MSI AB / RTSS development news thread

Awesome, I think this will help put a stop to discussions that cite numbers generated by Afterburner as VRAM _requirements_ for game title XYZ.

People really have been doing that for years, because they had no view of data isolated to just the running software. No measure of this stuff is completely accurate, but the new per-process counters will help reduce Internet arguments I am sure. The driver / HW GPU scheduling takes care of many of the scenarios where the sum total of ALL graphics memory allocated by everything on the system is too much to fit into VRAM, so realistically any question of "can my system run it?" needs to focus on some kind of per-process working set.

With this update, per-process numbers are finally available (in said process), and that's highly valuable information for analyzing the running game.

Thank you.


Could I bring your attention to another issue that could affect FPS numbers reported by RTSS in advanced graphics engines and/or Chromium-based games?



As funny as this is, the real problem comes from the way framerate is currently counted by RTSS.

SKIF is running at 120 FPS, just with multiple swapchains to composite the different UI windows and RTSS does not know the difference between
1 swapchain and 6 running concurrently.

If RTSS’s framerate limiter were turned on like this, it would slow down the software to 1/6th the correct rate because there are a sequence of 6 buffer swaps (happening in parallel on independent swapchains) that must happen every time I refresh all of these windows.

I am in the process of updating Special K’s in-game UI to use multi-plane overlays to draw and RTSS is going to start reporting wrong framerates (it will over-report by 2x) to users in all games unless changed to count framerate per-swapchain. Once this starts happening, we will have a flood of confused users accusing either Special K or RTSS of misrepresenting performance :-\

---

If you need to test software with multiple swapchains, SKIF.exe ( https://sk-data.special-k.info/SpecialK.7z ) is the software shown in the screenshot.

SKIF has a dynamic number of DXGI swapchains (at minimum 2) depending on how much of the UI is visible. RTSS can be considered multi-plane overlay / composition-aware when it stops reporting the same aggregate framerate on all of these UI sub-windows.

After testing any potential fixes, SKIF.exe also needs to be added to the default RTSS blacklist because this is distracting

 

Also, your overlay is impossible to see in HDR

I'd like to offer some assistance in making your overlay HDR compatible since I have fixed Valve and Ubisoft's overlays already

There are three cases you must handle:

1. DXGI:

Hook IDXGISwapChain3::SetColorSpace1 (...) and watch for sRGB, scRGB (FP16 HDR) and HDR10 (R10G10B10A2 HDR).

When the colorspace is set to scRGB (swapchain fmt=R16G16B16A16_FLOAT), color is a linear scale w/ 1.0 = 80 nits, you can easily boost your overlay's white point by multiplying the color (e.g. if user wants overlay running at 240 nits, then multiply color values by 3.0 and you are literally done because the colorspace is the same as Rec 709).
When the colorspace is set to HDR10 (swapchain fmt=RGB10A2UNORM), color is in Rec 2020 and gamma is Perceptual Quantization (SMPTE 2084).

The HDR10 case is harder to handle, you will have to transform your colors (overlay was written for Rec 709) from Rec 709 to Rec 2020 to prevent everything from going hyper saturated, then you must apply PQ gamma to scale your SDR luminance to HDR.

2. NVAPI:

Hook NvAPI_Disp_HdrColorControl and watch for cmd == NV_HDR_CMD_SET, hdrMode == NV_HDR_MODE_UHDA_PASSTHROUGH means HDR10 and is the only type of HDR I have ever seen games that use NvAPI for HDR utilize

3. AGS:

AMD has a proprietary API for HDR too, but I could not tell you anything about it.


To save you a LOT of time, here's a patched version of Valve's Steam overlay shader I wrote to handle both types of HDR:

https://gitlab.special-k.info/Kalda...iberated/resource/shaders/steam_d3d11_ps.hlsl

You just need to get a luminance scale into that shader

* I wrote the user's desired "paper white" luminance value to uv2.x

- Negative values of uv2.x = HDR10, and they represent your user's preference for peak luminance. This value is fed into PQ gamma (ApplyREC2084Curve) to rescale your SDR color values to fit the new range.
- Positive values of uv2.x = scRGB. I pre-scaled this (e.g. since 1.0 = 80 nits bright, take user's luminance preference and divide by 80 before passing values to shaders).


If you intend to do alpha transparency in HDR, things get complicated fast. My suggestion is do not bother, I did not for Valve.

My own overlay handles alpha transparency correctly, but it's very complicated and requires implementing a custom three-input blend equation in pixel shaders to keep the source image from overpowering your overlay when the pixels underneath your overlay are significantly brighter.

https://gitlab.special-k.info/Kalda...iberated/resource/shaders/imgui_d3d11_ps.hlsl
^^^ That's what it takes to do alpha transparency in HDR.

Just make the overlay opaque in HDR unless you have an actual HDR display and a lot of time to learn this stuff

 

i don't know if i understood what you said about the Overlay with HDR on but it looks good to me

 

Hello @Unwinder
Just got a 3080 and I'm having trouble with fan speeds in MSI AB. Looks like setting a fan curve doesn't work properly and same with setting a fixed fan speed. For example, if I set 60% then the fan only goes up to 46% and displays 60%. So with the fan curve, even if I set something like 60% the fans won't go up there as described.

Am I doing something wrong?

 

Thank you!

 

Same exact problem as I have and my card is a Palit GamingPro, not MSI...

I asked Unwinder if the fan control behaviour is different for Ampere but instead he just replied with "it's intended" which was not helpful, he could have replied with the comment he made at #2570 in this thread and I would have said "Ok that explains that it is different and why 0db mode doesn't work with the fan curve, but there still seems to be some funkiness going on as setting the fan speed doesn't seem to work properly.", but instead, he proceeds to block me after pointing out that there's definitely something dodgy going on.

Sigh...

All Unwinder had to do was actually explain things to me rather than treat me like a dumbass and I wouldn't have flamed out of frustration, I recently reformatted and installed AB fresh, the fan issue is still there and now I know it's something to do with the partner BIOS and not AB apparently, that's all I needed to know.....

 

Imgur is currently down so I cannot upload a picture of the fan curve but in Beta 2 the dotted line is at 30%. Interesting though, setting one point in the curve to 0% does nothing, 30% seems to be the minimum which must be intended.

 

you can attach pictures to posts now

 

Didn't know that

 

Now you are just twisting my words, I don't care about being banned from this forum - I only came here to let you know there was a problem and there still is a problem regardless of the fan stop function so instead of being a massive raging arrogant know-it-all how about you consider investigating it and stop making excuses as to why it's everyone else's fault that it doesn't work properly because it clearly couldn't be you and your superior intellect, there's clearly, blatantly and obviously an issue with how AB is messing with the fans and the guy posting about it happening on his MSI card as well as it happening on my Palit card just proves there is something wrong with how AB is doing it, both companies are separate entities and I'm pretty sure they don't share the same BIOS that happens to have the same issue...

Just an FYI the fan control works PERFECTLY on EVGA Precision X1 which is what I have now switched to, further leading to the point that the fan control on AB is not working right, be arrogant all you want and go ahead and ban/ignore me, it's not going to change the fact that you are in the wrong no matter how much of a genius you think you are, there's an issue and that's the entire reason I made an account to begin with, frack me for trying to point out software bugs in the future when someone like you is at the helm.