Forcing Anisotropic Filtering with GeDoSaTo (in FF13 and elsewhere)

I just added a new option to GeDoSaTo, forceAnisoLevel.

You can use this option in any game, but it only makes sense in a select few. If you force anisotropic filtering in the driver, it’s smart about which surfaces and original filtering types it overrides – that’s why it very rarely breaks games, and this makes perfect sense for a driver option.

However, specifically in the case of running stuff at resolutions it was not built for and downsampling, it is sometimes beneficial to apply filtering even to surfaces specified to be point filtered, which is something the driver doesn’t do (as it could often break shaders).

The main reason I added this feature is FF13, or more specifically its HUD and menus. These are point filtered by default (since they are rendered 1:1 at 1280×720), which looks terrible at higher resolutions. This setting alleviates the issue, though of course higher-res UI assets would still be preferable. Here’s an example of the difference:

To use it, add a user-level FF13 settings file (if you don’t already have one) and add the line forceAnisoLevel 16 to it. See here for details on settings files – I have seen that this causes quite some confusion and sometimes erroneous bug reports.

As always, you can get the latest version by grabbing the installer here or simply update, and if you want to you can donate here.

How recent Unity games do stuff, and a new GeDoSaTo version

Dreamfall Chapters: Book 1 was just released (go buy it), and it’s another game using the Unity engine. Like with another recent Unity title, Wasteland 2, it refused to work with GeDoSaTo. Now, since I like both of these games a lot I invested some time to find out what’s happening, and hopefully fix it.

Without further ado, here are my findings. This is what recent Unity engine games do on Windows if you select “fullscreen” mode. Note that all of this is based on deduction from the behaviour of Dreamfall and Wasteland 2, someone with access to the Unity source probably has a more exact understanding:

  1. Check the desktop resolution and create a fullscreen window as well as a DirectX device with that size.
  2. Check the native monitor resolution (using GetMonitorInfo), and reset the device/window to that size.
  3. Render at whatever resolution you specify in the game settings, to an off-screen surface.
  4. Stretch that surface to the window.

So, no real fullscreen mode in sight. Why would you do this? Well, it has multiple advantages: you don’t lose your resources switching to another rendering resolution, alt-tab behaviour is much faster and more stable, and you get free, correctly implemented triple buffering if the user is using Aero.

Obviously, this majorly messed up the way GeDoSaTo works — and the same goes for traditional downsampling methods. In the latest version, it’s now possible to downsample Unity games following this scheme, provided you add this magic formula to their configuration file:

It works by “pretending” that both the desktop and monitor are the given renderResolution in size, forcing that to always be reported, and modifying the mouse cursor position used by the game (so that clicks register correctly). GeDoSaTo takes care of actually constraining the fullscreen window to the correct size, and of course performs a high-quality downsampling of the rendering result as always.

Since the resolution you want to downsample from needs to be known before the game requests any, only a single rendering resolution can be provided.

Cursor Sidenote

Already in earlier versions, a problem in games using windowed modes was that custom cursors would be lost outside of the rectangular region corresponding to portion of the screen that would be taken up by a window downscaled by the downsampling factor. I figured out why this happens: To make games work, the cursor positions reported to them need to be adjusted (modifyGetCursorPos). This works for any processing within the game, as it thinks it is operating within a larger rendering area.

However, an issue occurs for cursors: I found out that many/most games use the Windows API WindowFromPoint function to check if the mouse is within their window before setting the cursor, passing the modified coordinates. Now obviously, Windows knows what the real window sizes are, and the modified virtual coordinates fall out of them. So I had to apply the reverse transformation in that function.

Release

Anyway, the new version is called “Tokikagura”. Other than the stuff discussed above it also includes some GeDoSaToTool fixes.

As always, grab the installer here or simply update, and if you want to you can donate here.

By the way, Nvidia’s DSR can’t downsample in these games (for now). Take that big boy corporate version!

FF13 micro-update

Another small update to fix some reported issues:

  • Fixed lack of postprocessing when disabling HuD
  • Fixed crash on alt-tab (again)

The latter took a lot more time to figure out than I expected. It seems that the game is actually leaking a backbuffer reference :/

About texture dumping/replacement: After getting the current GeDoSaTo facilities to work (more or less) on FF13, I figured out that most interesting textures (e.g. the fonts) aren’t actually being loaded using D3DX, so the existing mechanisms don’t help at all. I have a different method in mind (for a long time now actually), but this will take some time to implement.

Talking about time, what I wrote about on the blog a few days ago regarding not really having any time due to “real world” workloads applies now even more than before — after I spent basically the entire weekend on FF13. Therefore, don’t expect updates from me until next weekend.

That said, I’ve seen a lot of new forks at GitHub, so perhaps someone will make some contributions! I’ll try to merge good additions as quickly as possible if there are any.
As always, you can use the installer here to get the latest version (or just press the update button!), and you can donate here.

