Anisotropic Filtering is not even supposed to be part of the Pipeline State Object, samplers are part of the resource descriptor heap.
I do not know who takes the blame for whatever the hell happened there, I have read and re-read the D3D12 specifications and can’t figure why/how anisotropy is being baked into the PSO / Shader cache. But it absolutely is, the only way to get anisotropic filtering working is a driver override + cache flush.
Sounds like a oversight perhaps something that should be invalidated or not possible but can be done because well I don’t know maybe someone didn’t check the documentation well enough and the assumption on DO’s and DO NOT’s is that developers will be a bit familiar with the design and works but mistakes happen.
AMD and NVIDIA and Microsoft (D3D12 and SDK and all those tools.) should have plenty of validation possibilities and such to avoid problems like these as well.
Something must have gone pretty wrong somewhere.
EDIT: Hmm wonder if the initial studio that did the port work got removed from this project after launch and now Guerilla Games are doing the support in-house slowly getting it right over the course of what appears to be multiple smaller more focused patches and a tighter release cycle so far.
(Thus why there’s Guerilla employees active in the support roles on the forums and Reddit.)
If nothing else, I’m going full D3D12 spec. nerd here, which is how I learn new APIs best 
I used to know the OpenGL 1.2 - 4.5 specs like the back of my hand because it was my job – Lead OpenGL Engine Dev.
If lucky, SK could have working D3D12 support for its UI in-game either by the end of this month or early next.
Shame – it does nothing for me. I haven’t changed the graphics settings since I forced the AF override in the game some 1-2 weeks ago, and since then I have had like three shader recompiles following driver upgrade/downgrades/upgrades.
Though in general I tend to play just fine for some 2-3 hours before it crashes.
Except in the vicinity of, or within, Meridian. ■■■■ Meridian.
Edit: Stopped using Steam006’s mod as well as it had no impact on the crashes either.
But, do you (more techy savy people) guys think this shader cache thing is here to stay in other games/future releases? I know the shader is cached in other games, but never saw one doing in this way and to it take so long at it … This seems to me like a brute force solution to a problem …
Yes, shader caches were here to stay a few years ago. There’s no reason to not precompile shaders if game developers wants to ensure the best possible performance and frame pacing.
Microsoft implemented D3D12 shader caching in some prior version of Windows 10, NVIDIA I think was first with it and AMD then followed.
AMD and NVIDIA are now having some issues due to the growing size of these caches which also increases their importance since having these pre-compiled reduces stuttering or loading times that were used to mask shader compilation and some games also do shader caching of their own including for D3D11 so not just the low-level API plus Vulkan and SPIRV I think is what that format is called.
Game implementation can vary a bit but the increase in shaders and also more complex shaders and shift into compute and later on mesh shaders also increases the reliance on shader compilation and the importance of a robust shader compiler which is something I believe AMD and the Valve Proton effort on Linux is currently involved in heavily and even on Windows Steam now has a way to preload shader caches which Valve has also added to and improved on over time but I think it’s predominantly for the Vulkan API so far.
For NVIDIA the cache should be in the ProgramData directory and from ManuelG the community representative and active on sites like Guru3D the cache is kept around 1 GB and cleaned I think on a daily basis for when this is exceeded.
AMD increased their cache a few years ago but I don’t know what the current limits are, cache doesn’t seem to be cleaned out other than on driver upgrade which wipes the D3D and VLK shader folders entirely. (Keeping the OGL one for some reason.)
I think AMD has improved their shader cache but the setting for actually toggling this disappeared in Adrenaline 2020 though the registry key for it is still there, usually it’s a per-profile system so older drivers or less known games won’t be part of this and it also for some reason tends to cache certain apps and programs although I think there are blacklists for some software too.
NVIDIA I believe has a per-profile setting for it’s toggle and you can also add new games and get it to work with these pretty sure both AMD and NVIDIA has a really good Vulkan and D3D12 driver code including shader handling less certain on AMD and D3D11 and earlier.
For Microsoft the cache invalidates on software updates and also driver or OS updates so the folder might have a number of older subfolders but it’s frequently system apps although UWP titles I don’t know if those caches end up here or in the apps user folder and settings.
Games like Borderlands 3 under D3D12 dumps some shader data here too but much smaller than the games own cache curiously enough, about 110 MB or so with the full cache at almost 900 MB split between Pixel, Vertex and Compute I think is how that worked for this game and it’s D3D12 API implementation.
(Some games also have a pipeline state file in the game folder or such think it makes things a bit faster for some of the core shader data not entirely certain here.)
Emulators might be a good way to see it too like the newer WiiU one with CEMU and compare how a game runs before and after the caching is (mostly) finished but that’s a bit more of a extreme situation and I think the Vulkan API implementation removed some prior OpenGL bottlenecks too speeding things up. 
EDIT: Err how to sum this all up then.
