RenoDX: Watch Dogs

[spice vector]

Now this is a game that could probably make use of it well

[elder sinew]

id be interested in that, would actually like to give the game another playthrough at some point since there are a lot of big overhaul mods

thats all independent from renodx though right, renodx itself doesnt have any weird incompatibilities with the various graphical/gameplay overhaul mods? i dont think it would but just checking XD

right the game file modifications are what i was thinking of

like this looks pretty good https://www.nexusmods.com/watchdogs/mods/156

If you want to make your own color grading, be it natively or through ReShade, make sure to delete the default LUT in graphics\postfx. Also, windy_city.game.xml has some extra options for ambient colors that might be useful
this is probably a problem there i suppose, but easy enough to solve

ah ok, sweet. havent messed with cp2077 in a while so i cant say

pretty sure when i replayed it when the expansion dropped i just played mostly vanilla

didnt even have an hdr monitor at the time so i need to replay that at some point as well but ill wait until i upgrade my hardware 😂

[peak jungle]

Preview of incoming update:

• safer upgrades (using hotswap)
• added Vignette, CA, film grain (disabled in camera view).
• added slider for Profiler's flashbang effect.
• various fixes and improvements

[peak jungle]

Adjusted auto-exposure slider behaviour and color grading presets.

[peak jungle]

Fixed Ambient Occlusion artifacts. 🙈

[peak jungle]

• added support for Camera Tools mod alternative weather.
• fixed broken FXAA decompilation (I think).

And that would be it for now, this is on Nexus too

[nocturne heron]

@peak jungle did you ever try to mod watch dogs 2?

I looked and it seemed very messy.

[peak jungle]

I had a quick look and saw some lutbuilder, but couldn't really figure it out back then. Maybe tonemapping is baked in a LUT and lutbuilder starts off that and applies grading? Dunno really.
Was planning to have another look eventually some day now that I'm done with first one, but if it's messy, I might pass. 😅

[nocturne heron]

@versed hawk has renodx fixed the issue where deferred command lists appeared all mixed up in the draw call list capture?

Watch dogs 2 suffered from that.

[versed hawk]

Yes, they're by time stamp now, not command list

[nocturne heron]

Mmm? That was the problem in the first place?

They were added from multiple threads at the time of their call

But to be ordered properly they need to be gathered in a separate list and then displayed when the deferred command list is merged with the main list.

[versed hawk]

It was a vector of command lists, but each individual command list has their execution in different times, so now it's copied over to a single vector and sorted by timestamp

[nocturne heron]

Ok. I'm not sure I understand, but hopefully it's right 😅.

[nocturne heron]

Ok I got it.

I didn't rely on timestamps of the execution of the deferred cmdlist

I found a way to do it properly through reshade directly, there's functions hooked that already tell u the order.

[versed hawk]

I don't thread lock between command list / device until present. That's when it dumps everything that happens in the command list to the Device private data

[crisp geode]

I've been trying to get this mod to work but I keep getting a totally black screen on startup. I can interact with the game menus and open up the reshade settings but they just stick to the screen. Is there something I'm doing wrong?

[flint orbit]

borderless fullscreen
latest reshade 6.5.1
renodx - snapshot latest version

[crisp geode]

Thx! Using the latest snapshot version does let me see the game fine but only the UI brightness slider works
Is there a possible conflict with another mod?

[flint orbit]

why not try with clean install first

[crisp geode]

my dumbass did an overwrite of the original files instead of using a mod manager lol

[crisp geode]

can confirm works fine after a reinstall thanks again

[peak jungle]

I tried to make sure at least the most used mods are compatible, but I didn't test every mod out there, so feel free to lemme know if you find one that breaks RenoDX I'll look into it.

[crisp geode]

I'm honestly not even sure what ended up fixing it
I originally tried the Motherpacking Modpacked Modpackous Modpack and I was getting a black screen with the file uploaded to nexus then using the snapshot latest version got me into the game but with only UI brightness working
after a total reinstall I installed the EPIC Mod Pack (EMP) instead and it worked fine

[peak jungle]

Yup', it seems Native Dithering by Parallellines0451 is the culprit.

Added support for it here, so this should work with Motherpacking Modpacked (and any other pack that includes Native Dithering).

Will update Nexus later, thanks for letting me know!

[gritty wave]

I think someone else tried to use RenoDX to fix the games RTX flickering and came out of it basically having the game in fullbright, which I guess did indeed fix the problem. Can't have flickering lighting if there's no lighting to begin with. 😭

you can fix it with either a profile inspector .nip or DXVK, or both, some people report shittier luck on 50 series with either option

[vapid rampart]

I had some shaders mapped out maybe a year and a half ago

https://github.com/mqhaji/renodx/tree/beta/src/games/watchdogs2

[peak jungle]

I have this in some backup

I remember reading that people get rid of ACES or something with mods. 😅

Maybe that would make RenoDX easier to set up.

[vapid rampart]

Oh if it has ACES

could try looking for aces numbers

Or fake aces numbers

[peak jungle]

Can't remember if I did that, but I wondered if it wasn't just baked in external LUT...

I had guessed these are what's loaded by lut builder.

Not sure though, no RenderDoc/Pix so it really was a guess here.

[gritty wave]

is this what you're referring to? https://www.nexusmods.com/watchdogs2/mods/3

[peak jungle]

Can't remember it's been like half a year, possibly yea!

