Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion ?Chuck? Patch

[RobertR1]

Originally posted by: Gstanfor
Most people wouldn't even know what HDR mode it was doing. As I said before SC:CT still uses the SM2.0 path. So far as I'm concerned there has been no conclusive proof that ATi is using FP16 HDR, most likely they are using the cheesy FX10 mode of theirs which is why they have to hack the hell out the drivers to make it work.

Cheesy? Not one reviewer or user has reported an IQ degradation from using the "chuck" patch, a difference in HDR quality from ati > nvidia and if there is no IQ hit by them using FX10 instead of FP16, the users don't care, only you. As usual, your jump to conclusions mat is used before your head.

 

[Munky]

Originally posted by: Gstanfor
Most people wouldn't even know what HDR mode it was doing. As I said before SC:CT still uses the SM2.0 path. So far as I'm concerned there has been no conclusive proof that ATi is using FP16 HDR, most likely they are using the cheesy FX10 mode of theirs which is why they have to hack the hell out the drivers to make it work.

Did you read the interview with Chuck about the patch?
Link...
He said he did not change anything to lower precision mode, he simply binds the FP16 render texture to a separate FP16 MSAA buffer, and performs the MSAA in there. I hope you're not still debating whether or not the x1k cards are capable of FP16 MSAA rendering, because it's already been shown to work in games like Farcry and SS2.

 

[Vesper8]

so.. I'll ask again since no one has answered yet

DOES THE CHUCK PATCH WORK WITH 6.4 ??

AND IF NOT HAS CHUCK GIVEN ANY INDICATION HE WILL MODIFY HIS PATCH SO IT DOES?

thx

 

[Shortass]

Caps really aren't necessary. How about you just try it? If there are horrible problems reinstall the drivers.

 

[Ackmed]

Originally posted by: Sable

I'm pretty sure TWIMTBP money played a part in HDR+AA not working straight out of the box.

My opinion as well. I dont see how they couldnt get it working. It took Chuck about 12 hours, and they sure didnt ask ATi about it, you can tell that by his interview.

Originally posted by: Vesper8
so.. I'll ask again since no one has answered yet

DOES THE CHUCK PATCH WORK WITH 6.4 ??

AND IF NOT HAS CHUCK GIVEN ANY INDICATION HE WILL MODIFY HIS PATCH SO IT DOES?

thx

Yes it works with 6.4's. Word on the street is, the drivers were too far into Q&A to get the chuck patch built in the drivers. It should be in the 6.5's, in about a month or so.

 

[RobertR1]

Originally posted by: Ackmed

Originally posted by: Sable

I'm pretty sure TWIMTBP money played a part in HDR+AA not working straight out of the box.

My opinion as well. I dont see how they couldnt get it working. It took Chuck about 12 hours, and they sure didnt ask ATi about it, you can tell that by his interview.

In the same token, what, if any, effort did Ati make to contact bethaseda to offer them help to get HDR+AA implemented into their game? I bet 0. Ati are not every pro active with talking to developers about offering assistance. According to sireric, they didn't even have a retail release until the game actually hit the shelves. I don't see that as being a positive.

 

[PingSpike]

Originally posted by: Ackmed

Originally posted by: Sable

I'm pretty sure TWIMTBP money played a part in HDR+AA not working straight out of the box.

My opinion as well. I dont see how they couldnt get it working. It took Chuck about 12 hours, and they sure didnt ask ATi about it, you can tell that by his interview.

Like I said, the only logical explainations are incompetence on the part of developers or some form of pressure/incentive from probably microsoft or nvidia. Given some of the other dubious decisions surrounding this product, I'm leaning towards the conspiracy theory on this one myself.

 

[thilanliyan]

Originally posted by: munky

Originally posted by: Gstanfor
Actually Munky in this case, it can. The application can ask for AA and it can ask for hdr rendering. It already knows how to ask for both in isolation. That's all it should take providing the drivers work right.

But the application itself does not allow you to select HDR and AA at the same time. It's explicitly coded to NOT support HDR and AA simultaneously.

Exactly...Betheda decided to not even make that an option remember.

 

[Gstanfor]

Originally posted by: munky

Originally posted by: Gstanfor
Most people wouldn't even know what HDR mode it was doing. As I said before SC:CT still uses the SM2.0 path. So far as I'm concerned there has been no conclusive proof that ATi is using FP16 HDR, most likely they are using the cheesy FX10 mode of theirs which is why they have to hack the hell out the drivers to make it work.