Storage API’s and file system limits, thousands of files getting processed and more so for the newest games so this makes a really big difference and makes it quite important for smoothness and minimizing stuttering or having it trying to compile things in the background or slowing down initial start or loading times although doing it all at ones will make the initial startup and any further required shader compilation times a bit slower even on higher-end SSD systems.
Also makes it important to get this right and not get a corrupt or incomplete or otherwise buggy shader cache or such.
And the summary of the lengthy post ended up being lengthy too. 
Think I attached this to the above post too instead of as a non-quote since this is more of a general bit about it.
EDIT: It’s slow and non-perfect but once it’s done it makes for a nice improvement. That should do it.
But when games have 10k+ shaders (Shadow of the Tomb Raider I think for issues around DXVK performance linked to just how much shader data this game had on analysis.) it’s not going to be the fastest of tasks to process and newer games even with possibilities of using newer shader techniques will see it increase further.
But it realy is annoying having to recompile it on settings change.
I give it to driver change and gpu change, but on settings change does not make sense to me.
I remember using CEMU and somekind of nvidia driver bug at the time, that the shader cache would use more than 8GB of RAM.
Yeah that’s a game specific issue only taking the current state and caching it plus some issues around texture filtering and perhaps more if someone were to dive deeper into this and see what else is going on here.
Not sure how much of SpecialK can be adapted for D3D12 and eventual Vulkan and these API’s doing certain things different from D3D11 although it sounds from one of Kaldaiens earlier posts that the OSD functionality is coming up so that should help a bit with using SpecialK under D3D12
How’s it looking anyway for patches here?
Well going by SteamDB the depots are updating and work is being done so another patch is happening.
EDIT: That’s this.
https://steamdb.info/app/1151640/depots/
QA and development branches updated two days back and the public branch / release branch from around a week ago.
The developers are pretty active with communication so there will probably a notification for when they are readying for releasing this third update ahead of it’s release.
Different settings uses different shaders. You want them to just cache the necessary shaders, or all permutations of the shaders regardless of your current graphical settings?
It can almost certainly be optimized, but for now they probably chose just to cache the current settings to keep shader compilation times and space requirements down.
Hello, I got a problem, the 60fps limiter seems to disengage when I enable vsync at 60hz, it does work when vsync is off or at 120hz vsync, however I get either tearing or stuttering with those options. Is there a way to fix this?
Try setting the FPS a bit lower… say 59.93 or so.
Although note that the FPS limiter is going to fight the vsync anyway if you have both enabled.
Ok, thank you, I will try that
That’s only true of the braindead limiters from NVIDIA and RTSS
SK is designed to adapt to clock skew from VSYNC, it doesn’t fight with VSYNC unless you’re doing something really wrong.
Is it possible to hack the game into forcing AF override instead since AMD AF override is limited to DirectX 9 apps?
Hopefully they’re able to fix it with the next patch but if not, AMD users still have to play this game with broken shaders 
At the moment, no :-\
I sorta have been slacking off on learning D3D12. I know the basics finally, but I have been putting all my eggs in the D3D11 basket (for obvious reasons – most games ship on D3D11 and there’s a lot of room to make D3D11 software run better and I love every minute of it.)
If this were a D3D9, D3D11, GL or Vulkan game I could easily whip up an AF override mod. But I’m just now getting my sea legs in D3D12 Ask again in a few months and I just may have such a feature, but that obviously isn’t going to help anyone trying to play the game while it’s relevant
on that note, shoudn’t that be done on the first gameplay load of the game? Like this:
I’m getting awful stuttering but i’m in Meridian right now. It was workable but then started crashing.
I was K’s recent post about the driver-forced filtering… is this correct? 
Also, how is my config?
