Painkiller

[light palm]

perhaps the bottleneck in atrium specifically could be a combination of far too many small meshes
plus cpu side vertex animation on the light anchors

individual meshes for particles and decals etc

[tall iron]

can you verify that with some kind of profiling tool?

[light palm]

yeah

instances and buffers

[tall iron]

something like this but more detailed, like showing the actual rendering steps and all that

[light palm]

yeah i can attach one

at the end of the day it likely boils down to similar solutions to solve
decals and particles being rendered as separate geo
drawprimitiveup calls
frequent createvertexbuffer calls
etc

not to mention each object being split into many small meshes in painkiller maps

ill hook nsight up if i can

[tall iron]

for example, why is it that the last room in Atrium Complex seems to have less bottlenecks than the rest of the level

[noble beacon]

AABB culls something out

That's also why you usually have the worst performance in the middle of the level (Docks)

Cause you draw everything around you

[tall iron]

then why is it that the first room in Atrium Complex so slow? the problems must lie in the early parts of the level

[noble beacon]

yes, it means that it is drawing problematic geometry/particles etc

[noble beacon]

[light palm]

oh geez he got it 😄

[noble beacon]

[tall iron]

almost as corny as the original 'the way its meant to be played' nvidia logo

[odd thicket]

https://tenor.com/view/willy-wonka-gene-wilder-imagination-gif-3480021

[tall iron]

my understanding is that there are certain elements within specific levels which have more of an effect on the performance, than the new bounding box algorithm developed for this mod

[tall iron]

if only moddb can support torrents or something....

[noble beacon]

We're trying We're trying!!

Can't say anything certain just yet, but there is a chance

[odd thicket]

Bribe them with the $40,000 you guys won

https://tenor.com/view/evil-smile-evil-evil-laugh-gif-10865501938883882879

[light palm]

based on a suggestion from @vale gust, I've managed to convert the original object space normals (very bespoke format used, strangely different for each map..)

Another case of InstaMAT coming in clutch!

[north kiln]

https://tenor.com/view/smash-markiplier-gif-1438034459517818172

[pallid saffron]

I can’t jump high enough in lab on this one

[noble beacon]

Try going to Alt+X - Developer Menu - uncheck Ray tracing XD

I remember some jumps being tricky even in the Vanilla game

I know someone who calls that phenomenon "skill issue"

[pallid saffron]

Ok I got it I was trying to get too high

There is a few precise jumps in this game you don’t see anymore in modern gaming lol

[noble beacon]

My head still hurts from bashing against the ceiling trying to reach a secret in Palace

[tall iron]

any progress on these levels? is there something in common with them which causes the bottlenecking? btw Military Base seems to run just fine for me in the last version of the mod ... let me try it with the newest version

[tall iron]

the jump pad through the hole in the roof?

[tall iron]

oh wow, theres definitely a bottleneck situation in Military Base , alright

first of all the culling is doing something funny to the fog or lighting

and the bottleneck is definitely that side of the level

i dunno but the earlier versions of the mod where the entire level is rendered all the time... it never had performance problems like this

[light palm]

ahh thanks for finding that. Fixed it 🙂

[light palm]

i'll check this

Guess the level? 😄

(should be pretty easy one)

[noble beacon]

It's not like we see a lot of UFOs in Painkiller

must be catacombs then

[light palm]

its much better performance with the current version. Old version never went above 60fps for me, new version hits 100fps

just changing the culling algo basically. there may be some other element affecting performance

if you have the old version still available and can test and compare that would be good

[noble beacon]

Meanwhile in the other chat you drop a screenshot where
FPS 8.4 Frame Time: 117.8

[light palm]

accumulation mode 😛

[noble beacon]

nah nah surely it's AABB performance improvements kickin in

[light palm]

draw distance is set quite high on military base, so there are a lot of things rendering at once

same problem with colosseum, draw dist was set high not to cull when you are out in the arena. probably possible to implement a trigger box which changes the farclip distance when entering those areas and reduces it when inside

optimally we would have a custom portals system as well as AABB

recursive portals where only the second iteration culls

[noble beacon]

Huh
It sounds like something that should and can be implemented

I know this guy, btw

@vale gust

[light palm]

still waiting on that bible

[vale gust]

There is WORLD.SetFarClipDist, but it interferes with the user settings

[noble beacon]

How do we change this value as we go through the level

[vale gust]

an alternative is to enable back anti portals and modify the maps to use them, when in a certain area, we activate antiportals and nothing inside them renders

there is this command:

WORLD.EnableAntiPortal

or use the switch variant which is explained in the documentation

[noble beacon]

the documentation

🤮

not reading any docs that aren't called "Painkiller Bible"

[light palm]

which docs, the ones in the docs folder?

[vale gust]

My plugin documentation, official does not have it

[tall iron]

I definitely remember NOT having the framerate tank to around 40fps in Military Base at any point in the old version

[north kiln]

I love this materials quality

[noble beacon]

Yeahh, this one is really cool

[tall iron]

huh , in all the denoising and accumulation, must have missed that

maybe have a mode where the enemies spawn optionally , so it becomes more like a classic nvidia demo

and set the movement speed really low

so it gives you time to ogle at the little details

[noble beacon]

You can configure time speed pressing PgUp/PgDown

[tall iron]

really though, i dont think its a good idea to spend time on little details which can be missed

i've seen many projects fall into that same hole

[noble beacon]

McGillacutty, it is blinking time

Nothing to read here

[noble beacon]

Looking time

Beautiful work

[tall iron]

i notice that pillar on the staircase, it still looks kind of '3d graphics' with its faceted base and perfectly straight lines

[pallid saffron]

Colosseum was literally causing framgen to break badly so bad it was running haha

[light palm]

tested with 0.1.7 on military and framerate never went above 55 fps on lowest possible settings. At least on my system, performance is better across the board in newer versions. If you can test with the old version to see how the performance differs that would be helpful!

also lower performance across the board in every other place i tested

Mark has been doing some amazing work on the runtime, i believe I will need to summon him to glean insight into telemetry soon, once I have gathered solid data regarding bottlenecks using nSight.

[tall iron]

sorry but i dont really have enough space on my hard disk to store more than one copy of the mod at the same time....

[light palm]

Technically you get most of the difference just by replacing one file, Engine.dll

the 500mb 0.1.7 download from moddb has it

[light palm]

i cant test framegen on my card, so thanks for testing this!
is it any better if you swap in the latest dxvk-remix actions build?

that will somewhat break fog and skies, but it works very well nonetheless

[light palm]

you need to make sure occlusion is disabled in the options as well though

[tall iron]

i can run framegen but all it does is add mouselag... for accurately seeing the performance i run with it off, so i can see the true frame rate

[light palm]

also on actions build?

[tall iron]

what do you mean by actions build

[light palm]

from here:
https://github.com/NVIDIAGameWorks/dxvk-remix/actions

[noble beacon]

If you feel like testing the 0.1.7 Engine.dll, put this in Bin

[light palm]

i think you might need to be logged into a github account to download, not totally sure

[elder cypress]

How much of the game is playable?

[noble beacon]

100%, excluding multiplayer maps

[elder cypress]

wild

only steam version im assuming?

[noble beacon]

GoG works as well

[elder cypress]

Perfect

appreciate ya

https://tenor.com/view/letgo-lets-goooo-pickles-lets-go-excited-gif-13808708

[odd thicket]

I just realized GoG allows mods

https://tenor.com/view/tf2-gif-7931397507241457912

[faint wharf]

do y'all use a custom remix fork by any chance?

[noble beacon]

Yeah, we use a custom fork with alpha emissive visibility fixes

[faint wharf]

is it open to contributions?

[noble beacon]

https://github.com/BinqAdams/dxvk-remix/tree/refs/heads/fix/alpha-emissives-and-fog-threshold

Here it is

[faint wharf]

remix's default tone mapping really isn't great so if y'all are open to I'd like to redo it lol

[noble beacon]

Well, we want the changes to be merged into main, here's the PR https://github.com/NVIDIAGameWorks/dxvk-remix/pull/107

What would you like to change about tone mapping? (not that I know anything about it haha)

[faint wharf]

Use per lumiance reinhard instead of remix's aces / local auto exposure

aces shifts the hues of bright colors like crazy

you know how people were complaining about hl2 rtx being "too bright"?
that was because of remix's tonemapping

[noble beacon]

Didn't they fix it in the patch?

[faint wharf]

they lowered the brightness of the game in a patch but that really doesn't fix the issue
swapping out the tonemapping is the ideal solution imho

[noble beacon]

I feel like I perceive more depth/detail on the left picture

I know nothing about colours so I don't have much to say otherwise

[faint wharf]

I should probably just throw something together and show you of an in-game comparison

trust

[faint wharf]

this mod is chunky...
holy

[light palm]

i think they updated the aces tonemapper to give a better result

rtx.useLegacyACES = False in rtx.conf will do it

[noble beacon]

I don't think this line is even necessary anymore

I'm pretty sure it is no longer needed

[faint wharf]

y'all didn't intentionally change the color of the lights, right?
a different tonemapper will make the color more faithful to the original

[noble beacon]

We did not inherit any lights from OG Painkiller really

#reverse-engineering message

[faint wharf]

interesting

[noble beacon]

By the way this Digital Foundry vid is really outdated

There's been a lot going on ever since

[faint wharf]

I assumed so
still downloading the mod lol

[faint wharf]

turns out remix already has reinhard
it's just unused
should make things easier

[faint wharf]

crashing everytime I walk into a body
I am using a custom build but I don't think tonemapping would cause that

weird

[next basin]

doesn't Remix have a global exposure setting for a given scene?

[faint wharf]

bandaid solution

[next basin]

wait what does Color Management does Remix use, I mean Unreal uses ACES with a Filmic tonemapper on top to make a less aggressive tone curve.

