Thank you ED - Terrain shadows are go!

[edmuss]

Hard edged flat terrain shadows are a thing again!
We can now fly the lovely new lighting engine with terrain shadows on without the monster GPU hit of the soft edges, thank you so very, very much

Regarding terrain shadows moving forwards, would it be possible to have hard edged, terrain map following shadows as an option?  Perhaps have two settings for terrain shadows - off/flat/terrain map and soft edge/hard edge.

Once again, thanks, a lot of people have missed the terrain shadows in VR!

[5ephir0th]

I still have soft edge on flat shadows, still the same

[dburne]

9 minutes ago, edmuss said:

Hard edged flat terrain shadows are a thing again!
We can now fly the lovely new lighting engine with terrain shadows on without the monster GPU hit of the soft edges, thank you so very, very much

Regarding terrain shadows moving forwards, would it be possible to have hard edged, terrain map following shadows as an option?  Perhaps have two settings for terrain shadows - off/flat/terrain map and soft edge/hard edge.

Once again, thanks, a lot of people have missed the terrain shadows in VR!

 

Ok I must be missing something here and yes I am fully updated. What the heck are you talking about this soft edge/hard edge option??

 

[edmuss]

24 minutes ago, 5ephir0th said:

I still have soft edge on flat shadows, still the same

Have you installed todays OB hotfix?

24 minutes ago, dburne said:

 

Ok I must be missing something here and yes I am fully updated. What the heck are you talking about this soft edge/hard edge option??

 

In 2.7 default terrain shadows would follow the terrain map and have a soft diffused edge, flat shadows wouldn't follow the terrain map (stick out from the side of steep hills etc.) and would have a hard stencilled edge.  Default shadows had a really hefty GPU hit, flat didn't.

In 2.8 the flat terrain shadows developed the same soft edges as the 2.7 default but without the terrain map following, they had almost as much GPU hit as the default.

I now have flat shadows with hard edges that aren't eating a load of frametime

 

[5ephir0th]

6 minutes ago, edmuss said:

Have you installed todays OB hotfix?

Yes

[edmuss]

Default terrain shadows - 17ms with soft edges

 

Flat terrain shadows with hard edges - 16ms

 

[5ephir0th]

2 minutes ago, edmuss said:

Default terrain shadows - 17ms with soft edges

 

Flat terrain shadows with hard edges - 16ms

 

I see soft edges on both images, just a more aggresive LOD on default shadows

[maxTRX]

Is edmuss the only one that got the fix... anyone else?   I didn't bother updating just for the 'mosquito' fix ;/ 

[dburne]

35 minutes ago, edmuss said:

In 2.7 default terrain shadows would follow the terrain map and have a soft diffused edge, flat shadows wouldn't follow the terrain map (stick out from the side of steep hills etc.) and would have a hard stencilled edge.  Default shadows had a really hefty GPU hit, flat didn't.

In 2.8 the flat terrain shadows developed the same soft edges as the 2.7 default but without the terrain map following, they had almost as much GPU hit as the default.

I now have flat shadows with hard edges that aren't eating a load of frametime

 

Ok so they are not necessarily selectable graphics options, guess I read it wrong thanks.

[edmuss]

Perhaps it's the LOD's that have been adjusted but I'm seeing better performance with flat shadows over default than I did with previous testing on 2.8.0.  However if I'm seeing lower LOD on default wouldn't that typically result in less frametimes not more?

The flat shadows also shimmer far less now than they did on 2.8.0

Just now, dburne said:

Ok so they are not necessarily selectable graphics options, guess I read it wrong thanks.

No, still the same selectable options as before, that was just my wishlisting

[dburne]

15 minutes ago, edmuss said:

Perhaps it's the LOD's that have been adjusted but I'm seeing better performance with flat shadows over default than I did with previous testing on 2.8.0.  However if I'm seeing lower LOD on default wouldn't that typically result in less frametimes not more?

The flat shadows also shimmer far less now than they did on 2.8.0

No, still the same selectable options as before, that was just my wishlisting

 

Lol y'all probably get way more into the weeds on details in some of this stuff than I would even think about. Very informational though!

[freehand]

I see nothing different performance wise.

 

Edited December 24, 2022 by freehand

[dburne]

1 minute ago, freehand said:

I see nothing different performance wise.

 

 

I have kept terrain shadows off. Have changed them to flat and will see what it does to me tomorrow sometime.

[zildac]

I'm still seeing a drop of 10FPS with terrain shadows set to flat versus off.

[Art-J]

^ Well, that's underatandable and expected. The question is more about the impact of flat vs default, compared to initial release of 2.8 and the last release of 2.7.

[edmuss]

19 minutes ago, zildac said:

I'm still seeing a drop of 10FPS with terrain shadows set to flat versus off.

Yeah they're not free at all, but currently they're behaving better for me compared to the initial release of 2.8 which caused flat shadows to be soft edged like default.

