Few questions about darknovismc's Directx11 renderer

[TankBeef]

Ok first of all, I mainly run the game under 469b's OpenGL renderer and HD textures. Looks really nice, and I get 120 fps average.
Now that I got that out of the way, I would like to know how many of you are using darknovismc's Directx11 renderer and what framerate are you getting. Some of your machine specs would be nice too. In my case, performance is really bad, it is very difficult to go over 40 fps, even disabling ASSAO, SSR and HDR as he recommends. All this even without the 4K dds textures that only work with this renderer. I also read in his comments at moddb that Epic was not "pleased" with it. So, what can you tell me?

[Feralidragon]

Performance:
I never tried it myself, but there is a youtuber that tried it out and made fair number of videos showing it off, together with other mods and such, and he always had a very solid frame rate with it.

Having said that, his frame rate only dipped when there were too many effects going on, usually (from the mods he was testing it with).
You can check his DX11 videos here: https://www.youtube.com/c/314Reactor/search?query=dx11


Epic:
He never really clarified what happened that led him to cease to release new versions for UT99, even though he was asked what happened by folks with direct contact with Epic such as Anthrax himself, with the intent of potentially help him out.

Due to the way he behaved when asked, completely brushing aside the question, and the fact that he deleted almost every comment asking what happened, the general consensus of the people involved in trying to understand what happened is that he was never in fact contacted by Epic at all, and he had other more personal reasons that he doesn't really want to disclose.

We can only speculate, and my own personal opinion is that he stopped doing so because maybe some people in the community, which he dubbed "Epic" (not actual Epic itself) didn't really like what he was doing with this renderer, based on the wording he used to justify why he left.

Some people, like myself, didn't really like the over the top effects he was putting on pretty much everything, although some other people loved it (like the aforementioned youtuber).
And sometimes when the DX11 became a subject of conversation in Discord and other places, some people would openly say they didn't like this renderer because of all the unnecessary shader effects (reflections everywhere, bloom everywhere, tesselation bloating every model, etc).

But overall, as far as I could see, no one was really very vocal about it at all one way or the other, not even myself (I gave my honest opinion to others, but only when asked), and personally, while I didn't and still don't like this renderer myself as something to use in the game normally, I still considered it to be a very interesting project nonetheless, and could be used to do some experimentation on the visuals of the game.

So, maybe he read some of those, thought people didn't really like it, so he quit updating for UT99 out of spite.

Maybe he even read my own comments about it at some point (the fact that I said I didn't like it when asked by someone else), and considering that he took my mod into special consideration due to the tesselation not really working well with my models (not only my mod, but some other mods as well), maybe he felt attacked and felt it wasn't worth the trouble to keep updating the renderer with all these special considerations if the mod authors weren't happy with it (which again, he may have dubbed as "Epic"), and maybe that's why he doesn't want to tell the real reason to anyone.

I spent a bit of time thinking about this back when he announced that he was quitting updating it for UT99, and this is the overall conclusion I reached, but please note that it's entirely speculative solely based on what he said and the way he acted at the time, in other words, this is just my interpretation of it (and it could be wrong), and no one really knows for sure.


So, there you have it.

[TankBeef]

Thank you Ferali for your answer, it really clarifies lots of things. I see the youtuber averages 60fps (at least according to him). I get double that with the OpenGL, and I prefer a good balance between good looks and performance, so I will stick with it for now. And yes, you are right, all those extra effects do feel out of place in this game. Yes, it is definitely "better" for experimenting than for playing, really.
EDIT: One of the youtuber's videos is about configuring the tessellation, and he made weapons and vials looks like "balloons" . Man, I am definitely not touching that stuff.

