Warframe Revised: Deferred Rendering Megathread

[Raitoning]

23 hours ago, Arniox said:

80° is fine. That's actually quite low for a gpu under stress. 

80°C is already hot for some live electronics. Also, as stated, I get a temperature increase of about 9°C just by turning the Deferred Rendering mode on. That's a massive temperature increase, not mentioning that for the moment it is buggy AF. I hope the bugs will be corrected and the Deferred Rendering pass optimized as fast as possible.

[ECHOALPHASUD]

I'm not sure if this counts as feedback or bug, but with hands off keyboard and mouse the reflections in my orbiter go crazy and have a dance party. Maybe it's because I'm on a laptop and my settings are too high for my own good. I don't have a decent way to capture this as this phenomenon isn't really shown in a screenshot.

[TheKurtiStryke]

the new render is good, it's really beautiful for the eyes, yes, it has some issues that needs to be fixed, but there is one main problem that really bothers me;

in short, the new render, if enabled when you use  he normal anti aliasing , has a lot of visual issues, and i'm forced to switch to the high anti aliasing taa 8x, and THATS the main issue, that antialaising is really bad, sure, it works well as an anti aliasing, but it has this...like, blurry/blurred effect that is a real pain to watch, i've tryed everything, but it doesn't go away, so please, before fixing the new render, think of  fixing that taa 8x anti aliasing first, it's a real pain...

[CarrotSalad]

Loving the graphics upgrade. I occasionally get stutters its rare but it happens.

Is this because my hardware is being stressed or because a bug or other issue in the rendering process?

System : Ryzen 3600, 16gb ram, rx580 4gb, Windows 10 64

[EnvoyOne]

So I gave it a few weeks to try and digest all the graphical new changes that were implemented recently and I've come to my conclusion: 

TLDR: I don't like it, but it's a step in the right direction. Everything always looks greasy and wet, so the materials are whack, but the lighting and shadows look better, but I'll still always turn them off for better performance in any game.

Normally I type pages and pages... and pages when I have something to say, attempting to put every nuanced thought into words so that the Devs can sort through them and make of them what they will, but I'm trying something a bit different today.

Final thought, the transparency in the "profile" page is still the worst looking thing in the game, I'd rather see that fixed first than whatever new fancy graphics stuff is in the works.

And that's my two cents.

[Vavency]

The upgraded render spills with potential but, there's two issues right now that affects specular (I'm pretty sure devs are aware of this):

Spoiler

Specular isn't rendered correctly in deferred render when dynamic point/shadow mapped lights are involved. Almost everything is effect by this

Deferred render (Please make it a sigil or an ephemera):

For comparison forward render:

 

Another thing is screen space fresnel effect, it's too sharp and noisy which is ultimately distracting.

[MillbrookWest]

Not sure if tied to the general over sheen-iness that others have noted in the thread, but i just wanted to add that the wet shader looks kinda bad. Not too sure whats going on closer to the screen edges but it makes the landscape look like wet plastic:

 

[MillbrookWest]

Also, not sure if trying to mimic some kind of light bounce, but it doesn't really work well (looks worse in motion):

 

[Arniox]

On 2020-03-15 at 12:16 PM, Raitoning said:

80°C is already hot for some live electronics. Also, as stated, I get a temperature increase of about 9°C just by turning the Deferred Rendering mode on. That's a massive temperature increase, not mentioning that for the moment it is buggy AF. I hope the bugs will be corrected and the Deferred Rendering pass optimized as fast as possible.

For some reason, with deffered on, there are some very specific effects that cause huge fps drops. 

The kuva now thing. When it explodes, it literally drops my fps by 30. From 130 to 70 instantly. It's horrifically unoptimised. So yeah I see your point. A 9° increase is absolutely massive for a single change in settings

[NikkMann]

Loving the direction the graphics are headed (especially that juicy lighting and those delicious reflections🤤) but needs some tweaking. Here's what I've noticed:

1. Surfaces are way too glossy in certain cases, as others have explained.

2. Shadows don't work on tilesets.

3. Self-shadows from the player weapon and other parts of the player model onto themselves (and also for NPCs) are not present anywhere outside the Orbiter. You can clearly see it working in the Railjack and Duviri Paradox trailers, which I'm guessing ran on this new renderer, so it's definitely a feature that's supposed to be in here (and would make the lighting on the player character look much more realistic). The Orbiter Arsenal menu is the only place they really seem to work, but as soon as you leave the Arsenal they either disappear completely or become so transparent you can barely see them.

