Terrain aliasing issues in 1.104

[coconut]

Hi,

 

First off, let me give a big thumbs up to the devs for the new summer and autumn maps. It's a big welcome change from the white of the winter.

 

However, I'm having a problem, and I wondered if I was the only one. The problem: aliasing effects on some of the ground textures.

 

Here is a track file that shows the problem. I'd like it if people replayed it and took snapshots so that I can compare.

 

And here are some of the screenshots. Hopefully the image host won't blur them too much. The effect is more visible, and more disturbing when the camera moves.

 

 

 

 

My settings: Ultra, anti-aliasing 4X, terrain detail 4 (also tried 3, and anti-aliasing off, same issues). My NVidia control panel:

 

 

[FuriousMeow]

Occurs below about 1.2km when the higher detail LOD is applied to the terrain. Going to happen unless they don't use higher detail LOD, or don't have it turn on until much closer to the ground, or until monitor hardware pixels become nano scale so that very small features can be shown seamlessly.

[Urra]

What if the custom terrain file is used?

[FuriousMeow]

What if the custom terrain file is used?

 

Doesn't apply to this. The custom terrain file just had higher resolution, which is the cause of the aliasing here, at the extreme ranges on the terrain.

 

The "custom terrain" file is moot now anyway. The devs finally got the X4 terrain detail to properly do what that file was doing.

[LizLemon]

Hi,

 

First off, let me give a big thumbs up to the devs for the new summer and autumn maps. It's a big welcome change from the white of the winter.

 

However, I'm having a problem, and I wondered if I was the only one. The problem: aliasing effects on some of the ground textures.

 

Here is a track file that shows the problem. I'd like it if people replayed it and took snapshots so that I can compare.

 

And here are some of the screenshots. Hopefully the image host won't blur them too much. The effect is more visible, and more disturbing when the camera moves.

 

 

 

 

My settings: Ultra, anti-aliasing 4X, terrain detail 4 (also tried 3, and anti-aliasing off, same issues). My NVidia control panel:

 

 

Capture.PNG Capture2.PNG Capture3.PNG Capture4.PNG

This was a problem in Rise of Flight too

 

In that game someone came up with a mod that got rid of it almost completely

 

But since we dont have a mods on mode with BoS, then I'm afraid there is no fix

[Feathered_IV]

Smoothing that particular style of field in its bump-map would fix the problem.  Oh, for a mods-on mode..

[1PL-Husar-1Esk]

In ROF it got it fixed by setting sprace grid supersampling

[Trinkof]

Use DSR ×2 + 33% to 40-45% smoothing, if your hardware support it. Nvidia control panel, 3d parameters, global settings.

Then when relaunching BOS select the maximum resolution a viable which should be something like 2700.

 

You wil' loose some fps, but jagged lines will almost disappear.

Edited October 28, 2015 by LAL_Trinkof

[coconut]

I tried DSR. It helps a bit, but it's not perfect. I tried using terrain.cfg and "downgrading" quality. I got good results with this particularly bumpy potato field, but the rest also got more blurry. It's especially visible at places that are close enough to have 3d trees. At a distance it works pretty well. I think I'll keep the vanilla settings and hope the devs smooth out the problematic textures.

 

[FuriousMeow]

You can mess around as much as you want. The culprit is your monitor. It's everyone's monitor.

 

The terrain files are given extra fine detail so that when you are low, they look nice and not washed out. The "mods" in RoF didn't actually fix anything, they just removed the detail.

 

I prefer the aliasing to what will become less detailed textures.

 

The super sampling, that takes the textures and actually adds gradient borders thereby making the actual textures lines slightly thicker. Anti-Aliasing by default does that. It adds extra filling to cornered areas. Super sampling does that far more. Anti-aliasing 2x takes two images, and super imposes them thereby making areas thicker so there's less crawling due to the PPI of the monitor. 4x, more superimposed same images. Super sampling just removes the FSAA attempt to only add extra filling in some areas and throws it almost across the whole screen. Yes, it's gradient, but it still makes the edges fatter.

 

You are getting less aliasing but also a fatter corners with anti-aliasing, and fatter everything with super sampling. Which negates the actual finer details in the texture.

 

http://kb.worldviz.com/articles/831

 

There isn't a real fix, the real fix is nanopixel monitors. Or less detailed textures which isn't a fix, it's a compromise that is terrible.

Edited October 29, 2015 by FuriousMeow

[1PL-Husar-1Esk]

I do not like some bump maps on textures,they look good only from higher alt but not so from short distances. Btw RoF moders have many approaches to texturing ground not just one you mention. In the end i have perfect landscape now - ofc IMHO.

