Topic-Free Mega Thread - v 1.11.2020

JonasBeckman · November 10, 2020, 5:29am

Hmm the FPS limiter in Valhalla caps at 90 FPS, curious choice.
Thought it had a D3D11 → D3D12 toggle too but maybe you have to use -D3D11 or similar and it auto detects and uses the highest available otherwise.

Otherwise not much to say, runs well and as usual it’s quite demanding though toggling down the volumetric cloud options should work and it seems the high anti-aliasing option is a bit more demanding than before.

Lengthy prologue section, only really cleared up that Vikings can’t sing very well before having to take a pause ha ha.

EDIT: Update Tuesday today too should see some fixes for Windows 10 again, I see Microsoft is quite active already because opening the settings app and update page it ignores user settings and starts scanning on it’s own, weird change.

JonasBeckman · November 10, 2020, 6:28am

Nice.

(Via Reset Era. Sega to Release More in Back Catalog of Atlus Games as Remasters and Remakes Thanks to Persona 4 Golden Steam Success | ResetEra )

JonasBeckman · November 10, 2020, 6:35am

Seems Assassin’s Creed Valhalla utilizes DXGI Debug Interface1 as well, popping up a error message about that when trying to utilize SpecialK think there’s a few of these not sure how it’s supported in SK and if it’s the game or just something else interfering here.

EDIT: D3D12SerializeRootSignature too, interesting.

EDIT: Temperature sensor having fun too it seems.

F1 for stats, not too bad pretty detailed for what it is.

EeK · November 10, 2020, 7:01am

I doubt that Kal would ever be able to get SK working with DX12 and Vulkan. That’s probably way beyond his capabilities. I dare him to do it - in fact, I double dare him!

trowgundam · November 10, 2020, 7:13am

Streamers got early access to play the prologue last Friday, I believe. The NDA on the rest of the game opened up at 6am EST yesterday (Monday). So, that bit of footage is nothing really. Heck if a youtuber got access they could uploaded a full playthrough by now, assuming they were no lifing it. However, it is quite buggy. The one streamer I was watching got hard locked. Came out of a cutscene to be stuck in place and couldn’t do anything. Even reloading older saves had the same result. He just gave up and went to play something else.

Kaldaien · November 10, 2020, 8:47am

Cross-posting here:

JonasBeckman · November 10, 2020, 9:02am

Yeah the game is quite prone to glitches, no stability issues so far but plenty of small problems even in the very scripted and controlled prologue area of the game.

Some NPC’s weren’t cleaned up so mid-fight they’re off in the longhouse continued dancing though one complains about the constant warring and while some tables were cleaned up the food and props were not so those are floating mid-air.

One of the NPC’s running into the longhouse stopped and started running in place as the player is meant to just waltz out into the rest of the introduction not turn around and check out the situation first apparently none of the QA testers bothered to do that or it got filed as DNF.
(Do Not Fix.)

Difficulty choices and other selections although there’s a odd one for gender selection now where depending on how manly or womanly “Eivor” is throughout the game it just switches based on whatever kinda parameter that even is. (Also that’s a decidedly female name far as I know ha ha.)

Gets a bit better once you’re done with the early stuff and you get into the rest of Norway for the remainder of the early game but yeah Origins felt like it had a good part of the starter cut out but was otherwise fairly polished, Odyssey had it’s quirks and forced gameplay changes like the totally-Greek-fighting conquest moment but this feels like it would have needed at least a few more months for final polishing and fixing.

Need to see what the 1.0.2 update contained and there’s probably nothing for 1.0.1 probably a ton of internal fixes and improvements already.

And see if let’s see November 9th - 10th so December about a month for now and if the games already on a big discount or not.

Hmm and Yakuza (7) Like a Dragon coming out later today too plus Prodeus is now available in early access.

