[DX11] Help regarding Nvidia Profile Inspector (NPI)

[BenganJ]

@JHTrucker

I NEVER use SMAA! Read my previous post! Sorry about my misjudgement! :=(

[JHTrucker]

@BenganJ
Ok, you said this back a few pages ago and so i thought you had set smaa on and forgot it was on.
"For me it works good when I don't use NPI at all and set SSAO to High in-game, but then I can only get the lousy SMAA antialiasing."

But don't judge from game menu... that has no NPI AA at all. It's another type of AA that wasn't MLAA and only used on the menu.
Remember the menu isn't 100% scaling now to stop the gfx flipping. So no AA.
I have my game set to "start in cab" so after clicking my profile i'm straight into the cab... no menu.

[BenganJ]

@JHTrucker

Yep, I got carried away there, when I thought I had found something! Sorry!
Back to the testbed again!

Edit: The odd thing was that without deactivating NPI totally I got the SCS type
of AO just by changing that 8 in first position. There might be something in those
4 bits that has an impact on AO!

[JHTrucker]

@BenganJ
I see that first position as an AA on/off switch, 0/1/2/3/4/5/6/7 = off & 8/9/A/B/C/D/E/F = on
As long as the right bits are set further along!

[BenganJ]

@JHTrucker

Yep, looks like it!

[JHTrucker]

@BenganJ
You use Nvidia Freestyle filter, can you add SSAO to it in some form?
By doing that does it enable in game SSAO to be visible?

Just thinking out loud!

[JHTrucker]

@BenganJ

So if we can get SSAO to work with NPI AA then there shouldn't be a big fps hit, if this post is correct on scs forum:

Re: 1.38 Performance Issues
#5 Post by SiSL » 15 Jul 2020 19:51

Glad to help.

While Scale UP and reduce down tactics might help to create fake anti aliasing, in basic terms 400% scale means 16x more GPU power needed to calculate and draw Ambient occlusion than 100%. So it can be nice to find a good balance between.

[BenganJ]

@JHTrucker

Actually I don't use Freestyle anymore, but I can see if there's any AO shader in that pack.
I've also installed a lot of extra shaders in there! Interesting thought! Report coming later!

EDIT: After enabling GE overlay, I found the famous ReShade shader MXAO which you can
read about here.

https://reshade.me/forum/shader-present ... ao-with-il

There are several levels of quality, you can adjust the amount of AO and also the AO gamma. BUT,
to me it felt non-natural. I also got a message from Freestyle that the shader needed access to
a depth map, which the game now don't supply, did in DX9 though! I also noted that the effects
spilled over to the menu, so as I said, nothing useful at all.

[JHTrucker]

@BenganJ
I thought something like that might have enabled in game SSAO to work rather than use them, if you see what i mean.

The AA bit is far too strange to work anything out.
Here for example, these all give AA but untested for the anomalies.
0x80000A7F
0x8000A7FF
0x800A7FFF
0x80A7FFFF
0x8A7FFFFF
0xA7FFFFFF
0xFFFFFFFF
0xA7FA7FFF

It's almost like it wants you to have AA!

[BenganJ]

@JHTrucker

Yes, I read a Steam article about fixing ReShade SSAO in a game, Source Engine,
where the conclusion more or less was that one has to choose, AA or AO! Here's link.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/ ... 1974370257