[Acoma]

i use his renderer and i like it for the texture injector, the problem with using s3tc texture packages is that the engine has to decode and uncompress the files as you play the game and usually either ends up making the game stutter or causing unforeseen memory overloads that crash the game. with the injector method dx11 uses it makes the textures load pretty much seamlessly- though i did notice that the dds texture format does still take a little bit to load but is still a better alternative to s3tc files

as for the included effects you can disable all of them and just leave the game as is. i personally disabled everything except the reflections and high res textures
you can tone down the reflection effect and it looks pretty good though still kind of out of place in some cases. they are screen space reflections so you get the occasional wacky angle reflection, the reflections also use the diffuse textures as a greyscale specular mask and if you configure the contrast it looks pretty nice, especially when combined with the provided normal maps (though the normal maps they made are just auto generated)

also included is a parallax texture effect similiar to what tes oblivion uses. afaik it only effects certain mountain textures and looks pretty bad because it uses the wrong angle to calculate shadows and ends up making textures way too dark. i recommend disabling the parallax effect and only using the normal map option

One of the youtuber's videos is about configuring the tessellation, and he made weapons and vials looks like "balloons" . Man, I am definitely not touching that stuff.

yes the tesselator causes ballooning on models but you can turn the value down so that it doesnt happen. the reason the tesselator is necessary is because you can apply reflections to object models just like on the map surfaces (and disable one or the other) and with ut's built in model smoothing the weapons have very bad geometry (think a bunch of triangles with smoothing errors). tesselating the item and player models allows the reflections to look proper but ironically the reflections look the best when you disable tesselation AND ut's model smoothing (smoothed surfaces) so if you like using the weapon reflections i recommend disable those options for the best effect. i turned off model reflections and only use map reflections

i think ambient occlusion looks good in ut2004 using reshade but in ut99 it just seems out of place and actually detracts from the maps beauty by overdarkening things

one last thing to note is that annoying ass watermark popup that happens at startup. it shows up every time and auto copies a donation link to your clipboard so that might be a turnoff for some people

[TankBeef]

Thanks so much for your comments, Acoma. Yes, I guess one has to tinker around to find the right balance with it.

[Acoma]

tank post your pc specs and we might be able to help with framerates

[TankBeef]

tank post your pc specs and we might be able to help with framerates

Well, I game on a laptop, Asus Q524UQ. So I know the bottleneck is mostly the GPU, Nvidia Geforce 940MX. 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD, Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-7500U CPU @ 2.70GHz, 2904 Mhz, 2 Core(s), 4 Logical Processor(s). Win 10. 1920 x 1080 resolution. I don't plan to upgrade for now.

[Acoma]

actually from the sounds of it your laptop should run ut pretty good even on large maps, since its nvidia there should be no problems with tesselation and the cpu is about the same as what i have
the only problem or reason i would see for your game to drop in frames would be high res textures, your integrated card has 2gb of vram which would be considered the bare minimun for running and loading 4k textures, unfortunately it would seem the only way to increase frames would be to use lower res textures. i would recommend s3tc high end packages (extreme end textures require too much vram for your laptop)

so if you are using 4k textures of either kind the game would run at about 30-40 depending on map size so that sounds about right, if you add any of the special effects from the dx11 renderer it would drop your frames considerably since you are already pushing it with 4k textures

ambient occlusion can be a real frame killer
parallax textures kill frames too especially on lower end cards
using normal maps in conjunction with the 4k textures will REALLY kill your frames because it would mean you are rendering twice as many hd textures (the base textures alone already push it with 2gb) the normal maps are sometimes higher res than the diffuse txtures

bloom effects have little to no effect on framerate
the reflections arent actually that demanding since they are probably based on the ancient enbseries style view hack

its unfortunate but i dont think your laptop can really handle 4k textures, but i also think the high end s3tc packages look fine, especially with detail texture overlays

---

Automatically merged

testing the new double post function

tank if youre dead set on using the dx11 renderer i might be able to make a compressed version of all of ahaigh's textures at half scale that would run better for you, it would probably be more efficient than just using the old s3tc packs

[TankBeef]

its unfortunate but i dont think your laptop can really handle 4k textures, but i also think the high end s3tc packages look fine, especially with detail texture overlays

Thanks again Tacoma. Will take this in consideration, really.

tank if youre dead set on using the dx11 renderer

I'm not really "dead set", I was mainly curious about others experience with it. Also because there was a bit of "drama", but Ferali explained it really well. I am perfectly happy with 469b's OpenGL, runs great and looks good, at least to me. But..who knows, I always leave a door open to try new stuff.

[Acoma]

yeah lately ive been questioning if i really need the dx11 renderer or not because the reflections sometimes look dumb and it bothers me when i play custom maps and the low res textures clash with the 4k ones
i might just go back to using d3d9 for the classic ut experience