Did you read the interview with Chuck about the patch?
Link...
He said he did not change anything to lower precision mode, he simply binds the FP16 render texture to a separate FP16 MSAA buffer, and performs the MSAA in there. I hope you're not still debating whether or not the x1k cards are capable of FP16 MSAA rendering, because it's already been shown to work in games like Farcry and SS2.

No, I haven't read the interview yet (been way too overworked most of this week for anything like that), I did however notice comments by people saying the chuck patch does not render certain things correctly. This reminds me of farcry a while back with bluish grass being rendered. The reason for that was a wrong texture format and I suspect the same will be true of the chuck patch. Since the game already knows about and uses FP16 you can only conclude the textures are being converted to some other format - you can guess which one I think it is....

 

[nts]

Originally posted by: Gstanfor
No, I haven't read the interview yet (been way too overworked most of this week for anything like that), I did however notice comments by people saying the chuck patch does not render certain things correctly. This reminds me of farcry a while back with bluish grass being rendered. The reason for that was a wrong texture format and I suspect the same will be true of the chuck patch. Since the game already knows about and uses FP16 you can only conclude the textures are being converted to some other format - you can guess which one I think it is....

Ugh No. I think we can only conclude that you're a troll and very uninformed...

 

[Gstanfor]

From that interview:

When you force on MSAA through the Catalyst Control Center, our driver has a special "ForceAA" path that will allocate an MSAA buffer and bind it to the flip chain (back buffer). That causes all rendering to the flip chain, to actually go into the MSAA buffer, so you get higher quality. This doesn't work for Oblivion, because most of the rendering doesn't go into the flip chain, so you don't see any difference. In my patch, I made a special ForceAA path to enable MSAA on textures instead of the flip chain.

Currently, this path is only enabled for Oblivion under Catalyst AI app detection. The exciting thing is that this ForceAA path could be enabled for other games in the future, like FarCry and Splinter Cell, so these games could get HDR+AA also! In my special ForceAA path, I detect when the correct FP16 renderable texture is created and then allocate a separate FP16 MSAA buffer and bind it to the texture. From that point on, all rendering the app does to the FP16 texture actually goes into the FP16 MSAA buffer instead.

With the first bolded part of that quote, Chuck is saying what I said on the previous page, it should be as simple as the driver forcing the AA on since the app and the GPU both already know about HDR and AA. No "patches" required.

The second bolded bit puts the lie to 5150joker/munky's claims that FP16 HDR is already being used...

 

[evolucion8]

Originally posted by: Sunday Ironfoot

Anyone tried enabling 'Adaptive AA'? It looks superb, it applies AA to alpha textures like those used in the grass and trees, and stops the shimmering effect you see with distant trees. Trouble is with 6xAA plus Adaptive AA I get 13fps...really need a Crossfire system for that.

Yeah, the impact on performance hoves around the 5 and 20% depending on the resolution. I used it on Far Cry on my X800XTPE and the Frame Rate decreased from 60 to between 35 and 53, not bad considering the nature of this anti aliasing. And yes, it can be enabled via Registry Tweak on any R3X0 or R4X0 GPU and it's RVXXX derivates.

 

[nitromullet]

No, I haven't read the interview yet (been way too overworked most of this week for anything like that), I did however notice comments by people saying the chuck patch does not render certain things correctly. This reminds me of farcry a while back with bluish grass being rendered. The reason for that was a wrong texture format and I suspect the same will be true of the chuck patch. Since the game already knows about and uses FP16 you can only conclude the textures are being converted to some other format - you can guess which one I think it is....

Odd, we have a 7 page thread here, and I haven't seen a single mention of things rendering incorrectly. Additionally, after having played quite a number of hours of Oblivion (on single/dual 7900GTX and an X1900XTX), I have also not noticed anything rendered incorrectly on the ATI card, and I have had HDR + AA enabled with the ATI card since this patch came out.

 

[Gstanfor]

Well, it was either here or B3D forums (didn't take more than a passing interest at the time due to being incredibly busy), i believe it concerned the grass or grass shadows (funny how the grass always cops the rendering errors in games).

 

[BFG10K]

(ATi claims that their HDR AA is orthagonal to all the other rendering the chip does

No. ATi claims all forms of AA are orthogonal to FP HDR, which is correct.

farcry, SC-CT & now Oblivion all tell a different story...)

That would be because the games aren't coded to take advantage of the two features at once.

It's a hack because support has to be specifically added, when the GPU should require no added support at all in order to use the feature.

