seems like a separate discussion. I do wish other types of AA could be added to the engine, I've seen others engines use stuff like Temporal AA which look pretty nice (blurry but in a tasteful way).

[lowenz]

Temporal AA+sharpening is good and it's my solution of choice when I use the 50% (0.25x) resolution in every game.

Edited December 16, 2020 by lowenz

[cabalistic]

TAA is, unfortunately, the most complicated form of AA to implement because you need to generate a good velocity buffer to get good results - and I'm not sure if we can do that in all situations. FXAA is, in my opinion, a garbage blur-fest and not worth the time spent to implement it

[lowenz]

TDM @50% (1280x720 over 2560x1440), maximum sharpening:

https://postimg.cc/YLBjKF95

It's really a good result, best I'd ever seen for internal 720p. Just missing a bit of AA.....SMAA does not work well @low resolution (when upscaling from the lower one). FXAA is better @low resolution. TAA the best-but-blurry.

Of course MSAA gives the best results and it's enough lightweight @720p

Edited December 17, 2020 by lowenz

[lowenz]

TDM @50% (1280x720 over 2560x1440), maximum sharpening, MSAA 2x:

https://postimg.cc/N9B0fHmm

Edited December 17, 2020 by lowenz

[Araneidae]

13 hours ago, stgatilov said:

Did you try changing the rendering cvars listed in the second post?

Could you please bisect by dev builds? I.e. install various "devXXXXX-YYYY" versions from dev/2.09 in tdm_installer and check which was the first to fail.

Did you always have this problem with resolution, having to set it custom in config?

UPDATE: Did you try windowed mode?

How do I select windowed mode by changing a config file?  I'm not able to navigate the configuration menus because the graphics is too messed up (half the screen is is covered by large diagonal bars of noise).  I tried setting r_fullscreen to "0", which is clearly half the story (my window is decorated, so there must be another setting I need to change) ... but it makes no difference to the graphics.  Maybe I can try for a screenshot though. EDIT: the answer is r_fullscreen "2"!

I've always had a bit of trouble with the default resolution, but this time was much more extreme.

Working through the cvars now:

r_useNewBackend: makes no difference, I'll leave as "1"

r_usePersistentMapping: same

r_useMultiDrawIndirect: had to add manually, no effect

r_useBindlessTextures: again, no change

r_gpuBufferNonpersistentUpdateMode: think this one defaults to 0, changed to 1, no change

Sigh.  Guess I have to do the bisect now.

I've attached a cropped version of my screen.  This was generated in windowed mode using the ImageMagick import tool and cropped to fit into the upload size limit.

Edited December 17, 2020 by Araneidae
Add answer to question

[Araneidae]

Bisect done.  Gosh, that was remarkably easy: your new installer is pretty good!

• dev16017-8976 is good
• dev16027-9022 is bad

Guess I'll sit on dev16017-8976 for the time being...

[wesp5]

7 hours ago, lowenz said:

You mean "ON", cause "OFF" is the default (capped framerate to 60 no matter the monitor refresh rate)

Oops, my mistake. Also you are right about the AA x16, I just wanted to see what is possible after peter_spy asked to set higher defaults ;). Just now I noticed that he only meant AF x16 which indeed does not make any performance difference.

BTW, when testing this in the training mission I noticed that the orange loading bar keeps going outside the frame at the right side which doesn't look professional. I don't know if this is set in the mission itself or in the base game somewhere.

Edited December 17, 2020 by wesp5

[peter_spy]

7 hours ago, lowenz said:

TDM @50% (1280x720 over 2560x1440), maximum sharpening:

Why would anyone want to lower internal resolution this much? At least in my experience, going below 75-80% of native resolution looks horrible, even more so if that's the dynamic resolution setting.

[lowenz]

No dynamic of course.

50%=1/4 native 1440p area, just for the sake of numbers

75%=1080p

 

A modest, 4 yo VGA as the 1050 Ti can run every today game @1280x720 attached to a 1440p monitor. I play Horizon Zero Dawn in that way and I'm.....content enough (ultra details for vegetations, etc.)

TAA+sharpening help to hide the upscaling intrinsic issues.

FXAA in upscaling scenarios is acceptable but it can't remove all the aliasing.

SMAA is really good @native resolution but not so good in upscaling scenarios from a very low resolution (preserving the details more than FXAA it preserves the low resolution heavy aliasing too)

Edited December 17, 2020 by lowenz

[stgatilov]

4 hours ago, Araneidae said:

How do I select windowed mode by changing a config file?
I tried setting r_fullscreen to "0"

Windowed mode is r_fullscreen 0. You should also set r_customWidth and r_customHeight to some good values, because otherwise you can get a window which spans over 3-4 screens

Quote

EDIT: the answer is r_fullscreen "2"!

As far as I know, r_fullscreen 2 (borderless) only has distinctive effect on Windows yet. On Linux it should work exactly the same as r_fullscreen 1 (traditional fullscreen).

Quote

I've attached a cropped version of my screen.

Very strange images indeed. Perhaps your computer has gained consciousness and you should drop it into lava until it has exterminated humanity...

4 hours ago, Araneidae said:

• dev16017-8976 is good
• dev16027-9022 is bad

Just to be sure: did you reset config on each of these versions? (defaults can be slightly different)
Normally tdm_installer should do it by default, but I recall you wrote it did not work. That's why I'm asking to be sure.

P.S. By the way, was you config named darkmod.cfg or Darkmod.cfg when installer did not rename it?
 

UPDATE: Could you please try some "broken" version with r_postprocess_sharpen 0 ?
And in case menu looks good, try toggling "Sharpen" in Video settings.