Edited October 29, 2015 by tomcatqw

[coconut]

 

 

You can mess around as much as you want. The culprit is your monitor. It's everyone's monitor.

 

There are two problems: Aliasing at the edges of fields, and noise in some of the fields. The aliasing can be dealt to some extent with a number of anti-aliasing techniques, which are already in the game.

 

The noise problem is due to the filtering method the devs use. If they enabled mipmaping, and/or changed the filtering method, this problem would go away. There would be a cost, though: changing the filtering method to average over all the texels every pixel covers would cost GPU time, and enabling mipmaping would cost 33% more texture memory for ground textures.

[LLv24_Zami]

I watched your track coconut and I have exactly same issues as you. That noise and aliasing problem is very visible. Great track to see those. 

 

Don`t know if those can be fixed or not but I sure hope devs will give it a try. If the fix uses more vram, that`s not a problem for us who has newer cards with more memory. Very disturbing in otherwise beautiful scenery. Maybe you could do a bug report about this.

[LizLemon]

The super sampling, that takes the textures and actually adds gradient borders thereby making the actual textures lines slightly thicker. Anti-Aliasing by default does that. It adds extra filling to cornered areas. Super sampling does that far more. Anti-aliasing 2x takes two images, and super imposes them thereby making areas thicker so there's less crawling due to the PPI of the monitor. 4x, more superimposed same images. Super sampling just removes the FSAA attempt to only add extra filling in some areas and throws it almost across the whole screen. Yes, it's gradient, but it still makes the edges fatter.

 

You are getting less aliasing but also a fatter corners with anti-aliasing, and fatter everything with super sampling. Which negates the actual finer details in the texture.

 

With all due respect, you have no idea what you are talking about.

[LizLemon]

I watched your track coconut and I have exactly same issues as you. That noise and aliasing problem is very visible. Great track to see those.

 

Don`t know if those can be fixed or not but I sure hope devs will give it a try. If the fix uses more vram, that`s not a problem for us who has newer cards with more memory. Very disturbing in otherwise beautiful scenery. Maybe you could do a bug report about this.

The game should be using mip mapping already. Otherwise the shimmering would be much worse and it would happen everywhere. Plus its 2015 and mip mapping is very old hat - I cant think of a game that doesn't do it that has been released in this century. Mip mapping is really an essential thing.

 

More likely is that something goofy is going on with clamping distances. Some people had success in lessoning shimmering in RoF by messing around with the texture clamping(lod bias) setting in nvidia control panel. Amd might offer a similar setting but I'm not sure.

[coconut]

 

 

If the fix uses more vram, that`s not a problem for us who has newer cards with more memory

I could be wrong, but as I understand it all textures must also be located in the application's memory space. For a 32bit application, that limits you to 3GB, and then you have nothing left for your physics and other game logic. Which may be why the game never seems to use more than 2.4GB of GPU memory. Considering that ground textures probably make up for most of that texture memory, a 33% cost for mipmapping might not be affordable.

 

 

 

The game should be using mip mapping already. Otherwise the shimmering would be much worse and it would happen everywhere

I thought so too. But I suspect they are doing their own mipmapping of sorts, using the terrain detail level. Depending on distance, they load the texture of the appropriate size and use that. This would be hard to get working as well as the in-driver method for mipmapping, which I suppose would select the mipmap level on an individual pixel size, depending on the corresponding texel size. Compare that with the game's method, which would do that decision on the level of ground squares that are several kilometers wide.

 

 

 

I watched your track coconut and I have exactly same issues as you

 

Thanks for letting me know!

[LizLemon]

^Right. Its a really strange issue.

 

But I think I found the reason we see shimmering on the ground textures and no where else.

 

Keep in mind that ankor has a lot of map making experience, and this actually makes sense (much more so then out monitors being at fault)

 

"After messing with shaders I started to suspect, though I can be wrong, that ROF renders ground textures in two steps: first it mixes various layer together to produce a new texture in memory, then it applies this custom texture to the actual landscape.

 

This will explain why some of you didn't see the minecrafty look. Setting texture quality to low while keeping other settings on high (as I did) only affects how original textures are drawn onto the intermediate one which still remain high res and retains sharp edges. However, lowering landscape quality affects the size of intermediate texture and thus makes it blurry hiding the jaggies.