[faint wharf]

ignore the saturation for rn
see how much brighter the image on the left is?
just two different tonemapping setups

[faint wharf]

aces actually has a tendency to make things look more aggressive

[next basin]

yeah that's what i mean they have a different tone curve from regular ACES but it's still built on top of it. The one on the right looks more aggressive.

[faint wharf]

should specify remix is using some other weird stuff along side ACES
Godot ACES vs Custom tonemapper

[potent cedar]

I have implemented blender's AgX tonemapper for remix with some additional controls for this very reason
https://github.com/NVIDIAGameWorks/dxvk-remix/pull/101

hope they merge it at some point

[faint wharf]

AgX does weird things to colors imo

[potent cedar]

like?

[faint wharf]

shifts the hues

[potent cedar]

for overexposed colors?

[faint wharf]

like this

[potent cedar]

that might just be a particular implementation problem, mine does not have that effect in remix

to clarify, my work is based off the agxc fork which looks like a direct upgrade over traditional ACES imo
https://github.com/MrLixm/AgXc

its much better at preserving highlights

[faint wharf]

this is a mockup how do y'all feel about this?

before / after

[tall iron]

ok yes, Military Base with this Engine.dll runs at a maximum of 60fps for me

[light palm]

looks good!

[light palm]

aight thanks for testing!

[faint wharf]

so you'd be okay with me opening a pr for it in the next few days?

[tall iron]

i feel like most people arent going to really notice the slightly darker tonemapping... its even hard to tell if the difference is due to the different position of the moon in the Cemetery level

[tall iron]

im really curious as to what is causing the CPU and GPU to basically wait around and do nothing... something is stalling and its causing low CPU and GPU usage, which causes the low framerate

[noble beacon]

The thing is, this "most people won't notice" reasoning is flawed to say the least. If something makes for a better visual experience, we should go for it regardless of how substantial it is

[tall iron]

and thanks to the new culling algorithm in the latest version of the mod, at least we can narrow the problem down to certain parts of the level

[noble beacon]

Especially when someone's willing to do the work

[tall iron]

if theyre willing to do it, then that's their problem

[faint wharf]

most people might not notice the difference instantly but they will "feel" it

trust

[noble beacon]

We should praise the effort, not criticise the fact that they are willing to spend their time on this

[tall iron]

that's assuming that they have monitors which comply with the sRGB colour space

[tall iron]

im not telling them to stop, im just saying it as it is

[noble beacon]

It is not necessary

[tall iron]

okay now that sounds ominous

[faint wharf]

-# also swaping out the tonemapper should make implementing hdr easier

[noble beacon]

No, it's just that it's not "how it is", tone mapping is important. And then personally I would get frustrated if someone told me I waste my time instead of praising or ignoring

[light palm]

my research so far is currently pointing at vulkan pipeline barriers from the translation layer, but I have learned that I need to be very sure before jumping to conclusions

[light palm]

on the dxvk-remix github?

[faint wharf]

yeah for your fork

[light palm]

ahh best to make your own fork i believe, keep it modular in that way makes it easier

i should have even split up the prs i have done into individual pieces rather than multiple changes in one PR

[tall iron]

looking forward to what you find out

[faint wharf]

hopefully I can get it merged into main then
idk how much nvidia wants to change up the tonemapping

[light palm]

im sure that if it doesnt break anything, then more options should be good, i would encourage you to do a PR for sure

[tall iron]

can someone like @gaunt forge or something give any insight? or should i say, nsight .... they of all people should know how to make it work

[light palm]

I would be super grateful for someone who is experienced with these things to give some tips or pointers to help accelerate my learning of what I am looking at here

[light palm]

this was a capture from non-bottlenecked state (ie. 99-100% gpu usage iirc)

this was from the bottlenecked state

[tall iron]

hmm, it looks like the pattern from the 1st and 3rd frames are quite similar, but no the second frame... i'd hazard a guess that theres something with an asynchronous nature happening somewhere in there?

https://www.reddit.com/r/vulkan/comments/pnweh0/vkcmdcopybuffer_performance_worse_on_nvidia_than/ is this helpful?

[light palm]

vk wait semaphores stick out

wait for fences

[light palm]

i believe it is related to two issues;
Particles being a large culprit, where PainEngine creates many individual billboards.
Level geometry in Painkiller maps appears to be split into many small meshes with few triangles.

[tall iron]

fascinating

[light palm]

it is likely difficult to cache particle billboards which are not static

[tall iron]

but at least with the culling feature from the newest Engine.dll, we can narrow the slowdown to specific parts of the level

[light palm]

i have replaced all of the particles on atrium with rtx particles

there is a performance improvement, however we are still heavily bottlenecked, which points now towards the fragmented level geometry. I am going to merge the geometry and observe the results.

[tall iron]

at least in the case of Atrium Complex and Military Base, the slowdown seems to be related to the earlier parts of the level

or from what i can tell anyway

[light palm]

at this point, i need to choose which "difficult" thing to do.
Merging level geometry:
Conceptually simple
Huge amount of manual work

Implementing portal / antiportal culling:
Conceptually difficult
Minimal / zero manual work

im leaning towards portal antiportal culling in addition to AABB

but this is very challenging, as in order to avoid reconfiguring all of the original levels, I will need to modify the recursive portal walk to ignore the first iteration, which is a challenge in assembly

more fun though

[tall iron]

for example, it would be interesting to have the profiles of the situations in this video...getting slower as i get closer to the center of the level, causing more of the level to render

[tall iron]

i dont think its wise to start doing something before we truly understand the nature of the bottleneck

[light palm]

i rolled a 4 for wisdom unfortunately

(sorry, was playing DnD last night :P)

[tall iron]

one thing that stood out to me from your nsight screenshots was the noticable increase in vkCmdCopyBuffer

from 207 to 901

[light palm]

yep, about 700% increase

[tall iron]

maybe thats what all that waiting is for

[light palm]

vkQueueSubmit seems to be a big culprit on the bottlenecked frame(s), around 100ms cpu time

30-ish ms in gpu-bound capture

[tall iron]

is it a culprit or is it a victim?

is it slowing down stuff, or is it being slowed down by something else?

[noble beacon]

You play DnD ?!
And the other day I was happy for you not playing Paradox GSGs

[tall iron]

i do a bit of parallel computing myself, and queues are like the canaries in the coalmines

[gaunt forge]

If you need help with DXVK stuff you’re better off asking Mark!

[tall iron]

queues are almost certainly very basic functions , and they are entirely dependent on other processes finishing on time

[light palm]

err i was reading the csv incorrectly. Please ignore

[tall iron]

okay so vkCmdCopyBuffer is still the most obvious thing

i'd like to trust the call names to be descriptive... so, what buffer is it copying?

[light palm]

i feel its the vkWaitForFences, due to geometry fragmentation causing many many BLAS updates

which afaik is the cpu waiting for the gpu actually

im new at this though so learning as I go

[tall iron]

"If the condition is satisfied when vkWaitForFences is called, then vkWaitForFences returns immediately. If the condition is not satisfied at the time vkWaitForFences is called, then vkWaitForFences will block and wait until the condition is satisfied or the timeout has expired, whichever is sooner."

what is "the condition" ?

[light palm]

hmm. seems that when you call ckQueueSubmit, you can pass a fence, ie the condition.. the gpu signals when it completes all the commands from the submission

what are those commands in this case

lets see

gpu building acceleration structures i think

slow with all of the fragmented geometry

[tall iron]

in my rudimentary understanding of how GPUs work... copying buffers does match the symptom of a long wait time with low GPU usage

[noble beacon]

You could fragment all the geometry on the level even further to see if it's going to worsen the situation

Should be fairly straightforward I imagine

[tall iron]

does that involve high GPU usage?

[tall iron]

assuming that the culling distance slider in the game settings does control the bounding box size.... then i think tomorrow i will lower it and fly around the maps and try to map out the slowest regions of the problematic maps

[light palm]

i wonder if remix could support tagging geometry as dynamic so that everything else can be cached in the blas, unless that is already done

[tall iron]

but also... when i was in combat in Military Base , the performance suffers when a lot of those WW1 zombie soldiers are present ... i think the GPU usage drops even more when there are many of them around, but its hard to tell

[noble beacon]

On the latest engine I don't think it does
You go to the CLevel and change o.FarClipDist in there

[tall iron]

okay thats my plan for tomorrow

[tall iron]

is building the acceleration structure a low GPU intensity task?

[light palm]

it may be that the gpu util counter isn't giving the most accurate reports, as the cpu waiting on the gpu in this scenario may count as cpu time or something. but i am not sure.

[tall iron]

all i know is that the raw GPU power usage is low, when the frame rates are low

[light palm]

ahh interesting

[tall iron]

it matches with buffer copying when i am running my GPU compute projects ... low GPU usage, long wait times

when I use Blender to render with pathtracing and its doing the acceleration structure step, its usually a GPU intensive thing... not sure how it translates to RTX though

[noble beacon]

What do you think? I feel like it should be possible to use some tool to just hack all the crap apart further
And if it shows a regression in a similar way, you have the culprit

[tall iron]

this is high level diagnosis, hopefully it can be combined with some low level clues from nsight to find the true cause

[noble beacon]

If the same values in nsight spike after this, it would show

[light palm]

gpu pipeline stalls may be causing low utilisation even though the cpu is waiting on the gpu

[north kiln]

Whooo it was hide very well!

[tall iron]

okay so I just tried Atrium Complex with 25 farclip distance, as far as i can tell the performance loading is pretty even across the level... as in there is no 'trouble spot' where the GPU stalls particularly much

this means that the bottleneck is in how the level geometry is fundamentally being drawn

i wonder if there is a way to 'summon' or otherwise spawn the enemies manually... i'd like to populate a level with unusually high numbers of enemies and see if the GPU is stalling on them too... or is the problem limited to level geometry...

[light palm]

i suspect its many small draw calls related to particles and level geometry. you can open the paineditor and modify the monster spawns that way

[tall iron]

there is no 'summon' command like there is in Quake, Unreal, etc etc?

