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That’s a surprising reaction. What I tried to say above means in a nutshell that the whole thing, although useful, doesn’t really warrent the current hype. Their marketing department is just as good as their engineers. I’m pretty sure some video players/renderers with support for higher-quality upscaling + sharpening that are available for more than a decade can produce fairly similar results.
This is “just” a better-than-bilinear upscaler combined with state-of-the-art image sharpening, topped with a pinch of smoke and mirrors (increased texture detail through a lower mipmap bias has nothing to do with their upscaling at all). Probably better than how vorpX currently handles scaling/sharpening when processing the image before sending it to the headset, but using vorpX’s built-in sharpening will already provide a result that shouldn’t be too far away.
If you never tried that before: depending on the resolution the game runs with and your personal tolerance for sharpening artifacts, values between 0.8 and 1.5 are usually good choices for the built-in sharpening filter.
Just checked the sample app AMD offers for download and can’t say I’m super impressed. This is nothing like nVidia’s DLSS and even that is really just good enough with the two higher quality presets. I wouldn’t go so far to call this a full blown marketing stunt, it clearly has its value. But very similar results could be achieved with any other high quality upscaling method and some sharpening. That’s what this actually is: upscaling + sharpening. No more, no less.
The method involves two shaders that are run after another. The first one is the actual scaler that upscales from the lowered render resolution to the higher target resolution. The second one is a sharpening filter that gets applied to the upscaled result. Their sample allows to run just the upscaler without sharpening, and guess what: for the most part the sharpening filter and their recommendation to render the scene with a lower texture mipmap bias are responsible for the crisper end result, not the upscaler itself. The upscale shader without anything else still does produce slightly better results than normal bilinear scaling, but after all it’s still just upscaling, unlike nVidia’s DLSS no detail can be added that isn’t already there in the lower res input image.
Funny enough in their documentation they even ask developers not to separately mention the sharpening in a game’s options menu. No comment on that… Also the lowered mipmap bias while rendering the actual game is fairly misleading, as that enhances texture detail regardless of the upscale method, i.e. with or without the AMD shaders.
Long story short: I’ll check this on some rainy weekend, but don’t really expect wonders. vorpX already can do a sharpening pass (‘Image’ page of the vorpX menu) on the higher res final image before it is sent to the headset, so it pretty much already can do half of what this methods does to enhance the image.
Bethesda games traditionally are well suited for the different things vorpX can do ranging from 3D to the memory scanner stuff, so both Skyrim and Fallout 4 are still being used here for dev work quite often. Surprisingly they also both still seem to be fairly popular among users despite VR versions being available, probably for the same reasons as yours.
Anyway: did you run the DirectVR scan (either ALT-L or from the vorpX menu)? After a successful scan there should be positional tracking for both G3D and Z3D since that let’s vorpX access the game’s camera position/rotation values in memory. Without running the scanner positional tracking is only available for G3D.
You probably are aware of that, so just in case: there are tooltips at the bottom of the menu with short explanations for most options.
@ RJK_
Had I known that a pip boy speeds up working on vorpX, I’d definitely had gotten the Fallout 4 collectors edition. BTW: your mug is in use here regularly, must have been a hideous plan to remind me of what I have to do every day. ;)
@ Demosthenes
I somehow doubt that there would be any serious demand for someting like that. Still: do you by any chance know of a way to sell small amounts of merch without having to take care of worldwide shipping? If there was e.g. some service where one could upload pre-made graphics templates, I’d be happy to do that. Wouldn’t want to make any money with it, but having an option to easily order a mug or t-shirt for those of you who want to would indeed be great.
The shader authoring page will look just like before. The authoring key unlocks more pages in the authoring UI, you don’t have to touch any of that unless you want to.
Just a heads-up that dellrifter’s G3D profile for the game will work again with the next vorpX version.
Incidentally discovered today that it didn’t work right with the matrix array transform handling that was introduced a while ago. I implemented a workaround that will also get applied to all other profiles created before said feature was introduced, just in case there are more profiles affected in a similar way.
*MIGHT* work, I’ll have experimenting with that on the list. However: As always no promises.
