Baldur's Gate 3

[dull cobalt]

Careful @strange lantern I'm getting a sense of deja vu

[random oak]

Crimson Desert: The Gatening

[cobalt pewter]

tried the pinned vulkan versions but explodes :x

[random oak]

read the instructions: https://discord.com/channels/1408098019194310818/1410855640112566375/threads/1466367902923096105/1466367902923096105

you need to find the ReShade64.dll and override it, it should be somewhere, no idea about linux

[cobalt pewter]

i did but still exploded :/

[vivid yacht]

I was gonna send $50 but the man's kofi doesn't even have an option to send him money lol

might as well be a substack at this point @strange lantern

a myspace lol

[strange lantern]

Kofi is being special

My paypal is blocked as well

is there another option?

Just pigeon mail me some sweets

[amber stream]

Buymeacoffee

[random oak]

https://tenor.com/view/regretevator-roblox-picmix-pest-webcore-gif-15815855612149374446

[strange lark]

Killer post

[shy sleet]

Ok. So there is this trap in the middle of the floor. Where is this reflection coming from and also why is this room outputting 300-500 nits? Its a completely enclosed hidden room with no windows.

[strange lantern]

probably the sky probe or cubemap the game uses

and its not occluded

its for "visibility" purposes a lot of the time

[shy sleet]

Is that also what’s raising the brightness in the room?

Or in any area of the game

[frank flare]

it's not resident evil, not a horror game with jump scare moments,
bg3 lighting was designed like that and locations were created with the assumption of such lighting, for better or worse

[flat pawn]

how much sweets for DOS EE hdr

[strange lantern]

At some point

[rain tinsel]

anyone else getting some crashing?

[wooden abyss]

Lately, I've also been experiencing frequent crashes. I'm using the RenoDX DX11 version. Sometimes I can play for a few minutes, while other times the game simply gets stuck on the loading screen.

[wooden abyss]

I use DLAA, by the way.

[rain tinsel]

Vulkan version for me thats causing issues

[wooden abyss]

Vulkan seems to be working for me, but when I try to move the sliders, nothing happens. However, if I go into the game menu, I can adjust the brightness and saturation there. That's not how it's supposed to work, is it?

[wooden abyss]

Did you also overwrite the Reshade64.dll file? Check the pinned area.

[cobalt pewter]

I tried on last proton-ge and it's giving me errors right at the start :/

[rain tinsel]

I’m aware. You can’t even get into the game without it

[wooden abyss]

Can you adjust the sliders in the RenoDX menu? And if so, does anything change for you?

[random oak]

yes of course, and the in-game HDR will be ignored, that's how it's supposed to work
Did you get the Vulkan Reno mod?

[rain tinsel]

Is the reshade menu green?

[wooden abyss]

RenoDx for DX11 works as you described. I tried Vulkan earlier and nothing changes at all.

[wooden abyss]

How does it get green again?

[rain tinsel]

You have to install reshade as a Vulkan layer

Uninstall reshade

Then install it again and select Vulkan instead of dx11/12

It’s it’s not green, it won’t work

[wooden abyss]

Ah okay, thank you. I'll try it right away.

[wooden abyss]

Okay, I installed ReShade Vulkan—using the reshade64.dll from the pinned section and the ReNoDX Vulkan version—but my ReShade still isn't turning green/turquoise.

[random oak]

is the dxgi.dll still in the bin folder next to the .exe? you can remove that
Also make sure you're actually starting the vulkan version of BG3

[wooden abyss]

Why?

I managed to get ReShade Vulkan load. The color of the ReShade menu has changed, and this message appears on the loading screen.

[random oak]

that is the bug that the 64.dll is supposed to fix, where did you put it?

[wooden abyss]

I used the latest Reshade64.dll from the RenoVK Thread dated May 26, 2026.

[random oak]

hm your's has a different size than mine, try it again with this one #1466367902923096105 message

mine shows 5,216KB

[wooden abyss]

Thanks, that works. But now I have the next problem: it is flickering massively, with very severe visual glitches.

[random oak]

did you keep the newest RenoVK version?
did you delete the old RenoDX11 mod from the folder?

[wooden abyss]

This is my Game Folder.

[random oak]

hmmm

[wooden abyss]

I usually use RHI to install ReShade and Reno, as well as the other tools. However, for some reason, I had to install ReShade Vulkan manually. Now, though, both ReShade Vulkan and the RenoDX Vulkan add-on are showing up in RHI. I had also selected DLAA; this seemed to cause massive visual glitches and flickering. I have now switched to DLSS Quality mode, and everything is working very well so far. I’m going to play a bit longer to see if everything really runs without any issues. Thank you so much for your patience and help!

[random oak]

be careful with RHI, it can override the 64.dll
@rain tinsel already talked to Rank about it
Vulkan is a complicated matter in that regard sadly

But I'm glad that you got it working! 🫡

[cloud mirage]

nah took me a bit to get vulkan running, since i cant read but no crashes so far and im about 20h~ in

[random oak]

I didn't play much yet, but I also had no problems so far with Vulkan

[rain tinsel]

It’s possible it’s a different mod causing it I guess but it’s weird because my friend is using the same mods and not crashing

[cloud mirage]

Idk now RHI killed my installation and I can’t even install the crappy unofficial reshade version

[rain tinsel]

@strange lantern you make edits to the ui shaders, right?

[strange lantern]

To unclamp UI from SDR yes

[random oak]

yeah best to keep RHI away from Vulkan games and handle that yourself

at least until there is a solution

[rain tinsel]

It’s totally fine unless it specifically needs renovk reshade fork

[eternal radish]

@dull cobalt could just push these somewhere on his repo and rhi could grab it

[dull cobalt]

@odd flower has to approve the PR

[odd flower]

which?

[dull cobalt]

https://github.com/clshortfuse/renodx/pull/548

[odd flower]

yeah, has conflicts, i just pinged now

[eternal radish]

for the custom vulkan reshade for k?

[dull cobalt]

Updated

[dull cobalt]

Oh shit thought you meant fromsoft mod lol

Renovk is unstable, not sure yet

[eternal radish]

lol

[cloud mirage]

I excluded it but for whatever reason it got nuked, but whatever managed to fix it

[keen trail]

Its been a while since i used this mod, why vulkan all of a sudden? or can i still use directX11?

[random oak]

Forge wanted to do some major changes and Vulkan was fitting better for it and more performant

the DX11 version is still available at Nexus for example: https://www.nexusmods.com/baldursgate3/mods/15892

I personally had no problems with the Vulkan version and I gained a tremendous amount of fps, so I can recommend it

[vivid yacht]

The vulkan version has some nice fixes baked in over the dx11 version, no hero lighting, better shadows (with some bugs, but overall I like it more). I think it runs better too, but I get over 100 fps on this game no matter what I do lol (5090)

I heard act 3 is really tough to get to run well, but we aren't there yet

I think forge said the HDR itself in dx11 needed some minor fixes too

Removed Larian's custom ACES 2 beta grading
Removed the disgusting shadow saturation boosting
Using PsychoTM for tonemapping + Stockman LMS and co
Act 3 crowd NPC fresnal glow as been removed
Added film grain
Added bloom slider
Upgraded RTVs so less banding and UI characters are now unclamped

[keen trail]

Yeah it does look good, but portraits look hideous and the green flames and also undead have a really blue tint that looks out of place, maybe i try the vulkan version out

[upper flume]

i really really wish you could do windowed mode with vulkan 😭

[random oak]

borderless that bad? xD

[keen trail]

18:42:03:538 [ 2468] | WARN | No add-on was registered by 'D:\Baldurs Gate 3\bin\renodx-baldursgate3-vk.addon64'. Unloading again ...

i might be too stupid trying out Vulkan, what does that mean?

[cloud mirage]

Idk i copied the custom reshade DLL into the reshade folder and installed everything via RHI

And it just worked out of the box

The normal installer wasn’t working for me for whatever reason

It was replacing the DLL I overwrote

[vivid yacht]

you also can't use DLAA, dlss quality seems to work (and even forcing dlss ultra quality via nvidia inspector)

[keen trail]

You mean into the bin Folder in the game directory?