Also I remember that there is a concept of a 'Static Mesh' , back in the 2000's ... whereby a very high poly mesh is rendered almost exclusively on the GPU with little involvement of the CPU

what was special about them was that you could have many copies of them rendered at the same time, at little performance cost

but i think the 7x increase in buffer copies needs to be investigated, what is causing it

is it a Painengine thing, or a Remix thing?

[light palm]

gpu instancing perhaps

[light palm]

you could make one in the lua scripts

[tall iron]

sweet

[noble beacon]

For a quick test, just open Editor in Bin/Editor, load the level, toggle this to see spawnpoints, Hold Shift and click on a spawnpoint to select it, change its' properties

Save, load the game

[light palm]

its not feasible to combine the meshes in the base game, as the engine is splitting the meshes based on the material assignments / uvs, so it would not do anything

even if the mesh itself is in one piece

which leads to many draw calls

[tall iron]

good investigative work

[tall iron]

what program is this??

[light palm]

PIX for windows x86

part of the old directX sdks

engine does the same thing in FF mode and normal mode

[tall iron]

ff mode?

[light palm]

fixed function

basically compatibility mode for old graphics cards, doesnt run shaders and stuff

[tall iron]

ah yes what makes it possible to run in Remix

[light palm]

actually also runs now without fixed function, but it is much slower

[tall iron]

really? so Remix can support newer games too?

[noble beacon]

They just improved the existing vertex shader handling algorithm

Nothing more advanced has been added

https://youtu.be/6fjvAghZ-xM
https://youtu.be/xmurJv9Hs0c

Compare weapon position precision

Much better now

[tall iron]

weapon position precision?

and what is that white blanket

[noble beacon]

volfog brush that renders that way when using shaders

it does not render in fixed fucntion

[tall iron]

and what do you mean by weapon position precision, i dont see any difference

[noble beacon]

How unstable it was

Previously remix failed to reverse engineer the shader to achieve stable weapon position

[tall iron]

ohh yeah i see it now

it looks all glitchy and warped

hard to spot it when it plays in a small window in discord

[noble beacon]

Fun fact, Remix works in the editor

[tall iron]

its mind boggling, the maths can get it almost right like this but not quite... i would have thought that it would not be recognizable at all

[tall iron]

now do a capture from the editor and edit it in the Remix editor ... editorception

[light palm]

i had it working at one point, and i cannot get it working anymore. how did you get it working?

i cant remember how i did it and i did not write it down

[noble beacon]

I just took the PainEditor.exe and put it in Bin

[light palm]

oh

nice

[noble beacon]

But the gizmos don't work so you can't move objects around for some reason

it's working if you rename d3d9.dll (disable remix)

[light palm]

i got it working with paineditor in the bin/editor folder but i remember it was a muck around

anyway, all i need to do in the editor is go into an open level and spawn every monster and item so that it is easier to remaster them

and take a capture

did that a while back but i would like a new capture

thanks for the tip!

it seems there is some issue with the fixed function mode combined with many small mesh elements (specifically on the hanging lanterns in atrium for example, which are 12 draw calls each):
When fog is enabled, each lantern is triggering over 3000 texture transform operations per frame for fog calculations

disabling fog improves the framerate from 9fps to 22 fps, when running without remix

still extremely slow

[tall iron]

have you communicated this to the original developers of the game?

[tall iron]

and if Remix can work without fixed function, does it avoid this problem?

[noble beacon]

It can work, at 20-30FPS

[tall iron]

well at least when its not fixed function anymore, we get the proper demon morph visual effect back

[noble beacon]

No 🙂

[tall iron]

shame

[noble beacon]

It seems Remix does not understand "screen space" shaders

[noble beacon]

I get hit at 0:47 in the second vid and it stops pathtracing

When you use demon morph, it's all just flashing shades of grey

[noble beacon]

@light palm That's absolutely wild

[vale gust]

this sounds like a shitpost

[noble beacon]

Broken normals is a known Remix issue that affects many games, Mafia included

The fact that normals look fine in Mafia is something unseen before

[vale gust]

"I asked GPT-5 to make a fix for broken normals in mafia"

[noble beacon]

Hi, I'm making a mod based on RTX Remix for Mafia: The City of Lost heaven, and I got a problem with missing antialiasing groups, the same problem was in Fallout New Vegas, and it was solved there, there is this fix on github, I want to know how it works, and I want to adapt it to mafia, please help https://github.com/xoxor4d/NewVegasRTXHelper (I use d3d8to9 to run)

I bet "please help" was the cornerstone of the success

[vale gust]

then why don't you guys "please help" GPT-5 into making Blender plugins

[noble beacon]

it's more fun to please help XDavidXtreme into making plugins

[vale gust]

I've been replaced by GPT-5

[noble beacon]

I was about to try out that d3d9.dll, so I installed a vanilla game just using the dxvk/rtx.confs and the Engine.dll, and the normals appear...normal?

That's with the stock unmodded d3d9.dll

So I tried the oldest runtime that was available for download (822 as of now, 2+ months old) and the normals also appear to be fine there...

Did we miss something?

By the way, that guys' DLL works fine, but as normals seem to be working as is, I couldn't notice any difference

Stock/modded d3d9.dll

Also here's a modded d3d9.dll

You must rename the original one to "d3d9.remix.dll"

[noble beacon]

DAMN

I downloaded Painkiller RTX v0.1.3 that was without the mesh smoothing workaround implemented, and this thing works

Crazy

And putting in the new Runtime does not change anything, so I think previously I was confused by the fallback lighting

[noble beacon]

https://youtu.be/-YMV1T4rDe8?si=fZ9WlV7O_o9e_zdn

[obsidian crow]

How did you deal with this problem before?

[noble beacon]

https://github.com/NVIDIAGameWorks/rtx-remix/issues/753

There are workarounds mentioned in the GitHub issue

Space heavy, cumbersome

This is mind boggling mate

[obsidian crow]

yeah i did the same but i have unstable mesh on characters so it didnt work for me characters were still polygonal no matter what i did

[fringe tangle]

I've never actually used the nsight graphics debugger, I generally use the 'GPU Trace Profiler' option in the Activity panel (double click on your project in the project explorer view).

From a higher level - are you GPU bottlenecked or CPU bottlenecked? If it's based on the number of draw calls coming from the engine, or the number of replacement instances, then it's probably CPU bottlenecking.

[light palm]

it looks CPU bottlenecked - I will check out the GPU trace and send a screeny 🙂

[fringe tangle]

nsight GPU trace won't help much with a CPU bottleneck - you'd be better off getting a TRACY capture.
https://github.com/NVIDIAGameWorks/dxvk-remix/blob/14f94acbfe14e6e69a94584c19e8e86185876eb7/README.md#profiling-remix

[light palm]

aight will do!

[fringe tangle]

but honestly, if you just show the dxvk.hud and check out the number of surfaces, you'll probably have a good idea of the problem - more than a few thousand surfaces (which is the number of discrete meshes being drawn, including replacements) will bog down the current draw call pipeline

[light palm]

ahh alright - there are, to put it lightly, just a few 😄

[fringe tangle]

yeah, 11k is too many. How many is it if you disable replacements?

[noble beacon]

Outscore you

[fringe tangle]

actually, 11k presents but 2.6k instances? how'd that happen

[light palm]

replacements disabled:

[noble beacon]

Is it normal for Presents to just steadily grow overtime when afk?

[light palm]

presents just keeps climbing, i thought it was a frame counter

[fringe tangle]

derp, I was thinking of it as present count per frame.

[light palm]

phew lol

[fringe tangle]

2660 instances is pretty reasonable IIRC

[light palm]

or not - it would be nice if there was a big problem sticking out like a sore thumb

[noble beacon]

I like the common realisation

[light palm]

great minds think alike!

😄 j/k ofc

[fringe tangle]

this is one frame. The red chunk is the GPU rendering the previous frame, the purple is the CPU processing the frame. the first half or so is processing individual draw calls, and the second half it processing the scene to get it ready for the GPU.

Try taking a tracy of a region that isn't bottlenecked, and look to figure out what areas are much smaller

[light palm]

on it boss

i have it all ready, 30 secs

[fringe tangle]

If you zoom in on the individual draw call region, it should get taller and give you a better idea where it's spending time.

[light palm]

alright just a sec

[light palm]

this was here

[fringe tangle]

what happened to the GPU frames?

oh, and it'll be easier to parse the results if you disable DLFG

[light palm]

frame gen you mean? that should be off, running 3080

[light palm]

huh good question

here is a previous frame, looks like i was looking at the last captured frame

[light palm]

or final gather

a lot of information on the screen, it will take me a bit to wrap my head around it

build blas is taking about twice as long

around 60k draw calls on the main thread in the bottlenecked scenario

vs about 12k in the non bottlenecked

[fringe tangle]

well, it's building the blas for 600 instances vs 2600 instances, so double the time isn't unreasonable.

Is there another area with a similar instance count that goes faster? Or is your perf just scaling with instance count

[light palm]

it does seem to simply scale with instance count for the most part

[fringe tangle]

hmmm.... are your mesh hashes stable? 25 ms for 2600 instances is longer than I'd expect, so it's possible something about your draw calls are taking longer to process. It's been a bit since I've dug into perf tho

[light palm]

they are mostly stable

~~only ~~skinned meshes are not

basically just the meshes with bones or physics objects are unstable

like rocks that you can knock around

[fringe tangle]

ah, so physics objects are getting unstable hashes? how many of them are there? (less than 10? more than 100?)