If the game doesn't support it then the driver has to force it. This is really no different to implementing a driver path to force AF in games that don't support it themselves. If the game supports it then the force AF path is not needed.

Farcry, SC:CT & Oblivion should all have been capable of running HDR & AA without ATi so much as having to lift a finger or anyone needing to write a patch if what they claim about R5xx series is correct.

Nonsense. That the applications need to be coded support said features does not mean that the hardware support is not available.

Otherwise when GF3 came out we could have used your ridiculous reasoning and claimed that it doesn't actually have shaders because there are no games that support them. The driver should just be "forcing" shaders into games that don't have them. :roll:

Likewise using the same reasoning nVidia doesn't support HDR because I can't force it into GLQuake.

The application can ask for AA and it can ask for hdr rendering. It already knows how to ask for both in isolation. That's all it should take providing the drivers work right.

If it's not asking for both at the same time then it won't work without the driver forcing it.

If your really think otherwise then explain how to enable SSAA in Deus Ex Invisible war on nVidia cards. The application knows how to ask for AA so how come the control panel has no effect?

Likewise nVidia claims AF and AA are orthogonal so how come I can't run both in Halo? Using your ridiculous reasoning can we conclude nVidia doesn't have the hardware support to run AA and AF at the same time?

And if ATi really can't support FP16 and MSAA at the same time at the hardware level and are hacking it into the driver then surely it'll be trivial for nVidia to hack it in in the same fashion?

So how come we haven't see it yet? In a TWIMTBP title no less?

As I said before SC:CT still uses the SM2.0 path

What the hell does this have to do with anyhing? HDR is not tied to a particular shader model.

With the first bolded part of that quote, Chuck is saying what I said on the previous page

Uh no, he's not. He's saying it won't work because Oblivion using a non-standard rendering path which is why a generic force MSAA path in the driver won't work. This is no different to the likes of Halo not having AA when you try to force it through nVidia's control panel.

The second bolded bit puts the lie to 5150joker/munky's claims that FP16 HDR is already being used...

It is being used which is why Oblivion's force MSAA path on FP16 HDR could be applied to those other games he listed. In effect what he's saying is that he's implemented a force MSAA to FP16 HDR driver path that could force MSAA on other games using FP16 HDR, much like the old driver path can force MSAA into non-FP/non-HDR games.

Do you actually comprehend what you read or do you just spew anti-ATi propaganda at any opportunity you get?

 

[Munky]

Originally posted by: Gstanfor
From that interview:

When you force on MSAA through the Catalyst Control Center, our driver has a special "ForceAA" path that will allocate an MSAA buffer and bind it to the flip chain (back buffer). That causes all rendering to the flip chain, to actually go into the MSAA buffer, so you get higher quality. This doesn't work for Oblivion, because most of the rendering doesn't go into the flip chain, so you don't see any difference. In my patch, I made a special ForceAA path to enable MSAA on textures instead of the flip chain.

Currently, this path is only enabled for Oblivion under Catalyst AI app detection. The exciting thing is that this ForceAA path could be enabled for other games in the future, like FarCry and Splinter Cell, so these games could get HDR+AA also! In my special ForceAA path, I detect when the correct FP16 renderable texture is created and then allocate a separate FP16 MSAA buffer and bind it to the texture. From that point on, all rendering the app does to the FP16 texture actually goes into the FP16 MSAA buffer instead.

With the first bolded part of that quote, Chuck is saying what I said on the previous page, it should be as simple as the driver forcing the AA on since the app and the GPU both already know about HDR and AA. No "patches" required.

The second bolded bit puts the lie to 5150joker/munky's claims that FP16 HDR is already being used...

Could be used when the game does not support FP16 MSAA natively. Farcry has built in support for FP16 HDR + AA with the 1.4 game patch, and does not require any special driver hack. Same thing for SS2. Are you implying that those games do not really use FP16 MSAA, and that my eyes were deceiving me when I played them with both features enabled?

 

[BFG10K]

According to sireric, they didn't even have a retail release until the game actually hit the shelves. I don't see that as being a positive.

While it's a bad thing in terms of developer relations it's also a testament to how robust ATi's drivers are because they ran the title well right out of the box.

Meanwhile Tomb Raider is a TWIMTBP title with green icons plastered everywhere and nVidia had to rush emergency beta drivers when the game was released.

 

[Gstanfor]

I'm saying that an ATi employee has publically stated that FarCry and SC:CT are not using HDR+AA. Read the second bolded paragraph carefully!