[cloud mirage]

No read the installation instructions

[forest mason]

Trying to get an understanding of this. The only version currently available in the dx11 version on Nexus - but Forge is working on a Vulkan version that will have many improvements (making choosing vulkan more viable)

And that vulkan version isn't available in any capacity yet

I assume the DX11 version is closer to the Larian tonemapping - which changes the original games tones a bit much imo

[amber stream]

how do you mean changes the original games tones

anyway the dx11 version basically just matches how it looks in sdr

check pins for vulkan version

[forest mason]

Probably said it badly - the tonemapping for the original HDR implementation doesn't seem very good? I thought this Renodx Implementation might just be using that original tonemapping but enabling sliders to change it more.

But you are saying for the dx11 version (currently on nexus) it tries to match SDR? Doesn't use ACES or anything?

[amber stream]

the game uses pretty much the same tonemapping between sdr and hdr

contrast/saturation difference is just due to gamma/parameters mostly

It roughly matches the general contrast/saturation of sdr with the dx11 version of the mod but with custom code

forge's changes are way more in depth and change the rendering a lot

so he just changed the look of the game entirely

[forest mason]

Hmm well I choose vulkan and the Reshade menu can't load witht hat modified reshade dll (or the normal one)

I am able to load the dx11 version, modify variable and load the vulkan one again. No idea if it's actually loading it though

I guuess I might stick to the original dx11 mod for now. I want it to be as close to SDR as possible with a slight pop with the benefits of HDR. I guess that will provide that.

When this Vulkan mod is finished I'll revisit 🙂

[keen trail]

I guess im too dumb for these Instructions: Use the following custom reshade.dll (otherwise game explodes). You have to add it to C:\ProgramData\ReShade (or where ever your global reshade Vulkan layer .dll is)

What the fuck is global reshade?

[eternal radish]

reshade for vulkan doesn't install the dll on a per game basis but hooks the exe to the global dll with a registry edt

probly due to how t he API works

so the global reshade is in C:\ProgramData\ReShade

[vivid yacht]

yeah i wanted to ask, does this mean that if i were to use a different vulkan-based renodx you have to swap the dll out

[eternal radish]

ritsu fork integrates everything normal reshade does

so ultimately you only need ritsu fork

like u can just drop it there and it work for every vk game

the only caveat is that evertime u manually install reshade i think it replaces the dll

but i can't confirm

[dull cobalt]

It does replace it, yes

Just built this, better than posting dll

[vivid yacht]

ok so theorectically I should just run this even when installing dx games

that way i'll never have to swap it

[dull cobalt]

Yeah

[eternal radish]

git autobuild on your repo

[strange lantern]

With BG3 I'm going to RE, find their shader compiler and patch that shit so I don't have to edit 15 deferred shaders

Also going to improve shadows native side

Don't have to worry about reshade API limitations

[random oak]

don't forget the Texture switching/flickering bug

[strange lantern]

As to when?

Stuck in the XCOM 2 gulag atm

[random oak]

https://tenor.com/view/howdareyou-offended-rude-offensive-appalled-gif-26011926

[strange lantern]

XCOM 2 proved I was holding bsck

Well we don't have source for BG3

But I shall make do with all the other info I picked up

From Vulkan blogs about the game + their talk

Also Norbytes Script Extender already has a lot of stuff RE'ed

I found mentions to both LODs and virtual texture size limit

Dunno why no one has created a mod utilisating any

Only aware of Otis editing LODs

[random oak]

too busy making another subclass/race/WyllxAstarion mod
honestly the low amount of technical mods for this game is embarrassing

[strange lantern]

Class mod #40375038503

Cosmetic mod #50693059035

[strange lantern]

The game is perfect

I am going to try implementing instancing for meshes in XCOM 2 after that I am improving lighting, shadows GI xegtao ect

If I can get radiance cascades working

I'll do the same for BG3

[devout briar]

You are out of crimson desert gulag?

[strange lantern]

Yes

Now REing XCOM 2

RenoDX+ bro

[devout briar]

if renodx is so good where is renodx 2

[strange lantern]

Literally what I am doing

I am thinking of adding HDR and reno

Native

No need for Reshade since I can already access whatever I need

[random oak]

geezus, we are entering a new Era

[strange lantern]

Wellll

This takes way more time

This isn't going to be viable for every game

Only slop games I like

I'll send my slop tools to Laz and some other geezers

We fixing UE5 with this

Reverse Kevin

[random oak]

https://tenor.com/view/now-old-man-the-future-is-now-old-man-gif-9677657

[eternal radish]

@strange lantern just ask clanker to add dlaa to total war warhammer 3

[strange lantern]

I'll be REing slophammer 3 once they stop patching it

[eternal radish]

just ask clanker to dlaa tww3

[vivid yacht]

xcom 2 is legitimately one of my favorite games in last twenty years after about 100 failed commander runs I gave it up though

I had really good runs that I lost on the world view like the countdown timer

so lame

commander ironman ofc

[vivid yacht]

I don't know what this means but if you fix the shadows I will pay you if you give me a way to do so lol

i wanted to pay you already but you are putting roadblocks up lol

[keen trail]

okay my mistake was using the launcher and trying vulkan from there

[keen trail]

Thank you for the explanation, that makes a lot of sense to me now

[strange lantern]

Beginning work on BG3 RE

Ghidra auto analysis finished up

[strange lantern]

BG3 RenoDX: InitThread started bg3.exe base: 0x7FF6CCB70000 (preferred: 0x140000000, offset: 0x7FF58CB70000) BG3 RenoDX: Phase 1 — Vulkan hooks... vk_hooks: hooked vkGetInstanceProcAddr hooks::InstallPhase1: 1 installed Phase 1 complete: 1 hooks BG3 RenoDX: Phase 2 — waiting for renderer init... vk_hooks: intercepted vkGetDeviceProcAddr vk_hooks: intercepted vkGetDeviceProcAddr vk_hooks: intercepted vkGetDeviceProcAddr vk_hooks: intercepted vkQueuePresentKHR hooks::InstallPhase2: 0 installed Phase 2 complete: 0 hooks

And away we goooo

[wooden abyss]

What can we expect in the future?

[strange lantern]

Custom shaders + graphics = since I am not working through reshade abstraction I can add and edit whatever I want

LOD / draw distance = Increasing

Profiling what exactly causes Act 3 dips

Shadow improvements

Virtual texturing limit increase = to stop texture loading / unloading

Reflex + FG implementation = Maybe?

What I want to find is their shader batching compiling whatever you want to call it system

the one that is responsible for splitting 15 deferred shaders

That way I might be able to edit a single shader and then have the system split the permutations as needed rather than me having to edit 20 different shaders and have mismatched tiles

[wooden abyss]

That sounds very, very cool. I'm excited to see what the future brings!

[strange lantern]

BG3 SE does its own imgui hooking

and it conflicts

I cba to fork it

I will have to build it in visual studio and Norbtye updates it every week

[wooden abyss]

That sounds very annoying.

