Topic-Free Mega Thread - v 1.11.2020

It’s difficult to compare since some games shown don’t work correctly with SpecialK and some never got a PC release or the PC version is DX8-9 but Metal Gear Solid V and Fallout 4 look better on Special K than it seems to on Xbox. At least comparing it to that video, but then again Youtube’s HDR presentation isn’t 100% accurate to what I see in actual gameplay.

It’s weird that they complain about the logos being at peak brightness though. That’s not a bug of their emulated HDR, it’s how HDR is on games that natively support it too.

Yeah, I don’t think it’s that weird though…

One of my goals with SK HDR originally was to use the feature I developed to take HUDless screenshots to process a game’s UI and scene independently.

Games with real HDR support have something known as ‘paper white’ level that they scale their UI’s peak white luminance to while processing the rest of the game against maximum luminance. It is a dream of mine to be able to do that in SK (my UI and the Steam overlay are controllable, but game is not).

The paper white setting tends not to be specific to just the UI in HDR enabled games on the One X. It plays a factor into how bright objects likethe sun are and setting it too high causes clipping in clouds and some objects that reflect sunlight for instance.

Ugh, if your game uses a 30 FPS cap for FMVs and runs unlimited everywhere else… please ensure your framerate limiter can actually count. 30.3 FPS is not 30 FPS, Arkham Knight.

How can a game built on Unreal Engine suck this much at counting frames? The engine is used everywhere, Epic has had plenty of opportunity to write a competent limiter for developers to use.

I really would like to ask whatever cause whomever at Microsoft to think that those initial monochrome icons in the start menu along with the accented background tiles that Windows 10 had were a better idea than that of old.

And then I would’ve liked to ask them how it felt to see their shitty idea or concept fail to appease the mainstream, resulting in Microsoft eventually moving away from it again.

And now, finally, 5 years after its release, we have come full circle with both the tiles having their ugly background color removed as well as the OS adopting colorized icons again.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/jftr37/my_start_menu_before_and_after_updating_to_20h2/


Unreal Engine is… weird… such as their “smooth” 60 FPS cap locking to 62 FPS… Like… what? Only reason it would be “smooth” would be if V-Sync was enabled and actually locked it at 60 FPS – the “smoothness” would come from taking their shitty 60 FPS limiter out of the equation and rely on V-Sync instead.

A new Work in Progress guide for calibration in Special K v 0.11.1 can be found here:

Horizon Zero Dawn’s about wrapped up, not bad though releasing it about a year earlier would have fit a bit better although besides the visuals being a bit dated it’s holding up pretty well overall.

Standard open world fare with a few twists and turns, story works well enough early on but the late game trying to wrap up and explain things and I expect also leave enough for a sequel (Which now is in development.) eh it falls apart a bit but not too terribly compared to many other open world games.

Gameplay suffers a bit from being incredibly easy and the New Game+ mode and ultra difficulty comes with a few rewards but ultimately it just pads out the numbers a bit it’s still easy it just takes a bit longer for each encounter.
(Bonus for the game removing that nonsense one-opponent rule though, few games do.)

Suppose HDR might work well for the underground areas, poorly lit purple everywhere makes it really dull to explore these locations although the ridiculous amounts of one-use PDA’s scattered about gives some neat back info at least while at it.

Some hitbox problems but otherwise the bow combat and assorted tools do a good job and the AI while simple works pretty well for the various robot animals and not well at all for humanoids ha ha.

Like the angry screaming bird in particular, long-leg or what it was kinda like a cassowary but the game model looks like it’s using implants. :stuck_out_tongue:
(And it’s a bit bigger.)

EDIT: Liking that the sequel showed underwater areas too felt a bit limiting that you couldn’t go under the water and having played a lot of the early 8 and 16 bit games under water levels are…horrifying. :stuck_out_tongue:
(But can be quite imaginative and creative when it’s not a constant death streak for the player.)

EDIT: Now what to do for November/December.

Xuan-Juan Sword VII
Watch_Dogs Legion
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla
Yakuza VII
Cyberpunk 2077

And probably a fair bit more.

Cyberpunk seems like a clear case of wait and see and pick up maybe at discount it’s probably really good but Witcher all the games needed some patching up.

Valhalla got it’s content roadmap and once again two major packs and a discovery tour so another candidate for wait and pick it up at least partway through that after several usual sizeable Ubisoft updates for the game.

Legion seems like it’s going to be similar and they also announced the in-game micro transactions though as always focus on how it’s cosmetic stuff and unique appearance for agents and so on.
(Don’t want that pig mask? Cash!)

Yakuza well there’s a gap here due to SEGA being SEGA and being incredibly committed to the PC platform which they re-affirm every year with little happening until it does and surprise announcement and sudden release reveal ha ha.

Or just more backlog work, still another hundred or so larger titles to go and a whole bunch of indie games after pruning the early access development troubled titles, had way too many of those. :smiley:

EDIT: Definitively Baldur’s Gate 3 but that’s a 2021 title hopping over the early access version.
Nier 1 and hopefully the PC port’s solid and whenever the PC version of Nioh 2’s out likely after DLC #3 early next year is out for the console version.

Sakuna should be out at some point as well.

And then another yearly increase of bills and what not as 2021 starts, yay. :smiley:

Interesting that they removed the DOOG / Korone thing, wonder what happened there.
Probably not as controversial as Sim Copter and the easter-egg inclusion back in the day but there’s probably some story behind it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Doom/comments/jf1ku4/korone_reference_in_new_dlc_my_brother_discovered/

EDIT: And another sign for being old.