Be aware though that it would work differently compared to having FideltyFX natively in a game. That’s important to understand for comparing FidelityFX on/off.
FidelityFX natively integrated into a game renders the game at a lower resolution, e.g. when you set 1920×1080 in the game options, it might actually get rendered 1280×720, and then upscales to 1920×1080 using FidelityFX. That’s where the performance increase comes from, at the cost of reduced image quality compared to actually rendering at 1920×1080.
With vorpX on the other hand the game would still be rendered at 1920×1080 and then upscaled to a higher resolution with FidelityFX before it is sent to the headset. If e.g. you would run a game at 1920×1080 with vorpX + FidelityFX, the result would be comparable to running a ‘native’ FidelityFX game at 2560×1440. So instead of gaining performance, you gain image quality when turning on FidelityFX without changing the game resolution. Hope that doesn’t sound too confusing.
For now that’s all theory though, we’ll see if and how things turn out.
Found the bug. There will be a maintenance update with a bunch of fixes early next week that will also address this issue.
In the meantime getting an advanced authoring key helps. To get one, please select one of your custom profiles in the config app, click ‘Request advanced profile authoring key’ and then follow the instructions shown in the window that pops up afterwards.
The whole shader replacement stuff got stuck in ‘beta’ a while ago unfortunately since there always is so much else to do. I still plan to revisit and extend it, just have no timeline currently. vorpX is a beast of a project, the 3D-driver part is really just a quarter of it or so codewise. Many other, more VR-specific things also fighting for my attention all the time… :)
I’ll re-check the shader save bug within the next few days. Couldn’t replicate it the first time unfortunately and wasn’t sure how widespread it is. Seems fairly severe though judging from the number of reports in the meantime, so I’ll take a more in-depth look shortly.
Yes, but as said above DX9 only currently! You don’t have to restart the game, modified shaders will be reloaded whenever they change.
Exported shaders are saved to [Documents]\vorpX\AuthorData\[game folder] as assembler code. If you know how to program shader assembler, you can put modified shaders into the !shader_replace sub directory. Those will then be loaded instead of the original shaders.
There are a variety of shadow modifying options to choose from in the shader authoring UI. With some luck the ‘Invert’ option can fix certain types of shadows entirely. Games use a plethora of different shadow algorithms though, so that just works for some games.
For DX9 games you can also program your own replacement shaders by exporting disassembled shaders and modifying their code. If you have some shader programming knowledge, that enables you to fix all kinds of shadows perfectly. Currently DX9 only.
Best practice without programming knowledge: first and foremost leave the 3D-Strength at realistic levels, i.e. no exaggerated ‘dollhouse’ 3D. That’s not what VR (and thus vorpX) is about. In reality stereo 3D is a fairly subtle effect except for things quite close to your eyes. Without unrealistically exeggarated 3D the ‘No 3D’/’No Tranform’ shadow modifier can often be enough to bring down shadow glitches to acceptable levels. Not perfect, but easy to do.
That sounds odd. vorpX has it’s own frame interpolation that normally supports uneven game/headset FPS ratios unless ‘Fluid Sync’ is switched on in the vorpX menu. Headset runtimes may drop to 45fps themselves though if they feel like it, maybe that’s the case here.
Anyway: In principle you can reach 90fps at any resolution, but whether that is actually possible in a given game depends on your PC’s performance, especially with G3D, which is fairly demanding since everything has to be rendered twice. G3D at least costs half the FPS compared to no 3D, sometimes even more. 3240×1800 with G3D at 90fps may work for older games, but even with a very fast PC that won’t pan out for most newer games.
The majority of Gamepass games should work, just the ones that are compiled as Windows Store (UWP) apps won’t. For the most part that will affect Microsoft first party titles, third party games are more likely regular (Win32) programs. That’s just a rule of thumb though, there are exceptions. E.g. Resident Evil 7 Gamepass is a UWP app.
There also is another, less dramatic, pitfall: even if a game works in principle, the game devs may have chosen to use different .exe names for the various stores. That can easily be addressed by adding the actual .exe to the profile (for user profiles) or creating a profile copy for the actual .exe.