Development versions (2.12)

[datiswous]

I thought tdm already uses some features ported from Doom3 bfg.

[nbohr1more]

24 minutes ago, datiswous said:

I thought tdm already uses some features ported from Doom3 bfg.

Yes, we ported some BFG code. Both TDM and RB-DOOM3-BFG have radically changed the shader setup and render backends from vanilla (or vanilla BFG) so it may be difficult to reconcile the two. RB-DOOM3-BFG has a few things that we may be able to port without too much issue though.

[lowenz]

Interesting article: Lightmaps in Doom 3 Engine: A Hybrid Approach To Real-Time Lighting tutorial - Mod DB

[MirceaKitsune]

5 hours ago, lowenz said:

Interesting article: Lightmaps in Doom 3 Engine: A Hybrid Approach To Real-Time Lighting tutorial - Mod DB

Static lights are cached and not recalculated unless either the light or something in its radius move, which technically speaking acts like an internal lightmap. Conventional lightmaps I only see as being useful for bounce lighting, though proper global illumination uses voxels instead... so all in all I think that old lighting technology is better off left dead.

[stgatilov]

dev16809-10394 is released.

This version might give a noticeable performance boost depending on a mission.
Let's hope it does not bring along more bugs

[MirceaKitsune]

Oh wow: Areas in my city I clearly remember yielding 60 FPS from some positions / angles now reach well over 80 FPS with latest dev, same quality settings just the new optimizations and defaults. While it was commonplace to get barely over 60 FPS in many zones, I barely found a spot where it now occasionally hits 69 FPS for just one frame

You've truly worked miracles with those optimizations. Didn't imagine even more performance could be squeezed out of the engine by software fixes alone. Haven't tested broadly but they'll be felt on every FM for sure. Thank you lots!

Edited June 4, 2023 by MirceaKitsune

[thebigh]

Nice work! I'm getting ~10% performance improvements even on my most potato computer, which is a very significant playability boost.

[MirceaKitsune]

Noticed something rather shocking: Enabling 4x MSAA only seems to reduce performance by roughly 10 FPS now. This is a huge optimization, AntiAliasing would tank performance to a far greater extent! I'm seeing it on The Painter's Wife where performance is generally good, if it holds in other places I may be able to leave it enabled at last; Still wish we had an alternative like FXAA or TAA but now it may not be so urgent at least.

Edited June 12, 2023 by MirceaKitsune

[stgatilov]

On 6/12/2023 at 11:40 PM, MirceaKitsune said:

Noticed something rather shocking: Enabling 4x MSAA only seems to reduce performance by roughly 10 FPS now. This is a huge optimization, AntiAliasing would tank performance to a far greater extent! I'm seeing it on The Painter's Wife where performance is generally good, if it holds in other places I may be able to leave it enabled at last; Still wish we had an alternative like FXAA or TAA but now it may not be so urgent at least.

I guess the difference is because of long-standing issue was with stencil shadows: https://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=5851

Other then that, multisampling is a big waste of memory bandwidth, so antialiasing will never become totally free in TDM.

[MirceaKitsune]

2 hours ago, stgatilov said:

I guess the difference is because of long-standing issue was with stencil shadows: https://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=5851

Other then that, multisampling is a big waste of memory bandwidth, so antialiasing will never become totally free in TDM.

I'm seeing the improvement with shadow maps too, albeit I keep their quality at lowest. Indeed MSAA is still costly even so, I kept it disabled even now for that reason. Fingers crossed the next release may get shader-based Anti-Aliasing: From my tests in Tesseract / Redeclipse, FXAA / SSAA / TAA all tend to be cheaper, hope we get at least one someday.

[stgatilov]

27 minutes ago, MirceaKitsune said:

From my tests in Tesseract / Redeclipse, FXAA / SSAA / TAA all tend to be cheaper, hope we get at least one someday.

FXAA is cheap but looks awful.
Supersampling AA is strictly more expensive than multisampling, no reason to use it if multisampling looks OK.
Temporal AA requires major changes in the engine in order to be used, plus it kinda requires motion blur to hide its uselessness on fast camera motions.

So don't expect multisampling to be replaced soon.

[HMart]

Agree on FXAA indeed but it would be cool if you looked at SMAA (Enhanced subpixel morphological antialiasing) as well, is a upgraded version of MLAA (rival of FXAA) from AMD, made by Crytek and Universidad de Zaragoza.  Is always subjective but many say it looks better than both FXAA and MLAA while being almost as fast.

Never tried it in TDM but I know that Reshade has a SMAA shader, could be a way for you to test how it looks in comparation to FXAA ingame and later decided if is worth to write a inhouse one.

And IMO no need to replace multisampling it can work along side post process AA systems very well. 

