SweetFX Shader Suite release and discussion thread #4

I was thinking in addition to that. Also the graphical overlay of steam can be disabled but the service is still running.

 

I implemented highlighting of clipped regions yesterday.

The levels shader can now show you what pixels lose details if you push them beyond the white or black level.
This is useful for finding the right values for your game. You should be aiming for settings that cause minimal clipping, so you don't hurt the details.

 

Crosire, I cannot send you PM's since my post count is below 15 and I don't want to spam just in order to unlock that.

@CeeJay.dk: I tested SweetFX 2.0 (that first eFX injector based thingi, foudn the DL somewhere here). With BF3, it randomly enables/disables itself or applies only on the chatbox or the shaders are only active in the ESC menu...

 

Just message me on Steam/Skype or whatever, name should be clear. And don't use eFX, it's a very, very big mess.

 

I have some general suggestions for the next versions. CeeJay and Crosire can you give me some feedback if those things are possible? Thanks.

• Smart Film-Grain: Similar to the grain shader in Boulotaur2024's injector but with additional options such as only apply to shadows, midtones or highlights. I think the grain effect in The Evil Within might give you some idea. Also maybe a new pseudo-random grain algorithm? Since ReShade has access to frame and time counters I think now it should be possible.
• Dynamic Contrast/Curves/Levels: Similar to Photoshop's Auto Levels/Contrast option. For instance, brighten up the screen once it gets too dark etc.
• Deband:I already know this one is on the research list, I was actually wondering about its current status. In some games especially skies have a serious banding issue. (e.g. Fallout 3)

 

You can remove filmgrain from your wishlist. CeeJay has already something working.
It's not perfect, but it is already better than anything i've seen before. And he is still improving it.

I was also talking about dynamic stuff with him yesterday. It's possible in the future. But not that important right now.
Those dynamic shaders need information from a previous frame which is not yet possible with the current injector. However, as Crosire already said, it'll be implemented in the future.

 

Believe it or not,I just read about Sweetfx last night. I know its been around for a while and I've seen the thread,just didn't pay any attention to it until I ran across a vid of it..and Wow! Does this work on x64 yet? Does it work on Borderlands Pre Sequel? It is a straight forward install? I'm sure there are vids I can watch to learn how to set it up.

 

• Smart Film-Grain:
  I have already created a new Film Grain shader that I think is good now and is going to be great once it's released.
  
  Currently the grain looks great, and I have an option to make the grain stronger in the dark areas and weaker in the light areas, to simulate a signal-to-noise ratio like in real life. This works fine but I haven't quite found the right ratio yet - maybe tweaking of its settings is all it needs but I may also have to tweak the algorithm.
  
  The movement of the grain still needs some more work. What I have currently makes the grain move with a semi-random wave-like or smoke-like movement .. which may have potential if I was going to further develop this to make a dust particle shader, but what I'm looking for is a more truly random look.
  I expect to be able to give it that before release, but right now I'm working on other stuff.
  
  
• Dynamic Contrast/Curves/Levels:
  I need two things for this:
  Mipmaps so I can efficiently get the average brightness of the screen without completely killing the framerate. I now have this - Thanks Crosire!
  And a way to get the average brightness from the previous frames so I can make the change gradual and smooth, instead of instant. That could be solved if I could access previous framebuffers or previous renderbuffers. Reshade does not provide this option yet, but it's on the wishlist for future versions.
  
  
• Deband:
  Still as tricky as before, although I have now have Reshade features that would make it perform faster. I have not worked on this.
  We are also looking at being able to force the game to render in 30bit color instead of 24bit color, and then just use the dither shader on it which would completely solve banding issues, without any need for debanding.
  
  This is the ideal solution so I'm hoping we get that working in a future version, so I won't even have to create a debanding shader.

 

What you call clipping is normal even for human eye, as in dark areas details in brightly lit patches will be lost, so it is good to minimise clipping, but completely avoiding it is impossible and the contrast shift would be so slight it will be hardly noticeable.

What i'm actually interested in is - does the ReShade allow the use of technique in shaders? As it is needed for effects like Gaussian blur to have less impact on performance. Such a thing would allow to make a local contrast shader, which, IMHO, will fix all the contrast issues. Currently have this shader for MPC-HC, but it is so heavy performance-wise that it is impossible to use in games.