5 minutes ago, Art-J said:

^ Well, that's underatandable and expected. The question is more about the impact of flat vs default, compared to initial release of 2.8 and the last release of 2.7.

What he said^

[Supmua]

For me the shadows are now flat with flat setting, but has softer edges (better antialiasing) compared to old flat shadows.  Performance-wise not as good as the old one but I prefer this as it looks better and also costs less than low/med shadows.

[speed-of-heat]

So this is my testing results of shadows on the Syrian Map using the AH64 hot start, using a track with stabilised head position (etc)   the only variables changed are shadow types as noted, this is on the latest hotfix:

FPS	1% Low	0.1% Low	app CPU(ms)	render CPU(ms)	GPU (ms)	Shadows	Secondary  Shadows	Terrain Shadows	Scale
71.64	64.56	58.93	14.06	10.47	13.46	Off	Off	OFF	100%
71.17	64.93	63.25	14.20	10.56	13.59	Off	Off	FLAT	100%
59.16	49.87	44.02	17.15	14.97	15.22	FLAT Only	Off	FLAT	100%
55.63	46.85	41.70	18.49	16.34	15.93	LOW	Off	FLAT	100%
57.51	50.67	44.94	17.70	15.08	16.44	LOW	Off	DEFAULT	100%
59.22	49.41	43.16	17.33	14.96	15.12	Flat Only	Off	DEFAULT	100%

from a functional pov enabling terrain shadows still mullers performance... hope it helps 

 

 

 

Syria Ah64 Hot start performance.trk

Edited December 24, 2022 by speed-of-heat
Column Transposition

[edmuss]

20 minutes ago, speed-of-heat said:

So this is my testing results of shadows on the Syrian Map using the AH64 hot start, using a track with stabilised head position (etc)   the only variables changed are shadow types as noted, this is on the latest hotfix:

FPS	1% Low	0.1% Low	app CPU(ms)	render CPU(ms)	GPU (ms)	Shadows	Secondary  Shadows	Terrain Shadows	Scale
71.64	64.56	58.93	14.06	10.47	13.46	Off	Off	OFF	100%
71.17	64.93	63.25	14.20	10.56	13.59	Off	Off	FLAT	100%
59.16	49.87	44.02	17.15	14.97	15.22	Off	FLAT Only	FLAT	100%
55.63	46.85	41.70	18.49	16.34	15.93	Off	LOW	FLAT	100%
57.51	50.67	44.94	17.70	15.08	16.44	Off	LOW	DEFAULT	100%
59.22	49.41	43.16	17.33	14.96	15.12	Off	FLAT Only	DEFAULT	100%

from a functional pov enabling terrain shadows still mullers performance... hope it helps 

 

 

 

Syria Ah64 Hot start performance.trk 4.57 MB · 0 downloads

Odd, the second line (flat terrain shadows only) is the same performance as terrain shadows off?

It appears to be the secondary shadows that are mullering your performance

26 minutes ago, Supmua said:

For me the shadows are now flat with flat setting, but has softer edges (better antialiasing) compared to old flat shadows.  Performance-wise not as good as the old one but I prefer this as it looks better and also costs less than low/med shadows.

Yeah I think the edges may be slightly softer than the 2.7 ones but they're far more defined for me than the default ones

Edited December 24, 2022 by edmuss

[speed-of-heat]

8 minutes ago, edmuss said:

Odd, the second line (flat terrain shadows only) is the same performance as terrain shadows off?

It appears to be the secondary shadows that are mullering your performance

 

Columns were transposed ... by keyboard chair interface failure , corrected 

As for the 2nd line more testing for completeness, you dont get any shadows unless some form of Shadows is selected so any state other than off

or if you do it only really impacts some stuff that was out of the scope of the test, which might account for the difference in 1% lows 

 

[edmuss]

That makes more sense

Interesting that you're so CPU bound, wonder if that's a function of the AH64 or the shadows?

edit: my appCPU and renderCPU are much lower than my appGPU, typically about half. I guess the 12700 is bottlenecking the 4090 hard?

Edited December 24, 2022 by edmuss

[speed-of-heat]

Yep, also just realised turbo mode was on so those cpu numbers may be meaningless ( more keyboard to chair problems)

Edited December 24, 2022 by speed-of-heat

[speed-of-heat]

31 minutes ago, edmuss said:

That makes more sense

Interesting that you're so CPU bound, wonder if that's a function of the AH64 or the shadows?

edit: my appCPU and renderCPU are much lower than my appGPU, typically about half. I guess the 12700 is bottlenecking the 4090 hard?

 

yep so if i turn turbo mode of the CPU FT drops to about 12ms ... but the FPS drops by about 10 ... lesson to me (turn turbo mode on for gaming but not for perf testing, which should be obvious as it sends all the numbers whack for CPU

 

[edmuss]

Yeah that sounds a bit more logical, double edged sword is turbo but it does lift the FPS to match frametimes

[speed-of-heat]

Yep!