AgX color transform for WD2.

For lifelike colors, soft highlight rolloff and smooth color transitions.
Replaces the default ACES tonemap and LUT.

Oh, is 3dmigoto mod 🤔

No lutbuilder tho, sad. These all look like post-processing/lut sampling shader, and it skips the whole original LUT which also includes grading afaik. 😕

[peak jungle]

Mmmmh, maybe to create a neutral LUT in lutbuilder instead of starting off baked one is doable.
Something I had no idea about back then so definitely never tried.
Could be pretty straight forward (?)

[lean kite]

I can't get RenoDX to work when using this Modpack. Anyone know a way to work around it?

https://www.nexusmods.com/watchdogs/mods/357

It lets me change the UI brightness slider but that's it. If I uninstall the Modpack RenoDX works fine.

[versed hawk]

it's a mod pack, so probably one of the mods changes one of the shaders that renodx modifies. no clue which one it would be

maybe the DOF remover

[peak jungle]

I'd say Watch Dogs REBORN

Graphics have been reworked, hard to exactly tell you what are the changes since it's the usual content - Colorgrading, Sky, Lighting, Bloom etc.

I didn't look into this one since modder suggests not to use it because of some bugs/crashes.
Recommends this instead, which I made sure is compatible.

Now if people include it in packs, maybe they figured out a workaround for Reborn's issues.
I'll look into it, just a couple shaders to add.
Thanks for letting me know!

[lean kite]

ya rebirth seems to work fine with that modpack. But ill look into some others that might be compatible. thanks for the help!

[peak jungle]

• Added support for Watch Dogs REBORN (and any modpack using it including REBIRTH)

[mild jolt]

Bit bright maybe still

[peak jungle]

This is SDR screenshot 😞
Try to increase Clipping maybe

[mild jolt]

Guess i'm not getting HDR then.

[peak jungle]

Maybe some overlay or background application interfering somehow? RTSS/Nvidia App usually.
Also make sure to use latest ReShade (6.5.1 atm)

[mild jolt]

think it's probably ubisoft connect

[peak jungle]

I've also been using that version. I always disable overlays though, so if there's a toggle in there I likely have it off

[mild jolt]

Gonna try clean install

[peak jungle]

Of the game? I don't think game mods should affect swapchain upgrade.
Most likely something external, like Nvidia filters/RTX HDR. I'd try to close RTSS also.

[gritty copper]

Hey there I had the same problem today

first time running the game with renodx worked fine HDR looked awesome

second time for some reason highlights were clipped at 203 nits but all sliders were technically working

except for the peak brightness settings

really weird

[peak jungle]

Hello. Did you change anything in between? Installed some other game mod maybe?
Or some ReShade effects

[gritty copper]

I'm not sure. I reinstalled the whole game and all mods and it's all good now

could've been a mod or some other setting

will let you know if it comes back and thanks for the awesome mod!

[gritty copper]

Hey so after playing a bit more today it seems to happen during normal gameplay all the time

sometimes when switching from gameplay to cutscenes and from cutscenes back to gameplay it will suddenly cap the peak brightness to 203

just it happened and only thing I did was transition into a mission/quest there wasn't even a cutscene

seems like there are some shaders missing or something I don't really know I guess you'll probably find out 🙂

after completing the mission, hdr started working again, I guess it's really just some shaders that are just missing

[peak jungle]

Thanks will have a look! Any modpack or graphic mod installed?

[gritty copper]

yea actually let me check the name

The Fall of Windy City

and this one https://www.nexusmods.com/watchdogs/mods/345

[gritty copper]

the effect of turning on the profiler also clipps the whole image to whatever UI brightness is set to, I guess the game sees this as UI so that would make sense

[gritty copper]

oh actually the problem is tied to the anti aliasing setting

I might have missed that in the description on nexus, using temporal smaa resolves my issues

[peak jungle]

Ooooh. I might have missed that, what was your previous AA setting?

[gritty copper]

I tested FXAA, MSAA and TXAA and all of them had this issue

just started using temporal smaa a few minutes ago and it's not happening with that AA setting

temporal smaa seems to look best overall anyway

[peak jungle]

Any particular mission/situation I can look for to reproduce this consistently?

[gritty copper]

just turning the profiler on/off and I think random world events will trigger the behavior

[gritty copper]

actually the most reliable way to reproduce this is hacking into a camera

when hacking into cameras using msaa highlights are clipped at 203nits

[peak jungle]

This is so weird, I can't reproduce any of this.

[gritty copper]

hmmm

[peak jungle]

If you set for example Blowout to 100, does color come back when clamping occurs?
That would mean for sure a missing shader, and later I can make a build that logs those in ReShade.log so I don't have to reproduce it myself.

[gritty copper]

ok funny thing

if you boot up the game with msaa (for example 4x)

the issue will happen

if I switch to temporal smaa while ingame

and then back to msaa

it doesn't happen and msaa is working

if I boot up the game with smaa the issue doesn't happen at all

really weird lol

[peak jungle]

https://tenor.com/view/ubisoft-moment-ubisoft-moment-gif-2151549476317201993

Something fairly similar occurs in AC Syndicate, booting with FXAA or no AA would look different from switching to that after booting with some of the other options. Broken output in both cases though, so only MSAA/TXAA are usable with the mod.