[strange lantern]

Ok built SE fork

Now ImGui between my slop and SE wont break

ReShade hooks on a different layer which is why its ImGui works but I require deeper hooking which happens on the same layer as SE

[strange lantern]

Me now that I can natively fix the game and dont have to rely on RitsuVK

https://tenor.com/view/i-dont-want-to-play-with-you-anymore-toy-story-i-dont-wanna-play-with-you-anymore-dont-wanna-play-no-more-play-gif-26906930

@dull cobalt

Maybe I can debug whatever causes the black squares with DLAA

[devout briar]

pt wen

[strange lantern]

Radiance Cascades bro

[strange lantern]

Found LOD and draw distance settings

[random oak]

Most exciting news of 2026

[strange lantern]

Vanilla / New sloppa

Looks like something is conflicting

its both better and worse

[devout briar]

Increased draw distance might be good for a third person playthrough

[strange lantern]

This helps get rid of crimson Desert tier playdoh with no perf cost

But instanced meshes, shadows and HLODs are still ass

So the REing continues

[strange lantern]

Got instanced meshes to have higher draw distance

but there looks to be some sort of mem budget or limit

it adds more but also makes some meshes worse

[naive lichen]

yo wtf

[random oak]

same problem as the loading/unloading? or maybe just similar

[strange lantern]

Looks to be related

I am able to solve all the blurry ahh textures

But big meshes like buildings break

[random oak]

of course the game doesn't want to be easy

[short frost]

damn i just started bg3 but now i might have to wait till Forge does his thing

can u implement everything from start to finish in the next 10 minutes so i can play

https://tenor.com/view/puppy-dog-eyes-sad-saint-innocent-shrek-gif-5356542188534881202

[random oak]

get in line bud, I have postponed my just started playthrough for over a month now
Cannot wait to get rid of the shadow flicker and texture unloading which break immersion oh so badly

All hail the Forge!

[strange lantern]

I GOT HIGHER DRAW DISTANCE / LODS WITH NO DOWNSIDES

https://tenor.com/view/gigachad-gif-5430850758035663288

Now I need to improve the streaming budget

Game has 64

So after that other meshes don't increase in quality

Let's try 256

[devout briar]

How to optimize games? Just use more resources

[strange lantern]

Better than "let's murder LODs and shadows for that 0.3ms because shitbox 5 can't into grafix"

[forest mason]

Love coming back to see so much progress

Is this normal haha - using the dx11 nexus mod

[vivid yacht]

apparently portraits are f'ed on dx11 version i literally never noticed though haha

[vivid yacht]

you got one in the oven for us to test bud? My group might play tn haha

[rain tinsel]

@strange lantern doing gods work

[forest mason]

Haha, I'll swap to the vulkan implementation when it's made more headway then 🙂

[wooden abyss]

I'm looking forward to what Forge conjures up.

[shy torrent]

Frog abandoned cd to do bg3

What a chad

[wooden abyss]

CD receives so many updates from the developer in a relatively short period. I believe that once the pace of updates slows down a bit—and most of the graphical improvements have been implemented by the developer—it will be more worthwhile to continue working on it. As of my last check, the updates change so much that the mod constantly requires reworking—a process that consumes a great deal of time and effort.

CD looks best with RR. However, I don't find either of the old presets particularly good due to the noise or smearing. Unfortunately, Nvidia hasn't released a second transformer model for RR either.

[strange lantern]

So a quick recap of what I slopped up

• small clutter, rocks, grass, crates ect have a slider that can get boosted (minimal perf cost and no downsides) I'll probably just max it as a single toggle

• Large meshes are 50/50 increasing the cull distance makes meshes go from using HLODs to using up close meshes quality meshes. However I ran into the issue of meshes disappearing

My "fix" stops all disappearing meshes but I now noticed it does so by doubling and applying both the HLOD proxy and the high quality mesh at the same time depending on the distance

So I am investigating figuring out wtf controls allat

[strange lantern]

Perf cost for all these is non existent

I am going to try a force LOD0

[strange lantern]

In the talk Larian said they first added LODs and HLODs and found perf was still ass so only after did they add Intel's MOC

So I think this is a case of "we utterly butchered draw distance and LODs. Gained every little perf and the realised we need actual occlusion culling"

But they still kept the doodoo playdoh draw distance

[shy torrent]

Even bg3 can't escape from the Skyrim lod unload bug

[strange lantern]

It's abysmal

Far distance = has LOD mesh
Close up distance = has mesh
Medium distance= mesh entirely disappears no LOD or high quality mesh

If everyone could pass me some source code that would be great

Downloaded toolkit but I don't know if there's anything useful there

[shy torrent]

This is peak skyrim jank

I feel right at home

[strange lantern]

The game is "dipped out toes in Vulkan but because the team didn't want to switch fully from DX11 we made a half and half mismatch"

[shy torrent]

I watched their talk about it

[strange lantern]

Bro Vulkan is sooo good, Khronos is marketing and sponsoring us

Proceeds to make a goofy ahh implementation
Btw for our next games we dropped Vulkan entirely and moving over to DX12 anyways

What did they mean by this

[shy torrent]

Considering what ID can do with it

I think it's a classical case of

https://tenor.com/view/dark-souls2-skill-issue-gif-25396804

[strange lantern]

I like how Vulkan's entire carry is literally just

ID

Emulators

DXVK because michaelsoft made DX9 worse

[random oak]

I can still remember the Hype around Vulkan, we were so naive back then 😭

[shy torrent]

Minecraft just swapped to vulkan

[strange lantern]

OGL betta

More soulful

[worthy belfry]

no native hdr output on opengl though

[strange lantern]

Mantle was AyyyMD actually doing something legit because their drawcall handling was soo dogshit

Then Michaelsoft panicked and released DX12

[strange lantern]

Just Extensionmaxx

[worthy belfry]

but vulkan has extensions too

[strange lantern]

That's too much Extensionmaxxing

Need like 10 extensions just for Reflex to still not work

Can't wait for me to try and get streamline working here

And FG

[strange lantern]

So

Where is my source code?

Why hasnt anyone posted

[random oak]

https://tenor.com/view/box-of-shame-peek-im-sorry-gif-16767234

[short frost]

https://tenor.com/view/rented-bunny-horror-game-horror-candle-gif-12556992930635681589

[forest mason]

So does the vanilla game actually differ graphically between dx11 and vulkan?

[strange lantern]

It doesnt

Even though Vulkan is mismatch

It still runs better CPU side and has faster loading

[rain tinsel]

At what point do you just make a regular mod for the game? Lmao

Like with their toolkit

[strange lantern]

Toolkit doesn't give me much

I did find include symbols in the dlls

But a SE mod is proving impossible

My goal rn is to fix draw distance, I can't do anything until I improve it

It's soo dogshit

Norbytes hasn't RE enough of the rendering

And toolkit + moonglasses toolkit has nada as well

[rain tinsel]

I see

[random oak]

The BG3 modding landscape wouldn't look as bleak as it is, if it wasn't a PITA to fix the underlying problems.

I'm glad that we have someone like Forge to take a look at it, but at the same time disappointed that such a big success in the gaming market hasn't caught more interest from the high know-how crowd...

[vivid yacht]

@strange lantern does you mod conflict with this? or complimentary

[strange lantern]

With what?

[vivid yacht]

https://www.nexusmods.com/baldursgate3/mods/17611

[strange lantern]

For what?

Reno works with it

[vivid yacht]

your shadow improvements

[strange lantern]

Gosh mentioned there's a way to fix the shadows properly engine side but it requires RE. It's what I will do next

Base game shadows use reconstructed depth which causes all manner of issues

Instead of just using the actual Buffer normal depth

[vivid yacht]

sorry what is RE

[random oak]

works fine with the current Vulkan mod, also has like 3x the performance of the DX11 version with Shadows of the gate

[strange lantern]

Reverse engineer

Bashing my head in until I figure out how the engine works

[vivid yacht]

yeah i am currently in a playthrough with console plebes trying to load some loose texture/grpahical imporvements that won't affect them

im hoping loading vivid landscapes as a loose file would work

same with this

[random oak]

this also on board?
https://www.nexusmods.com/baldursgate3/mods/18252
the modder recently removed all Vivid textures so no double download/overwrite etc.