[light palm]

generally not that many - there are very few in this scene, it seems mostly to scale with static level geometry parts

the game splits level geo into small meshes based on texture assignment

ie. one wall can have many parts if it is using a few different textures

[fringe tangle]

In the tracy profile, each of those small executeAll chunks in the purple area are individual draw calls. I notice that the ones closer to the end take a lot more time than the earlier ones

you might zoom in on that area and see what the stack looks like (compared to the faster draw calls)

[light palm]

the only thing in this scene without a stable hash is this animated armor which is animated with bones

[fringe tangle]

probably not bottlenecked on vertex processing then

[light palm]

Is it OK if I upload these tracy captures to my google drive for you to look at? I know how frustrating it can be to direct a novice around a new user interface 😄

[fringe tangle]

I want to teach you to look for yourself, cause I don't have time to dig into it myself (I'm about 2.5 hours from going on vacation)

[light palm]

heyy nice!

https://tenor.com/view/relaxing-beach-beach-life-nature-ocean-gif-3328182

[fringe tangle]

I misspoke earlier - the submitDrawCallState is one draw call. Not sure why it's batching them under varying size executeAll, but the thing you want to compare (between fast frame and slow frame) is the time for that submitDrawCallState.

[light palm]

alright, this is great help! tracy looks really good for this. Thanks for pointing me towards it!

[fringe tangle]

or if there are a few draw calls that take a lot longer than others, you may want to dig in and figure out which draw calls are slow

[light palm]

cheers Mark, i'll dig in a bit more after I get some cool particles flying around 🙂

thanks for the stability fixes as well in dxvk, they have helped a lot

[fringe tangle]

Stepping back a bit, you've got a couple reasonable options for improving this - reduce the instance count (probably by stricter culling) or get rid of specific expensive categories of draw calls (if there are any)

[fringe tangle]

fixing my own bugs, so sorry for causing the instability in the first place

[light palm]

yep. there's a few approaches i want to investigate here, most promising is reimplementing some of the portal based culling which i had removed

would be interesting to investigate these draw calls more closely as well to see if there are some rendering operations which are no longer required when running with remix

its the bugs we made along the way

[fringe tangle]

Your focus should probably be on dropping the number of draw calls Remix has to deal with - whether by culling, ignoring, or getting the game to not send them in the first place.

[light palm]

i would love to gut the levels so that there only remains a few anchor meshes, and simply use remix replacements. the challenge is collision in that case

[fringe tangle]

That being said, I do know how to dramatically improve the perf of the draw call processing for static draw calls, but it's taking a ton of refactoring to move Remix towards that. The changes that caused all that instability were part of that 😅

[fringe tangle]

the most expensive part applies to replacement instances as well, unfortunately.

[light palm]

oof

[fringe tangle]

the only way to bypass it is with PointInstancer right now (what's used for grass and similar many-copies-of-one-mesh)

[light palm]

less small meshes, better culling, see if there are calls which i can scrap from the engine

[fringe tangle]

but if you can merge a bunch of separate meshes into one big mesh, you'll get better perf.

[light palm]

single triangle instance, build entire level from that 😄

[fringe tangle]

you could always just ignore all the level textures and let the game still draw them for collision

[light palm]

huh... interesting

i will definitely try

i have a script which makes a usda to ignore every mesh in the captures folder, i'll do the same with the textures

then I can merge a bunch of level geometry and use those replacements

i really want the performance not to be bottlenecked, it would be a shame for people to conclude that pathtracing is slow due to an actually somewhat unrelated bottleneck.
It actually performs really pretty damn well on even a 3080, easily 120+ fps without FG at 1440p and auto DLSS, when not bottlenecked

[fringe tangle]

you might want to have 1 anchor mesh per culling region (portal based?), and then just put all the stuff for that culling region into a single replacement, with one mesh per material. You could even bundle materials together by partitioning the UV space.

Might be too much work to be worth it, but that's the sort of thing that AAA games did a lot of when facing hardware constraints

[light palm]

we need it to run at 165fps on David's RTX 2060

[fringe tangle]

well.. you know how gamers always complain that modern games aren't well optimized?

optimizing the assets is part of that

it's a lot of work, and most companies prefer to have more more more, not better better better

[light palm]

luckily we have some good tools for automating a lot of this work, which while less glamorous, gives good results

[fringe tangle]

hmm, I do have to point out - merging all the meshes will help with that CPU bottleneck, but it's actually bad for the raytracing performance

cause the bounding volumes will be less accurate

[light palm]

ahh so its a balance

[fringe tangle]

yep.

[light palm]

i guess keep things in bounding box friendly shapes`?

[fringe tangle]

and it's a balance that will (hopefully) shift, as it's theoretically much easier to optimize our CPU pipeline that getting similar improvements in the raytracing collision perf

[fringe tangle]

think about the percentage of rays which hit the bounding box, but miss the actual mesh. try to keep that percentage low

[light palm]

ahh alright

would merging a cube-shaped room into one mesh be a good idea?

ie. when the camera is inside it

(along with all of the static props in it)

[fringe tangle]

well, maybe. it means that every ray inside the room has to collide with the room. If lots of rays hit the walls, then that's fine. But if there's enough stuff inside the room that you usually don't see the walls, then it's wasteful

[light palm]

ill look up bvh to make some informed decisions about this

you should def. get your holiday socks on

is it bvh?

[fringe tangle]

yeah... I think there are also hardware optimizations for meshes that are bad for BVH now, depending on the GPU generation you're using. so I'm not even sure how accurate my advice is this year

[light palm]

awesome advice Mark, really appreciate it

not often you get direct help from senior engineers

[fringe tangle]

well, I can give advice, but hard data is better. And you have the tools to actually test perf of various ways of combining it now 🙂

Tracy has good ways to get statistics across entire runs (including ways to limit the frames, so you can get rid of startup frames)

[light palm]

I have the user manual up, good docs

Look @noble beacon
Tracy
Profiler
The user manual
Bartosz Taudul [email protected]
June 25, 2025

Polish software helps us mod polish software!

[noble beacon]

You should never have left Kraków
That country is your place of power

Embrace your new identity

[vale gust]

can I get a tl;dr

the .mopp are pretty much the collision of the level

if we create simple geometry so we generate collision for .mopp

we can then use the more complex one for rendering and keep the .mopp of the simple one

[potent cedar]

not sure if painkiller's engine is capable of this, but for portal 2 rtx, glados's chamber in the beginning is completely CPU bottlenecked on the engine side. My solution was to turn off culling completely, disable dynamic entities other than static geometry, and then make a capture. I then opened that remix capture in my blender toolkit and re-exported everything to a anchor mesh. I then disabled engine rendering and got a massive FPS boost since remix now handles world rendering
#1289195427119501424 message

[noble beacon]

It's absolutely possible yeah

The idea has been floating around #1313627595815911448 message

[odd thicket]

Was this ever merged?

I honestly can’t remember since the Steam build is not using it

[potent cedar]

i thought i did

[odd thicket]

Then I might not have updated the Steam build

[robust hollow]

@light palm hi, i messaged you about something

but unrelated to that, i wanted to ask (since i'm unable to download it currently), did you guys pack your assets with RTXIO?

also unrelated, but i'm hoping that we get this in Remix at some point: https://github.com/NVIDIA-RTX/Rtxntc

it'll reduce VRAM load quite a lot, and also help with the texture size on disk

for Remix it would be NTC on Sample

[noble beacon]

did you guys pack your assets with RTXIO?
Yep, I think it saved like 10GB or so

[kindred haven]

what benefit does rtxIO give again? never felt any difference between normal and rtxIO

[noble beacon]

Ability to pack your mod and hopefully achieve some performance gains

[robust hollow]

it's just loading times afaik

it does help

[kindred haven]

ah ok

[robust hollow]

i think i'm actually gonna open an issue for this

it'd help a LOT

https://github.com/NVIDIAGameWorks/rtx-remix/issues/907

if you guys wanna give it a like, it should help get some traction on it

[odd thicket]

Which can help the texture streaming setting seem more seamless

[robust hollow]

oh no the texture streaming thing helps immensely with RAM usage IME

even combined with RTXIO

but not every project is gonna use RTXIO so it's still good to have it

[odd thicket]

I definitely want to use it for P2 RTX, keep those sizes down and all

[robust hollow]

the savings with this would be even more substantial

[faint wharf]

is there a downside to using rtx ntc?

[robust hollow]

there's a slight performance cost

#general-remix message

you can see it here @faint wharf

look at the ms measurement on the left side

the performance hit is greater on 30 series cards compared to 40 and 50 series (afaik), but it's still very usable

and it should be able to be toggled in remix's settings

[faint wharf]

wonder what the difference is in a vram limited scenerio

[robust hollow]

the first image is NTC on Load, which loads it as a BCn texture instead. so very little rendering cost, but the file size is still ~1/10th the size

the second image is NTC on Sample, which reduces VRAM load significantly on top of the file size savings

[robust hollow]

well, in a full remix game (like painkiller), i imagine this would allow GPUs with like 6 GB VRAM to play it

currently that's not possible afaik due to VRAM limitations

a dynamic system to load only the necessary amount of textures with NTC on Sample would probably be best. so there wouldn't be unnecessary performance cost unless there wasn't enough VRAM

[vale gust]

that would be me with my RTX 2060

[noble beacon]

RTX 2060 release date is closer to Painkiller Hell & Damnation than to now

[kindred haven]

Mfw I played remix with a 6gb 3060 mobile for 2 years

[odd thicket]

lets get a limited edition painkiller RTX 2060

[tall iron]

any updates?

[light palm]

soon™

[tall iron]

cool looking forward to it

[noble beacon]

motorcycles take time you know

can't quite figure out that transmission system

[vale gust]

they'll only be in Catacombs and throw you off every time you hit a wall like in GTA

[noble beacon]

I would also like to see one in Swamp

[vale gust]

it will be in Tower

[noble beacon]

Good idea, you don't get fall damage when riding a motorcycle in GTA

[karmic cove]

Красотище 🙂

[noble beacon]

I recognise that aspect ratio 😄

I think I've seen your screenshots on VK

[dull stratus]

this?

https://vk.com/closing_door

[noble beacon]

Ahh I was mistaken, I meant these
https://vk.com/wall-11121247_10193

[dull stratus]

it's some other guy

[kindred haven]

why does "its on" cut off RTX so quickly 💔

[karmic cove]

Dear s0crates, if it’s not a secret, may I ask how you achieved such a sharp shadow from the grate?
Did you use shadow mapping, or did you make the light source extremely small to get that level of sharpness?
I just can’t figure out how you minimized the penumbra.
Did you perhaps modify the surface properties (e.g, diffuseness/glossiness) to achieve this effect?