4. Lighting on Warframes is inconsistent with the environment on tilesets. E.g. They will appear to be flatly lit by a bright point source in areas with medium/minimal light (it is not the flash light)

5. Screen space, while REALLY nice now that it now reflects particles and the environment better, is very noisy. While this is somewhat remedied with TAA, I have another point below on an issue with TAA.

6. Colors in customization are inconsistent. For example, using Coral Blue #5 on both my Warframe and gun produces 2 different shades when they should be the same. 

7. The culling distance seems to be too short on some tile sets. Here is Hydron, Sedna. When I move just a few feet back, the game stops rendering the ship geometry. It pops back in once I move closer. This appears to be an issue in BOTH the old and new renderer (look at the area past the doorway straight ahead, it turns black).

 

These next few are more of old graphical issues that seem to have carried over to the new renderer:

8. Bloom seems inconsistent with its levels. At 50 Bloom, the particles and impact decal from an airborne heavy melee strike and the blue energy bubbles from enemies are at a reasonable brightness, while the Eidolons attacks and energy waves (when one of their limbs get blown off) seem faded/non-vibrant.

9. TAA still causes major blurriness and pixel bleed-over, especially on particles and transparency effects. And if you have a high contrast between 2 objects, you can see how intense the bleed-over is. This is present in both the old and new renderer (does not happen with other forms of AA). It's unfortunate since a fast moving game like Warframe really benefits from added temporal stability. An SMAA T2x solution (like what was implemented in the 2019 COD: MW) with an adjustable Temporal Filter may work well.

Here's a video example. Notice the edge of my ship against space causes an almost smear/wipe of white that follows the ship on the background. I assume this happens with the whole image in general when there's movement in the game, but it's very noticeable here.

 

10. Anisotropic filtering is still subpar. Driver forced AF (Nvidia) of the same level looks much better than the games native AF.

11. Max frame rate is still limited to presets, instead of being on a slider like most modern games. It's odd because you can even go into Warframe's EE file and manually adjust the max frame rate to whatever you want (and it'll work). The functionality is clearly there.

12. Resolution scaling is still limited to only going down. You can use Nvidia custom profiles to force the game to run at higher resolutions (I run it at 1440p downscaled to my 1080p monitor), but an in-game implementation would be nice.

13. With DoF enabled, Garuda still displays the "low health" DoF effect on the screen when her health is low, which is very distracting/obscuring if you have a build that revolves around her always being at low health for her damage boost (I'm a Garuda main haha). Maybe add a toggle for it?

 

Thanks for all the hard work the team has put into the game! Keep up the awesome job and if you need more details let me know 🙂

 

Edited March 24, 2020 by BeatAirBreaker

[NightmareT12]

Quick update post Scarlet Spear update: Materials seem fixed, at least on the arsenal (and therefore no more constant wet and color dissonances). So I can keep Deferred on by default. Let's see if there's anything funny!

[theMangoose]

Is this deferred shading or deferred lighting? Because one is a performance hog compared to the other. Or is it a different rendering model?

Edit: Wait wait I want to make an educated guess. First, you guys were tied up with the Unreal series til after UT 2k4. Secondly, UE4 documentation suggests it is using deferred shading, for it seems to suggest only two passes in the rendering pass. My wild guess is that you guys consulted with Epic.

In deferred shading, there are 2 passes: the first pass is gathering the data representing geometry (not yet rendering), whereas the second pass does the computing and rendering.

Deferred lighting is a modification takes 3 passes. you pay the cost of an double-rendering in return for more efficient G-buffer (Geometry buffer) usage.

Edited March 24, 2020 by theMangoose

[LostJudoka]

What API does the renderer use? I cant find anything about it online.

[Raitoning]

On 2020-03-24 at 6:43 PM, theMangoose said:

Is this deferred shading or deferred lighting? Because one is a performance hog compared to the other. Or is it a different rendering model?