Had no idea virtual Youtube personas were a thing, nor that they were incredibly big.

Oh, didn’t know the DLC released. If it’s like two or three missions, then i might wait for more DLC before playing again.

I bet I can break that. Not cause I have an exceptionally long friends list (~450), but because I fetch friend achievements every time you start a Steam game :slight_smile: I usually come to find weird bugs in games (i.e. The Witcher 3 shuts down SteamAPI the first time a friend callback fails).

This should prove interesting, I do not think EvilBoris has tried to quantify color gamut coverage before, so finally I’m not simply duplicating work already done by someone else :wink:

It is much more difficult to explain this visualization though, so I am going to have to build a compute shader to monitor gamut coverage in real-time and in addition to this color-coded graph, also draw the geometric boundaries for the tightest fitting gamut approximation and maybe try to visualize a point cloud.

A triangle overlaid a CIE chart would be easier to grok for many than these false colors (distance in CIE XYZ-space from standard gamut-defined primary points, for any pixel outside of gamut bounds).

The truth of the matter is that color gamuts are a 3D construct; my calculations for gamut coverage know this, and include luminance but you can’t really get an intuitive sense for luminance on the Y-axis until you draw something 3D :slight_smile:

^^^ Now, THAT is how you visualize a gamut, but I doubt I’ll ever build something that awesome.


Here’s a build that supports gamut visualization.

Don’t ask me to explain the difference between purple, green and metallic tints… this is mosquito-vision in effect, humans don’t see things this way. More intuitive visualizations will follow later.

SpecialK64.7z (7.6 MB)

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If you were a graphic artists and I put this mode in a game you were working on …

How hard would you work to ignore it? :stuck_out_tongue:

Haven’t been active in gamedev for well over a decade; I would have loved to just put eye searing color shifting pixels on all artist defects, lol. Stuff like missing collision brushes, visibility culling problems, I tried to visualize those in the past in custom tools… turns out HDR is all you really need :slight_smile:

A few questions:

  1. would a OGL-to-Dx11 translation layer not make the Quadro and GeForce-Studio-driver feature of 10-bit support redundant in regards to differentiating them from GeForce under Game Ready drivers? I mean, all card support 10-bit output, but the OGL 30-colour system that many art-focused programs rely on is locked out of game-ready drivers, because I suppose to promote the sales of Quadros…? In that regard, Nvidia has really kicked itself in the groin with the Studio drivers.

  2. Since color gamuts, constructs or not, are triangles based on the red, green, and blue extremes, would it not be more ideal to map the colors in the gamut range in a cube? That is what the 3D LUT is for, after all. I understand the limitations of alpha in HDR10, but since this is about displaying color data of what the application is showing, I do not see how that is important.

  3. A new question from me: is there any way for games or programs to identify FPS locks, and is there any way for an injector such as SK or RivaServer to pick up on this, without relying on an external data sheet of what games have FPS locks?

All of NVIDIA’s OpenGL policies are redundant and have been for a long time :stuck_out_tongue: They treated that API like a workstation-only thing, and that’s eventually what it unfortunately became. Meanwhile Microsoft forced them to support all these things in consumer hardware for Direct3D.

Realistically, professional software should move on to Vulkan. NV doesn’t have the same stupid anti-consumer policies in that API.


I don’t render in HDR10 thankfully :slight_smile:

I don’t know how anyone does, there’s not enough precision. SK renders in scRGB, which is wide enough to encompass every conceivable color gamut. I’m not sure you completely understand the problem with gamuts in HDR – there are wide color gamuts, we’ve had those for years.

Where things get tricky is the fact that displays don’t produce the entire triangle that you’re thinking of across the entire range of luminance. About the only place you get the full luminance characteristics of your display is at its whitepoint, the second you start trying to produce color (particularly blue), you lose brightness in a hurry.

I’m reluctant to go poking around in gamuts wider than Rec 709 because it’s a no man’s land. Most displays can do Rec 709 in its entirety without any weird loss in luminance. Beyond that, you need assistance from the display’s own tonemapper.

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In any case, the feature I was working on here was to get a feel for just how much wider than Rec 709 the image is becoming w/ HDR processing. It’s not possible to do HDR completely in Rec 709, though I prefer to stay as close to it as possible for the mid-tones or a game’s UI elements stop being recognizable :slight_smile:

Currently out-of-the-box SK’s HDR is about half way between DCI-P3 and Rec 709, which is a good place to be since consumer displays don’t really support much beyond DCI-P3.

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lol

“You guys want color? Here’s your frickin’ color.”

Hah.

Although there’s some interesting efforts in colorizing old footage and now with AI assistance as well.
Unsure about remastering or updating older media like movies but assuming the source film reels and such (negatives?) are in good shape (Which they aren’t always.) it’s probably quite flexible.

Old history footage restored and a little bit better than what that old lady did some years back with a certain other artwork…

EDIT: Or restoring some of the lost mockbusters and reviving that genre again ha ha.
Suppose next up is going to be 5k to 8k upscaling realistically.

Colorization for some of the older works would be fascination though if at all possible.

Wouldn’t it be better for SK’s HDR to target around 93-94% DCI-P3 as that’s what most displays currently have.

My OLEDs cover 84% of DCI-P3 on a good day, at least according to the EDID and that’s what my tonemapper is shaping the signal for. So, unless the EDID is lying, no :slight_smile:

BTW, I have not forgotten about SK’s framerate limiter… new and improved latency monitoring will arrive in the next update.