It’s just that my shadows get very blurry at this distance from the light source - they turn into a mess.

[dull stratus]

I am not part of the team and do not participate in the development in any way. I just downloaded, installed, recorded a clip. Regarding shadow maps - they are not in the path tracing, because they are not needed

To reduce the penumbra, either the light source must be smaller, or the distance between the object casting the shadow and the plane where the shadow falls must be smaller

Soft shadows in path tracing are not a problem, but a natural consequence of physically correct light simulation

[light palm]

There are a variety of factors which could influence this, however to get crisper shadows at longer distances, as @dull stratus says, you need a small light source with high intensity. Alternatively, the distant light type is what you should use for crisp shadows in sunlight scenarios.

These best practices are good to know:
https://docs.omniverse.nvidia.com/kit/docs/rtx_remix/latest/docs/howto/learning-bestpractices.html#optimizing-noise-levels-when-relighting
https://docs.omniverse.nvidia.com/kit/docs/rtx_remix/latest/docs/howto/learning-lighting.html - "radiance values up to approximately 1000 generally produce reliable results, while values exceeding 10000 may introduce lighting artifacts."

TLDR make your spherelight radius small, and the intensity large. Follow best practices.

[earnest ember]

Distant lights have a angularDiameterDegrees property so the sun won't be a singular point either, but a disk based on that angle

[light palm]

i was wondering how the distant light type worked under the hood, ie. parallel rays?

perfectly parallel rays would be hard for a path tracer i would assume, as few camera rays would meet that criteria?

ie. be heading in that exact direction

i suppose there would be a good way to account for this

the distant light type is less noisy than using other light types and placing them far away, in my experience

ahh so the angularDiameterDegrees is effectively the "tolerance" for the direction camera rays are heading, to be considered to have met the distant light?

[earnest ember]

So the way I understand it is: From a given hit point, you shoot a shadow ray (a light checking ray) towards the DistantLight, but randomized within that angleDiameterDegrees lobe, so rays will be looking for a disk in the sky, not just a point.
This makes close objects cast a sharp shadow while distant objects have a wider penumbra

[light palm]

fun stuff! does it work something like this?
ray shot from camera
upon hit first surface:
fire shadow ray towards all existing distant lights (and other light types?) to see if it connects

Does the disc in the sky have an effectively infinite radius?

[earnest ember]

Yeah, along these lines. The last bit, it shoots towards distant lights, but randomized a bit within that angle, so the ray won't be shot straight toward the light, but slightly, randomly off to the sides, within that angle range, essentially making the sun light be a disk of finite radius (that angle thing)

[light palm]

ahhh i getcha

cheers Eman!

[leaden quest]

That looks so dang good. But what's going on with the left-most skeleton in the third image? There's a weird glowing blur that seems to be tucked under his arm.

[north kiln]

he's just sexy and he know it
"Hello, miss, you have a lovely little neck. Would you like to see my femur?"

https://tenor.com/view/bonezone-dancing-skeleton-gif-15509355211278610936

[noble beacon]

Looks like a hit effect. When they swing a weapon it shows a trail

[north kiln]

yes he have just finish his attack animation

[leaden quest]

It looked cool. I just saw that image and was like "Wait, when did Remix get lens flare?"

[north kiln]

i don't know. but it's something can be add in post processing effect for a future update of rtx remix maybe

[leaden quest]

You guys have done such a great job enhancing the misty and moody look of the game already. There's no need to turn it into a J.J. Abrams Star Trek film!

[north kiln]

i'm not directly in the dev yet the merit does not belong to me i have mainly made beta test and bug detection

[leaden quest]

Hey, taking screenshots that show off the great work the devs and artists have done is not nothing!

[north kiln]

i love take photo in realife like i take photo at VRchat it's maybe for that i know when it's the good moment to capture a moment i have do my possible to attract the skeleton to the light to showcase the details on light on them or the first boss to have the light behind him and be close enough to in sametime show his massive size and the detail on him. i will have to see to made nice new screenshots of Alastor that big boy love show himself i guess

[leaden quest]

The shots are all well-composed and highlight the improved assets nicely. It's good work.

[north kiln]

https://youtu.be/XFTATcYfSv8?si=A37Xzq1GPH2SVbpk

[odd thicket]

I thought, let me go install Painkiller RTX to see how it’s changed
…
Then I saw 1 out of 5 and said nope

[robust hollow]

the parts are actually pretty small

idk why it was split up like that

the cap is 50 gb per upload for remix mods iirc

[light palm]

aussie internet, cant upload large files without it failing and having to try again. took me a week to upload a single file once

[leaden quest]

I low-key love the occasional low-poly meshes, like the broken cobblestone chunks in the fourth image. It's a nice subtle reminder of what an old-school game this is under the hood, beneath all the beautiful new textures and lighting. That gives me a double hit of both 90s-gamer nostalgia and modern-gamer dazzle factor.

[noble beacon]

Many meshes appear low-poly only because Remix fails to preserve the original mesh normals, so chances are it looks different in the original renderer

https://github.com/NVIDIAGameWorks/rtx-remix/issues/753

[kindred haven]

If this gets fixed it would be beyond goated

[leaden quest]

It wasn't a dig at all--I actually really like it. I mostly see it on pieces of level geometry that are supposed to look broken, and it's a fun throwback to the kind of chunky destruction of old-school games. Something about it just tickles that boomer-shooter center in my lizard brain.

[noble beacon]

It's just that it is not supposed to look like that, it's not an original game under the hood 😄

It's a bug

[leaden quest]

Shhh.. don't tell anyone! Unless and until a bug gets fixed, sell it as a design choice!

[noble beacon]

I'd rather have it fixed, as the workaround Binq used for some of the meshes is space heavy 🙂

[odd thicket]

Tell that to browser and my internet download speeds

And my browser tends to just cancel a huge download at times

[tall iron]

where i notice it the most is the terrain, like on the Asylum or Military Base levels - really brings back the 80's 3d graphics vibes

[leaden quest]

https://tenor.com/view/elrond-lotr-lord-of-the-tings-lord-elrond-3000years-gif-13229890

I remember 80s 3D, when the best we could hope for was either wireframe graphics (e.g. the first Star Wars acade game) or proto-Mode7 sprite-scaling tricks (e.g. Outrun). This gives me more the vibe of the era of Quake through the original (pre-Blue Shift) Halflife geometry. And that's a pretty nostalgic era for me, which is why seeing those little chunks of low-poly debris covered with such beautiful new textures makes me smile.

[north kiln]

I was here virtual racing on Sega Genesis/Megadrive a full 3d graphics formula 1 racing game. The maps the cars even the first persons pilot view with his hand in 3d

[leaden quest]

THat didn't even begin development until 1990 (for the Model 1 arcade cabinet, released in 1992), and the Genesis version came out in 1994. In the 1980s, something like the 1989 MechWarrior game was about the peak of 3D graphics on consumer hardware, outside of the demo scene.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MechWarrior_(1989_video_game)

[north kiln]

https://tenor.com/view/seelmaru-gif-27016060

[light palm]

noone will find ever find it, top secret!

[north kiln]

only you and i know where is it it's to the others to find it

[light palm]

david will find it in 0.0000323 seconds 😄

[noble beacon]

Now add a lever that would play Marseillaise when pushed

[vale gust]

is it somewhere here?

either here or the last yellow soul secret, but that isn't really top secret

would've been a better secret if you put something inside there

[north kiln]

A new level for Painkiller in Paris and for once Daniel will have a good reason to die if he jump into the water of the Saine

[noble beacon]

It reminds me of when Macron announced his bathing in the Seine to prove that it's not that bad and some guy created a script that determined where and when in France one must shit in the river for it to reach Macron in time

🇫🇷

[north kiln]

People have swim on it for the trial during the olympic game have puke their guts and some of them has been sick

[noble beacon]

It's a miracle that those poor souls managed to survive

[north kiln]

it's like that the game ILL begin

https://tenor.com/view/ill-kick-baby-kick-ill-kick-ill-2026-gif-13442827705264584630

monks

[north kiln]

https://youtu.be/hKlTT76ajC4?si=LX7hYhvDJUZsz5ns

[tall iron]

have the performance issues been ironed out?

maybe its called the 'PainEngine' because.... its a Pain to work with

[north kiln]

no it's okey but after it's still in wip

[vale gust]

I didn't find this funny

[faint wharf]

is pain engine totally home grown or is it a fork of another engine?

curious

[noble beacon]

Made from scratch

[faint wharf]

neat

[noble beacon]

The first demo we did around June 2002 just had static mesh renderer with baked GI lightmaps and Havok hooked up to it. It was Prison level with crates using physics and 1 weapon chaingun+rocket launcher. Then we decided to go with high quality graphics (for that time 😉) and use full Havok potential. So the next thing was to add skeletal meshes and ragdolls. And later we hooked up LUA and started adding gameplay around it.
There were no games using Havok at that time, or just a few, but not shooters afair. And realtime physics was mindblowing.
I think we started with Havok 1.6, which had a lot of cool features, like water, softbodies etc, but was extremely slow, and then switched to 2.0 at some point which had only rigid bodies and constrains and skeletal meshes, but was much much faster

That was just after we got a deal from Dreamcatcher and development started. I was the first programmer in the office. Bart Sekura started a few months before and he worked remotely on a demo, which was just an empty level that you could run on and that had Havok hooked up with boxes that you could shoot. But no enemies, no editor.
Bart Sekura and Bartek Sokolowski started a month later both from the office and we started working on an actual game. Sokol was working on editor and AI, and Bart with me on the rest of the engine.
And I think there were 3 of us until E3 2003 where we had a hands on demo. And then we had another programmer working on enemies, one working on multiplayer/audio/physics and another on UI.

