Is this the cause for the strange texture effects people have been seeing ?

[William Gaatjes]

I was reading about doom and other games and the new doom has dynamic resolution scaling.
This is primarily used in the console world to limit the effects of finite calculation power.
What it does, is to maintain a required minimum fps rate, the resolution is temporarily decreased to a lower resolution. As soon as the hardware in the console can keep up and reaches the minimum amount of fps, the resolution is increased again.
For the pc, this should not be needed and for Doom it seems to be disabled (see article) but maybe it is active in pc games like hitman.
I mean, people have been seeing this with 4k resolutions. Maybe this is the reason why.



More in these articles :
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2016-doom-tech-interview

Digital Foundry: Dynamic resolution scaling works great on consoles - are there technical reasons that preclude the same technology working on PC?

Billy Khan: Dynamic resolution scaling actually works on all of the platforms. We don't currently enable dynamic resolution scaling on the PC because the user can effectively choose the resolution they want from the settings menu. We do offer static resolution scaling that allows users to run at high resolutions but then lower the rendering buffers by percentage to achieve higher frame rates.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/...ion-scaling-keeps-halo-5-running-so-smoothly/

The technique is called dynamic resolution scaling, and a recent analysis by Digital Foundry goes into some detail about how it works in Halo 5: Guardians. Basically, the developers at 343 have prioritized hitting 60fps consistently through the entire game, a big boon for a twitchy first-person shooter (and a first for the Halo series). The level of graphical detail in some game scenes, though, means that such a high frame rate can only be delivered at resolutions well below the Xbox One's highest 1080p standard.

Instead of just statically setting a low resolution ceiling for the entire game, though, Halo 5 dynamically changes the resolution based on the detail of the current in-game scene. This on-the-fly adjustment takes place on both the X and Y axes, with resolutions jumping from as low as 1152×810 to as high as 1536×1080 in Digital Foundry's analysis. The apparent on-the-fly change in resolution wasn't even noticeable to my eye during some recent testing.

While Digital Foundry says that "the game spends the overwhelming majority of its time well under full 1080p," this dynamic resolution scaling means that pixel counters can get the very best visual fidelity possible at any point without the usual frame rate jumpiness. The game also uses other tricks to preserve the overall frame rate, such as using less detailed, "half-rate" animations for far-off enemies (like many other games, Halo 5 also uses less-detailed polygonal models to save cycles when rendering far-off objects).

Any thoughts ?

 

[Piroko]

I thought the issue was that textures popped in whenever you see something new in that level, that is related to how the game handles texture loading (just in time, so to say) and how fast and fluid the system as a whole (drivers, cpu, hdd, gpu) can handle these load requests while maintaining fluid gameplay. Dynamic resolution scaling is very different to that, both in why it exists and what it tries to fix.

 

[William Gaatjes]

Okay. Is the texture popup visible in 1080p and 4K ?
Is it even visible at lower resolutions ?
Is there some test that shows that the games utilizes all Vram that a graphics card has available ?
With Doom and hitman in mind ?
Is there not some switch that allows to see what amount of vram the game engine is using ?

 

[dogen1]

Okay. Is the texture popup visible in 1080p and 4K ?
Is it even visible at lower resolutions ?
Is there some test that shows that the games utilizes all Vram that a graphics card has available ?
With Doom and hitman in mind ?
Is there not some switch that allows to see what amount of vram the game engine is using ?

Probably, it has more to do with how quickly the data can be read from the drive and transcoded into the right format.

And you can use msi afterburner to monitor vram use.

 

[Piroko]

Okay. Is the texture popup visible in 1080p and 4K ?
Is it even visible at lower resolutions ?
Is there some test that shows that the games utilizes all Vram that a graphics card has available ?
With Doom and hitman in mind ?
Is there not some switch that allows to see what amount of vram the game engine is using ?

Just (re-)watch this video:

it's a bit clickbaity, but starting at 1:35 it has a decent visual representation of what's happening: Kepler and Maxwell are just slower at filling their vram with the way id-Soft is loading textures in DX12. Take note of the following though: This behavior should be changeable through drivers or a game update, it's specific to the way the DOOM engine currently loads textures and not something specific to DX12.

It is however obvious to the naked eye and I never liked this way of loading textures. Not in Borderlands, not in Civ5, not here. I prefer to have consistent detail.

 

[dogen1]

It is however obvious to the naked eye and I never liked this way of loading textures. Not in Borderlands, not in Civ5, not here. I prefer to have consistent detail.

It's not really the same as borderlands, it's much more efficient(at not wasting vram for offscreen texels), and pop in doesn't seem as bad as those games.

 

[William Gaatjes]

Is this not affected by the amount of vram a gpu card has ?
More video memory would seem (at least to me) to solve such issues.
Is this still present at modern 4/6/8GB cards like the RX 480 (4GB) ,GTX1060/GTX1070 ?

 

[Piroko]

It's not really the same as borderlands, it's much more efficient(at not wasting vram for offscreen texels), and pop in doesn't seem as bad as those games.

Yes it is more efficient, but just as I said, I don't like this effect.

Is this not affected by the amount of vram a gpu card has ?
More video memory would seem (at least to me) to solve such issues.
Is this still present at modern 4/6/8GB cards like the RX 480 (4GB) ,GTX1060/GTX1070 ?

I don't think it's affected by vram as it's about loading textures into vram for the first time (from system ram or HDD). GCN seems to be very fast at this specific implementation and as far as I know Pascal is at least faster as well.

 

[dogen1]

Yes it is more efficient, but just as I said, I don't like this effect.

I don't think it's affected by vram as it's about loading textures into vram for the first time (from system ram or HDD). GCN seems to be very fast at this specific implementation and as far as I know Pascal is at least faster as well.

I wonder if their texture transcoder is heavily tuned for gcn.

 

[antihelten]

PCGamesHardware.de did a test of Hitman, and found that the issue was worse in DX12 than in DX11, and that the setting "override memory safeguards" could help when turned on (but not eliminate the problem).

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

Saw the same thing in Rage, I don't think this is 'new'. Always just assumed it was a way to get vid cards to load textures that, with a full load would eat up 8~GB or more of vram, but when piecemealing it, can fit it into smaller chunks without running like hammered dog crap. If anything it's rather remarkable that it's coded to retexture surfaces on the fly without altering the FPS any.

 

[dogen1]

Saw the same thing in Rage, I don't think this is 'new'. Always just assumed it was a way to get vid cards to load textures that, with a full load would eat up 8~GB or more of vram, but when piecemealing it, can fit it into smaller chunks without running like hammered dog crap. If anything it's rather remarkable that it's coded to retexture surfaces on the fly without altering the FPS any.

Yeah, it's called virtual texturing.

 

[imaheadcase]

MMO do this a lot, i'm playing Black Desert online right now, and textures pop in as i'm moving in the distance on my GTX 1080, or old GTX 580. Just game engine limitation.

I think its put in games to just make the game "fair" for all players to get a smoother gameplay.