Game designers are the only ones who can decide if a user can use HDR rendering or not. However if AA is orthagonal to *all* other rendering modes, then anyone can enable AA on anything. This is precisely how it worked prior to HDR and it isn't about to change now.

 

[Munky]

Then what he stated was wrong. I played Farcry myself with HDR + AA, and I didnt need any patched driver. SC:CT, though, does not allow HDR+AA, so he way right about that one.

 

[Gstanfor]

Ah, so the Ati software engineer is wrong and munky is right? :roll: The fanATics are *always* right, especially ob subjects such as whether partial precision is part of the DX9 spec or not... :roll:

 

[Munky]

Did you read what I said? I personally played Farcry with HDR and AA, and I didnt need any Chuck patch for it. But according to you, I must have just imagined playing it that way, because my eyesight must not be as good as your omniscient grasp of the subject... :roll:

 

[Gstanfor]

No, according to chuck you are wrong. I remember Baumann thinking he had FP16 HDR+AA going with farcry also, only it turned out he didn't.

 

[Munky]

Originally posted by: Gstanfor
No, according to chuck you are wrong. I remember Baumann thinking he had FP16 HDR+AA going with farcry also, only it turned out he didn't.

Do you have a link to that article?

 

[thilanliyan]

Originally posted by: BFG10K

(ATi claims that their HDR AA is orthagonal to all the other rendering the chip does

No. ATi claims all forms of AA are orthogonal to FP HDR, which is correct.

farcry, SC-CT & now Oblivion all tell a different story...)

That would be because the games aren't coded to take advantage of the two features at once.

It's a hack because support has to be specifically added, when the GPU should require no added support at all in order to use the feature.

If the game doesn't support it then the driver has to force it. This is really no different to implementing a driver path to force AF in games that don't support it themselves. If the game supports it then the force AF path is not needed.

Farcry, SC:CT & Oblivion should all have been capable of running HDR & AA without ATi so much as having to lift a finger or anyone needing to write a patch if what they claim about R5xx series is correct.

Nonsense. That the applications need to be coded support said features does not mean that the hardware support is not available.

Otherwise when GF3 came out we could have used your ridiculous reasoning and claimed that it doesn't actually have shaders because there are no games that support them. The driver should just be "forcing" shaders into games that don't have them. :roll:

Likewise using the same reasoning nVidia doesn't support HDR because I can't force it into GLQuake.

The application can ask for AA and it can ask for hdr rendering. It already knows how to ask for both in isolation. That's all it should take providing the drivers work right.

If it's not asking for both at the same time then it won't work without the driver forcing it.

If your really think otherwise then explain how to enable SSAA in Deus Ex Invisible war on nVidia cards. The application knows how to ask for AA so how come the control panel has no effect?

Likewise nVidia claims AF and AA are orthogonal so how come I can't run both in Halo? Using your ridiculous reasoning can we conclude nVidia doesn't have the hardware support to run AA and AF at the same time?

And if ATi really can't support FP16 and MSAA at the same time at the hardware level and are hacking it into the driver then surely it'll be trivial for nVidia to hack it in in the same fashion?

So how come we haven't see it yet? In a TWIMTBP title no less?

As I said before SC:CT still uses the SM2.0 path

What the hell does this have to do with anyhing? HDR is not tied to a particular shader model.

With the first bolded part of that quote, Chuck is saying what I said on the previous page

Uh no, he's not. He's saying it won't work because Oblivion using a non-standard rendering path which is why a generic force MSAA path in the driver won't work. This is no different to the likes of Halo not having AA when you try to force it through nVidia's control panel.

The second bolded bit puts the lie to 5150joker/munky's claims that FP16 HDR is already being used...

It is being used which is why Oblivion's force MSAA path on FP16 HDR could be applied to those other games he listed. In effect what he's saying is that he's implemented a force MSAA to FP16 HDR driver path that could force MSAA on other games using FP16 HDR, much like the old driver path can force MSAA into non-FP/non-HDR games.

Do you actually comprehend what you read or do you just spew anti-ATi propaganda at any opportunity you get?

Thanks for that. I knew the "it should just work" argument was ridiculous cause the hardware needs the software programmed properly for it. I don't think someone is gonna answer this post though....figures.

 

[Gstanfor]

Originally posted by: munky

Originally posted by: Gstanfor
No, according to chuck you are wrong. I remember Baumann thinking he had FP16 HDR+AA going with farcry also, only it turned out he didn't.

Do you have a link to that article?

Search in the forums @ B3D, it wasn't an article AFAIK.