[faint wharf]

wait did y'all get in contact with one of the painkiller devs for help? lol

[noble beacon]

We met out in the wild in the YouTube comment section under Digital Foundry's Painkiller RTX video

[faint wharf]

that's awesome

[noble beacon]

do you know the story behind the reason why exactly Painkiller is so compatible with Remix?
i've been telling it around here for some time but just can't get enough of it

[faint wharf]

I do not

assumed y'all just got lucky

[noble beacon]

you could say so

I did the whole renderer, shaders, animations, some vfx, exporters and a lot of inner engine stuff, well most of the engine
But not gameplay, physics, audio, networking

So you are based on a fixed pipeline? Jeez, I did it in like last 1 or 2 months before shipping, just because Dreamcatcher wrote that game's minimal requirements was Geforce 4 MX, and it was basically rebranded Geforce 1/2, but actually shaders 1_x were supported from Geforce 3. At least it's finally useful for something 😉
And because it was supposed to just work, it was slow. For example a basic lightmap shader for env was done in two passes because only 2 textures per pass were supported on GF1/2

It was 22 years ago

[odd thicket]

Tell them to give you publishing rights

[noble beacon]

yeah I wish

Plaion holds Painkiller publishing rights

they've been dead silent so far afaik

[odd thicket]

https://tenor.com/view/springtrap-fire-fnaf-gif-2873982408042466685

I can make them scream

[vale gust]

you always come back?

[noble beacon]

I'm always scumbag

[north kiln]

cumbag?

https://tenor.com/view/loona-helluva-boss-helluva-boss-loona-snicker-chuckle-gif-973615676558742613

[noble beacon]

☹️

[north kiln]

sorry my twisted mind

https://tenor.com/view/spincat-gif-4620048645392468202

[karmic cove]

What kind of game is this?

[north kiln]

It's ILL a fps survival horror playing a lot with body horror it's coming at pc ps5 xbox series https://youtu.be/ZBPi85S2MmA?si=0yWwaOADFZsTtWA9

[north kiln]

@odd thicket I’m addicted to caffine

https://youtu.be/hbjLWwfH-d0?si=xJ07VNwpuKMfz9cO&t=5

[light palm]

The calm before the storm 😉

[noble beacon]

https://tenor.com/view/ghost-rider-ghostrider-bike-gif-26074678

don't mind the flat desert from the gif, in the game it will be catacombs

[north kiln]

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/427492527776727041/1403941416715030628/Dorado.gif

[noble beacon]

is this a Jesu Død riff

[noble beacon]

My ISP just offered a free of charge plan change to the 200/100Mbps one instead of the 100/50Mpbs I've been using because it is getting deprecated

So feel free to make Painkiller RTX twice as big now

official permission

[open lotus]

https://tenor.com/view/bad-movies-rule-bmr-under-siege-2-movie-apply-full-image-enhancing-enhance-gif-11740005328423716755

[north kiln]

https://tenor.com/view/shrek-its-quiet-quiet-gif-22160130

[north kiln]

Painkiller protagonist scream pain
Daniel Garner AAARRGGHH!!!
Belial Gnnrgh!
William Aaaaaaawwwww

[astral magnet]

Wow. It's pretty good. I've never played Painkiller in my life, but I think I'll start playing just to try this project. I wonder if this project is finished?

[north kiln]

Painkiller RTX remixed is still in work in progress but the entire game is fully playable some levels are not yet fully polished it's come update after update and a new one is soon on the way with cool new features and improvement

[astral magnet]

It's nice to hear that

[north kiln]

it's how it's look like you just need to buy Painkiller Black Edition at Steam or Gog and good news at the moment i write this Painkiller Black Edition is on Sale at 2€

[light palm]

Before/After of attenuation of emissives by volumetrics change

[north kiln]

https://tenor.com/view/knuckles-knuckles-the-echidna-approved-knuckles-approved-knuckles-approve-gif-12133775096657000385

[north kiln]

show more please

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/404840637834461186/1145307706127822959/He_Came_Back.gif

[pale pumice]

hi. i've put all the files in the game correctly but it doesn't start. i thought i had to wait for it to load but after close to 3 hrs it still didn't start. it was still active because i checked task manager and it was still there. i have a 3050 ti laptop

[light palm]

downloaded recent version from ModDB?

[pale pumice]

yes and the patch

[light palm]

in painkiller/bin/rtx-remix/logs there are three log files, can you put there here?

oh and was it a clean install of painkiller black edition? most of the time when people have trouble it is because they installed painkiller RTX on top of another mod, or installed another mod on top of painkiller RTX

or installed a newer version of painkiller RTX on top of an old version of painkiller RTX

[pale pumice]

only log file in there. and i installed only this mod

[pale pumice]

yes it's the black edition thats on steam

that's all its doing in task manager

[noble beacon]

Make sure you replaced the original files when prompted, it behaves like the original Engine.dll

I'm not sure but that A: drive letter is sus, I'd try installing the game somewhere else

[light palm]

check that NvRemixLauncher32.exe exists in painkiller/bin folder
Sometimes windows defender deletes it because it thinks it is a virus

[pale pumice]

ok i got it to work

i think my problem was that i just only extracted part 1 thinking it would also extract the others as well

[pale pumice]

new problem i cant set water quality to high. it wont let me click it

[noble beacon]

you're not supposed to change the ingame settings (safe for resolution)

all the settings you need to change are in the Alt+X menu

[pale pumice]

oh ok thanks

[light palm]

Glad you got it figured out @pale pumice !
How do you find the gameplay?

[pale pumice]

i like it. reminds me of classic doom

[tall iron]

classic doom doesn't have jumping like painkiller does

[noble beacon]

still Painkiller is known as a late love letter to the classic shooters

it was very conservative in 2004 in this regard

[tall iron]

actually the enclosed arena spawning enemies concept is ahead of its time, Doom 2016 and Eternal uses this format

[pale pumice]

ok i tried multiple times but i think i ran into a bug. i cant enter ch 1 ep 3 catacombs because the rocks block the way even after blowing up the explosives outside and inside

[noble beacon]

yeah this is annoying 😄

[light palm]

sure is annoying, this is fixed in next release already. You can use the painkiller spinning blades to slowly get through if you jump on top of the rocks and point the blades down and try to push through the door

[noble beacon]

It is easier to reload the level and try your luck again lol

[pale pumice]

ok thanks i'll just wait then because i already tried the spinning blades to get through and it wouldn't work and i reloaded the level at least 10 times and still couldn't get through

[north kiln]

**Update v0.2.4 **https://youtu.be/6pDPqNOE0s0?si=jea1q5q5nFq6U32K

[light palm]

nice! Thanks Mora 🙂

[light palm]

https://tenor.com/view/sunlight-sunshine-sky-good-morning-gods-light-gif-12347058

[north kiln]

Someone to steal his snack from his big boy?

RTX Particules & Dark gothic ambiance

[light palm]

a bunch of scripting on the flying nun to have the light attach to her hand, and then transfer to the fireball when she throws it and then back to the hand 🙂

[light palm]

Tweaked chest materials!

[north kiln]

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/427492527776727041/1416549049842143252/Alilkira_Fortnite_2_GIF.gif

[north kiln]

https://youtu.be/BHANRAYwF2s?si=GnawgjwMOn7AnX2f

[tall iron]

https://youtu.be/MiRUVnQieMI?si=x-JOhpq1QF4u4cXq

[tall iron]

where do you get the latest version from?

[tall iron]

its not on moddb

[north kiln]

soon
i beta test and showcase the updates and i detect for them possible crash or glitch and i report them when i meet some

[north kiln]

Welcome to hell

hell only way out

[north kiln]

https://youtu.be/b8P77x1-LLo?si=LPdJkrwDZoqhIi_-

[north kiln]

@fringe tangle hello. in your opinion with rtx remix it's possible to replace the old blood effect to big splats and splash like here?

[fringe tangle]

err... what's the old blood effect?

If it's just a blood decal on the ground... once the component system is fully up and running, it may be possible to spawn a particle effect in response to a decal with a specific material showing up. Whether you can get a good looking blood spray with the current particle system I'm less sure of, and spawning more blood decals from those particles probably wouldn't be supported.

also spawning the blood effect at the place where the projectile hit (as opposed to wherever the game spawns the blood decal) may be difficult

[north kiln]

for the moment it's the vanilla particules for blood. can it be replace by a similar blood effect like th new painkiller 2025?

[fringe tangle]

yeah... I think something like that could be enhanced quite a bit, even with the existing particle system. I haven't messed around with it much, but from what I understand this sort of effect is something it's supposed to be able to improve

I don't think we have any way to add giblets with physics though

[north kiln]

it's give me an idea! adding PhysX & Flex to RTX Remix and have blood and guts with physics fluid simulation and soft body physics. like at Killing Floor 2 if you remember. IF it's technically possible

[faint wharf]

https://tenor.com/view/polvoron-gato-war-flashbacks-recuerdos-de-guerra-traumatizado-gif-17714149605432288357

[fringe tangle]

The problem is mostly about extracting reasonable geometry for the physical objects to collide against. the old games like this didn't send physics info to the GPU

[north kiln]

hmmm so physx for the moment it's not possible

[fringe tangle]

doesn't seem like it. Maybe with a bunch of work we could let users categorize which meshes should have collision, and throw it all into a physics sim... but we have no way to share any of that data back to the game, and when the game objects suddenly move through our simulated objects, the physics sim will probably explode in unstable ways.

(so it may be possible to do it in a super janky and manual way, but probably not possible to do it well).

