▫️Senua's Saga: Hellblade II

[polar glen]

Oh, Dgrdsv is on the every tech/gaming forum out there
Always ready to "well achtuhally" someone else

[void tree]

I was that kind of person too... was maybe right 70% of the time, but often was far too driven/fanatical in defending my position, which makes things annoying for others

[polar glen]

Ngl I'm like that sometimes too, but I like to think that I know when I'm defeated
Plus, I generally don't take much pleasure from arguing with others

The problem is, on the internet the best way to get any feedback is to say something that pisses people off

[merry magnet]

yeah, that's why I stopped replying.

deniers

[polar glen]

https://tenor.com/view/indiana-jones-last-crusade-chosen-wisely-gif-13257298

[void tree]

That's also how the laudest voices often got the most to say there honestly...

[polar glen]

And the most confident takes are often the most wrong, lol

[void tree]

Amen

[merry magnet]

i can't stop it

there's a billion reddit posts about raised blacks on black bars

if that's not enough...

[void tree]

Yes, this is always a weird and difficult situation... glad I don't have to deal with that shit anymore, even if I wanted to haha

[merry magnet]

the xbox store might be buggy, but it's impressive to see the same download progress across 3 different applications

[merry magnet]

There seems to be some crazy gamut expansion in Senua's HDR.

I find it a bit overly saturated.

In some scenes, the sky in SDR looks realistic, but in HDR it's super red.

brightness and gamma mismatch between SDR and HDR but, u can see what I mean?

[shrewd monolith]

#000000 is 8bit SRGB, not enough definition as 10 bit HDR, so it's a useless metric

Though #010101 is 0.00392, linearized at 2.2 is 0.00000507705190066 and scaled up to 100 nits is 0.000507705190066 nits

If I did my math right

[dim kestrel]

I checked it on my calibrated C1 too and the black bars are obviously raised

Into videos too

min reported by Lilium's is 0.000431

[umbral raven]

Damn that sucks

[dim kestrel]

it's an easy fix with the black floor fix shader though

[umbral raven]

And that doesn't crush anything in the actual game?

[dim kestrel]

I don't think so

the "normal" black floor fix does crush blacks

[umbral raven]

How'd you come up with the roll off stopping point?

[dim kestrel]

I always use 20

[umbral raven]

Sdr emulation?

[umbral raven]

Why? I forgot what this does

[dim kestrel]

yes

[dim kestrel]

it helps with the near black gradient banding or something

[umbral raven]

Did lilium said 20 was best?

[dim kestrel]

I don't thing that there is a best value

@umbral raven #💬chat message

[umbral raven]

thx

so 20 is like where banding went away?

[dim kestrel]

nah there is no banding even at 10 in this game, but I think it helped in cyberpunk when I was using the shader

doesn't really matter I think

[umbral raven]

alrighty thank you sir

so you can tell that the black bars are raised?

by looking at it?

[dim kestrel]

yes it's very obvious

if you lower the in-game HDR gamma to 0 it's even easier to see how rised the black bars are

[merry magnet]

intro video has sRGB / 2.2 mismatch

[merry magnet]

thanks. I'm not the only one.

[merry magnet]

then u crush detail.

[dim kestrel]

ahh that explains it lol

[dim kestrel]

those settings fix the rised black bars on my display

the game has this semi-nolan rised blacks effect at the default settings

probably intentional, but not sure

this is 0 in-game gamma

[shrewd monolith]

downloading out of curiosity

like, how do you add nits to letterboxing?

i need to know

[clever bloom]

lilium's shader often read minnits as 0 for me

black bars always seemed pretty black to me

[clever bloom]

i can't see a god damn thing lmao

[shrewd monolith]

i'm not sure that's mathematically possible

oh sorry, the inverse

@loud tartan if it's exactly 0, perhaps it can be treated differently?

like == 0.f instead of0.0000000001

so we know that actually 0, and not a number above 0

[loud tartan]

you would be able to tell if it's not 0 because of HDR10 and scRGB limitations

[loud tartan]

update the shaders
thanks

[clever bloom]

these screenshots are from the game's release day

[shrewd monolith]

i mean in the numeral value that's presented, instead of 0.000000 we don't if internally that's 0 or 2.4414e-4 (0 + ELIPSON)

