SweetFX Shader Suite release and discussion thread #4

All good suggestions. I passed them on to crosire.

 

Screenshot Suggestion

Yeah, I always wished for the same thing that Psychor has suggested.

Even more after the 1.3 because of its issues with other overlays, like FRAPS, Banidcam, even Steam, and some other apps to capture a screenshot.

I mean, they did fine, but, sometimes, they would not capture the image on the "right" time and the screenshot would be captured normally, the effects would not be shown on the screenshot, I want to say.

And, with fraps, if it were enable when the game started, could happen two things, one is it to crash the game upon the start or to nullify SweetFX entirely.

Then, I decided to try the screen capture function from SFX itself, but it had a kind of a lag whenever I took a screenshot...

To avoid all teh trouble, I decided to play my games in a window. I've used some other programs to make them windowed+bordeless fullscreen (in a windowed mode, but occupying all the screen and with hidden borders, you know) and I made Bandicam monitor the Desktop. That way I was able to capture the game image with all of its effects on.

Psychor's sugestion is more than welcome in my opinion. I've never suggested something as like this because I always felt shy to write here. I dunno why I decided to write this now. Forgive me...

 

Thanks and keep up the amazing work!

 

Yeah I am also interested.

Can we overlay smaa one on each otehr.

Like have 5 smaa ultra running at the same time one above other?

Or if I enable fxaa and smaa to those work at the same time?

ALSO - what is a difference between fxaa and smaa? Isnt smaa causing more delay and more blur while moving, while fxaa is faster (delay) but causes textures to blur ?

 

Good question. However, SMAA doesn't look better if it's stacked. Once the first SMAA pass clears all the aliasing it can find, the next SMAA pass can't find any aliasing because all the aliasing that SMAA could detect during the first pass had already been eliminated. I have tested out SMAA stacking by first putting the sweetfx dlls into the game folder with just SMAA enabled, and then stacked another pass of SMAA using RadeonPro.

 

I asked that very same question once, turns out that isn't how it works. You can't just layer up passes to make it 2x or 4x.

 

can smaa and fxaa both be active? or are they mutually exclusive?

 

Sorry I'm confused, how exactly do we get 1.5.1 to work with ARR? I know for 1.4 people had to do some messing around to get it working properly, but I'm not sure what they did.

 

download
http://www.radeonpro.info/download/
Yes it works for nvidia
then download the sweetfx
go to settings in radeopro change the dir where sweetfx is the inport the settings it works in win8.1.

 

Post-process anti-aliasing techniques like FXAA, SMAA and MLAA don't stack.
You can apply one on another but as raj explains this doesn't improve the image because the AA that is applied second can't find the right edges to work on. In fact applying one over the other will often cause artifacts that decrease the image quality.

Applying SMAA or FXAA on top of MSAA, CSAA or SSAA can also cause artifacts but it can also catch edges that MSAA, CSAA or SSAA didn't because a post-process AA technique works differently and can also find aliased edges in textures, where the other techniques find aliased edges on geometry.
In some cases combining these two types of AA works better than just the one, but not in all. I prefer not to combine them.

FXAA and SMAA however combine perfectly with the downsampling trick. This causes no artifacts and it also helps conceal the blurring that FXAA does, which makes FXAA even better when used with downsampling.

As for the difference between them :
SMAA tries to do as little harm to the original picture as it can, so when it's in doubt if a pixel should be processed or not it prefers not to.
When it does find a line however it makes very smooth lines.
It's slower when smoothing lines than FXAA, but it's also intelligent and only works on the part of the picture that it believes contain lines unlike FXAA which works on the entire image.
This more often than not makes SMAA the faster technique overall - especially now in 1.5.1 with the performance optimizations I made.

FXAA makes less smooth lines and is often slightly slower than SMAA. It also prefers to blur pixels when it's in doubt if they are part of a aliased line or not. This hurts the quality of the finer details in the image, but it also makes the image more temporally stable in movement .. that is .. when you move, you will see less shimmering.

The reduction of shimmering that FXAA can do is nice and if you combine FXAA with downsampling to lessen the blur and also use sharpening .. to further lessen the blur then FXAA can be quite good, however I still prefer SMAA with most games. It tends to leave the image sharper with more details intact.

TL;DR :
SMAA = Smoother lines, sharper and faster.
FXAA = Blurrier, less smooth lines, slower but with less shimmering when moving.

 

Just tried 1.51 in Tomb Raider.
Doesn't work. Real Dark with effects missing. Tried every config out there.
Tried Sleeping Dogs and Mass Effect 3. They were fine.
Guess 1.51 isn't backwards compatable with some games.

 

I tested with Sleeping Dogs (Steam version) under DX10 before release - I had no problems.
What version did you use?

Did SweetFX 1.4 work? (the official one by me - not Boulotaurs)

Also try forcing DX9 for Tomb Raider
The DX9 version of InjectSMAA (used by SweetFX) have a little better compatibility and Tomb Raider runs much faster under DX9

 

RadeonPro is anoying. it doesn't autoload sweetfx settings file when i start it. i think it's a bug.
I only use it for Pro evolution soccer 2014.
When i start RadeonPro I select de pes2014 profile and sweetFX effects seem to be activated in the sweetFX tab, but if i start the game i get the same dx11 errors i would get without using RadeonPro in windows8.1.
So i have to import the settings file...every damn time.

 

Sorry my bad. Incomplete sentence. Sleeping dogs and Mass Effect 3 were fine.
It's Tomb Raider with issues.
Every other SweetFX (1.4, 1.4, Boulotaurs) work no problem. I've swapped and changed to see if it was my end. I put it down to 1.51

 

What 32-bit redistributables do you need to download? The game runs without sweetfx and with Boulotaur version. Can you explain what to download?

 

Tomb Raider + FF14 have same engine (14 is a slightly newer version)

 

If you read his post after that one he already stated he tried radeonpro, which he actually used it correctly and it refuses to work properly.

You don't have to use sweetFX and/or win8.1 period; You wanting to use 8.1 as your OS while also wanting to be able to play dx11 games means you have to use radeonpro and import the settings every time which in turn makes it an annoying process. A working 8.1 injector for SweetFX is in the works as you know and it's not really up to CeeJay when that will be ready.

 

maybe youre using 64 bit os? if so then its the fact that some games are 32 and some are 64 causing it to not run since again sweetfx 1.5 isnt x64 compatible yet because they are waiting for someones additions.

 

Very doubtful that him having a 64bit OS is the problem, besides most games don't have 64bit exe's and if they do it's a separate exe while also not being default. They aren't waiting for anyone's additions for 64bit support AFAIK, would be great if boulotaur resurfaced with an updated version of his injector but that seems a bit far fetched.

Should also add that being on a 64bit OS does not remotely mean SweetFX wont work, it's all based on the game exe and DX versions, not so much the OS.

 

redistributable 2008 x32 and redistrubutable 2010 & 2010 SP1 i forget if these attatch

offtopic;

I know this may not be simpel but im sure its possible.
is there a way to color everything black and white only make the colors red to a certain set of range show? like sin city and the other movie that came out?
this wouldve been what i wouldve added as soon as possible to this project because of its rarity