[vivid yacht]

yeah i'm not good or haven't learned anything about making mods but from my knowledge of modding for many years texture stuff is usually like drop in with no conflict

[random oak]

yeah and it adds so much quality... especially with the sad looking textures throughout BG3

[vivid yacht]

the problem with this game is if you load them as a .pak BG3 will block console plebes

if that same mod is not on their in-game manager for consoles

[random oak]

yeah it's nice that we are able to circumvent that

[vivid yacht]

I actdually think the base game looks pretty good

especially character models

the lighting is deffo flat though

[random oak]

sure, but many textures, especially armor etc. can look super low resolution for some reason
no idea why they never offered a high res texture pack
nah let the modders do the work, even though we have the master 8k Texture files in the dev studio server 🙄

[random oak]

yep art direction is pretty amazing, sadly lots of concessions because of console release... and PC never got the option to go higher/better

[vivid yacht]

not always the best idea they could just offer it but it would add like 100 gb to the game file better that modders do it

[random oak]

many games offer optional 4k texture packs, I don't see the problem with that

[vivid yacht]

yeah

I mean art direction goes a long way with fixed hdr this game looks so good to me, it just is missing advanced lighting of modern games

I think the game is uniquely suited for HDR as well

[random oak]

and it's missing proper shadows and Texture budget, they both flicker like crazy...
hopefully Forge can fix all that

[wooden abyss]

I'm really curious to see what @strange lantern will be able to get out of BG3 in the future. From what I've been reading, it seems like a lot of work—and I want to thank you for that. It's truly wonderful that you're doing this. Thanks for all your effort, and thanks to everyone helping Forge out.

[vivid yacht]

game deserves it it's the best CRPG ever imo

[strange lantern]

HOLLLLY FUCKING SHIT

Finnallly

Finally

It's fixed

37 chat sessions

A trillion .mds rewrites

A trillion game loading in saves

[worthy belfry]

what is fixed?

[random oak]

https://tenor.com/view/hackers-hack-the-planet-taogifs-zero-cool-crash-override-gif-5753306679943930050

[strange lantern]

Draw distance

Game has stable draw distances now

Doesn't pop in every 2 seconds

[worthy belfry]

bruh

[worthy belfry]

hackers is sooooo good

[strange lantern]

One fucking float

One

[worthy belfry]

[strange lantern]

They have a Spatial Query Radius (because the HLODs are broken up into tiles)

I was forcing higher quality

But didn't adjust the size of the radius

So shit was just being culled out and disappearing

[random oak]

is that the thing(or similar) that you can see moving around your character in 3rd person games? like a square or circle around your character loading in shit... RDR2 had that problem when I tried playing it 1-2 years ago

[strange lantern]

Maybe? I haven't looking into it too much

I don't know if it's a cell

Like say Bethesda

But it's responsible for grouping all the meshes into their respective areas

And each has a limit

Does the game blow up if I increase the limit? No

So why did Larian place it there?

Probably performance

They removed shadow casting for instanced meshes because they tried improving act 3 perf

Except it barely did anything

But now all your instances meshes lack shadows

As always

Significant quality degradation for 0.2ms improvements to perf

What's funny is that increasing the Spatial Query Radius alone already improves the visuals even without additional cull distance forcing

So the game was already giga cooked

Because of this limit

[random oak]

Funny how the game already shows everywhere that Larian was kinda overburdened by getting BG3 and engine under control, especially with the console releases having to be addressed in a timely manner

seems like the code world of that view seems even more crazy

[strange lantern]

My last couple of messages to clanker are pure schizo

[random oak]

remind me not to stay at Forges place during the AI overlords takeover

[strange lantern]

I now understand why fellas who RE mald

and I am already doing it the easy way via clanker assist

doing this manually is

[random oak]

I get the pain,
Debugged a trainer with Assembly code once... it was so slow to get to the point that I needed
and that was all pre-clanker era

[strange lantern]

Need to test stability now I guess

inb4 game blows up in X under Y becasue of Z

[rain tinsel]

You write to an AI like my dad talks to Siri

I have also felt the will to swear at it before. Then I realize how dystopian that is and get depressed LMAO

[strange lantern]

Tomo I can start malding on shadows

Wait

POE 2

Oofers

Bro dropped heat and is about to bounce

[random oak]

finally!
can't wait to stress test it with the soft Hair mod

[dull cobalt]

So fucking relatable...

[strange lantern]

Norwood Solver

Ahh yes floating rocks

Makes even close up meshes better

[random oak]

don't question the genius of Larian

[strange lantern]

Going to add characters as well

Looks like they use a different function for draw distance

[novel lion]

LETs GO

[foggy ember]

This is unreal, thanks Forge

[river marlin]

This is really promising, though i'm getting flickering grey boxes on the main menu and it got all flashy on the press any key to continue screen. Other than that though everything seems to work normally. Definitely not playable without fixing the bugs first though. I'll try the not WIP one that was posted and see if that changes anything

[mortal horizon]

This is caused by DLAA usually

[river marlin]

I tried toggling it off in the menu but i'll try again one more time just to be thorough

[mortal horizon]

I went to quality to fix this for my setup

[river marlin]

oh hey look at that

i just had to try toggling it again and it's all good now

thanks for the tip 🙂 I think i recalled reading it didn't work with dlaa so i toggled it off, but on and off again fixed it for some reason.

The lighting already looks so much better just in the menu.. i'm excited

I know the video above looks all wrong but i didn't capture properly, looks fine in game

DLSS Quality is so close to DLAA these days anyway, i don't even consider it a visual downgrade. Especially with profile M/4.5

I swapped out the DLLs and it seems to work really well

ok.. the one on the nexus i didn't like because the EOTF emulation felt too strong for some reason, and it felt like it blew out highlights while saturating colors a lot, this so far is chef's kiss. I'll save my commentary though to spare you guys from all the spam xD it's just alway snice to see some love go into one of your favourite games.

[river marlin]

wowowow, i did not realize how bad the player light spills tons of ugly ass lighting into the scene, i mean i knew it was there but not how egregious it was. This is so beautiful... thank you so much forge !

Here's a quick comparison. Once I have more time to actually start playing, i'll make a litlte comparison album that highlights a lot of the beautification this renodx + vulkan setup has to offer

[random oak]

and that is just the beginning..
Right now Forge is working on getting the pixelated/shimmering shadows fixed. Texture loading/unloading
Above you can see that they already took care of the useless pop-in that didn't even really help with performance...

BG3 is on it's way to finally fully arrive in the current gen.

[modest linden]

Hey guys, when i start the game with Vulcan, I get the error "Device_Lost".. anyone know a fix?

[cloud mirage]

Could be anything

Are you running your card oc or uv?

If yes try running it stock if the same error appears

[modest linden]

Completely stock. Don't have that with other Vulkan games

Never had that before

[random oak]

did you replace the ProgramData dll?

[modest linden]

Yes

okay, changed the dll again and now it worked. maybe the first time was buggy. ty guys!

[river marlin]

Yeah, it's great. I did just realize there's one major issue that's kind of a dealbreaker for me. Wanting a fresh experience i opted to give the WASD movement and unlocked camera mods a try. It's fun to play around with, but made me quickly remember that the built in anistropic filtering in BG3 has been broken for ages. I always just forced it through NVCP, but iirc that works by intercepting api level dx draw calls and can't do jack with vulkan 🙁

[random oak]

are you using RHI?

[river marlin]

And normally you could say that it's probably not that noticeable to most people, but the other issue is it really messes up beard appearance.

If only there were a way to get proper AF, darn, guess you can't have it all.

[random oak]

@strange lantern is that possible to fix, or is that something you might want to tackle in the RE build?

[river marlin]

Here's a good example that shows both the beard smearing (this is present in the vanilla game when you don't force AF) and in the distance you can really see the textures all smushy too for the same reason

[strange lantern]

That's draw distance being shit

Already fixed on my end

Dawg my autism and tweaking is reaching defcon 4.9

Character draw distance is abysmal to debug

[river marlin]

The textures get sharper though if i move my camera so they're not on as much on an angle. Also, in DX11 the beard issue with AF is nonexistent, the in-game AF is broken and only gets fixed when you force AF through NVCP.