Choices, well it’s a good thing it’s not just stuck on waiting for more patches at least.

trowgundam · November 10, 2020, 9:11am

The new Yakuza game looks so hilarious. Was watching CohhCarnage play it. He got access yesterday to it. I love the new Turn-Based combat. And I love how the game doesn’t take itself serious most of the time. It has its serious moments, like the past Yakuza games, but the rest of the time it is over the top, hilarious shit. The fourth wall breaking parts are particularly hilarious. It definitely seems like it’ll be a lot of fun.

Kaldaien · November 10, 2020, 10:03am

Thanks for reminding me… way too many games releasing right now

Wish the Steam store had a store badge for games with HDR. I don’t know whether to expect HDR or not. I know the Series X version has HDR, but that doesn’t mean anything when a game is ported :-\

Kaldaien · November 10, 2020, 10:06am

Pfft, need more Patrons so I can buy and test all the games flooding the market right now, lol.

Do you literally mean there’s an error message about IDXGIDebug1 not being implemented that prevents the game from starting, or just a log entry in SK?

Either way, WTF is a retail game using IDXGIDebug1 for? That’s for memory leak tracking, which you do not do for software that is release quality. It’s just going to tank performance.

Now you have really piqued my interest, and I’m going to have to add some features to SK to see just how often retail games ship using the DirectX debug layer .

JonasBeckman · November 10, 2020, 10:43am

There’s a few games that do, I’ll be screening the actual error messages shortly but it’s looking for functions across these two and that fails the start of the rest of the game.

EDIT:

Aftermath is the runtime component for NVIDIA NSight debugging I believe so that’s where that comes from at least.

EDIT: And the game where this also popped up was Metro Exodus.
Must have been a similar thing then, wonder if that’s using Aftermath too.

EDIT: Yeah a helper for identifying GPU crashes.

Think AMD has something like that as part of the AGS package (5.3 being used here.) curious as to what the NVIDIA file is loading up though as usually NVAPI isn’t active on AMD GPU systems to my knowledge.
(Well there’s PhysX still but that goes separately and through a strictly CPU only path.)

JonasBeckman · November 10, 2020, 10:57am

Hmm wonder if that means that this might be in a majority of the newer games that are utilizing NSight / NVIDIA Aftermath is then hooking up IDXGIDebugInterface1 or similar so they can troubleshoot memory related errors.

And then reliance on this functionality as a potential problem unless supported in some form.

EDIT: Guessing there’s no easy way to check Steam packages for GFSDK_Aftermath_Lib.x64.dll or similar for that particular dependency or .dll file rather.
(Version 2.6.0.0 here.)

Kaldaien · November 10, 2020, 11:12am

Here’s a build that fixes the DXGIDebug1 problem…

dxgi.7z (7.6 MB)

I have half a mind to change that to report to the game that Debug Interfaces are unsupported, and get better performance But for now, this implements GetDebugInterface1 (…) to spec.

LOL!! I thought NVIDIA Aftermath was a matrix math library, not a crash reporter That’s hilarious.

Kaldaien · November 10, 2020, 11:22am

[API.Hook]
LastKnown=128
d3d9=false
d3d9ex=false
OpenGL=false
d3d11=true
d3d12=true

[Render.FrameRate]
TargetFPS=60.0
SleeplessRenderThread=true
SleeplessWindowThread=true
MaxBusyWaitPercent=0.0
PreRenderLimit=6
BackBufferCount=6

[Render.DXGI]
UseFlipDiscard=true
SwapChainWait=1

[Textures.D3D11]
Cache=false

More or less the best you’re going to do with a D3D12-based game. No other settings in SK matter for the most part.

Before

After

Install

Download SK_ACV.7z (7.5 MB), and extract it to your game’s directory (usually C:\Program Files (x86)\Ubisoft\Ubisoft Game Launcher\games\Assassin’s Creed Valhalla)

Configuration

The configuration that ships with this release is tuned for 60 FPS, if you want a different rate the only change you need to make to dxgi.ini is TargetFPS=…

Uninstall

Delete dxgi.dll and dxgi.ini from your game’s directory, no other changes are necessary.

