Shader injections

[Malix]

This is probably the right section to post about this, no?

I was doing antialiasing benchmarks with the game and wanted to try out how injected AA-shaders would work quality/performance-wise with EM. Apparently they don't work, at all. Using shader injections (fxaa/smaa/etc injectors) seem to prevent starting EM, it just shuts down right after executing.

I've tried with FXAA Post Process Injection and injectSMAA

Sure it's not dealbreaker by any means, but I kinda wanted to add some brightness to the game with the fxaa injector

And I am aware that this isn't even remotely supported, but afaik, ENB -series injection used to work before, so these should too?

EDIT: well derp is me, found out that atleast FXAA injection crashes with some games if large address aware -flag is set on with the game's exe. And I've set that... I'll try out if that causes the crashes.

EDIT2: nope, running without large address aware does nothing.

[Edited on 3-15-2012 by Malix]

[Edited on 3-15-2012 by Malix]

[ijon]

cool someone is taking care of that again. not really happy with ENB.

i see at least 1 issue:
injectSMAA - may be incompatible with overlays (afterburner, steam(what does steam have to do with gfx at all?), fraps)

i'm an msi user (afterburner on a 460gtx cyclone) which i can highly recommend, btw. one of the better cards price/performance wise. rock solid, silent and overcloackable on 560TI lvl.

how do you solve that if testing? virtual box? how does FXAA handle that? can you be sure this isn't one of the issues rather than the game?
afterburner seems to work with ENB.
as written before i'm a nublet regarding all this. just an idea.


[Edited on 3-16-2012 by ijon]

[Malix]

i see at least 1 issue:
injectSMAA - may be incompatible with overlays (afterburner, steam(what does steam have to do with gfx at all?), fraps)
[Edited on 3-16-2012 by ijon]

meh, works just fine (atleast with steam and/or fraps) if you tweak the ini-file to say WEIRD_STEAM_HACK=1 (or whatever the last setting in it was).


and what comes to testing... I kinda got lost there, why would I need virtual machines here? I just try out different AA methods by switching them around and doing a quick benchmark.

[ijon]

hmm.

well, whats 'overlay'? so far i'm used to 'process running in the background', that 'drives', or emulates or spies on you.

since they mention steam, afterburner, etc., what about ati catalyst or nView - would that be an overlay, too? whats the difference here?
regarding the vm:
how do you narrow down a possible problem if not excluding several possible disturbing factors? i'd rather chop off my left foot than installing /uninstalling all the processes, services,drivers that may disturb your research but which you need on a daily basis.
--> vm
or a dedicated machine.

if its for AA only, thats allready fixed with that little text file mod. satisfying.

[Edited on 3-16-2012 by ijon]

[Malix]

this starts to be waayyy offtopic considering the first post, but oh well..

overlay is basically, as far as I understand it in this context, an app "in between", basically grabs the computed image, does post-effect, and puts on screen.

For instance, steam overlay (friends list, chat etc) is basically just that, the steam overlay is drawn on top of the game screen.
and fraps overlay just puts the fps count on the corner and shows the screen.

now, these fxaa/smaa injectors basically do the same, they grab the computed image, find rough edges and apply smoothing there & then display the image.

I'm not doing this on daily basis, duh. I'm just tweaking around for fun, mostly. And games in virtual machines... eugh. Just no.
And I'm not installing anything here, these injectors are basically just drop-in stuff, they don't modify the OS or anything.

The idea of these injectors is that there no need to use actual antialiasing (multisampling or otherwise), because they are slow, the AA is created as image postprocessing, done by the gpu, which is ridiculously fast.
But, since it is not actual multisampling, quality may vary, but it is a tradeoff between speed and quality.

[Edited on 3-16-2012 by Malix]

[ijon]

spot on for my taste. thx a lot!
or to quote a famous philosopher: ahh!