But it's just one example, there's definitely no AF being applied to textures

This is vanilla game behaviour though esp in Vulkan since there's no way to force it, I'm just not sure if there's any way around it. I don't think there is with any currently existing tools

[strange lantern]

Well I'll just fix base game AF

[river marlin]

Here's the same texture close-up next to my character, I get that most people aren't playing in an over-shoulder style view, but the fact it still messes up beards kinda sucks. I would imagine this also probably affects controller players a bit more than KBM players that probably stick to more top-down view

[random oak]

https://tenor.com/view/heroes-thats-what-heroes-do-thor-ragnarok-thor-thats-gif-20445883

[river marlin]

You'd be a legend my man

This isn't a feature request, I just wanted to point out it's something already broken with the vanilla game, but if you're fixing a lot of dumb stuff in the game already, this is one thing that could be worked around in dx11, but not in vulkan

[strange lantern]

I asked Norbyte if we could send me some special sauce

And help me out with the REing he has already done

[random oak]

oh that's awesome, they must have lots of experience with how long they have been working on ScriptExtender

[river marlin]

Damn, i feel like I don't wanna play without AF now, but also don't wanna play with the dumb lighting and shadows of the original game 😭

[random oak]

why not put it in the backlog for now and enjoy some other games? I have put off my playthrough since Forge announced his RE build

I will start anew once it's out

[river marlin]

Yeah, I might have to do that. I was actually coming back to bg3 after putting it on the backlog though, spent a few days theorycrafting a fun party which is half the fun for me honestly. I played a lot of cyberpunk and Forza after 1 and a half elden ring playthroughs to finish the achievements

I have only 3 achievements left and 2 fun party ideas, really wanted a fantasy rpg to play and i keep coming back to this game because it's so good. I did 2 honor mode playthroughs and got to ansur with a third before i dropped the game for a year or so

[random oak]

yeah I get that feeling, but the shadow flicker and texture unload bug is just too immersion breaking for me, so I stopped for now
Especially with the amazing "soft hair" mod, which makes the hair actually look current gen, the shadows are just going ham

[river marlin]

I didn't see any texture issues in my short tests, also didn't really play much of the game though. The one that stuck out immediately to me though was the anistropic filtering

though i'm sure it's exacerbated by playing with a controller or WASD, since your camera is more likely to be on an angle relative to ground textures

[random oak]

in Vanilla it most often happens in Act3, with 4k texture packs, it will happen already in Act1
the shadow flickers/pixelation are constant no matter what, but some people are less sensitive to it

the shadows are too low resolution and all that and the textures are not given enough VRAM/RAM budget even if you have the hardware for it

[river marlin]

Are you referring to some armor textures and stuff loading a low res version in cutscenes? I'm pretty sure I saw that and just decided it was engine level and fundamentally not much could be done about it so might as well ignore it

I'm very discerning usually but when i'm having fun playing the game and i know i've done everything i can to make it behave and look the best it can be, at that point i just learn to not get as bothered

[random oak]

After Forge is finished, those shitty textures being stuck or needing to load in for seconds should be gone

[river marlin]

it still bothers me but i supress it 😅

[river marlin]

that would be amazing

[random oak]

And that's why I'm being patient... as a Jaguar

[river marlin]

Yeah, maybe I'll have to play pragmata or something in the meantime. It's so annoying having 2 builds ready to go and not wanting to start playing

but i can manage

I'm pretty sure I read as well that it's a game engine limitation (the texture bug) and not really due to resources

I'm fortunate enough to have a 5090 and 9800X3D (mainly due to other things i do that make full use of the hardware), so i tend to not have many issues. When I see pop in I just go welp

[random oak]

yeah it is, but that is true for many games
no idea why a 2 million concurrent players game didn't have 1-2 modders until now try to fix it like Forge is

[river marlin]

Cyberpunk 2077 has had a bug since PT went live that causes trees to get black spots and have really really bad pop in shadows when you get close to them

there's just no way around it sadly

[river marlin]

This baffled me too tbh, I'm guessing because most PC players are not playing with a controller or the WASD mod, so there's no reason to look at many things up close often. It's also not a game like skyrim where a graphical overhaul can be considered so transformative to the experience

it's one of those games where the community probably doesn't really care and runs it on a potato anyway

[random oak]

yeah from many of the mods main screenshots, there are many potato PC modders in the big community 😄

but even in those communities there are often Engine modders that try to get the most out of the Engine even for potato PCs
it's really weird how Script Extender is the biggest effort and only effort to actually work with the Engine for the good of all users and not just a specific mod

[river marlin]

mfw i see a 720p screenshot with DLSS and it's not from a steam deck

[random oak]

sometimes not even DLSS, just plain no AA xD

[river marlin]

oh god, not the no aa purists

bRiNgBaCK MsAa

[random oak]

hey it saves frames when you have ultra potatoe 😄

[river marlin]

that is true

i meant there are people with good computers that won't use DLSS, DLAA, or TAA out of principle

without actually taking the time to do their own comparisons and evaluate what looks best

Some games have shitty TAA implementations, some have genuinely fantastic ones, others have terrible DLSS implementations (clair obscur is still stuck at rendering DLSS quality or balanced even when you set it to DLAA I think)

MSAA is garbage in 2026 because it does nothing to fix the temporal stability of an image.

[random oak]

the hair xD

[river marlin]

lol, yeah, i saw a way worse one on a mod page earlier, can't remember which one

but i clicked on the image to view it and it barely got any larger 💀

I'm actually going to take a stab at making a really simple reshade addon to try and fix the AF, I always have fun learning mod things

If I can get it working standalone then I'll just ping forge and let him know what seems to work.

It can't be any worse than working in wwise to add danerys's "i'm about to do something badass" cello riff to the fireball cast sounds

[strange lantern]

@river marlin

[random oak]

https://tenor.com/view/shadowheart-disgusted-baldur's-gate-3-gif-15522810519260726905

[rain tinsel]

hero lighting fix is hero lighting removal, right? lmao

unless im missing something

[strange lantern]

I will rename it

Its not a fix

its me removing the three point lighting

and restoring scene probe lighting

on characters

[rain tinsel]

typically in games i like a little bit of hero lighting but it doesnt really make any sense for bg3

like at all

[random oak]

"Hero Studio Lights"

[rain tinsel]

like silksong for example makes sense

[strange lantern]

You'll install the "Darker" enivorment mods

and all the characters glow

because of the three point lightiong

[rain tinsel]

yeah the shadow improvemnts in your mod make the hero lighting way more obvious

[strange lantern]

I am actually going to remake the shadows

atm its inlined

and its dogshit

Now alongside Reno 2.0 I can rework shaders

I can see how their descriptors and all work

so I can do "proper" shader work

[rain tinsel]

what is reno 2.0?

[strange lantern]

Just what we call Reno with the new custom render passes and binding code

[rain tinsel]

ah i see

[strange lantern]

"Engine Limitation"

Larian set a single float to a low value

[river marlin]

lmao, yeah, it's hilarious when you find out under the hood why a problem is even a problem in the first place

[strange lantern]

Again its all just mid development / early access shenanigans

and trying to keep good perf for low hardware

that and the whole we wanted to move over to Vulkan but the team didnt want to

I think all the stuff I am doing rn will have a larger impact on perf if you tried DX11 because of the CPU gimping

but well

all the addresses are exclusive to vulkan

so this wont even work for DX11 .exe

[novel lion]

Reno 2.0?

[river marlin]

it's ok, I'll wait for the RTX ON ™ version

jk

[strange lantern]

uhhh

I might have plans for RT

[random oak]

https://tenor.com/view/now-old-man-the-future-is-now-old-man-gif-9677657

[strange lantern]

Since Vulkan supports it

but I dunno

[novel lion]

👀

[river marlin]

That would be incredible. I just fired up vs studio with claude code and i'm gonna see if i can fix the AF

will report back in a bit

[strange lantern]

You REing?