[loud tartan]

ALL THESE SPECIAL CASES OMG

🤣

[shrewd monolith]

oh, that can also be done as a reshade anyway. that's how i tested in starfield to know if i was crushing. by replacing float3(0,0,0) with yellow.

kinda like how you have a clip color

[loud tartan]

I display 6 digits after the dot:

• smallest non 0 nits in HDR10: 0.00004... nits ✅
• smallest non 0 nits in scRGB: 0.000004... nits ✅

[shrewd monolith]

👍 so that answers that

thanks for checking 🙏

[loud tartan]

I designed it like that 🙂

[shrewd monolith]

good designing 👍

[loud tartan]

oh wait it can be lower than that

uhhh

[shrewd monolith]

0 + 2.4414e-4 is min i think

whatever elipson is

though i have no idea if directx will ever round down

[loud tartan]

should be round to nearest even

[clever bloom]

new screenshot, pretty sure i have the up to date shader

[shrewd monolith]

a reshade before with a slider would answer that

[loud tartan]

0.0000003 nits is theoretically the lowest in scRGB, so ‼️

[loud tartan]

there might have been a black pixel somewhere in your other screenshots

[loud tartan]

extreme edge cases in scRGB are:

• RGB(0, 0, 0.00000006)
• RGB(-0.00000006, 0, 0.00000018)
  there are probably some other ones
  I guess I can add another digit 😬

I tested these

@clever bloom there are filters to filter by nits in the HDR analysis shader to see where those pixels actually are
there is highlighting of nit range and displaying pixels above or below a certain threshold as black

0.00043 RGB channel values is 4/1023 in HDR10
on OLEDs the pixel is very much visibly on in this case

[loud tartan]

right I remember deciding against this because it's such a extreme edge case

[shrewd monolith]

11945 shaders; 5382 unique

oh nice, they left all the debug info

not using unreal's ACES LUT

[shrewd monolith]

idk, this looks like upgraded sdr based on the code #1248107862929047552 . after tonemapping, there's a stretch to EditorNITLevel.

idk until i start messing with it

but SDR could just be clamped

interesting, the rendering is actually 2560x1072 for 2560x1440 so the letterboxing is from UI blending, not the game rendering

[dim kestrel]

Yea, but you van see that the black bars are not 0% black 😄

[merry magnet]

maybe they fixed it already

[shrewd monolith]

#1242512664090120283 message it's the UI that has raised black. game doesn't render into that space (already decompile it)

[merry magnet]

yes, I had mentioned that the game doesn't draw black bars

it just renders at a different aspect ratio and then draws on top of "black"

but black isn't black 😛

UI blending shouldn't cause raised blacks though?

[shrewd monolith]

the render doesn't have that area. it's the ui output that is making black 0.00004

[polar glen]

The "voices" are subtitled on the black bars during the gameplay, maybe that's why

[shrewd monolith]

i can output 0 and see really quick

yeah, i output 0 and the game just adds 0.0004

the game can render down to 0, but when it comes to blend with ui, gets raised

SV_Target.rgb = 0;

[merry magnet]

ok, if you can tell me the exact shader name

I can tell the contact I have

so they fix it

[shrewd monolith]

paid renodx mod only!

[merry magnet]

does it raise pixels of the game render too or just the black bars pixels?

[shrewd monolith]

that's what i mean. i modify the game render to output 0, and it comes out on the screen as 0.00004, meaning it's adding, not multiplying

let me check the final shader

[merry magnet]

it could be that they also tonemap the UI?

[shrewd monolith]

nah, i'd guess funky math

their final shader has two textures:

Texture2D<float4> UITexture : register(t0, space0);
Texture2D<float4> SceneTexture : register(t1, space0);

also they left all the debug/trace names and structures

it's straight up their final shader.

where it raises

they do a safe division with max(EPILSON, 0)

so when they blend the UI, it adds to 0

float4 _39 = UITexture.Sample(UISampler, float2(TEXCOORD.x, TEXCOORD.y));
float _44 = _39.w;
// float _46 = max(6.1035199905745685100555419921875e-05f, _39.x);
// float _48 = max(6.1035199905745685100555419921875e-05f, _39.y);
// float _49 = max(6.1035199905745685100555419921875e-05f, _39.z);
float _46 = _39.x;
float _48 = _39.y;
float _49 = _39.z;

and fixed

there's no need for it. there's no division here anyway

[merry magnet]

that's why I'm always mega careful with max and EPSILON

[merry magnet]

it's better to branch around zero instead of do max(0.000001, color) on division

this is the proof the human eye can see 0.0000000001 nits 😄

[shrewd monolith]

on OLED, shouldn't, but even miniled/lcd have dimming zones. no reason for them to be lit.