[north kiln]

https://youtu.be/tstr3-r_j58?si=LTCiBZKMvhCJRY1c

[light palm]

Will ping mark to ask about this at a sane US timezone hour
I got to test with a 50 series card, and it seems that there is something wonky going on with the Subsurface Scattering 😮
I tested on the same system in HalfLife 2 RTX, and everything seemed OK there, so it may be something specific to Painkiller RTX + 50 Series.
If anyone else has a 50 series card and can test, that would be awesome!
This footage was taken in Atrium (Chapter 1, level 2)
https://youtu.be/esZSSuAe_S0

[north kiln]

https://tenor.com/view/earthworm-jim-groovy-gif-20682712

[north kiln]

Painkiller RTX v0.2.4 Cathedral

[north kiln]

Painkiller RTX Remixed v0.2.4 The Factory

[north kiln]

Painkiller RTX Remixed v0.2.4 The Snowy Bridge

[leaden quest]

Looking fantastic. How did y'all get the stain glass windows to cast colored shadows on the ground? I've been playing around with Clive Barker's Undying, which uses a lot of stained glass windows, and haven't figured out how to create this effect.

[north kiln]

I call the specialists.

@light palm @noble beacon Advise for them?

[open lotus]

Use thin opaque and enable 'rtx.enableDirectTranslucentShadows = True' either in DXVK.conf or Alt X menu

[leaden quest]

"thin opaque"? As in a texture with areas of low but non-zero alpha? Or is this something else?

[open lotus]

It's a setting on the texture itself in the toolkit. You need to convert it to translucent material. Lemme grab a screenshot for ya

[noble beacon]

I'm no specialist by any means haha😄

you probably played this more than me at this point

[leaden quest]

And then stage lights outside each window to project the light down to the floor?

[open lotus]

No, just one sun 🙂
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3P2KUQ7y1A

[jaunty harness]

Nice would be great to see mod for Undying

[naive oriole]

Hello is it only me having game crash after Atrium? Trauma difficulty - unable load autosave after

[light palm]

hmm, is the save from before the mod? it's only compatible with saves made with the same version of the mod

[naive oriole]

No, fresh start from beginning with the mod - actual patch from moddb

Painkiller Black Gog version

[naive oriole]

Here is the save

[leaden quest]

I've only been able to give it intermittent attention, but you can see my early progress here (along with other Unreal Engine 1 projects): https://discordapp.com/channels/1028444667789967381/1211038540218109953

[naive oriole]

The game looks great btw https://youtu.be/782iLQHRE1g

[light palm]

im not sure what is causing this, was the save from a previous version of the mod?

[naive oriole]

No, all is done in one version from start. If you can send me save after this chapter I can try it

[north kiln]

Chapel

Monastery entrance

[north kiln]

V0.2.4 Old Monastery

[noble beacon]

New Monastery

[light palm]

@fringe tangle Hello sir! Do you happen to know what the differences are between how 50 series cards and other series render SSS?

[fringe tangle]

Hmm, as far as I'm aware the only major difference should be the use of multi frame gen. nothing SSS specific...

That being said, there's a lot I'm unaware of 😅

The flickering issue you were showing looks more like a light caching issue or something like that, not so much like an SSS specific issue

[light palm]

So I grabbed a different version of remix, and everything works fine.
Perhaps it is a 50-series only regression..

Hey @fringe tangle!
I tested a bunch of builds, and the issue seems to crop up between 884 and 891.
I don't have builds between those directly available, but it narrows it down a bit!

984 - sss issue exists
944 - sss issue exists
932 - sss issue exists
926 - sss issue exists
891 - sss issue exists
884 - seems OK
856 - seems OK

I tested the latest build from actions (984) in HL2RTX, and the SSS is broken there too:

I also noticed an issue where it seems the screen space for SSS does not update when the DLSS base res changes

[kindred haven]

i think i noticed the same thing when installing the latest remix official release in hl2rtx

im also on 50 series

[north kiln]

oh the ui have change?

[light palm]

Ja 🙂

xorxor contribution!

i think it looks great

[kindred haven]

Been added to the main branch?

[light palm]

seems like it!

[kindred haven]

Also I wanna ask what future plans do you have for this mod since it still seems like it’s early days

[naive oriole]

Btw game crashes on rtx4050 laptop 6gb

On save upper

[north kiln]

City on Water v0.2.4
Personaly my favorite level

[north kiln]

Cemetery v0.2.4

[naive oriole]

Btw can someone upload all saves done in mod? To be able to pass crash check point

[north kiln]

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1GVzUzKPOAQSg-RjYSiQdCbhTujCSqZnk?usp=sharing you can use my save game is you want

[naive oriole]

Thank you!

[kindred haven]

where can i download the latest version of the mod?

[north kiln]

right now the public release the most recent is 0.2.2 i have beta test the 0.2.4 and repport all problem i have meet they finish to debug and prepare new cool stuff its for soon

[kindred haven]

ah ok

whats new in the version ur testing?

[north kiln]

the next public update will be even more advanced and cool

[north kiln]

rtx particules new materials on weapons better shading on ennemies new pbr material on maps new textures pbr for the nun model and the poison monsters of loony park better fog renders and a lot of improvment and optimisation

[north kiln]

https://youtu.be/6pDPqNOE0s0?si=mx8mux4u0NT-ii5-

[north kiln]

The Town v0.2.4

Can you eared the scream of pain bring by the wind? The smell of the ashes and the burning flesh?

[naive oriole]

@north kiln Can you please also tell devs about the crash on this save? Gpu is rtx4050 6gb laptop

[north kiln]

@light palm

https://tenor.com/view/yoink-cat-dragged-gif-1263419341748157821

someone need your help

[light palm]

Hey @naive oriole, Is this crash occurring on a clean install of the latest version from moddb (0.2.2), which was installed into a clean install of Painkiller Black Edition from Steam or GoG, without any other mods?

[naive oriole]

Yes this is correct

I used the save to pass to chapter 3 and it works

Problem is with specific checkpoint, mb related to trauma difficulty

[north kiln]

Opera v0.2.4
In the puragatory the glorious past of this Opera is over!
The only thing you can listen it's the echoes of the previous representation from the living world and the screams of rage of the troups of Lucifer using that place like an outpost

[vale gust]

this save is corrupted, it looks like the game crashed while trying to save, so there is no use for these

[naive oriole]

I tried to go this level again from beginning - same result

[vale gust]

send the latest save that works for that level

[naive oriole]

Rewrote it is with upper save that is on Insomnia diffuculty. Completed full lvl on this difficulty and could pass further. So problem happend on Trauma difficulty only. Also had 2 random crashes during play - I think this happen when rage mode triggered. Here are logs

Here was the problematic checkpoint

[light palm]

Thank you @naive oriole !

[vale gust]

This is bizarre because the only thing going with this difficulty is not having souls, maybe the lack of souls is crashing the game?

[naive oriole]

May be, happens only on one fixed checkpoint

May be next too but could not pass futher

[north kiln]

let's smooth some angular assets

[north kiln]

smooth

[north kiln]

Skull smooth

@fringe tangle hello i have a question. if i import an 3d asset like a rock or a wall into the scene at Blender. once at RTX remix Editor it's possible to add a collider on it?

[fringe tangle]

Apparently I missed this when you first posted it.

If you've filed an issue, you should definitely post this info there. If not...you should file an issue!

[fringe tangle]

All physics are done in the game engine on the CPU. Remix only intercepts the signals that the game sends to the GPU.

That means while Remix can replace all of the rendering, Remix (including replacement assets) cannot alter the game logic or physics.

So if you want to add something with collision, you'll need to mod the game's content directly.

[civic ibex]

My brother in Christ, you suppose to add supporing geo before subdividing, otherwise the original shape is gone 😭

[north kiln]

nothing is implanted yet i can re-capture the original scene anytime

now i'm confuse.

@light palm i made the things wrong?

[civic ibex]

Yeah, I'm just saying, it's not really a great way to go about upgrading the meshes

without supporting geo, parts that actually suppose to show for example rectangular shape, while get overly smooth and circular

[north kiln]

it's complex i would love be capable to remade all from scratch with blender but it's beyond of what i can do

"sigh" i will let that to someone more competent than me the best i can do it's playtest before the release of the next updates

[civic ibex]

Theres no need to give up

Supporting geo is literally just adding a loop of edges when you don't want the shape to get overly smooth

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffjRTtBD11U

[north kiln]

[north kiln]

vanilla skull VS new skull

[north kiln]

cobblestone floor

[odd thicket]

You guys could have just used my skull

[north kiln]

work in progress of the first corridor of the catacombs

[north kiln]

@fringe tangle helloooo. RTX remix don't have problem with Tesselation at condition it's not to much charge in quads?

[odd thicket]

This makes me want to do a “Behind the Development” series for Remix mods

[north kiln]

i love that type of content. when a studio made a making of of a game i alway's check the moment when we see the devs work on the game on the maps etc. example for MWII the moment i mostly remember it's when they have show one of the devs work on a multiplayer map even if it was short i have stop the video to see how is the ui of the IW engine 9

[odd thicket]

@potent cedar I have a video idea

[potent cedar]

hu

[odd thicket]

A “behind the development” series for Remix games

[north kiln]

Oh no, I have made a mess of everything

but not enough!
@light palm MORE BLOOD! MORE MORE MORE!!!!! A CARNAGE!!!

[north kiln]

⚰️ Replacing vanilla cube coffin by much better modular coffin of my personal library ⚰️

WIP

[fringe tangle]

Remix uses Parallax Occlusion Mapping (POM), not displacement. It's an inferior technique in most ways, but benefits from being usable on any geometry (especially relevant for Remix, since we can use it on the original game's meshes).

POM does suffer from a number of artifacts though. I'd encourage you to load up your asset in the game and play around with the POM strength slider in the runtime menus to see how far you can push it before the effect breaks down.