 

This led me to a though - what about that shimmering in the distance? Part of it is caused by forests and cannot be solved easily, but even without forests - it doesn't look right. Now, I suspect the answer may be hidden in that intermediate texture. It looks like it doesn't have enough (or even any) mipmap levels and always rendered at full resolution. This isn't a good thing however - at large distance way too many texture elements should be combined into single pixel on the screen and no amount of anisotropic filtering can handle that. This is what produces shimmering because small change of viewing angle causes completely different texture elements to be drawn for the same pixels.

 

Unfortunately mip map generation is something that is controlled by the application and I can't make a mod to test this assumption."

 

Source, http://riseofflight.com/forum/topic/35075-ground-textures-smart-blur-mod/page-2

 

 

Now the question is why do they do it this way and can the developers be persuaded to fix it.

 

Or just give us a mods on mode....

Edited October 29, 2015 by LizLemon

[Feathered_IV]

Switch HDR off in-game.  Also set in-game antialiasing to a minimum of 2x, and use the latest Reshade/SweetFX which happens to work when antialiasing is applied.  The improvement is dramatic.

[LLv24_Zami]

Switch HDR off in-game. Also set in-game antialiasing to a minimum of 2x, and use the

latest Reshade/SweetFX which happens to

work when antialiasing is applied. The improvement is dramatic.

You mean that use the antialiasing from Reshade on top of the ingame x2 setting? Edited October 30, 2015 by Zami

[LizLemon]

You mean that use the antialiasing from Reshade on top of the ingame x2 setting?

Reshade uses post-fx aa solutions like fxaa and smaa iirc, and I think they have more advance methods as well.

 

Post process aa solutions are more like a photoshop filter than normal aa methods. They usually act on the entire screen rather than just the edges, and as such can remove forms of aliasing that multi sampling aa doesn't touch, like specular aliasing and the texture shimmer too.

 

There are some forms of post process aa that will take advantage of the depth buffer or use edge detection algorithms to try and only touch the bits that normal multi sampling aa would hit. These wont do as much for texture aliasing.

 

Super sampling is the best solution though, since you are rendering the image at a large size and then scalling down to the native screen resolution (the inverse will be somewhat true too, btw. Upscaling blur helps)

 

And if you have the option of choosing the downscaling algorithm then opt for something like lanczos.

 

If anyone want to make a vid, try super sampling the game at 4k or higher with and output resolution of 720x1280 with lanczos downscaling. This should be close to pixar level cleanliness.

 

Edit: You could also try a sort of reverse unsharp mask. The problem with shimmering is one of microcontrast.

Edited October 30, 2015 by LizLemon

[LLv24_Zami]

Thanks for the info LizLemon.

 

I just read from RoF forum technical section that space grid supersampling have helped people there with shimmering issues. I will give it a shot when I get home from work.

[TG-55Panthercules]

Thanks for the info LizLemon.

 

I just read from RoF forum technical section that space grid supersampling have helped people there with shimmering issues. I will give it a shot when I get home from work.

 

Yes, we've been using sparse grid supersampling via nVidia Inspector for several years to get rid of the shimmering in RoF, and it seems to be doing a good job on these BoS maps as well (at least based on some quick tests a couple of nights ago).  It did seem to me that there were a few of the field textures that were displaying a different kind of shimmering/moire-like pattern or something weird, at various angles and/or altitudes, but I haven't had a chance to do any careful testing and overall my typical RoF settings seemed to do a pretty good job for BoS (except for the tree rotation/flashing/weirdness at low altitude, which so far has been much worse for me in BoS than in RoF).

[LLv24_Zami]

Panthercules, those trees are very annoying too. Hopefully the devs can do something about that because I don't think there's anything we can do.

 

What is the performance hit with the sparse grid supersampling?

[TG-55Panthercules]

Panthercules, those trees are very annoying too. Hopefully the devs can do something about that because I don't think there's anything we can do.

 

What is the performance hit with the sparse grid supersampling?

 

I only use sparse grid at 2x (as that's sufficient to get rid of the shimmering), and I don't detect any significant performance hit with either RoF or BoS at that level.  I did notice some hit when I started using it with the older video card I was using a couple of generations ago (though it was well worth it to get rid of the shimmering), but not with my current card.  Of course, my current monitor caps out at 60 FPS, so there could be some sort of performance hit above that level that I'm not detecting because I stay maxed out at 60 pretty much the whole time anyway.

Edited October 30, 2015 by TG-55Panthercules

[LLv24_Zami]

Sounds good, thanks!

[LukeFF]

Sounds good, thanks!