Edited June 17, 2023 by HMart

[stgatilov]

dev16814-10408 is released.

It finished the optimization on shadow-casting lights, might give some more performance.

[thebigh]

Yes, it does seem a little bit quicker.

[MirceaKitsune]

The new update sounds very exciting! Already got it and will probably play a new FM again soon. I wasn't sure if lights make full use of portals in order to ditch even more calculations, awesome to hear that's now on the list too

Reminds me of something I asked a while ago, don't think anyone knew the answer with certainty: When using a targeted light / spotlight, does it improve performance compared to omni lights? I wasn't sure if the engine knows to calculate only inside the cone they're pointing at, or if behind the curtains it still treats them as 360* projections and just visually makes them a cone.

If there's an improvement I was wondering if hooded lights could be made like that by default. Visually there should be no difference: I experimented with the outdoor lamp once, by default it still shines in all directions... you don't see anything above anyway since the model self-shadows, we could likely get it looking almost identical with a wide cone. Just thought it might be a good idea to bring this up now that I remembered, for now a nice new optimization to enjoy

[stgatilov]

5 hours ago, MirceaKitsune said:

Reminds me of something I asked a while ago, don't think anyone knew the answer with certainty: When using a targeted light / spotlight, does it improve performance compared to omni lights? I wasn't sure if the engine knows to calculate only inside the cone they're pointing at, or if behind the curtains it still treats them as 360* projections and just visually makes them a cone.

Every light volume is represented as a frustum. Indeed, spotlight has smaller frustum than ordinary point light which is shadowed, so it generates less interactions. It should be faster in most cases.

Currently shadow maps always use cubemap, even for spotlights. But I hope we'll change that too in the future.

[AluminumHaste]

Whatever you're doing keep it up, man what a performance increase.

2.11a:

 

Latest SVN version:

 

+100 FPS in this scene is an insane increase.

EDIT: just noticed that I had min ambient turned down and increased FOV by 5 degrees in the second shot. So there's even MORE for the SVN version to render and it's still 100+ fps over.

[MirceaKitsune]

OMG... can't wait to try this one out! It's a shame I don't know the engine code and C++ in general: I always think of optimizations but all I can do is share them hoping it may inspire a developer for their idea. stgatilov did some amazing work I wasn't expecting we could see, thank you for that it's awesome

[HMart]

Indeed I saw a big increase in performance has well. This new light culling system is doing wonders, fantastic job.

Btw to test this new version, I played Volta 2 for a while and in that part where you need to swim against the current, to get too the gold bottle, I was unable to do so, no matter how much i tried, but I remember being able to do that very easily, does the swimming system got changed or is a bug?

[Wellingtoncrab]

"might give some more performance" is quite the understatement. It is now achievable to get Iris to runs on the Steamdeck at 60fps, where as before most of the map was stuck between 30-40 regardless of settings, resolution scaling, etc.

In terms of frame render times that is a much bigger performance jump than even 180-300.

Really fantastic job devs!

Now we can tank performance with even more elaborate and unoptimized scenes.

[wesp5]

4 minutes ago, Wellingtoncrab said:

Now we can tank performance with even more elaborate and unoptimized scenes.

LOL

[AluminumHaste]

1 hour ago, HMart said:

Indeed I saw a big increase in performance has well. This new light culling system is doing wonders, fantastic job.

Btw to test this new version, I played Volta 2 for a while and in that part where you need to swim against the current, to get too the gold bottle, I was unable to do so, no matter how much i tried, but I remember being able to do that very easily, does the swimming system got changed or is a bug?

I was just going to create a bug tracker yesterday for that.

That uses id_forcefield, and the impulse on the player is either increased or happens more often as FPS goes up.

Just set your FPS to 60 at that spot, then change it back.

That bug has probably been around since uncapped FPS made it's debut.

[MirceaKitsune]

Did just a quick test on a rather intensive FM I've almost finished: In a place where I know I previously had 60 FPS, I'm now getting 80 FPS instead... not bad at all! In most areas I'm getting roughly 100, 90 - 110 give or take. You can really feel the extra smoothness all in all, really extraordinary stuff!

[stgatilov]

Well, the previous dev build introduced a bug with noshadows lights. Their lighting can be optimized away in some cases, for faster performance and wrong results

The upcoming fix will probably reduce performance a bit back, although it seems to be rather small.

[stgatilov]

33 minutes ago, AluminumHaste said:

I was just going to create a bug tracker yesterday for that.
That uses id_forcefield, and the impulse on the player is either increased or happens more often as FPS goes up.

Maybe this: https://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=6244 ?

If yes, please leave a comment there about how much it breaks existing mission.
Such circumstances greatly raise significance of an issue, at least in my eyes