That all being said - Remix actually works better with high poly meshes without POM, so you might be better off just making that an actual mesh rather than a heightmap.

[north kiln]

got it i will use something else for the corridor

[fringe tangle]

POM was added as an easy way to improve game geometry that wasn't feasibly replaceable, like all the terrain maps in HL2. If you can replace meshes stably, it's better to just use enough triangles to make the mesh look good and skip the heightmap.

(Some displacement solutions will actually have ways to bake the displaced result out as another mesh, but I haven't touched that stuff in over a decade, and never with Blender)

[clever gull]

Has the motorcycle been implemented yet?

It better be implemented

[north kiln]

I dont know its not me in charge of that part i work on the static part of the maps

[light palm]

Shall i implement
Moped 😄

🛵

welcome lolo 😉

[north kiln]

@fringe tangle no tessellation walls correctly details without be highpoly for performances

[fringe tangle]

As far as I know, Blender's displacement implementation is probably very different from Remix's POM implementation. you should check what that looks like within Remix.

[north kiln]

i think i prefer stay with optimize walls mesh too much high poly mesh risk to drop the performances i have by the way send a previous version of the map to binq for him to see if nothing cause trouble with rtx remix

[next basin]

well POM is a different thing is it not?

[north kiln]

attacking the first big room of the catacombs

[modest comet]

Hello all

Works with bost Steam and Retail editions?

How it runs with a 3080 @4k 240 HZ with HDR On?

[north kiln]

@modest comet hello!
Yes for physical copy of the game be sure to install the most recent patch of the game and for the digital version yes Steam like for GOG.

For your spec yes the RTX 3080 is enough but in 4k don't play without the DLSS

[vale gust]

Merry Christmas

[clever gull]

🎅

[open lotus]

https://tenor.com/view/merry-xmas-merry-xmas-funny-gif-1223698705761373793

[tall iron]

does anyone know what's going on here?

[clever gull]

iirc this was due to the cone angle value being too small

[tall iron]

i have a pet peeve about the flashlight ... i would like the bounce lighting from the flashlight to be brighter, without making the direct illumination brighter... is this possible?

[clever gull]

I never really tried this but just maybe it is possible to make the highlight less blinding in the post processing settings (?)

Also could play around with the pathtracer/NRC settings, but keep in mind that both that and PostFX usually require awareness of what you are doing in order to achieve something plausible

[kindred haven]

I think it’s mainly an issue that the bounce lighting doesn’t update fast enough to the flashlights movements, it’s something I noticed in gmod rtx with nrc and especially restir

[tall iron]

i go into the alt-x menu and under Neural Radiance Cache, I disable 'include direct lighting'

makes it update much faster

[clever gull]

I'd like to see how Ray Reconstruction on Transformer 2 performs

[kindred haven]

Holy shit you can do that?

Wait wait this is huge what

[tall iron]

one of the first things I did when I downloaded the mod a few months ago

[kindred haven]

Does it update as fast as importance sampled

[tall iron]

well its updating fast enough for me... much faster than leaving 'include direct lighting' on

i just wish the bounce lighting was brighter

[tall iron]

how do i edit the brightness of the flashlight?

i remember i could use a text editor to mess with the light sources but its been a few months

[clever gull]

Bin/rtx-remix/mods/PKRTX/PKRTX_Shared_Flashlight.usda

[tall iron]

i thought about messing with the volumetric radiance scale, but it just leaves a trail , its basically 100% temporal accumulation ... it would have been such an epic effect if it worked in real time though

[tall iron]

IMHO some of the volumetric effects shouldn't be raytraced if they are just going to ghost from temporal accumulation

[clever gull]

the way is to raytrace everything and iterate on it until it stops ghosting

looking forward to the new RR model which should arrive soon enough

[tall iron]

how can a new ray reconstruction model help with the flashlight ghosting?

i mean like it uses a realtime AI to approximate what a properly pathtraced scene should look like... but I think that showing a flashlight from a first person perspective has too many variables

in the end i think it's just going to be mimicking what shaders have been doing for many years already , to produce light shafts and god rays

like its not literally rendering the shadow masks and stuff which is used for traditional volumetric lighting effects, but i think it will do something analogous with the 3d scene data available to it

personally though, i think that raytracing should only be used for things which are impossible to do with shaders ... replace baked lightmaps with realtime global illumination, replace screen space reflections with raytraced reflections, etc etc

[light palm]

could do a raycast and spawn a light at the hit location

like 180 degree sphere away from the surface

would be hard to get the albedo color at the hit point though and have plausible fake bounce light color, at least using original pk logic

afaik

might be something for component system

[tall iron]

isn't it supposed to be a parameter of the light source or the rays? like the bounce intensity or something

[light palm]

there are very few if any non physical params exposed

[tall iron]

hmm that seems like a bit of a limitation...

like for example, imagine you want to model some kind of nightclub scene or something, and there's a bunch of UV lights and people wearing fluorescent fabric

you need the rays from the blacklights to the fluoro fabrics to check for shadows and intensity, and they are invisible because they are ultraviolet ... then the rays will basically diffuse bounce from the fluoro fabric but the rays are visible after the bounce

[clever gull]

This sounds like something real time rendering would struggle with in general

RT is still an approximation and there are things that are still difficult to implement, like Caustics

[tall iron]

i mean its just a simple parameter change after a condition

change the colour of the ray after bouncing off this surface

as i recall, rays don't just hold RGB values?

[clever gull]

we'd need a graphics programmer to assess whatever assumptions we have lol

[tall iron]

the minigun bullet ammo box seems to be missing textures?

[light palm]

fixed for next release 👍

[tall iron]

also, on the Palace level, i am getting this

[01:41:14.981] info: [RTX Opacity Micromap] Instance has non triangle list topology. This is only partially supported. Falling back to a conservative max value for estimated numTexelsPerMicroTriangle instead.

Exception 0xc0000005 at 00007FF9AD1C2FAD! Saving minidump to 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Painkiller Black Edition\Bin.trex\NvRemixBridge.exe_20260113_014115.dmp'

[tall iron]

Turning off opacity micromaps fixed it

[clever gull]

yeah those can be tricky buggas

[light palm]

He's getting good at the aussie lingo 😛

[clever gull]

too much pud

[tall iron]

so whats the status about Docks? has there been any progress to make it run better?

[light palm]

nothing implemented as of yet, basically the simplest option would be really thick dx9 fog and smaller draw distance, with very diffuse (overcast) lighting.
I have been mulling over culling stuff, was considering whether something like a "2x PVS" system would work and be doable in the engine

there are almost certainly better pathtracing centric culling methods, i have not done the research on it though I want to. Just getting more pressing things in order

a snippet from one of the patreon posts drafts
"...precomputed PVS (Potentially Visible Set) algorithm with an additional step where all of the areas visible from the first iteration of the PVS are also visible..."

possibly something fundamentally wrong with this logic, but it's fun to think it through

there are other thought threads. there are a finite number of cases where the original PK culling method causes visual artifacts with PKRTX, and manually handling them on a case by case basis by setting specific pieces of geometry to always render would work, but it would be a lot of time investment to do it that way, and not generalisable obviously

colosseum has horrendous performance as well

[tall iron]

Im curious if you have a definitive cause for the performance issues

I remember something about excessive draw calls and all that

[clever gull]

In essence, pathtracing requires disabled culling,
while the game engine requires enabled culling to function without CPU bottlenecks

It's a real headscratcher to find the middle ground between the pathtracing-friendly rendering and CPU performance

[tall iron]

Then have a static model of the entire level which is only visible in Remix

[clever gull]

That would be the best case scenario actually, if done seamlessly

but imo it's just more cool to make the generalisable approach work as was mentioned above

you never know until you want a Pathtraced Overdose just like that😉

[tall iron]

i dont understand why are you still seeking a generalizable approach when you already need to manually place lights and everything for Remix

[light palm]

there is a good discussion earlier in this thread with Mark about this, I believe that the bounding box should be a certain way, so entire level as a single mesh may not be optimal

[light palm]

I prefer to spend 1 day once automating a thing than 1 hour a day for the rest of time doing it manually, something along those lines

[tall iron]

if you could generate a single mesh of the level, that would have been peak automation ... too bad it seemingly doesn't work?

[light palm]

this may not be optimal for pathtracing

[tall iron]

but the levels are so low poly anyway

[light palm]

search up this thread for stuff Mark said, really interesting stuff

u can do that with the search thingo in the top right, at least on desktop discord

strangely one of the big performance killers on atrium was because a chain used 2 textures instead of one, getting in the way of certain batching etc. This stuff can be pretty counter-intuitive!

[tall iron]

can a tool exist which automatically breaks down a large mesh or optimizes it somehow?

it brings to mind the BSP tree of Quake levels...

the idea is that instead of one big mesh which the raytracing apparently doesn't like... you have the level in chunks which are positioned correctly to recreate it, which should hopefully work better?

[quasi salmon]

BSP is too aggressive hiding non visible faces, resulting in light leaking and it also breaks hashes.
Here are some issue you see in Quake3 with BSP enabled (it's even more aggressive in Quake2).
ATM we disable BSP completely for the idTech 2&3 games being remixed.

[quasi salmon]

👋

[clever gull]

👋

[clever gull]

https://youtu.be/rFI_Yg1LAFU

Doesn't run on Samsung S25

Needs to be addressed ASAP

the mfer doesn't even create any logs

[potent cedar]

turnip doesnt expose the correct RT extensions by default, from what i can assume is a lack of proper hw acceleration. I built a custom version on my x1e laptop and got it working but it runs pretty poorly lol

[clever gull]

Adreno 830 drivers also arrived like yesterday and it is very hacky (it is basically a hack)

Works kinda great tho
https://youtu.be/TOOIE7--ISI

[potent cedar]

turnip or the official qualcomm ones?

ah nvm

vid finally loaded

[clever gull]

Fuck me if it was official

one day

[kindred haven]

what phone is being used here