Shadow Quality

Morbad

Morbad
StefanOS said:
To be honest I dont understand what the values are in the Video - text is small and hard to read.
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It's a 4k video, and needs to be watched at that resolution for the text to be clear.

If you go to twelve minutes exactly you can see where a single thread is stalling the entire game, causing the GPU queue to bottom out. That window is a 94 millisecond slice of time, where the main game or render thread is only ~75% loaded across that duration.

StefanOS said:
All I can say that the CPU is not working at max power in EDO on my system - at least thats how it looks
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Doesn't mean it's not CPU limited.

Even ~80% load on a single core (an intermittent ~6% aggregate load on an 8c/16t part), averaged out over a single second polling period, can be representative of a thread that is choking the entire game due to a clear CPU limitation.

StefanOS said:
I did find this video - a cmdr with a much faster PC - using V-Sync at 75hz I think - and the same picture GPU and CPU looking do be in low usage.
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Odyssey is CPU limited at any sane resolution with any top-end GPU in most surface CZs. Even my tuned 7800X3D setup, while significantly faster than any of the other systems I have on hand, is still extremely CPU limited in large settlement CZs: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threa...vs-ryzen-7000-series-etc.608969/post-10166337

Aggregate CPU usage says nothing, even per-core usage says very little if the polling rate isn't fast enough to catch spikes. If the game isn't at 97%+ GPU load and doesn't have a frame cap, it's CPU/memory limited.

StefanOS said:
As every CZ is different I would say you cant really compare any results - we would need a fixed reproducable CZ run in game as benchmark
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High intensity CZ at similar settlement sizes and types are reasonably consistent. The suit tutorial, while not as CPU limited, is almost perfectly repeatable.
 

CMDR X

CMDR X
Nice necro. Glad I found this.

Morbad, looks great thanks!

Can I plop this into Legacy without any problems?
 

sgurr

S
So, I'm getting the CTD with Ultra directional shadows in VR so thought I'd try these shadow tables and am getting the same CTD.
(I know these files aren't tested for VR, just trying hopefully)

My main aim is to do away with the low angle flickering terrain shadows close to the terminator, they look awful.
Any hints on how to do this, or if it's even possible?
 

Morbad

Morbad
sgurr said:
So, I'm getting the CTD with Ultra directional shadows in VR so thought I'd try these shadow tables and am getting the same CTD.
(I know these files aren't tested for VR, just trying hopefully)

My main aim is to do away with the low angle flickering terrain shadows close to the terminator, they look awful.
Any hints on how to do this, or if it's even possible?
Click to expand...

VR seems to have issues with the number of shadow frustums past a certain point. It's likely duplicating them for each viewport and running into some kind of cap, but I haven't done much testing with VR. You might try reducing shadow slice size, but if Ultra is already causing problems, that's not likely to help.

Odyssey moved over to EVSMs that fix some of the old shadow issues, but at the cost of much less customizability. Without being able to use tons of frustums, Odyssey shadows will always look pretty rough at high angles of incidence. I was running the old shadow method on some profiles until last year, but turned EVSM back on for everything to get around crashes with certain assets and difficulties blending the last couple of cascades.

You could try going all the way back to my version #2 profiles (which have EVSM mostly disabled and should still be in the first post of this thread) to see if those work, but they definitely have other issues. They'll also need to be pasted in to the current GraphicsConfiguration.xml manually, as there have been a few appreciable changes to the baseline since then.
 

sgurr

S
Morbad said:
VR seems to have issues with the number of shadow frustums past a certain point. It's likely duplicating them for each viewport and running into some kind of cap, but I haven't done much testing with VR. You might try reducing shadow slice size, but if Ultra is already causing problems, that's not likely to help.

Odyssey moved over to EVSMs that fix some of the old shadow issues, but at the cost of much less customizability. Without being able to use tons of frustums, Odyssey shadows will always look pretty rough at high angles of incidence. I was running the old shadow method on some profiles until last year, but turned EVSM back on for everything to get around crashes with certain assets and difficulties blending the last couple of cascades.

You could try going all the way back to my version #2 profiles (which have EVSM mostly disabled and should still be in the first post of this thread) to see if those work, but they definitely have other issues. They'll also need to be pasted in to the current GraphicsConfiguration.xml manually, as there have been a few appreciable changes to the baseline since then.
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Ah thank you, much appreciated o7

I'll give those ideas a go and let you know how I get on.
 

sgurr

S
The number of frustrums seem to be the problem, pre patch 16 using ultra with the default 6 frustrums ran fine, post patch 16 if I manually use 5 frustrums then Ultra works fine, 6 gives a CTD on startup, (tested up to 8k slice size).
The v2 profile had the same no. of frustrums problem, also worked with 5.

I wonder what FD changed that caused the crashing for the same settings post update.

Will be away for a bit but will have another try with 16.01 when I get back.
 

Morbad

Morbad
sgurr said:
The number of frustrums seem to be the problem, pre patch 16 using ultra with the default 6 frustrums ran fine, post patch 16 if I manually use 5 frustrums then Ultra works fine, 6 gives a CTD on startup, (tested up to 8k slice size).
The v2 profile had the same no. of frustrums problem, also worked with 5.

I wonder what FD changed that caused the crashing for the same settings post update.
Click to expand...

Five frustums is a pretty serious limitation. I use the maximum number the game seems to support in my profiles, and reducing them, even after carefully rebalancing the distances to account for the reduction, noticeably compromises quality.

I strongly suspect that Frontier messed with the distance at which the frustums for the two viewports merged. I haven't toyed with shadows in VR enough to be 100% confident of this, but I think the prior behavior had separate frustums for each eye out until some cut off distance, then just applied the same frustum to both viewports. If they were split with the latest update, then even the default ultra shadow tables exceed the game's maximum frustums when using two viewports.

I could tune a set of tables for one more frustum than high and one less than ultra, but that's a fair bit of work for something they'll hopefully fix soon.
 

YDS55

YDS55
Man I'm a complete idiot when it comes to stuff like this. I'm experiencing crazy shadow pixelation and it's constantly moving around like a heat haze. Is this fixable by any chance?
 
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Morbad

Morbad
YDS55 said:
Man I'm a complete idiot when it comes to stuff like this. I'm experiencing crazy shadow pixelation and it's constantly moving around like a heat haze. Is this fixable by any chance?
Click to expand...

Can you post an example image or video of the issue?
 
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