 

Yes.

Custom techniques and custom passes are both in.
Using passes is faster than techniques, so I use that.

Mipmapping is also in which will also allow for faster Local Contrast Enhancement.

If I was making a Local Contrast Enhancement shader I'd start by taking mipsamples in the vertical in one pass, then horizontal in the other. That should give the very large blur that is needed while still being pretty fast for such a large radius blur.

I was also thinking that I might detect when other blurs had been created before the effect ran and then use those blur textures as input instead, which would be faster.

Would you like to join the closed beta test so you can experiment?

 

Just ported my shader collection to ReShade and I have to admit, it's super awesome. These are the features so far and I plan to add many more. Not wanna be concurrence to CeeJay though, I'd be happy if you could/would use some of the stuff here in SweetFX...

 

Man that would be great, I actually use Sweetfx and your ME compilation on DX9 games and its awesome. Having all those effects for DX11 would be perfect.

 

Where can this be found?

 

Can you bring an example of F3 banding?
When I think to "(color) banding issues" I think to horrible banding in Deus Ex Human Revolution metal surfaces or Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim sky

The later is solvable (see ENB), but the former?

 

Currently F3 or FNV is not installed on my computer. But here some examples from the internets:


Like you said it is most visible on the sky, ENB somehow makes it disappear I don't know how exactly. I think it has something to do with lighting.

 

ENB just forces true HDR so you have a very wide color range which makes banding go away´since the differences between one color and the closest possible second color are so small your eye can't see it.

Although this is only the case on the non-generic ENB versions. There are some versions like Generic 0.076 which work on multiple games but are limited in their possiblities and some who are game-, even patch limited which have an insane amount of features like 0.163 for GTA IV or the ones for Skyrim/F3/FNV.
Old GTA San Andreas had an exclusive version based on generic but recently, Boris released a GTASA exclusive one with Skyrim core, 0.248.
It forces HDR on SA, too but doesn't work on other games like the old ones which you could use on other games, too.

About that Smart Film Grain, I just did something... From color luma 0.0 to 0.2 LumaIntensityDark has full control,
0.2 to 0.4 the intensity is lerp'ed between Dark and Midtone,
0.4 to 0.6 Midtone has full control,
0.6 to 0.8 intensity is lerp'ed between Midtone and Bright and
0.8 to 1.0 Bright has full control.

It's dynamic, too...

Oh and:

 

That would be great, but my knowledge of shaders is very limited. Usually i just take someones code and alter it till it does what i want

 

My internet was down yesterday and I took the opportunity to get a lot of work done on SweetFX 2.0 now that I was distraction free.

Reworked the framework around the effects and put all the effects that needed it into their own pass so they no longer mess with the other stuff.

This means you can now run those together without problems - it also means more overhead due to more passes, so the performance took a hit.

But I should be able to recover much of that lost performance by being smart about what effects might be combined in a pass without problems and also by utilizing some of the new optimizations that became possible because of this, like moving the coordinate calculations to a unique vertex shader for that pass.

This might make the logic that determines when to load and run the various effect somewhat complex .. I will need to think about how I best do this, without getting lost in a spaghetti code mess.

 

You (and everyone else) are totally welcome to contribute effects to the official SweetFX suite - in fact I'd really like that.

I just require that no effects have an incompatible license and that the original shader author is credited - no passing off the works of others as your own.

I'd also really appreciate it if you take some time to polish off your effects so the code is neat, well commented and efficient - because otherwise I have to do that and it's always easier to do for your own code that the code of others.

If it becomes an issue and if I can find the time, I'll probably write a style guide to explain both how Reshade and SweetFX works and how I like to structure the code.

Managing a few effects is alright, but it gets tricky to manage a lot of them in the same huge übershader, without some kind of structure and plan.

 

Of course I can do that. Concerning credits, in my MasterEffect package for GTASA I have a detailed credits file where every author of every third party code is listed. Since I only ported it to ReShade, added SSAO and altered the noise shader, this file is up to date and will kept up to date. And that commenting, no problem. I can send you extracted code so you can add it as you wish, easier than digging it out of thousands of code lines although I tried to keep the structure clear.