AF wont be shader side alone

You'll need to crack open the engine and check renderer

[river marlin]

No, just want to try and make a simple standalone fix for proof of concept

[river marlin]

Yeah we will see how it goes. Vulkan being low level might mean there's a quirkier fix via the reshade api. I could also just be very optimistic and that's not at all how it works

[strange lantern]

I'll ask Pumbo what he did with Just Cause 3

it also has shenanigans with AF

[river marlin]

You can tell i really want to play now and not wait 😂

[strange lantern]

@open wind

Clankers strongest warrior

[open wind]

LOL

also

i feel tthe alll caps

and the token burning

what model were you using lol

[strange lantern]

Unlimited Opus babes

[strange lantern]

^

[open wind]

inzzzzane

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Npsg0UvEGIw

[strange lantern]

Takes about 150k tokens just to load up all the hooks and steering mds

only for clanker to ignore half anyways

You are totally right to question this, I actually never checked the source code

Apologies... I wasted your time. I should have checked blahblah.md first

[open wind]

LOL

goldfish memory

when will we ever get agi

[strange lantern]

Opus 4.9

[river marlin]

man trying to fix the AF is a rabbit hole

i might just give up and play POE2 lol

I'm very sensitive to not having AF so hopefully there might be a way. but seems like larian broke it in ways that you can't easily fix.

At least not that I have the capacity to

[river marlin]

HOLY FUCKING FUCK I got my proof of concept test working (but not with reshade)

I purposely wanted to just LOD +5 and make everything blurry so i can see if it was working

and i'm getting somewhere using a completely separate vulkan layer

Will report back if i get it all fixed - I couldn't get it to work through the reshade layer no matter what i tried.

Just wanted to share a minor victory after like 5 hours of trial and error lol

Will share method to the madness in case there is a way to do it through reshade after all, once I've done testing and comfirmed it works properly and does not cause issues

[random oak]

Kinda gives me Arcane (TV show) artstyle vibes 🫡

[river marlin]

haha, i wouldn't recommend playing the game like this. it's terrifying

ok, moment of truth...

[random oak]

I can imagine xD
But I kinda wish we could get a high quality RPG in that style

[river marlin]

rats, no dice. I have proof of concept now which is enough. If we can make the textures blurry AF, we can make them sharper. I believe.

[river marlin]

that would be pretty neat

so uh... it's working. But I think.. only when reshade is not running alongside it

notice how beard is not blurry anymore and distant textures are ok on an angle

need to do more testing to see if i can get it working alongside reshade without any conflicts. that's enough for one day though i think.

scratch that.. i just reinstalled reshade and it's still working. Need to make sure i'm not a dumbass before I celebrate but yeah, assuming it's all good, i'll post what i did here in case forge maybe finds a way to implement it, but otherwise i think it should work fine as a standalone .dll

here is beards before and after

Ground textures:

[river marlin]

AF is one of those things that maybe doesn't seem so important, but why have any texture on an angle get blurred (sometimes very visibly) when it costs little performance to improve. Anyway, if anyone wants the .dll to fix it in vulkan, let me know. I might upload it to the nexus standalone at some point, or if forge can find a way of getting it to work in reshade (which i couldn't) then that's even better. I just ran around and played for a while and i got the same performance and no visual bugs.

[river marlin]

Even in the character creator Forge's Mod looks so much better 🤤. One thing in particular i noticed is just how right fire looks now compared to without. Just to confirm the AF fix does work alongside RenoDX and Forge's addon

[wooden abyss]

Which mod are you using?

[river marlin]

The latest pinned one that forge uploaded

And then because anisotropic filtering is broken in the vanilla game and can't be forced in vulkan i worked with claude code yesterday to fix that

[strange lark]

What’s AF? Screenshots looks good

[devout briar]

Anisotropic Filtering

[strange lark]

Thanks

[strange lantern]

[random oak]

https://tenor.com/view/caffeine-ren-me-when-the-zoomies-bunny-gif-22991327

[strange lantern]

HOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

FINALLY SOLVED CHARACTER DRAW DISTANCE

FUCK ME THIS WAS ABYSMAL

[short frost]

ayy

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/880342502660530176/1397714654695919678/attachment-1.gif

[strange lantern]

LMAO

From 170FPS to the 50s in Act 3

Going to have to increase to just 120m

and add in slop generation now

That or rework the ::tick

[modest linden]

Awesome, love me some draw distance

[wooden abyss]

Very cool work. Incredible.

[random oak]

why not just make it a slider, when we have 9090s we can in the future decide if it's worth it 😉

especially if that FULL view really is still 50fps, that's not too bad

[strange lantern]

9090 wont do anything

GPU drops to 30% util here

9800X3D shoots up to 60% util

Will need to tracy profile

and thne figure out if I can improve the perf

The other problem is dialogue overlap

Fade system stops that

but then the characters are ofcourse faded

(but atleast the pop in is gone)

[random oak]

yes of course CPU will be more modern/strong then too

[strange lantern]

Thats slop though

I dont like improving graphics whilst destroying perf

PT desotrying perf is "acceptable" because of the complexity and all

drawing a few extra characters and having your CPU get annhilated is pure slop

Which means I now need to profile and see exactly what eats up the perf

Norbyte did mention thats its ::Tick so animation, scripts ect ect

In that case easiest solution is to just lower Tick for all of that depending on distance

However that might "break" something

Game deving be like

[random oak]

oh of course optimising it is number 1 importance, I just mean to give users the "extreme" option, so that this mod doesn't need a new version when hardware could easily handle more meters than 120

[frank flare]

it reminds me of fallout 4 performance
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/fallout-4-graphics-performance-and-tweaking-guide/#fallout-4-ugrids-config-file-tweaks

[strange lantern]

That was all drawcalls

DX11 is dog shit and can't into Boston

And on release FO4 had broken previsbones

So their precomputed occlusion culling and combined meshes were all broken

[river marlin]

I remember this, iirc someone made a mod that had to fix them all or something along those lines

[strange lantern]

Previsbine fix yh

That or you just generate your own

You're pretty much baking their occlusion culling

Welp

we now know why Act 3 runs like ass

ProcessBatch:: cost is dominated by "indivduals"

e.g skinned meshes

characters, torches, braziers, all the items you can interact and pick up and the like

[strange lantern]

Confirms what we know from the talk

No HZB culling

They only use HI Z for shader effects but not for culling

Instancing exists but it's only for small materials

The larger meshes or static building meshes don't have any instancing

No indirect draw

@worthy belfry game is spending about 5-9ms just proccessing MOC on the CPU

Kino

"I wonder why Act 3 runs like shit"

[worthy belfry]

MOC?

[strange lantern]

Masked Occlusion CUlling

its Bintels CPU occlusion culling

https://www.intel.com/content/dam/develop/external/us/en/documents/masked-software-occlusion-culling-779241.pdf

Its the Bethesda issue

[worthy belfry]

._ .

lmaoo

[strange lantern]

Occlusion planes = good becasue you stop rendering things and stop high drawcalls

but Occlusion planes are bad because its CPU work

HZB on the GPU would be like 0.1-2ms

Anyways, I am going to research a bit more

then update POE 2

and play

BG3 needs a renderer refactor

[random oak]

kinda embarrassing for Larian ngl... They have been lamenting Act 3 for literal years, constantly mentioning it themselves and players too of course...

[strange lantern]

MOC's ProcessBatch is eating 72% of the frame budget rn

I will piss myself if disabling MOC actually gets us higher perf

Costs more to process than whatever you save using it

well, MOC is saving performance when theres less stuff

its just that the cost grows exponentially when you have a lot of meshes like in Act 3

[river marlin]

i just jumped into poe2 and have never seen a more hilariously broken hdr "implementation" if you can even call it that, lol. Saw you made a reshade for it too, does it use just the base reshade or do you need the addon version? I heard that it's iffy using anything that hooks into the game

I want my HDR but also want to be safe lol

[strange lantern]

👀

[strange lantern]

Requires RenoVK custom reshade + Vulkan API for the game

Vulkan has no anti cheat

it doesnt care, only DX12 does. Why I dunno

DX12 just blocks any sort of hooking anyways

Yikes

They really are using deinterleaved depth "PPSAO"

internally its called "Post Process Screenspace Ambient Occluson"

Temu HBAO+

[river marlin]

that sounds like a very pp method

how long have we had hbao+ for now? lol

I remember loving it when i got to turn that on in older games ☺️ I think even FC3 had it?

