[Tuning] Rising Storm SGSSAA guide and DX11 AA petition

[SLIKnight]

Hi guys,

I have been working hard on completing an SGSSAA/SLI/tweaking guide for Rising Storm & Red Orchestra 2.
Using NVIDIA Inspector, you can force beautiful SGSSAA using the "0x080000C1" AA flag.
I also found a better SLI profile "0x02422605", which solves random drops in GPU usage in SLI mode.

In general driver-forced DX9 SGSSAA is a wonderful NVIDIA exclusive feature IMO.
SGSSAA works great in hundreds of DX9 games, most of which can be found in the very comprehensive AA sammelthread at the German 3DCenter forums.
The actual list of DX9 AA flags consists of the first two posts on page 1, and is updated regularly.

For example does SGSSAA also work wonderfully in the DX9 modes of Crysis, Crysis 2 and Metro 2033.
Another good example is the DX9 mode of Battlefield: Bad Company 2, which really shines with driver-forced SGSSAA and completely puts the ingame AA modes in BF3/4 to shame.

Unfortunately, there is currently no way to force high quality AA in DX11 games, so we are stuck with low quality ingame MSAA, FXAA or TXAA, possibly combined with Driver Downsampling.
For this reason, "aufkrawall" from the 3DCenter forums started a petition on the GeForce forums to extend driver-forced AA to DX11 mode:

Petition for DirectX 11 Anti-aliasing driver profiles

I would like to ask everyone who reads this post and appreciates the importance of high quality anti-aliasing, to register on the GeForce forums and sign the petition.
We need all the user support we can get, to convince NVIDIA to implement this feature into future driver revisions.

 

[octiceps]

I would absolutely love a D3D11 renderer as it would make the game truly multi-core CPU aware and probably solve most if not all of my current performance problems in Rising Storm which are caused by its outdated DX9 build of UE3 and processing draw calls being limited to a single CPU core/thread. Being able to play Rising Storm without random FPS drops would be so much more enjoyable. But at this point it's just wishful thinking as I know that DX11 support is an impossibility.

 

[SLIKnight]

I also have a feeling, that introducing a new API in RO2/RS would probably create more problems than it solves.
It took 1+ years from the release of RO2, before it was reasonably optimized and stable.

However, if you follow the advice in my tweaking guide and reduce "Shadow Quality" to "High" and set "Occlusion Quality" to "Normal", the game really isn't that badly CPU limited anymore.
And if you also force DX9 SGSSAA, you further shift the "load" away from the CPU and onto the GPU(s).

Either way, please make sure to vote for aufkrawall's DX11 AA petition on the GeForce forums.
Having such a feature added to the NVIDIA drivers would benefit the whole PC gaming community

 

[Zetsumei]

Its a real nice to have, sadly updating to a newer build, usually goes together with a ****storm of bugs. That changing at this point is likely not a feasible option.

 

[octiceps]

I also have a feeling, that introducing a new API in RO2/RS would probably create more problems than it solves.
It took 1+ years from the release of RO2, before it was reasonably optimized and stable.

However, if you follow the advice in my tweaking guide and reduce "Shadow Quality" to "High" and set "Occlusion Quality" to "Normal", the game really isn't that badly CPU limited anymore.
And if you also force DX9 SGSSAA, you further shift the "load" away from the CPU and onto the GPU(s).

Either way, please make sure to vote for aufkrawall's DX11 AA petition on the GeForce forums.
Having such a feature added to the NVIDIA drivers would benefit the whole PC gaming community

I've already got Shadow Quality on High and Occlusion Quality Normal. They don't really make a difference. It's primarily the object count that's causing the CPU bottleneck, which is why performance is worst on the foliage-heavy maps such as Hanto and Guadalcanal. Turning Foliage Quality to Low seems to be the only thing that has made any significant difference in my minimum FPS. But other than that, the FPS drops occur whether I've got my settings at lowest or maxed out and when I reduce resolution.

By contrast, Red Orchestra 2 runs great. Very smooth and consistent FPS at maxed out settings and high GPU utilization all the time. Which makes sense since Rising Storm is typically a lot busier (more detail and objects) in any given scene which means more draw calls. As a result, the frame rate is being limited by the number of objects. The CPU is overloaded with submitting a large amount of draw calls which unfortunately are only processed on a single CPU core/thread in DX9.

Since migrating to a DX11 renderer in the future isn't an option, I'd be curious if the devs could improve performance with further objects optimization. Have any measures been taken to reduce the number of draw calls such as batching, instancing, occlusion culling, etc.?

 

[octiceps]

Just letting you know that I tried out the SLI compatibility bits tweak and the result was amazing for me. Thank you SLIKnight!

http://forums.tripwireinteractive.com/showthread.php?t=98771