Downsampling and Pillars of Eternity

[Hogfather]

As a unity game, NVIDIA DSR doesn't work But there are ways!

 

Downsampling is a relatively advanced thing to do, and you'll need a grunty system, running at 80 or more FPS at your normal resolution. I use GeDoSaTo which works with Unity games - GeDo is quite safe (has been around for a few years now) but if you research how to do it you do so at your own peril!

 

Anyone else downsampling from 4k? The results are just spectacular, imo:

 

 

Straight PNG animation at http://gifmaker.cc/PlayFrameAnimation.php?folder=2015032820nOlslJez6qksp4lKHEvVGo

 

I think its because the models are relatively detailed but have to be also very small that it works so well.

 

I needed these options to get gedo to work well (ripped from a helpful post at neogaf!)

 

clearRenderResolutions

renderResolution 3840x2160@60

forceAlwaysDownsamplingRes true

modifyGetCursorPos true

Pastebin of my config: http://pastebin.com/9d2B0Am9

 

Something I've noticed though, is that as you increase the resolution, the render is significantly zoomed out - and it gets worse the higher you go. 4x my monitor's native resolution (5120x2880) the game is not really fun to play as you can't zoom into combat very well

 

Otherwise though its well worth playing around with if you are technically adept Anyone have any tips?

[Oxford_Guy]

I get an average of about 130fps at 1920x1080 playing Pillars of Eternity on my notebook's Nvidia 970M GPU, so would it be worth trying on my system? Not sure I'll be able to figure out how to set it up, though I'm moderately technically adapt (not a programmer, though)

[Hogfather]

If you're getting 130 frames at 1080 then its certainly viable. How well it actually works out will depend on lots of factors.

 

GeDoSaTo is a technical thing to set up (you need to edit a configuration file) and its not especially friendly, but worst case is probably just that you can't get it to work

 

The goal though is to be able to select 3840x2160 as your resolution in game basically.

[Oxford_Guy]

If you're getting 130 frames at 1080 then its certainly viable. How well it actually works out will depend on lots of factors.

 

GeDoSaTo is a technical thing to set up (you need to edit a configuration file) and its not especially friendly, but worst case is probably just that you can't get it to work

 

The goal though is to be able to select 3840x2160 as your resolution in game basically.

 

If you're getting 130 frames at 1080 then its certainly viable. How well it actually works out will depend on lots of factors.

 

GeDoSaTo is a technical thing to set up (you need to edit a configuration file) and its not especially friendly, but worst case is probably just that you can't get it to work

 

The goal though is to be able to select 3840x2160 as your resolution in game basically.

 

Well I can certainly edit a config file if I can figure out which parts I need to change, I'll take a look

[Oxford_Guy]

Okay, I tried this, using all your settings, except downsampling to 1920x1080. Pillars of Eternity will run and the downsampling status is displayed top left, but clicking on any of the buttons (New Game, Continue etc.) in Pillars of Eternity doesn't work, so I can't actually play the game with this enabled. Also the text on the buttons is actually less clear than running at native resolution currently (might change if I can change the resolution in the game options, but I can't select the Options button to do that!).]

 

Any ideas?

[Hogfather]

The mouse thing for me did hapen, but it was soted out by using the modifyGetCursorPos setting. Make sure you've saved into the main settings file I guess; did you try the config from the pastebin?

 

Text in the game is unfotunately not crisp at any resolution over 1080p. I didn't notice it to much because it was just how it was when I ran the game normally for me (scaling to 2560 wasn't too much different to native here). That said it wasn't ridiculously bad so I wonder if you have the target res right!

 

Make sure you changed the target resolution to your screen's native 1080 resolution in the config if you pasted my config in directly as its set up for a 2560 screen. Not sure otherwise sorry =\

Edited March 29, 2015 by Hogfather

[Oxford_Guy]

The mouse thing for me did hapen, but it was soted out by using the modifyGetCursorPos setting. Make sure you've saved into the main settings file I guess; did you try the config from the pastebin?

 

Text in the game is unfotunately not crisp at any resolution over 1080p. I didn't notice it to much because it was just how it was when I ran the game normally for me (scaling to 2560 wasn't too much different to native here). That said it wasn't ridiculously bad so I wonder if you have the target res right!

