Quoting: TheRiddickI would like to present your research project for the next week: Seemless Scaling app on steam.

This is exactly what I was referring to, except it's called Lossless Scaling. It works without motion vectors (or even a depth buffer) because it generates those on the fly the color buffer. It's not as precise as an in-engine implementation, but it can be pretty good at higher base framerates if you put in the GPU time.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: TheRiddickWonder if they can integrate FSR3.1 and framegen with dxvk sometime since its open-source. Would be a fantastic addition.

This needs per-game integration as both require motion vectors, so DXVK can't provide an universal solution for this.

I'd love to see an open source alternative to Lossless Scaling frame generation. The best course of action for implementing this would likely to find/create an algorithm that generates motion vectors from two color buffers, feed these motion vectors to FSR3 frame generation and run all this in Gamescope (so it can be applied to any game without needing per-game support).

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: hardpenguinThe ones released fairy recently are most interesting to me, like what decision or technical debt made people still use it in the 2010?!

Note that many games like Half-Life 2 and Portal still feature optional Direct3D 8 modes, which are useful for using RTX Remix on them (since Direct3D 8 is fixed-function). Without this mode, Portal with RTX would not have been possible.

Most recent entries you see on this list are remasters of old games, games using old engines for legacy reasons, or a leaked game from 2001 that became available in 2022 (Duke Nukem Forever 2001). For this last example however, a Direct3D 9-based renderer was developed by the community and is the preferred way to play. Bless Unreal Engine 1's swappable renderer system :)

View this comment - View article - View full comments

SGSSAA

That's an acronym I haven't heard of for 10 years now (in official engine implementations, that is) :)

It's bound to driver-specific APIs and isn't part of standard Direct3D/OpenGL/Vulkan, so it's pretty hard to enable from the application side.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: lejimsterI wonder if this work will easily translate to the M1 successors.

Seeing this question [External Link], it should be easy to get it working on M2/M3 (and most likely M4 when it releases).

M2 GPUs and later support image atomics though, which I don't know if NVK supports yet. Some apps/games might require this to run optimally (or at all). One application of image atomics is for volumetric fog rendering in Godot. A non-atomic fallback is used on macOS when running on MoltenVK, as image atomics were not available at all when volumetric fog was implemented.

M3 GPUs and later support hardware-accelerated raytracing, which is not supported in NVK yet.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: massatt212is there one for mario 64?

https://sm64coopdx.com/ [External Link] is my go-to option nowadays. It's geared towards multiplayer but can play singleplayer just fine too, with support for arbitrary FPS and mods.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: CatKiller

Plus they're also now limiting the CPU cores seen by Call of Juarez: Gunslinger as well to make it playable on high core-count CPUs. They did the same fix for Command & Conquer and The Covert Operations in a previous Experimental update.

It's weird that this keeps cropping up as an issue. High core-count machines have been around for quite a while now, and dev machines tend to have more cores than gaming machines, so you'd think that this was the kind of thing that would be spotted and fixed by game devs themselves.

In terms of performance, negative core scaling is still a common issue in modern AAA games. A fair amount of games perform better if you only expose 8 physical cores to them at most. It's usually caused by games spawning too many threads for tasks that can only be parallelized so much, simply because you have a CPU with more than 16 threads (assuming HyperThreading).

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Why? Turns out fixing these new extensions also fixed "an ancient 3D graphics feature in an actual game". Since it fixes issues in one game, it no doubt fixes issues in others too.

While shader derivatives are a 20 year old feature, they're still pretty important for modern games (and even some non-game applications) as they're used for things like smooth line drawing (without needing expensive MSAA or non-portable GL_LINE_SMOOTH).

View this comment - View article - View full comments

The armadillo timing is impressive considering the news that was published just after: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2024/04/atari-revives-infogrames-and-acquires-totally-reliable-delivery-service/

Coincidence? ;)

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Every Ubuntu LTS release feels special, since it's often treated as the baseline for shipping apps that are portable across distributions. Of course, the oldest still-supported Ubuntu LTS is usually the one developers are targeting (currently 20.04), but in a few years from now, this will be Ubuntu 24.04.

While I don't use Ubuntu anymore, it's still a distro I appreciate for this reason.

View this comment - View article - View full comments