[Araneidae]

51 minutes ago, stgatilov said:

Windowed mode is r_fullscreen 0. You should also set r_customWidth and r_customHeight to some good values, because otherwise you can get a window which spans over 3-4 screens

As far as I know, r_fullscreen 2 (borderless) only has distinctive effect on Windows yet. On Linux it should work exactly the same as r_fullscreen 1 (traditional fullscreen).

No, r_fullscreen 2 has the correct behaviour (window covers the entire screen), whereas r_fullscreen 0 has the window manager decoration.  Because I'm happing to cover the entire screen and only have the one screen I don't need to set the other parameters.

I did not reset the configuration.  When I started testing I discovered that Darkmod.cfg (capital D) had not been modified, so I moved it aside and let TDM regenerate it -- which it did with the capital D again. During my bisect I didn't touch the .cfg file, and I don't think it changed.

Will try beta 2.09 again ...

[Araneidae]

1 hour ago, stgatilov said:

UPDATE: Could you please try some "broken" version with r_postprocess_sharpen 0 ?
And in case menu looks good, try toggling "Sharpen" in Video settings.

So here are the differences I'm applying to Darkmod.cfg (after allowing it to be regenerated):

< seta tdm_mainmenu_confirmquit "1"
> seta tdm_mainmenu_confirmquit "0"
< seta tdm_wideScreenMode "23"
< seta r_aspectRatio "0"
< seta r_customHeight "600"
< seta r_customWidth "800"
> seta tdm_wideScreenMode "4"
> seta r_aspectRatio "2"
> seta r_customHeight "1200"
> seta r_customWidth "1920"
< seta r_postprocess_sharpen "1"
> seta r_postprocess_sharpen "0"
< seta r_fullscreen "1"
> seta r_fullscreen "2"

The r_postprocess_sharpen changed the way the menu looks, but doesn't fix things.  Let me generate some example screenshots.  For these two tests I made the following .cfg settings:

seta r_fullscreen "0"
seta r_customHeight "600"
seta r_customWidth "800"

The first screenshot shows r_postprocess_sharpen 1, the second r_postprocess_sharpen 0.  Not a huge difference in quality (both nasty), but different behaviour.

Sharpen 0:

Sharpen 1:

Edited December 17, 2020 by Araneidae
Label figures

[stgatilov]

57 minutes ago, Araneidae said:

So here are the differences I'm applying to Darkmod.cfg (after allowing it to be regenerated):

< seta tdm_mainmenu_confirmquit "1"
> seta tdm_mainmenu_confirmquit "0"
< seta tdm_wideScreenMode "23"
< seta r_aspectRatio "0"
< seta r_customHeight "600"
< seta r_customWidth "800"
> seta tdm_wideScreenMode "4"
> seta r_aspectRatio "2"
> seta r_customHeight "1200"
> seta r_customWidth "1920"
< seta r_postprocess_sharpen "1"
> seta r_postprocess_sharpen "0"
< seta r_fullscreen "1"
> seta r_fullscreen "2"

 

These changes are OK.

Let's continue bisection then
Please try version test16019-8981.

[Araneidae]

4 minutes ago, stgatilov said:

Let's continue bisection then
Please try version test16019-8981.

Oh, that threw me for a bit: it's hidden down the bottom under _test!

Afraid that one is bad.

[stgatilov]

30 minutes ago, Araneidae said:

Oh, that threw me for a bit: it's hidden down the bottom under _test!
Afraid that one is bad.

Ok, then could you please check the last one: test16019-8980
(note: the last digit is different!)

UPDATE: Oh, wait a bit... this one is not ready yet.

UPDATE2: Should be ready now.

[Araneidae]

59 minutes ago, stgatilov said:

Ok, then could you please check the last one: test16019-8980
(note: the last digit is different!)

UPDATE: Oh, wait a bit... this one is not ready yet.

UPDATE2: Should be ready now.

Looks good!

[stgatilov]

Could you also please try setting r_tonemap 0 for some broken version?

UPDATE: And also probably check r_bloom 0...

[Araneidae]

7 minutes ago, stgatilov said:

Could you also please try setting r_tonemap 0 for some broken version?

Yep, that seems to fix beta209-1.  Guess I'll run with this until beta-2!

[Araneidae]

43 minutes ago, stgatilov said:

UPDATE: And also probably check r_bloom 0...

What do I need to check for?  I currently have r_bloom 0 set anyway, seems to be the default setting.

What does r_tonemap control?  Quite curious about what was wrong, though am glad we seem to have found the problem.

Is there a particularly challenging mission I should check?  Graphically challenging, I guess I mean!

[stgatilov]

7 minutes ago, Araneidae said:

What does r_tonemap control?  Quite curious about what was wrong, though am glad we seem to have found the problem.

Gamma/brightness. They don't work for you now.

[HMart]

Was able to play for a few minutes today using the default console cvars, no messing on the console for now, apart from a initial very bright gamma that I add to bring down, everything seems to work as expected. I also enabled everything on the advanced settings to their max settings, to me the game feels extremely fast and snappy, is just fantastic what you guys did to the engine.

Btw played a few minutes of the Volta 2 mission because I think it looks awesome and would be a good test.

My PC:

Screen: 165hz 1080p freesync monitor (but set by me at max 120hz 1080p)

Windows 10 x64

AMD RX 570X OC 8GB latest drivers

AMD Ryzen 7 1800X  8c/16t

16GB of RAM

Edited December 17, 2020 by HMart

[lowenz]

Can you check the framerate after a savegame loading with AND without the freesync? Not moving around or rotating the camera, just standing there.

Edited December 17, 2020 by lowenz

[peter_spy]

7 hours ago, lowenz said:

just for the sake of numbers

IMO there's no use providing devs such data. I got gtx 1060 and I play most games either @1440p or 1080p for more demanding titles. TDM is old and uses low res textures, it should work great on 1050 @1440p.