 

Make sure you changed the target resolution to your screen's native 1080 resolution in the config if you pasted my config in directly as its set up for a 2560 screen. Not sure otherwise sorry =\

 

Ah yes, I'd missed the modifyGetCursorPos setting, that works now! I can now run the game at 3840x2160 - looks good (although text is still less sharp - I guess because not at native resolution), but the character graphics are certainly better. Without overclocking my GPU (which I have quite a lot of scope for), I'm getting about 50 fps. I might crank up the overclocking and see how this goes.

 

Also, I think I may have to change the zoom levels in the console, so that it zooms out not as far and zooms in more.

[Hogfather]

Yeh its a bit of a trade off with text clarity. 2560 native isn't sharp so I don't personally miss out  Glad to hear you got it going.

 

Also starting and stopping Steam can get a bit wobbly with GeDo running - if it stops working just Deactivate GeDo and let Steam open fully before starting PoE. There's some ambiguity about VAC status. Although nobody has been censured for it to date I wouldn't use it for anything competitive just to be safe.

 

Let me know if you get anywhere with console commands, I would like to be able to zoom in another notch or two.

Edited March 29, 2015 by Hogfather

[Oxford_Guy]

Yeh its a bit of a trade off with text clarity. 2560 native isn't sharp so I don't personally miss out  Glad to hear you got it going.

 

Also starting and stopping Steam can get a bit wobbly with GeDo running - if it stops working just Deactivate GeDo and let Steam open fully before starting PoE. There's some ambiguity about VAC status. Although nobody has been censured for it to date I wouldn't use it for anything competitive just to be safe.

 

Let me know if you get anywhere with console commands, I would like to be able to zoom in another notch or two.

 

Will do, I'd already changed the zoom settings before using GeDo to both zoom in and zoom out more, so just need to tweak this again I think. With overclocking I should be able ti get the frame rate up to around 60fps I think.

 

BTW should this also improve the quality of the background textures e.g. being able to zoom in further before they degrade?

[Hogfather]

Unsure about the background textures, I think they have a limit that is less than max zoom in unfortunately.

 

Would love to be able to download a very-high-res pack for these for people who have the hardware and disk space so that they never have to scale up.

[Hogfather]

Hey I found the zoom command.

 

SetZoomRange X Y

 

Where X is the closest and Y is the furthest. 0.25 1.5 working well for me.

[Oxford_Guy]

Hey I found the zoom command.

 

SetZoomRange X Y

 

Where X is the closest and Y is the furthest. 0.25 1.5 working well for me.

 

Hey I found the zoom command.

 

SetZoomRange X Y

 

Where X is the closest and Y is the furthest. 0.25 1.5 working well for me.

 

Hey I found the zoom command.

 

SetZoomRange X Y

 

Where X is the closest and Y is the furthest. 0.25 1.5 working well for me.

 

0.25 is a bit too close for me, 0.35 / 1.65 works better for me

[Smoker]

I've been using SetZoomRange 0.5 2

[Mungri]

I tried enabling 4k res ingame but it does nothing.

 

It would be awesome if we could get a higher resolution pack for download.

Edited March 31, 2015 by Mungri

[Oxford_Guy]

I've been using

SetZoomRange 0.5 2

I found this range way too much when down-sampling from 4k to 1080p

[Oxford_Guy]

I tried enabling 4k res ingame but it does nothing.

 

It would be awesome if we could get a higher resolution pack for download.

Are you down sampling using GeDoSaTo? I get better unit model renders

[Kaldaien]

I tried enabling 4k res ingame but it does nothing.

 

It would be awesome if we could get a higher resolution pack for download.

 

I assume you mean it does nothing given DSR? I have an actual 4K display and it most certainly does something It's not going to do anything particularly helpful in this game though, all it'll do is make everything really small. You could accomplish the same increase in resolution (and thereby texture sample rate) with 4x supersampling @ your display's native resolution and none of the silly DSR blurring.

 

Multisample anti-aliasing won't do anything in this game because that doesn't change the number of times pixel shaders run (MSAA only helps with aliasing at geometry edges, not texture aliasing). Supersampling will actually take 4 samples per-pixel, and that's all you need to improve the quality of the map over maximum anisotropic filtering. SSAA can be enabled straight up in the driver without requiring any special resolution and without totally blurring your UI.