JonasBeckman · November 10, 2020, 11:43am

Controller I suppose rather than limiter the way things are going, a few years with these one would expect behavior and control to improve in games not get stuck with the same issues over and over or get worse.

Kaldaien · November 10, 2020, 2:18pm

For ■■■■ sake (!!)

AC: Valhalla has the same stupid problem as FFXV and Watch Dogs: Legion. Any time input changes from mouse / keyboard to gamepad, the game hitches.

Who designs these stupid ports? I am getting really tired of this, it is common sense not to do any resource loading in response to user input. If they cannot even figure that out, there’s really no hope for these games ever performing reasonably.

GPUnity · November 10, 2020, 2:22pm

Frame-rate soother

Kaldaien · November 10, 2020, 3:52pm

Oh nice!

11/10/2020 14:15:23.435: [   DXGI   ] [!]     IDXGISwapChain::SetFullscreenState          ({ Windowed }, 00000000h)                              -- [ ACValhalla_plus.exe       <AK::MusicEngine::GetDefaultInitSettings>, tid=0x5dac ]
11/10/2020 14:15:23.435: [   DXGI   ] [!]     IDXGISwapChain::ResizeBuffers          (6,3840,2160,DXGI_FORMAT_R16G16B16A16_FLOAT,0x00000840)     -- [ ACValhalla_plus.exe       <AK::MusicEngine::GetDefaultInitSettings>, tid=0x5dac ]
11/10/2020 14:15:23.435: [ DXGI 1.5 ]  >> Tearing Option:  Enable
11/10/2020 14:15:23.464: [   DXGI   ] [@]  Return: S_OK  -  < DXGISwap_ResizeBuffers_Override >
11/10/2020 14:15:23.464: [   DXGI   ] [!] IDXGISwapChain3::CheckColorSpaceSupport (DXGI_COLOR_SPACE_RGB_FULL_G10_NONE_P709) 
11/10/2020 14:15:23.464: [ DXGI HDR ]  ] Color Space Supported. 
11/10/2020 14:15:23.464: [   DXGI   ] [!] IDXGISwapChain3::SetColorSpace1 (DXGI_COLOR_SPACE_RGB_FULL_G10_NONE_P709)

For those that do not speak DXGI, AC: Valhalla does not use NvAPI or AGS for HDR.

Moreover, it renders using scRGB instead of HDR10. If I could draw my overlay in D3D12, I would kiss this game for doing things the right way

HolyDeath3000 · November 10, 2020, 4:20pm

OH so AMD will do good then with HDR in Valhalla then? I mean decent right?

Edit
So I found out why WDL memory shoots thru the roof now with SK. If I do local injection it causes the game to build up memory usage within five minutes of hitting my 32GB easy. But doing global this doesn’t happen at all.

Edit2:
So I updated Valhalla and then it installs game and installs redistributals and then it basically forces restart of my PC. I am guessing the redistributables either overwrote the ones I had or I didn’t have them period for some odd reason which I could’ve sworn I did and it basically installed them.

JonasBeckman · November 10, 2020, 5:42pm

There’s a Visual C runtime in the game folder, I replace it with a dummy so it starts Shell Extension Viewer instead and thinks it’s installed rather than trying to forcibly overwrite the new VC++ 2019 redist with I think it was a 2017 variant?

It’s handled by this for that stuff, reboot required if something using VC++ is still running in the background though it’ll attempt to prompt for closing these if detected.

Steam you can just remove the common redist folder but Origin and Uplay gets funky if these aren’t allowed to install so I dummy them.

Or some other harmless .exe it can run and which can then be closed and the install routine is set as finished and successful.

EDIT: For some reason there’s also a bunch of autorun stuff (And the installer for UPlay itself.) like someone uploaded the Blu-DVD content entirely from the gold master to the online server depot.
(Well the retail gold master, annoying exe file padding and Ubisoft separating it for the Plus version too rather than keeping it through the Orbit/Uplay software client instead. )