Ankors Question

[alcanallen]

Hi all,finally after a long struggle iv`e got the latest Ankors Shaders working,the question is it will only run on my rig in"millions 32 bit" with a res of 1920x1080 which is standard for my monitor,my G Card is a Radeon HD 6900 series,is this correct?as in 16 bit mode all other CFS3 installs are running and the sim crashes if i try Ankor Shaders in "thousands 16 bit".PS are there any other "tweaks"to up the Sim`s performance?

OS Windows 7 home premium 64 bit
Mother board Gigabyte B85M-HD3
Procesor i5-4670@3.4 GZh
Ram 8 Gig
G Card AMD Radeon HD 6900
Monitor Samsung 22inch ToC 50000 Pix
Display 1920x1080 32bit
Stick Cyborg V1

 

[MajorMagee]

I was not aware of that limitation, but it makes sense now that you mention it. In order for AnKor's shaders to accomplish the lighting effects it's designed to produce it needs a wide range of subtle color shades to work with. Reducing that to 16 bit would probably result in some pretty noticeable banding.

 

[gecko]

I can't see any reason why you wouldn't want to run in 32 bit at 1920x1080, it looks better and runs smoother and your PC looks like it can handle it no problem.

 

[alcanallen]

Running Ankors in 32 bit

Thanks for the response,yes it runs fine except for stuttering in some missions,also when first firing the guns it pauses for a second or two before going off,my FPS are up in the high 50`s so i don`t understand why the jerky pauses.
are there any tweaks i can try?
alcanallen.

 

[AnKor]

Yes, 16-bit mode ("thousands" of colors) is not supported. It could probably work if I bothered to add it, but it is not any faster and would just look worse. It made sense in early 2000-s, but not now. My shaders use DirectX 9, but just for the perspective: initial version of DirectX 11 as shipped with Windows 7 didn't support 16 bit formats at all, neither as display modes nor as texture formats. They've added it back in DirectX 11.1 for Windows 8, but I believe it was mostly for versatility.

As for increasing performance, I think you can try reducing shadows quality in d3d8.ini (almost at the beginning of the file)
If you have it set to 5 like this

; Aircraft shadows. 0 - No Shadows; 1 - Low; 2 - Medium; 3 - Good; 4 - High; 5 - Best
ShadowQuality=5

You can try changing it to ShadowQuality=4 or maybe 3.

Regarding stuttering when firing guns.
It may be a side effect of one optimization I did for ground shaders -- there are separate shaders for different number of lights, so maybe your graphics card stutters when shaders are switched (muzzle flashes are additional light sources).
However I think this is very unlikely. Main work on these shaders was done while I had GTX 285 w/ 1Gb, which is older and slower than your graphics card and I didn't have such problems and switching shaders is very common optimization.
Anyway, you can try changing this line in d3d8.ini

; Enable dynamic lights (gun flashes, etc) for scenery objects. 0 - Off. 1 - On.
SceneryDynamicLighting=1

to SceneryDynamicLighting=0. It is somewhere in the middle of the file.

 

[MajorMagee]

My experience with stuttering is that it's difficult to reduce to one root cause. You can do a lot of trial and error experimenting without ever finding the cause, and everyone's system is going to be unique.

In the case of the guns firing, it could very well be addressed by adding a few files to the preload.xml list. I've also seen it tied to latency in the audio system when the gunfire sound starts to play.

On my system I've noticed a regular micro-stutter when flying fast and low that would seem to go away as I climbed. It was like clockwork, and seemed immune to changes in object density or other level of detail settings. I eventually concluded that it had more to do with the way CFS3 does memory management for the terrain information, and what I was seeing was an artifact of memory chunking. As the processor would reach a boundary the switch to the next block would cause a slight hesitation that was only visible if you were moving fast, close to the ground.

 

[alcanallen]

Ankors Shaders

Thank you for your input Ankor,i will try editing d3d8.ini and see what happens,Major which files do you mean for the preload and where to find them,
again thanks,
John Allen.

 

[MajorMagee]

Thank you for your input Ankor,i will try editing d3d8.ini and see what happens,Major which files do you mean for the preload and where to find them,
again thanks,
John Allen.

It's going to be the files that your computer is pausing to load the first time. Sorry about being indirect, but the list is going to be different for every system. On my system I have most of files in the effects sub-folders and the terrain graphics. I've tried using filename wildcards or just pointing to a directory, and that does not work, so each filename needs to be an entry of its own. This is what I have for ETO.

<Preload>
<Notes
note="IMPORTANT -- Edit this file using a text editor, not XML notepad since it doesn't support duplicate attribute names."
/>


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/>


</Preload>