Edited March 31, 2015 by Kaldaien

[Oxford_Guy]

 

I tried enabling 4k res ingame but it does nothing.

 

It would be awesome if we could get a higher resolution pack for download.

 

I assume you mean it does nothing given DSR? I have an actual 4K display and it most certainly does something It's not going to do anything particularly helpful in this game though, all it'll do is make everything really small. You could accomplish the same increase in resolution (and thereby texture sample rate) with 4x supersampling @ your display's native resolution and none of the silly DSR blurring.

 

Multisample anti-aliasing won't do anything in this game because that doesn't change the number of times pixel shaders run (MSAA only helps with aliasing at geometry edges, not texture aliasing). Supersampling will actually take 4 samples per-pixel, and that's all you need to improve the quality of the map over maximum anisotropic filtering. SSAA can be enabled straight up in the driver without requiring any special resolution and without totally blurring your UI.

 

 

Do you need a 4K screen for super sampling, or could I do this on my 1080p screen? I have an Nvidia 970M GPU with 3Gb vRAM, if it makes any difference. Is this something you can set in the Nvidia control panel? If so, which option is this?

 

Using down-sampling for 4K it does seem to help with the textures for the character models (though not with the backgrounds, I think), though does make the text look less sharp. The UI stays the same size, though and things only look small in the play area if you don't change the zoom settings to something more sensible.

[Kaldaien]

 

 

I tried enabling 4k res ingame but it does nothing.

 

It would be awesome if we could get a higher resolution pack for download.

 

I assume you mean it does nothing given DSR? I have an actual 4K display and it most certainly does something It's not going to do anything particularly helpful in this game though, all it'll do is make everything really small. You could accomplish the same increase in resolution (and thereby texture sample rate) with 4x supersampling @ your display's native resolution and none of the silly DSR blurring.

 

Multisample anti-aliasing won't do anything in this game because that doesn't change the number of times pixel shaders run (MSAA only helps with aliasing at geometry edges, not texture aliasing). Supersampling will actually take 4 samples per-pixel, and that's all you need to improve the quality of the map over maximum anisotropic filtering. SSAA can be enabled straight up in the driver without requiring any special resolution and without totally blurring your UI.

 

 

Do you need a 4K screen for super sampling, or could I do this on my 1080p screen? I have an Nvidia 970M GPU with 3Gb vRAM, if it makes any difference. Is this something you can set in the Nvidia control panel? If so, which option is this?

 

Using down-sampling for 4K it does seem to help with the textures for the character models (though not with the backgrounds, I think), though does make the text look less sharp. The UI stays the same size, though and things only look small in the play area if you don't change the zoom settings to something more sensible.

 

 

Yeah, the UI is going to stay the same size in this game no matter what resolution you choose. It scales that perfectly. However, when you increase resolution, the game shrinks everything else. So a virtual 4K resolution more than likely is not going to be beneficial, unless the entire reason you wanted to do this was to show more of the map at once?

 

If you're just trying to improve image quality, you can set anti-aliasing to override, 4x in the NVIDIA drivers and then set transparent anti-aliasing to 4x supersampling. That should give you 4K quality, but without shrinking the map to ant size. Also force anisotropic filtering to 16x (if you haven't already done so). The map is just one big texture, so you want the highest quality texture filtering possible to make it look good.

 

Supersampling works at any resolution. It's almost the same concept as DSR, but you're not telling the game that your display's a different resolution than it actually is. It's also extremely limited (has to be multiples of 2).

[Oxford_Guy]

 

 

 

I tried enabling 4k res ingame but it does nothing.

 

It would be awesome if we could get a higher resolution pack for download.

 

I assume you mean it does nothing given DSR? I have an actual 4K display and it most certainly does something It's not going to do anything particularly helpful in this game though, all it'll do is make everything really small. You could accomplish the same increase in resolution (and thereby texture sample rate) with 4x supersampling @ your display's native resolution and none of the silly DSR blurring.

 

Multisample anti-aliasing won't do anything in this game because that doesn't change the number of times pixel shaders run (MSAA only helps with aliasing at geometry edges, not texture aliasing). Supersampling will actually take 4 samples per-pixel, and that's all you need to improve the quality of the map over maximum anisotropic filtering. SSAA can be enabled straight up in the driver without requiring any special resolution and without totally blurring your UI.