[next oracle]

This is the first game where very often it legitimately starts to feel like you're controlling a feature live action film

[next oracle]

I assume it uses software Lumen, any way to mod HW Lumen?

"Another menu nitpick isn't limited to Hellblade 2. In short, there's no way to turn on hardware Lumen, which Unreal Engine natively supports. Instead, software Lumen is used universally on all platforms no matter the settings and, as my friend and colleague John showed in his Hellblade 2 tech review, this means quality can be lacking as screen-space tracing is used extensively. The majority of UE5 games released to date do not offer the ability to toggle hardware Lumen either, just like Hellblade 2."

ugh

this is so stupid when even Epic's own public UE5 demo Matrix Awakens, released only on consoles, used Hardware Lumen

[dreamy cave]

i'm sure hw lumen will be in more games in future but yeah it's dumb to only implement software

[polar glen]

Sw lumen isn't forward compatible with hw lumen, you can force it with right cvars but it breaks the lighting on some objects

Though they could provide option for hw reflections at least, like Robocop

[next oracle]

you cannot force it if they compiled the game with the feature disabled in the UE project

because the shaders won't be there

at least Hellblade 2 has environments suitable for SW Lumen

natural landscapes, mostly diffuse materials

[scenic dew]

My guess is that on consoles, most games are optimized to max out the GPU and not so much on the CPU...so shifting lumen to unused CPU cycles makes more sense?

Pretty amazing they could make a real-time GI system even remotely performant in software

[next oracle]

I have no idea what you're trying to say. You think Lumen is done on the CPU?

[next oracle]

UE5 Lumen didn't invent rasterized real-time GI

Anyway, we keep seeing UE5 games ship on PC with Hardware Lumen locked out because the developers are simply neglecting the PC version

[void tree]

Software lumen mostly is right? Only hardware lumen gets heavily accelerated by the GPU right?

[void tree]

I think it is mostly because they can mostly only use Software Lumen on consoles and generally don't bother implementing (and adjusting lighting) proper Hardware Lumen only for PC as that would require implementation-time and QA-testing...

[next oracle]

HW Lumen would not require much testing, and especially not in such a linear short game which also takes place entirely in naturalistic landscapes

[next oracle]

Lighting hasn't been done on the CPU in several decades

[void tree]

Accoding to https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/lumen-technical-details-in-unreal-engine UE5's Software Lumen uses Signed Distance Fields.

Still not 100% sure if those calculations are 100% done on the GPU

But get the feeling that software lumen simply is doing the calculations on the GPU raw without involving any of the RT-accelerated hardware

[next oracle]

Your answer was on that page

"Lumen uses Software Ray Tracing against Signed Distance Fields by default. This tracing representation is supported on any hardware supporting Shader Model 5 (SM5), and only requires that Generate Mesh Distance FIelds be enabled in the Project Settings."

it's done via shaders

HW RT has a higher CPU cost than SW Lumen

[tardy seal]

I think it uses screen space for small stuff, signed distance for medium sized stuff and voxels for big stuff

[void tree]

True, that's the answer

[next oracle]

Finished the game

Damn what an experience

I'd give it 8.5/10

If the gameplay was more in depth with a bit less linearity could have been a near 10

But the overall experience is just so strong that it's like an 8 at a minimum

And this is the first game that truly had moments of utter photo-realism that were tricking my brain

also really smooth experience, no performance issues, no hitching

[merry magnet]

I thought it was a let down

the story was so random to me

[next oracle]

Software Lumen was very unfortunately noticeable

almost always in reflections

and very often in the cave section

should have at least had HW option for that

[polar glen]

https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2024-the-big-senuas-saga-hellblade-2-tech-interview

Some neat tech info here