[DX11] Help regarding Nvidia Profile Inspector (NPI)

[black-coffee]

After not even 2 days with SSAO, I have no problem in saying - rubbish with diminishing returns. I choose this AA solution over SSAO any hour of the day... Anyone playing at a higher resolution than 1080P will quickly start cursing the inconsistent FPS all over the place. It's a good thing SCS is adding stuff, however the game engine needs a proper "sprucing up", without it it's like adding weight to an old under powered car...

[yiannis]

Those inconsistent fps and sudden dips for one second or two are the result of the game being single-thread, or rather the rendering is done on one thread, cause there is one thread for save games and maybe one for other in-game calculations (for example hired drivers). On difficult locations this one thread goes to 100% and there you have it, fps drops with the gpu sitting around at 60% utilization. This is unacceptable for a 2020 game. Yes, yes I know ETS2 and ATS were released years ago but the business model SCS has implemented (that is keep the same base game and release updates and DLCs for it) requires for core engine updates too. A person that discovers SCS games today will just see a single-core game with old graphic techniques, he does not know or care about the background. Anyways SSAO is gpu bound though, so any fps drops from using it mean that the GPU is not powerful enough..

[Jarinage]

Well guys, exactly my thoughts recently. The engine is so outdated that I'm afraid adding such features on top of it is not going to save it. On the other hand there's one thing that would improve it massively in my opinion, and that is a proper AA implementation. However much these settings this whole thread is all about help a lot, it's not ideal. The game still suffers from a very strong shimmering effect, as well as flickering textures etc. For me it is so immersion breaking that I'm really having a hard time to continue enjoying these sims. And I've been playing them since day one, have all dlc's and everything. Playing Snowrunner as it was released recently and the graphics quality is simply unmatched. SCS is not gonna survive with this engine forever, it's unsustainable situation I'm afraid.

[BenganJ]

@black-coffee
@yiannis
@Jarinage

I can only agree in most of what you say, the old game engine being the biggest problem.
But if I have interpreted Max correctly there's a hell of a lot of special handling within the
engine, limitations on some parameters e.g. and then it might be a bit hard to easily switch
engine. The only way there, I think, would be ETS3/ATS2 or WTS , World Truck Simulator.

EDIT: One other thing that bothers me heavily is, that when two textures are placed at the
same level, depending on viewpoint, they are displayed alternating, making them flicker
heavily!

[yiannis]

The best solution would be indeed ETS3 on some prover engine like Unreal. Every game I have played on Unreal runs like a charm with beautiful graphics. Gears 5, which is the second best game in graphics ever (first is Red Dead Redemption 2) runs way better than SCS games and with massively better visuals on top of that. A small studio like SCS cannot develop a proper game engine on their own, without a publisher. With my old computer I used to play SCS a lot more cause they were among the few games that could run well but since I got my new system my interested in ETS2 and ATS has been on a constant decline (imagine I haven't yet bought Road to the Black Sea), as now I can play everything I want so the competition between SCS's and other games is much more apparent for me now and I just cannot resist playing the new games. If it wasn't for you guys that discovered the inspector "hack" I would have abandoned both SCS games a year ago..

[Jarinage]

Or the shadows render distance that's another story. Sometimes the entire screen flickers like hell with some unidentifiable black mess... I just wonder if anyone can see or notice this in SCS. I wouldn't be surprised if they'd be ignoring such things due to their concentration on some other stuff that they consider more important... like new cab horns, or skins:-(

[yiannis]

Like I have said SCS just cannot do everything. They are a small studio so the priority goes to the DLCs as they are the ones that make money. Of course they are aware of the graphics problems and they address them but the progress is veeeery slow. Another thing is that if you check the SCS forums you will see that most people have prehistoric PCs so they don't know how a proper, modern game looks like so they may not even notice all those problems, so there is not much pressure on SCS to deal with them faster..

[BenganJ]

@yiannis

So true! And thanks for the appreciation of what we have achieved. There's
many man-hours in this too, testing a hell of a lot and mostly having to restart
the game in between. Yep, new game, new engine, converting the SCS world
into the new system, getting rid of anomalies on the way. Is it ONLY a dream???

[yiannis]

Yeah, I would say it is 99% a dream. A new game would require new licenses for every truck and trailer DLC, new map DLCs all over again, etc..

[BenganJ]

@yiannis

Why would it not be possible for SCS to just integrate all the map DLC's in the new WORLD
for the new game, start all over so to speak, and then add new DLCs from there, giving old
customers of ETS2/ATS a discount on the new game?