 

 

Do you need a 4K screen for super sampling, or could I do this on my 1080p screen? I have an Nvidia 970M GPU with 3Gb vRAM, if it makes any difference. Is this something you can set in the Nvidia control panel? If so, which option is this?

 

Using down-sampling for 4K it does seem to help with the textures for the character models (though not with the backgrounds, I think), though does make the text look less sharp. The UI stays the same size, though and things only look small in the play area if you don't change the zoom settings to something more sensible.

 

 

Yeah, the UI is going to stay the same size in this game no matter what resolution you choose. It scales that perfectly. However, when you increase resolution, the game shrinks everything else. So a virtual 4K resolution more than likely is not going to be beneficial, unless the entire reason you wanted to do this was to show more of the map at once?

 

No, you can accomplish that just by changing the zoom options in the console, in fact you can have the same scaled play window zoom settings when down-sampling from 4K as you see at normal 1080p by just changing these i.e. no tiny figures/massively zoomed out map. But the less-sharp text is still a bit annoying.

 

If you're just trying to improve image quality, you can set anti-aliasing to override, 4x in the NVIDIA drivers and then set transparent anti-aliasing to 4x supersampling. That should give you 4K quality, but without shrinking the map to ant size.

I'll try this, though I think I read somewhere that this doesn't work with the Unity engine the game uses? As said above, though, you can easily avoid the "ant size" map by changing the zoom options when downsampling

 

Also force anisotropic filtering to 16x (if you haven't already done so). The map is just one big texture, so you want the highest quality texture filtering possible to make it look good.

 

Supersampling works at any resolution. It's almost the same concept as DSR, but you're not telling the game that your display's a different resolution than it actually is. It's also extremely limited (has to be multiples of 2).

Okay, will give this a go and see if it helps!

Edited March 31, 2015 by Oxford_Guy

[Asmodean-]

Imo downsampling, doesn't work well at all for this particular game. You're basically increasing the gpu load exponentially for what ends up looking like low quality fxaa is enabled.

 

The way the game is being rendered, it doesn't work well currently with hardware antialiasing/downsampling (a: msaa is not sampling correctly on pixels(3d models) & it's producing artifacts, b: it has virtually no effect on 2d(i.e. most of the game) other than interpolation which blurs it more. It would be a lot better with a good in-engine post process antialiasing technique.

 

Anistropic filtering seems to not be working either, btw. It's the same with altering the render lod bias. It's only affecting a tiny fraction of what it should be. example: hardware filtering/lod bias adjustment only affects the MC portrait for me. Everything else is totally ignored.

 

This + the zooming issues with rounding offset errors producing blurry map/menu/text scaling. There is funky stuff happening in the pipeline atm with this game.

 

I think people are just desperate, because of the blatant lack of graphical options provided by the game lol. Turning on stuff that's not even working correctly, and saying "yeah , looks guuuud" ;p

 

edit: zombie typos & I'm speaking from Windows prespective

Edited March 31, 2015 by Asmodean-

[zephiris]

As a unity game, NVIDIA DSR doesn't work But there are ways!

 

Downsampling is a relatively advanced thing to do, and you'll need a grunty system, running at 80 or more FPS at your normal resolution. I use GeDoSaTo which works with Unity games - GeDo is quite safe (has been around for a few years now) but if you research how to do it you do so at your own peril!

 

Anyone else downsampling from 4k? The results are just spectacular, imo:

 

 

Straight PNG animation at http://gifmaker.cc/PlayFrameAnimation.php?folder=2015032820nOlslJez6qksp4lKHEvVGo

 

I think its because the models are relatively detailed but have to be also very small that it works so well.

 

I needed these options to get gedo to work well (ripped from a helpful post at neogaf!)

 

clearRenderResolutions

renderResolution 3840x2160@60

forceAlwaysDownsamplingRes true

modifyGetCursorPos true

Pastebin of my config: http://pastebin.com/9d2B0Am9

 

Something I've noticed though, is that as you increase the resolution, the render is significantly zoomed out - and it gets worse the higher you go. 4x my monitor's native resolution (5120x2880) the game is not really fun to play as you can't zoom into combat very well

 

Otherwise though its well worth playing around with if you are technically adept Anyone have any tips?

