Topic-Free Mega Thread - v 1.11.2020

[Aemony]

@Kaldaien

Okay… thanks a bunch for testing this stuff. I think it’s all fixed now

SpecialK32.7z (6.3 MB) SpecialK64.7z (7.6 MB)

I’m useless without sleep, lol.

Thanks by the way, I can confirm that this solved my issue

[JonasBeckman]

Nah the question is availability. My customers are eating up RTX 3090 like no tomorrow. Why? 24GB of vram. If they wanted that amount a few years ago, they would have to pay twice as much to get it. Now? They can get that amount of Vram for half the cost with a more powerful GPU to boot. What is the cost of an 3090 for them anyway? A project or two that will be over within a quarter? It is chump change. Sent my 2 3090 to my customer today and they are loving it, even though they paid close to 4400$ for these two on launch day. Yeah, 1500$ cards my fat bum. Those prices are set by the distributor, I can’t make them cheaper if I want to.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/iz3j6c/not_a_huge_amd_fan_but_im_really_rooting_for_them/

Ah.

Valve, just what did they unleash with Source Film Maker?

Ha ha.
Well there’s more memory hungry software I suppose.

EDIT: More accurately though these are fast GPU’s with a ton of memory and priced better than professional consumer cards like the Titan V is.

There’s Radeon VII on AMD but if CUDA’s a thing and it’s pretty established by this point AMD’s out entirely as a choice.

[Ahmlet]

did you see my post kaldaien? Check out no man Sky it`s vulkan and HDR. And meanwhile you could check it out framepacing is also all over the place

[Vertun]

@Kaldaien just curious but do you have a theory on why flip mode for POE works without brightness changing in borderless mode with windows build 1709 using automatic flip mode promotion?

[HolyDeath3000]

In roughly ten minutes I will have Mafia Definitive Edition installed. Will give some details later. When I get around to playing it.

Edit:
HDR in this game doesn’t play nicely after the first scene. Seems to blow up all over. Once you start getting to free roaming.

[JonasBeckman]

AMD Is Hiring To Work On New Radeon Driver Tooling Written In Rust

It turns out AMD is at least exploring the possibilities around using the Rust programming language in their graphics driver tooling.

AMD is hiring another 3D Driver Development Engineer but what makes this job posting of interest is they are specifically looking for a Rust developer. Yes, the increasingly popular programming language focused on memory safety and concurrency.

The job posting specifically mentions among the responsibilities are " Contribute to the development of new tooling with Rust and 3D graphics drivers with C++ ."

The post doesn’t detail their exact Rust plans, but it sounds to be they will be working on more/new developer tools written in Rust. The role is within the AMD Radeon tools group with the likes of the Radeon GPU Profiler, Radeon Memory Visualizer, and other tools generally under the GPUOpen umbrella.

In any case, it’s interesting to see the AMD Radeon crew exploring Rust in this area and will be interesting to see what comes of it given that many GPUOpen tools are open-source.

(From: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/iz8ege/amd_is_hiring_to_work_on_new_radeon_driver/ )

Interesting, wonder what this will result in.

Though one of the Reddit posts explains it quite well.

It’s growing in popularity right now and had been for many years now - e.g it’s perennially a favorite language on stack overflow.

It’s a low-level systems programming language noted for it’s memory safety due to its “borrow-checker” system. So you can comparatively eliminate certain types of bugs entirely that may be possible in a similar language like C/C++

On top of that, the toolchain is quite nice and Rust had put a large amount of effort into having human readable, clear and concise compile time errors. In other languages the compile errors can sometimes be cryptic.

Or this take.

Rust is what you get when you code close to the metal using Oxygene.

[galumn]

There is a graphical glitch when I use this newest test version with Hades.

Screenshot

These glitches only appear when moving to new chambers. (video)
d3d11.ini and log files: Hades_SpecialK_logs_2020-09-25.zip (23.7 KB)

Version 0.11.0.49 from 2020-09-17 does not have these glitches though.

[Kaldaien]

I think because I automatically handle sRGB conversion now. The game wants an sRGB framebuffer, so I have to intercept and change the format of any RenderTargetView and ShaderResourceView that the game creates for rendering into / reading-back the swapchain backbuffer.

Earlier versions of Special K couldn’t do that, so if you’re comparing the behavior of those versus any other solution for forcing Flip Model, earlier SK is probably the wrong behavior.

[Vertun]

Hmm i tried a way older release ca 2015, and it has the same behavior with the game getting all dark in flip mode, i was talking about microsoft’s solution to flip mode as it was in windows 1709 not older SK versions, maybe MS is doing non-standard stuff to get it to work?

[Kaldaien]

Did you test a version of Special K newer than about 0.11.0.44 or so? This change is relatively recent, having to do with HDR stuff I was working on. sRGB should just work correctly (even in SDR) now when forcing Flip Model on in most games.

0.11.0.49 was linked to a few posts back:

Topic-Free Mega Thread - v 1.11.2020

Okay… thanks a bunch for testing this stuff. I think it’s all fixed now SpecialK32.7z (6.3 MB) SpecialK64.7z (7.6 MB) I’m useless without sleep, lol.

[Vertun]

Yeah i’m pretty sure i have that version of the dll file installed.

[Kaldaien]

I don’t know what the problem is then, I cannot reproduce it. I know it used to work that way, but got fixed at some point for me.

[Kaldaien]

Holy crap, 12 FPS capped w/ RTSS:

SK:

So, the latency is > 4x higher with RTSS, and RTSS apparently doesn’t do very good with small numbers either because 14 FPS and 12 FPS are equivalent in its mind

---

Really good test here. You can feel the difference between 150 ms and 650 ms I don’t care how old and close to death’s door you are. There’s 12 FPS without a limiter (unplayable), 12 FPS with RTSS (unplayable) and 12 FPS with SK (unpleasant, but a completely different experience).

[Vertun]

According to presentmon the game in borderless mode is in hardware composed: Independent Flip in windows build 1709 while specialK still reports the game as bitblt, and DXGI_FORMAT_R8G8B8A8_UNORM_SRGB.

Isn’t Independent Flip, and flip mode the same thing though?

[Kaldaien]

Independent Flip is only possible with a fullscreen borderless window

[Vertun]

Hmmm presentmon is still reporting Independent Flip in fullscreen though, is it possible to force Independent Flip without changing DXGI_FORMAT_R8G8B8A8_UNORM_SRGB to DXGI_FORMAT_R8G8B8A8_UNORM, maybe a override somewhere in SK?
i want to check if this maybe fixes it as that combination seems be the one windows 1709 build uses.

[Kaldaien]

It’s possible to do that at the driver level, but the DirectX runtime won’t allow it and will fail to create the swapchain if you leave the format _SRGB with a flip model presentation effect.

[Vertun]

Oh, so the reason it works on that windows build is due to it being at a lower level than DX, too bad… i really wish i could get it working.

[JonasBeckman]

OS bug I think.

@Vertun

According to presentmon the game in borderless mode is in hardware composed: Independent Flip in windows build 1709

EDIT: Oops.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/c5ahfc/bug_dx9dx11_games_do_not_enter_independent_flip/

[Vertun]

Hmm seems according to that reddit post that they disabled it for compatibility reasons, and want to in the future allow us to whitelist games for that feature, so in MS time probably 2021-2023 if enough people want this feature,