[strange lantern]

Early 2010s

[river marlin]

BTW forge, this is the method to how i implemented working AF, i couldn't get it working with reshade but you've gotten way more into the weeds then i have so perhaps there is still a way without requiring a separate layer or dll

[strange lantern]

I noticed that with my AO tweaks rn in Reno, their HBAO exposes how dogshit it all is

constant tiles and ugly ahh halos

needs proper xeGTAO with multi bounce stat

[river marlin]

and when i say i couldn't get it working with reshade, i don't mean it doesn't work when you're using reshade at the same time, i mean i couldn't get it working using a .addon64 file

[strange lantern]

Yh, I'll just rework AF by fixing the engine internals

then include it as part of the .asi

no conflicts

[river marlin]

wonderful!

[strange lantern]

Just worksTM

[river marlin]

ye, right now i'm also getting the justworks experience using a standalone .dll registered to vulkan, pretty sure it would actually apply to every vulkan game

but obviously it's better to have it all contaained in one neat and tidy overhaul 🙂

excited to try out POE once you get it updated for the new patch

SDR looks great in this game too though

[strange lark]

Is the new WIP 2 build using PsychoV? Somethings look saturatd like fire but other things like skin and terrain look really undersaturated, was this to match the SDR look? Thanks

Also how do we get the DX11 skin textures back these look rougher

[river marlin]

I know what you mean by undersaturated but in this case i'd give it a chance. I think with no player lighting and whatever was done with the hdr implementation that it just looks more natural and we are used to seeing everything kind of red from before.

Like, look at how with it off the skin is kind of red and the flap on the bag also has that red tint

To my eyes it looks lesslike things are desaturated and more like the lighting is more accurate and the colors don't have the same glow like they used to before, in a good way

I turned SDR EOTF emulation off for a more fair compraison, but with it on there's obviously more contrast and so it does change the tone of the image a lot

I personally don't have any issue with the skin textures

It would be the same textures but maybe there's a rendering difference, not sure. I noticed other things like the missing anisotropic filtering much sooner than anything with the skin xD

[strange lark]

I'm used to this one, PsychoV, try this tonemapper and tell me you don't miss the saturation. This is the first one Forge did that was on Nexus (maybe still there)

The only reason I don't use this one is that the highest highlights are clipped or artifacting, i posted photos, it's only in certain scenes so i may go back

[night river]

the game looks very oversaturated vanilla

very cartoony

[strange lark]

I am comparing to the past Reno add-ons not vanilla

Also I don't think the Vanilla seems more saturated when you turn the Reno mod off, the saturation is the same as Forge's mod or less warm even

[river marlin]

I'll try it but the saturation of the game using the current addon doesn't look any more or less saturated than vanilla to me, and i found vanilla to already be very balanced

but i'm a guy who uses absolutely no saturation boost anywhere when i consume content and always set my TV to 6500 kelvin so i might just have a different opinion

[river marlin]

I personally don't mind the saturation of the vanilla game, I don't find it overbearing but i do find the tones are off like in the screenshot i posted above where everything gets a red glow

fire in particular did not look right but it looks perfect with forge's addon pinned here

Here's side by side with the one that you sent.

[river marlin]

The sky looks too blue and the trees look too green, I much prefer the natural tone of the one on the right/latest forge one pinned in this channel

I can see why some people would like it but i generally prefer to not touch the original color as much as possible unless it's a comprehensive overhaul that doesn't just crank saturation

i.e. something like Rudy ENB for Skyrim SE changes the image so dramatically that you aren't even comparing something as simple as saturation anymore

holy crap the house of hope looks so much better

also unrelated but i customized the lexend font and it looks really nice

[strange lark]

nice comparison, both are using PsychoV according to the original description so I wonder why they are different

[strange lark]

the one on the right is closer to vanilla

[river marlin]

yeah, that's using the addon pinned in this channel

i just wanted to keep the look of vanilla and fix hdr, but ended up also using the wasd camera mod, and after trying out the shadow options in the new addon file i'm impressed so i'm using that too now

i'm pretty particular with visual changes too, back when I used to mod skyrim i'd have to manually go through each texture so it was all cohesive. took way too long

[strange lark]

what is the shadow option, i'm not by my pc right now thanks

[river marlin]

forge's latest pinned addon file in here adds detailed shadows and some other things that make the lighting look a lot nicer

and also an option to disable the fake character lighting, which makes a huge difference

[strange lark]

ok i will look, sounds like only the hero lighting is optional but the shadow improvements seemed good

thanks

[river marlin]

you can toggle it all off and on. there's lots of options

[strange lark]

the one on the right looks more like SDR, but i wonder what they would have done had they understood HDR better, would they have kept the pastel look? wish we could know for certain

[river marlin]

Well a lot of games are mastered in SDR/SRGB and then get a lazy HDR implementation thrown on top of it, but on top of that, art design usually takes over and so even if you hypothetically had everything produced and mastered with source materials in a P3 color space it's going to get lost in translation somewhere along the way

If they wanted the game to be more punchy and colorful they probably would have made it that way

Cyberpunk is a good example where the vanilla LUT produces a very distinct image, basically skewing the entire picture to look a certain way and it completely changes the colors and presentation

But that's clearly what they were going for

And for well implemented HDR I think it's more so about whether or not they can make the lighting work properly and retain that same artistic vision they had for the base game, not necessarily just "it should look brighter and more colorful"

It makes me really happy when I turn on HDR in a game and I get the vibe that it's like I'm just viewing the same image but in HDR and not SDR. There shouldn't be a drastic change other than HDR doing what it was designed to do - a transparent implementation if you will

[night river]

left looks so cartoony to me

right is so much better

i guess hero lighting does have a big part to play

[river marlin]

Yeah, like i'm playing wow lol

[night river]

but still

Just waiting on mr forg to fix the face shadows

so i can start my billionth playthrough

[river marlin]

Also can we talk aobut the fact that so many people get x OLED monitor but by default it has an SRGB color expansion turned on that oversaturates everything, giving them the impression that "OLED Looks So Much Better"

looking at you AW3423DW

I bought one and returned it, because the only 2 options for SDR viewing were lifeless SRGB mode and oversaturated garbage mode

[night river]

i think oleds in general ship with unclamped default settings

[strange lark]

What’s up with face shadows?

[night river]

they're flickery, low res

[river marlin]

They can get a little pixellated sometimes too esp on hair

[strange lark]

Ok, I noticed skin looked rougher

[night river]

i have an aw3423dw, i just used acm to clamp

[strange lark]

It’s better in WIP 2 than the first one

[river marlin]

I know I shouldn't care what other people play with but there's already so much OLED circlejerking and

[night river]

there are ways to clamp without using the built in modes

[river marlin]

oops hit enter too soon

[river marlin]

Yeah, I had other issues with the image that drove my decision to return it, I have an LG C4 now and i'm very happy with it.

But like, coming from an asus PG35VQ

I can't describe how much of a downgrade it felt like

The HDR on FALD/Mini-LED monitors with a lot of zones is leaps and miles ahead

[night river]

depends a lot on viewing environment and stuff

hdr on minileds just get brighter

[river marlin]

Yet due to how few of them were produced and how expensive the good ones were, you won't hear anyone praising them

[night river]

is that better?

up to you

[river marlin]

I mean I remember playing assassin's creed odyssey and the beach felt like the beach

[night river]

current oled monitors are not good with bright scenes

[river marlin]

move to OLED, only getting 200-300 nits. ABL in virtually every environment, it was so dim, green and lifeless looking

[night river]

the thing is, your eyes need to adjust to the brightness

[river marlin]

I don't get the green and lifeless vibe from the LG thankfully, but it has its own issues with OLED, mainly off-axis green tint. But I sit further away now to minimize that

[night river]

but yea bright scenes are not good

especially if you like higher game brightness

[river marlin]

I just mean that if you stuck a FALD monitor next to an OLED and asked people which looked better, 100% of the time they'd pick the FALD assuming you weren't explicitly demoing less bloom on OLED

[night river]

100% of the time

they'll pick the brighter more colorful screen

does not necesarily make them better 🤷‍♂️

[river marlin]

Yeah, and I can't really describe how beautiful and punchy it looked, without looking grotesquely oversaturated, or having blown out highlights

Both technologies have their strengths. I daily drive an OLED TV so I get it

I've learned to like it and don't feel like i'm really missing out anymore

[night river]

I think it would be difficult to take a mini led based display over something like the lg g5

[river marlin]

but i know if i went back to mini led i'd be like yeah, as far as getting the best PQ overall goes this is better equipped. With a good HDR implementation, it just looked so darn good

[night river]

in almost all scenrios

[strange lark]

i miss my miniLED for scenes like the Vlaakith scene which is otherworldly on a Macbook Pro

1000 nits fullscreen looks like looking at a real goddess

[river marlin]

I think it depends on what you play or consume as well. Obviously oled wins for darker scenes, but there were times when that didn't even matter

[strange lark]

otherworldly

[river marlin]

This basically

[strange lark]

fullscreen white

[river marlin]

People love to say that you don't need the brightness, but I disagree. You can have your cake and eat it too.