Small FF13 Updates MK2

I just pushed a new version once again, with these improvements/additions:

  • Added shadow scale option (increases shadow resolution)
  • Added settings for the number of MSAA samples and coverage sampling (that is, CSAA or EQAA depending on your GPU)
  • Mitigated issues with large screenshots (taking a screenshot should never crash now, but it might still fail at very high resolutions or settings – it will report that failure though)
  • Changed scaling order, fixes some sharpness issues

A few words on performance, according to my testing: Starting from a base setting of 3840×2160 with bicubic scaling at 60 FPS I get a GPU usage of 66% on my 770.

Increasing shadow scaling to 4 gives a very marginal increase to 67% (basically free on my system). Setting it to 8 goes up to 70%.

Going from the default 4xMSAA to 16xCSAA increases GPU usage from the 66% base to 70%. Worth it in my opinion. 32xCSAA (that is, 8 MSAA samples + coverage AA) goes up to 80% and the improvement is debatable.

As always, you can use the installer here to get the latest version (or just press the update button!), and you can donate here.

Small FF13 Updates

There’s a new version of GeDoSaTo with a new FF13 plugin up now. It includes these improvements:

  • Fixed crash on Alt-tab
  • Fixed all known instances of cut-offs (including e.g. items and settings) without introducing artifacts
  • Fixed AMD user issues and minimap (thanks to Garteal for investigating this!)

I’ll do a more in-depth look into the screenshot issues and the problems with texture dumping/replacement tomorrow, I really want to get a high-res font replacement.

Also, I did some initial experiments with increasing shadow resolution. Sadly, without also improving the filtering quality that doesn’t help all that much. And improving the filtering quality would require reverse engineering and replacing the shadow rendering shader, which is a longer task, so I’ve put it towards the back of the queue for now.

Anyway, as always, you can use the installer here to get the latest version (or just press the update button!), and you can donate here.

GeDoSaTo Beta 0.14 “Barrage am Ring”

I’ll shortly release a new version of GeDoSaTo, which includes a pre-alpha version of a custom plugin for Final Fantasy XIII. Its current features are:

  • Arbitrary rendering and presentation resolutions (only 16:9 though)
  • HUD hiding (using the normal GeDoSaTo keybindings)

It’s bugs and known issues are:

  • Some off-by-a-bit scaling issues, making the output less sharp than it should be in some circumstances
  • DoF effects are unchanged (still at original, low resolution – this is more apparent in contrast to higher resolutions)
  • Probably some stuff somewhere is cut off. I saw some scissor calls and am not dealing with them yet
  • Crashes when taking screenshots using GeDoSaTo
  • Rendering resolutions larger than 3840×2160 don’t work
  • Probably lots more

Some observations:

  • The game performs really well from what I’ve seen, both GPU and CPU-wise. But their frame limiting/pacing stuff sometimes seems to bug out.

Tons of stuff can still be improved — obvious ones like fixing bugs and the DoF, but also e.g. probably shadow resolution — so if you like this work and want it to continue consider donating.

Of course, I’d also really appreciate any development or debugging contributions. As always, the source is on Github.

You can download the installer from here, it will automatically grab the latest version.

Don’t report bugs in the comments, report them on GitHub (and check for duplicates or if they are known issues).

Article about PC Game Features, Development Updates

An article I wrote for PC Gamer has now come online:

The features PC gamers want — an open letter to developers and gamers

I really liked the idea for this article when I was first approached about writing it. While writing, I turned it from something addressed mostly at developers into also trying to make gamers understand the cost of features and how to interpret comparative performance across games.

The final article is about 50% longer than initially planned, but I still missed at least two important features, which I will shortly discuss here. I’d add those to the “important” category.

  • Audio support: Just like with display devices, people use a lot of different audio setups on their PCs, both in terms of output and in terms of processing. Decent positional audio should be supported for at least the common speaker configurations and headphones.
  • Custom Server Hosting / Server Browsers: For online games, supporting match-making is nice, but it should never be the only option in a PC game. Traditionally, PC games which offer the option to host custom servers and browse servers by various criteria have a much longer active online life and foster a stronger sense of community.

One thing I did certainly not expect is to get feedback from some developers within a few hours of the article going live. I know of at least three who are forwarding it to the relevant parts of their team (some having it translated even), and others have said that it’s nice to have something “official” (even if it’s just an article) to show the decision makers when discussing PC features. This is honestly already a much better outcome than I had expected!

Development on GeDoSaTo and PtBi

As some of you might have noticed, development on these projects has slowed down considerably over the past few weeks. This is primarily due to my “real world” work load, which has increased significantly due to the unfortunate confluence of the semester starting in October here (teaching), paper deadlines (research), and project proposals in-flight (shit).

I still try to merge external contributions to both projects regularly, so please help out if you can. My own situation should normalize somewhat in November, and allow me to work on them once again. (By the way, I actually wrote most of the article discussed above roughly two weeks ago)