Eskating cyclist, gamer and enjoyer of anime. Probably an artist. Also I code sometimes, pretty much just to mod titanfall 2 tho.

Introverted, yet I enjoy discussion to a fault.

  • 9 Posts
  • 266 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • PBR isn’t shit, and it doesn’t necessarily mean targeting photorealism.

    It’s just a benchmark for material rendering that means once all your assets come out the other end of production, they work consistently with each other.

    You could shift that benchmark towards cartoony or painterly or whatever you like, and even with assets produced using PBR, it’s easier to “style” your game later because all your different assets are at the same starting point, and will therefore react to rendering changes consistently across the board.

    Basically if your entire team is making metal materials by eyeballing it, and you then put it all together in a scene, you won’t be able to get all the different metal objects to look like metal at the same time as you make changes to the lighting in the scene, because the asset team made all of them using slightly different material parameters.

    If you make your entire asset production pipeline PBR, all metal assets will behave the same, all glass materials will behave the same, flesh, fabric, fur…

    You get the idea.




  • I adore Fires of Rubicon. They know how to design games, and how to pull off an aesthetic. That side of the studio has serious world-class talent.

    But fromsoft has some big issues on the graphics tech expertise side of things.

    I don’t think I’ve seen any subsurface scattering in their games, or proper multi-texture materials. I don’t think they are on a PBR workflow (physically based rendering) though they couldn’t achieve their “style” if they were. And the way they still rely on shell texturing in places they really, really shouldn’t, actually hurts.

    My problem isn’t with their style. It’s that they don’t seem to know all the industry standard solutions and techniques that exist and have been developed, and shoot themselves in the foot both in terms of performance and fidelity, by achieving things in ways that an expert could immediately tell is a bad idea.


  • I know.

    But only games running dx12/Vulkan must compile shaders.

    The “normalcy” of sutters on linux is because dx7-11 games are running through vulkan, and those games were never coded to account for the way Vulkan works. Hence the shaders are compiled (by VKD3D/DXVK, not the game) during gameplay when first needed.

    Like I said, if games must compile shaders during gameplay, they should do so asynchronously in order to not impact frametimes. This only applies to titles actually coded with the intention of being run under dx12/vulkan. Elden Ring in particular straight up violates the dx12 spec.

    Compiling the shaders in advance also doesn’t take 30 minutes, and doesn’t require doing so for the entire game. Many games will only compile the shaders for the immediate area that a player is in. (Apex Legends in dx12 mode for example processes only the current map in rotation and lets you play when it’s done)

    Games that precompile shaders when running using Vulkan/dx12 have never made me wait longer than a few minutes at most, and only at first launch.

    There is no excuse.










  • Yes. But Valve didn’t do anything special. They provide pre-compiled shaders for all games on the deck and can only do so because of how directx shaders are handled on linux.

    All games on linux and windows when using DX12/Vulkan must compile shaders. They should be compiled during loading screens and such, not gameplay, then cached for use later.

    Elden Ring in particular, didn’t precompile shaders before gameplay, and then when it did compile them, it would discard the shaders rather than cache them. As a result the stutter would happen non-stop and never go away.

    On linux, the equivalent compiled vulkan shaders are cached by VKD3D, eliminating the stutter except when a shader is used for the first time. On the deck, Valve will deliver the shaders precompiled with the game download to eliminate the need to compile them at all.

    The fix of providing precompiled shaders was only possible on linux due to the use of VKD3D. And even without them, on linux the stutter would go away after a while as VKD3D will cache them even when the game doesn’t. Fromsoft had to update the game to fix it from their side on windows.




  • Immersion, yes, but also haptics provide feedback.

    Lots of games use it to tell you things, like when your health is low, when to time something, when you took damage vs blocked successfully, when you’re close to a secret…

    Used right, it’s another sensory input channel in addition to sound and visuals.

    One of the biggest genres that I use a controller for, because I consider KBM to be unplayable for it, is racing games. And there haptics are used to tell you TONS about what is happening in the game.