[API.Hook]
LastKnown=64
d3d11=false
d3d12=true
d3d9=false
d3d9ex=false
OpenGL=false
Vulkan=false
[Macro.FPS]
Ctrl+Shift+1=TargetFPS 60
Ctrl+Shift+2=TargetFPS 45
Ctrl+Shift+3=TargetFPS 30
Ctrl+Shift+0=TargetFPS 0
[Window.System]
Borderless=true
Center=true
RenderInBackground=true
Fullscreen=true
OverrideRes=1920x1080
MuteInBackground=false
XOffset=0.0%
YOffset=0.0%
ConfineCursor=false
UnconfineCursor=false
PersistentDragPos=false
FixMouseCoords=false
AlwaysOnTop=0
DisableScreensaver=false
DontHookWndProc=false
[Render.FrameRate]
TargetFPS=45.0
SleeplessRenderThread=true
SleeplessWindowThread=true
PreRenderLimit=3
BackBufferCount=2
PresentationInterval=-1
BackgroundFPS=0.0
LimiterTolerance=2.0
EnableMMCSS=true
MaxBusyWaitPercent=0.825
WaitForVBLANK=false
RescanRatio=-1/1
RefreshRate=-1.0
[SpecialK.System]
EnableCEGUI=false
ShowEULA=false
Silent=false
LogLevel=0
IgnoreRTSSHookDelay=false
UseCrashHandler=true
GameOutput=true
SafeInitCEGUI=true
TraceLoadLibrary=true
StrictCompliant=false
Version=0.11.0.45
[Display.Output]
ForceWindowed=true
ForceFullscreen=false
[Render.DXGI]
UseFlipDiscard=true
AllowTearingInDWM=true
SwapChainWait=66
MaxDeltaTime=0
DisableFlipModel=false
AdaptiveTearing=false
MaxRes=0x0
MinRes=0x0
Scaling=DontCare
ScanlineOrder=DontCare
ExceptionMode=DontCare
EnableDebugLayer=false
SafeFullscreenMode=false
Use64BitDepthStencil=false
IsolateD3D11DeferredContexts=false
SkipSwapChainPresentTest=false
OverrideMSAA=-1
[SpecialK.HDR]
scRGBLuminance_[0]=1.0
scRGBGamma_[0]=1.0
InputColorSpace_[0]=1
OutputColorSpace_[0]=0
scRGBLuminance_[1]=1.0
scRGBGamma_[1]=1.0
InputColorSpace_[1]=1
OutputColorSpace_[1]=0
scRGBLuminance_[2]=1.0
scRGBGamma_[2]=1.0
InputColorSpace_[2]=1
OutputColorSpace_[2]=0
scRGBLuminance_[3]=1.0
scRGBGamma_[3]=1.0
InputColorSpace_[3]=1
OutputColorSpace_[3]=0
Use10BitSwapChain=false
Use16BitSwapChain=false
Promote8BitRTsTo16=false
Promote10BitRTsTo16=true
Promote11BitRTsTo16=true
AllowFullLuminance=false
Preset=0
[HDR.Presets]
Activate0=F1
Activate1=F2
Activate2=F3
Activate3=F4
[Compatibility.General]
DisableBloatWare_NVIDIA=false
RehookLoadLibrary=false
[ImGui.Render]
DisableAlpha=false
AntialiasLines=true
AntialiasContours=true
[NVIDIA.API]
DisableHDR=false
Disable=false
[NVIDIA.Bugs]
AnselSleepsWithFishes=true
[Input.Keyboard]
CatchAltF4=true
DisabledToGame=false
[Input.Mouse]
DisabledToGame=false
[Input.Cursor]
Manage=false
KeyboardActivates=true
Timeout=1.5
ForceCaptureInUI=false
UseHardwareCursor=true
BlockInvisibleCursorInput=false
NoWarpUI=true
NoWarpVisibleGameCursor=true
FixSynapticsTouchpadScroll=false
AntiwarpDeadzonePercent=2.5
UseRelativeInput=true
[Input.Gamepad]
DisabledToGame=false
DisablePS4HID=false
AllowHapticUI=true
DisableRumble=false
[Input.XInput]
Rehook=false
PlaceholderMask=0
UISlot=0
SlotReassignment=0,1,2,3
[Input.Steam]
UISlot=0
[Threads.Analyze]
MemoryAllocation=false
FileActivity=false
[FrameRate.Control]
MaxRenderAheadFrames=0
OverrideCPUCoreCount=-1
[Textures.D3D11]
Cache=true
PreciseHash=false
Inject=true
InjectionKeepsFormat=false
GenerateMipmaps=false
[Textures.Cache]
MaxEntries=65536
MinEntries=512
MaxEvict=1024
MinEvict=64
MaxSizeInMiB=2048
MinSizeInMiB=384
IgnoreNonMipmapped=false
AllowStaging=false
AllowUnsafeRefCounting=false
ManageResidency=false
[Render.OSD]
ShowInVideoCapture=true
HDRLuminance=4.375
[Textures.General]
ResourceRoot=SK_Res
DumpOnFirstLoad=false
[DPI.Scaling]
Disable=false
PerMonitorAware=false
MonitorAwareOnAllThreads=false
[Steam.Achievements]
SoundFile=
[Steam.System]
AppID=0
AutoInitDelay=0
AutoPumpCallbacks=true
BlockUserStatsCallback=false
FilterExternalDataFromCallbacks=false
PreLoadSteamClient=false
PreLoadSteamOverlay=false
ForceLoadSteamAPI=false
AutoInjectSteamAPI=true
NotifyCorner=DontCare
ReuseOverlayPause=true
SteamPipeDLL=
CallbackThrottle=-1
[Steam.Social]
OnlineStatus=-1
[Steam.Log]
Silent=false
[Steam.DRMWorks]
SpoofBLoggedOn=false
[Steam.Screenshots]
EnableSmartCapture=true
[AMD.ADL]
Disable=false
Sure, and some games do. Other games does it when you go to apply the graphics settings, for example.
Where they position it is not really important as long as it’s done before scenes actually gets rendered.
For Horizon: Zero Dawn, for example, you have a built-in benchmark that can be used without actually starting a game – meaning shaders needs to be compiled before that can be started.
To get proper Force AF it needs to be 16x for maximum quality.