 

I've been using the sparse-grid supersampling as well with both BoS and RoF, and it's great. Definitely recommend anyone with an nVidia card to give it a shot. 

[LLv24_Zami]

Just tried sparse grid supersampling and it eliminated flickering ground textures completely. 2x sparse grid supersampling was good but 4x eliminates those noisy textures. On top of that I changed texture filtering lod bias to -1.000 like the guide says. Why I didn`t think this earlier . I strongly recommend to give it a try!

 

I used this guide: http://www.overclock.net/t/1250100/nvidia-sparse-grid-supersampling

 

I have ingame AAx4 and here are the settings in Nvidia Inspector:

 

Thank you all for help!

Edited October 30, 2015 by Zami

[coconut]

Thanks to those who suggested sparse grid multisampling. No idea what it does, but when set at 4x, it does wonders. There's a FPS cost, but strangely it's mostly in the menu. I went from 60 to 30 FPS there. The track however played at 60FPS when off the ground (and 40-50 FPS on the ground), and that's what matters. I'll try it for a while and see if the FPS holds during flight.

I also tried 2x, which gave me back 60 FPS everywhere, but the results were not as good.

[LLv24_Zami]

Thanks to those who suggested sparse grid multisampling. No idea what it does, but when set at 4x, it does wonders. There's a FPS cost, but strangely it's mostly in the menu. I went from 60 to 30 FPS there. The track however played at 60FPS when off the ground (and 40-50 FPS on the ground), and that's what matters. I'll try it for a while and see if the FPS holds during flight.

I also tried 2x, which gave me back 60 FPS everywhere, but the results were not as good.

 

No significant fps loss for me after quickly testing few missions. Menu went 60 to 30 fps though. Track plays steady 60 fps in all situations. So far looking good.

 

And the game looks amazing now!

Edited October 30, 2015 by Zami

[TheSNAFU]

 

 

Just tried sparse grid supersampling and it eliminated flickering ground textures completely. 2x sparse grid supersampling was good but 4x eliminates those noisy textures. On top of that I changed texture filtering lod bias to -1.000 like the guide says. Why I didn`t think this earlier . I strongly recommend to give it a try!

 

This is a miracle drug! The clarity and the lack of almost any shimmer anywhere is amazing. A bit of a performance hit but not significant. The game runs fine and looks great. Tested on winter map.  

 

Thank you!

[LLv24_Zami]

This is a miracle drug! The clarity and the lack of almost any shimmer anywhere is amazing. A bit of a performance hit but not significant. The game runs fine and looks great. Tested on winter map.  

 

Thank you!

Yes, it`s amazing. I couldn`t believe my eyes when I first time tested it.

[smink1701]

Does this miracle drug work with SweetFx?

[LLv24_Zami]

Does this miracle drug work with SweetFx?

I haven`t tried it with SweetFX. Probably will work just fine if you are not using anti-aliasing from sweetFX. It`s not even necessary to use FMAA or FXAA with these settings.

[smink1701]

Do you have to use AAX4 from the game? If so you can't use SweetFx.

[LLv24_Zami]

Do you have to use AAX4 from the game? If so you can't use SweetFx.

Yes. If you want to eliminate all shimmering it has to be 4xAA in game and 4x sparse grid supersampling. But you can still decrease shimmering with 2xAA ingame and 4x/2x sparse grid supersampling.

Edited October 31, 2015 by Zami

[Willy__]

 

 

Do you have to use AAX4 from the game? If so you can't use SweetFx.

 

You can if you use newer versions of SweetFx, the first ones you had to disable AA ingame for it to work, but the newer versions works with AA.   

[smink1701]

You can if you use newer versions of SweetFx, the first ones you had to disable AA ingame for it to work, but the newer versions works with AA.   

Can you point me in the direction of the newer version and does it install over the older one?

 

Thanks!

[Willy__]

Check this topic smink:

 

http://forum.il2sturmovik.com/topic/17096-reshade-sweetfx/

 

I dont think you should install over the older one. Always do a clean install. In all cases, save your config files and presets so you dont have to configure everything again!

Edited November 1, 2015 by istruba

[smink1701]

Check this topic smink:

 

http://forum.il2sturmovik.com/topic/17096-reshade-sweetfx/

 

I dont think you should install over the older one. Always do a clean install. In all cases, save your config files and presets so you dont have to configure everything again!

Thanks Brother!

[=LG/F=Kathon]

I don't have Il-2 BOS on the profiles list. When I click "Create new profile" and enter Name then nothing happens. Add application to current profile also do nothing. NV Inspector 1.9.7.3. Anyone can help?