 

I will give it a try tonight. I really forgot to play with these settings with regards to DRS. See the difference is noticeable or not. The screenshot provided got me curious atleast. Though a first look the differences look very minimal.

Edited March 31, 2015 by zephiris

[Kaldaien]

Imo downsampling, doesn't work well at all for this particular game. You're basically increasing the gpu load exponentially for what ends up looking like low quality fxaa is enabled.

 

The way the game is being rendered, it doesn't work well currently with hardware antialiasing/downsampling (a: msaa is not sampling correctly on pixels(3d models) & it's producing artifacts, b: it has virtually no effect on 2d(i.e. most of the game) other than interpolation which blurs it more. It would be a lot better with a good in-engine post process antialiasing technique.

 

Anistropic filtering seems to not be working either, btw. It's the same with altering the render lod bias. It's only affecting a tiny fraction of what it should be. example: hardware filtering/lod bias adjustment only affects the MC portrait for me. Everything else is totally egnored.

 

This + the zooming issues with rounding offset errors producing blurry map/menu/text scaling. There is funky stuff happening in the pipeline atm with this game.

 

Well, it could be that the textures are tiled completely isotropically (or in other words, parallel to the screen). In which case, anisotropic filtering will do nothing. Anisotropic filtering will help if there's a gradient to the texture mapping, which occurs with projection. But it's entirely possible that the isometric projection seen in this game is built-in to the textures themselves and they're applied directly to screen.

 

But super sampling definitely works. I notice a pretty big improvement on my 55EG9600. I use 2x super sampling at 3840x2160.

Edited March 31, 2015 by Kaldaien

[Asmodean-]

 

Well, it could be that the textures are tiled completely isotropically (or in other words, parallel to the screen). In which case, anisotropic filtering will do nothing. Anisotropic filtering will help if there's a gradient to the texture mapping, which occurs with projection. But it's entirely possible that the isometric projection seen in this game is built-in to the textures themselves and they're applied directly to screen.

 

But super sampling definitely works. I notice a pretty big improvement on my 55EG9600. I use 2x super sampling at 3840x2160.

 

 

If that were the case, then I'd agree perfectly with what you're saying. We'll also agree that the definition of 'big improvement' is subjective. (given that downsampling is typically the highest fidelity method of antialiasing with brute force).

 

Regarding the actual issues. I'm not trying to force random things, and 'looking' to see if anything is happening. I'm dumping frames straight from the renderer, and I'm clearly seeing that things are not adding up ;p there are quite a lot of issues with the game currently (it's a great game, for what it is. I'm not saying it isn't), but it is riddled with both rendering, and systematical problems atm, unfortunatley. I just hope they can fix them in good time, etc.

[Kaldaien]

 

 

Well, it could be that the textures are tiled completely isotropically (or in other words, parallel to the screen). In which case, anisotropic filtering will do nothing. Anisotropic filtering will help if there's a gradient to the texture mapping, which occurs with projection. But it's entirely possible that the isometric projection seen in this game is built-in to the textures themselves and they're applied directly to screen.

 

But super sampling definitely works. I notice a pretty big improvement on my 55EG9600. I use 2x super sampling at 3840x2160.

 

 

If that were the case, then I'd agree perfectly with what you're saying. We'll also agree that the definition of 'big improvement' is subjective. (given that downsampling is typically the highest fidelity method of antialiasing with brute force).

 

Regarding the actual issues. I'm not trying to force random things, and 'looking' to see if anything is happening. I'm dumping frames straight from the renderer, and I'm clearly seeing that things are not adding up ;p there are quite a lot of issues with the game currently (it's a great game, for what it is. I'm not saying it isn't), but it is riddled with both rendering, and systematical problems atm, unfortunatley. I just hope they can fix them in good time, etc.

 

 

I should point out that I'm referring to aliasing on alpha transparent layers. There's some nasty stair-stepping that is extremely distracting on an OLED, it's sort of a high-frequency shimmer. SSAA clears that up nicely, where as MSAA doesn't do anything at all because it's texture aliasing rather than geometry aliasing.

 

<img src="https://content-na.drive.amazonaws.com/cdproxy/templink/xyLJezrThUcEVANZKeVfdqil6syzk34AmE0xDkBKJyQE0Xnc3?viewBox=1920">