Neither solution has ever been perfect

But Mini-LED sure gave the "WOW, this is the best thing i've ever seen" impression much more than OLED did for me

[night river]

but i would argue that's still an oled

and not mini led

[strange lark]

the reality is if you use Liilium's analyzer you find out most games never go above 120 and by never i nean super rare

APL

[night river]

120???

[strange lark]

yeah

use i

[river marlin]

wat

[strange lark]

look at the numbers

the APL numbers in the top left

[night river]

i played 007 first light recently

it barely goes over 30

[strange lark]

most game scenes never go above it

[night river]

lmao

120 is absurd

[strange lark]

exactly

7 nits in caves

and castles

[night river]

try like

0.5 nits

xD

[strange lark]

ah ok

[night river]

again depends if you're cranking game brightness or not

[strange lark]

you were disbelieving me in the opposite way lol

[night river]

yes yes lmao

[strange lark]

most poeple don't believe me b/c they think games go brighter

[night river]

yea, altho tbf I was also surprised

[strange lark]

even on like 300 nits you're not doing that that often

[river marlin]

I still think that being able to make a large chunk of the screen relatively bright is a key component of what makes HDR really give the "wow" impression, in a pitch black room i'm pretty happy with my OLED but realistically, having owned and used a PG35VQ for years and playing many different games in HDR

[night river]

genuinely bright scenes that are sub 30 nits apl

[strange lark]

yeah that's the other thing,

[river marlin]

It will always feel like a step down. And I'm not a suck for zomg burn my retinas type content, but with a proper implementation it just.. man

[strange lark]

you learn that a bright scene can look "bright" at 30 APL

i'll literally think oh this is 80 nits right

and it's 50

or 30

[night river]

I dont remember what the g5 did, but something like 2k nits on 10%?

i'd say that covers almost anything

[river marlin]

The PG35VQ hit something like 800+ on 100%

it was insane

[night river]

but it's a bit irrelevant

nothing short of a flashbang

does 800 nits apl

[river marlin]

I agree, but it enabled it to do things that no other HDR monitor could at the time

like be in a bright outdoor scene with the sun, sky and sandy beach

and really make it look like... that

[night river]

yea pretty certain the G5 can do those scenes flawlessly

[river marlin]

It's hard to describe without being able to compare it side by side, but it really was a night and day difference

[night river]

I believe you

[river marlin]

as was OLED when you give it challenging content

as in, OLED wins for some things

[night river]

but the newer oled tvs

get absurdly bright

[strange lark]

I’m using S95F on 4000 nits

I still want more fullscreen

[river marlin]

yeah, I've heard that the larger OLEDs can hit good numbers

[night river]

lmao

yea

[river marlin]

more than enough

[night river]

exactly that

[river marlin]

I think it was something like 800 nits fullscreen almost on some?

and you'll never need more than that IMO

I have a sony x90l and i get flashbanged all the time, it's annoying

[strange lark]

The G5 does 400-440 fullscreen

G6 is 460

[river marlin]

but some content is mastered really well with dolby vision, so you can use the DV Dark mode and get a comfortable viewing experience

[night river]

I cannot emphasize how absurdly bright

400 nits is

its blinding

in a dimly lit room

anyway

[strange lark]

In a dark room yah

[river marlin]

Yeah, i know what you mean

[strange lark]

You said it

[river marlin]

My TV does that all the time to me and my friends

i can hear their discomfort but when no DV master is available it's what we have to live with

[strange lark]

We have sunlit room and we use the 600 nit SDR MiniLED often

[odd flower]

screen size matters a lot. 10% of 27" is a lot smaller than 10% of 55"

[night river]

very true

[river marlin]

good point

Anyway, I hope someday we will have the perfect display technology to get the best of all worlds

[night river]

micro led when

[river marlin]

It's really just the ABL that i have an issue with on oled. That and paper white still does not look like paper white to me on any oled

[strange lark]

My MBP still feels brighter fullscreen than S95F tbh

[river marlin]

It probably is, those screens are insanely good

[odd flower]

i mean, that could be viewing distance

[night river]

ABL is not much of an issue on non qd-oled monitors tbh

[river marlin]

On my C4 it's pretty jarring, if i open a menu in a game that covers half the screen often i see the rest of the scene light up the way it wanted to

but it's not a dealbreaker and i still enjoy the HDR experience on it

so meh

I didn't have much of a choice, I do big time flight sim stuff and so having a big 4K screen was something I realized I needed

[night river]

fair, depends how bright the game is already i guess

[odd flower]

this is a G5 55" used a monitor

[river marlin]

It vastly outweighed other considerations at the time

[strange lark]

The man in the flesh!

Showing how it’s done

[river marlin]

I didn't want to go bigger than 42" since i do a little bit of everything

[odd flower]

had to back to the 42" since the G5 i got was busted, but when i wall mounted the 42", i can do a bit more on the sides

55 inch is exactly 48 inches wide which is my desk

[river marlin]

The audiophile in me looks at the floorstanders and goes yes but sees the desk obscure them and goes no 😭

[strange lark]

Keep eye out for the 48” C6, it has a tandem panel I believe, but only the 48”

[river marlin]

I heard some tandem panels have their own wonkiness

but i will keep an eye out

[strange lark]

Posterixation

[river marlin]

always seeing what's new

[strange lark]

But the new chip fixes some of it

Not all

They will likely improve somewhat in software like last year

But S95H trumps all

Near perfect image OOTB

[river marlin]

Yeah, i'm happy with what i have now, gonna wait for the perfect display before i upgrade again

assuming something like that makes it to market when i'm ready to

[strange lark]

S95F modded does as well

[odd flower]

which is why i got the G5

[river marlin]

noice

[night river]

meanwhile

[odd flower]

also cheaper

[night river]

monitors

[river marlin]

I wonder if working on a 48" would be feasible

42 was a big jump but i got used to it pretty quick

coming from 34" ultrawides

[odd flower]

G5 55" is <$1400 now

tried open box for $1000 and that went poorly

[river marlin]

RIP CAD

oops big picture

oh i'm a dumbass

that's the 65"

[river marlin]

looks like it's similar here in canada

oh yeah i believed you about the price i just thought we were getting the short stick initially

our 55" is 2k give or take so that checks out

[odd flower]

The LG G6 OLED and the LG G5 OLED are very similar overall. The G6 is brighter in SDR and has superior reflection handling, making it the better option for bright rooms. The G6 also has superior gradient handling, and it does a slightly better job reducing artifacts in low-quality streams. Both TVs are incredibly similar, so most people are best off getting the G5 if they can find it for cheaper than the G6.
on rtings review of G6

G6 for SDR and bright rooms and lowbit content, none of which applies to me really

[river marlin]

damn i really got baldur's gate 3 discussion off track huh

[night river]

some1s about to make a reddit post about it

https://tenor.com/view/pepe-laugh-homyatol-gif-18542044

[strange lark]

That’s the review! He said it’s tandem

https://youtu.be/IbcFjyXnrhw?si=lMFvnXeXDSgwKcqW