Edit: Wait wait I want to make an educated guess. First, you guys were tied up with the Unreal series til after UT 2k4. Secondly, UE4 documentation suggests it is using deferred shading, for it seems to suggest only two passes in the rendering pass. My wild guess is that you guys consulted with Epic.

In deferred shading, there are 2 passes: the first pass is gathering the data representing geometry (not yet rendering), whereas the second pass does the computing and rendering.

Deferred lighting is a modification takes 3 passes. you pay the cost of an double-rendering in return for more efficient G-buffer (Geometry buffer) usage.

Digital Extremes doesn't use the Unreal Engine anymore, since darkSector in 2008. They use their own in-house game engine called the Evolution Engine.
The engine was working only with the "standard" rendering method, called Forward Rendering. Forward Rendering is a fast and simple rendering method that will do what you need, but has issues rendering transparent surfaces properly (a proper method was never found since the beginning of 3D real time graphics), and scales very poorly with the number real time light (dynamic light) used (Each pixel must be recomputed for each dynamic light affecting it).

Deferred Rendering fixes those issues by first gathering data about the scene to render as you said, then computing and rendering the final image. This method of rendering is inherently slower than Forward Rendering, but you can get (theoretically) as much dynamic lights as you want without hurting as much your performance, and you can render transparent surfaces properly. Another major trade-off when using Deferred Rendering is the total lack of native anti-aliasing support. This has been an issue for years. But this lack of AA support has been tackled by using shaders to run AA on top of the final rendered image (FXAA is probably the most famous example).

 

Warframe (and the Evolution Engine) can now render both in Forward mode or Deferred mode.

 

1 hour ago, LostJudoka said:

What API does the renderer use? I cant find anything about it online.

The Evolution Engine is proprietary to Digital Extremes, you won't find anything about it's tech somewhere (although there's a source code deposit about the engine somewhere I don't remember claiming it's open-source, I very highly doubt it). The engine uses Microsoft's DirectX API, both in version 10 and 11 (it could use DirectX 9 until either the Plains of Eidolon or the Orb Vallis release, when they stopped supporting Windows XP).

Edit:

After looking on the internet, the source code deposit I found is not for the Evolution Engine made by Digital Extremes, but by someone else who created an open-source game engine that is also named Evolution Engine. You can also find another game engine called Evolution Engine, but its complete name is Evolution XNA Game Engine. There is nothing to worry about then.

Edited March 25, 2020 by Raitoning
Diong some research

[theMangoose]

2 hours ago, Raitoning said:

Digital Extremes doesn't use the Unreal Engine anymore, since darkSector in 2008. They use their own in-house game engine called the Evolution Engine.
The engine was working only with the "standard" rendering method, called Forward Rendering. Forward Rendering is a fast and simple rendering method that will do what you need, but has issues rendering transparent surfaces properly (a proper method was never found since the beginning of 3D real time graphics), and scales very poorly with the number real time light (dynamic light) used (Each pixel must be recomputed for each dynamic light affecting it).

Deferred Rendering fixes those issues by first gathering data about the scene to render as you said, then computing and rendering the final image. This method of rendering is inherently slower than Forward Rendering, but you can get (theoretically) as much dynamic lights as you want without hurting as much your performance, and you can render transparent surfaces properly. Another major trade-off when using Deferred Rendering is the total lack of native anti-aliasing support. This has been an issue for years. But this lack of AA support has been tackled by using shaders to run AA on top of the final rendered image (FXAA is probably the most famous example).

 

Warframe (and the Evolution Engine) can now render both in Forward mode or Deferred mode.

 

The Evolution Engine is proprietary to Digital Extremes, you won't find anything about it's tech somewhere (although there's a source code deposit about the engine somewhere I don't remember claiming it's open-source, I very highly doubt it). The engine uses Microsoft's DirectX API, both in version 10 and 11 (it could use DirectX 9 until either the Plains of Eidolon or the Orb Vallis release, when they stopped supporting Windows XP).

Edit:

After looking on the internet, the source code deposit I found is not for the Evolution Engine made by Digital Extremes, but by someone else who created an open-source game engine that is also named Evolution Engine. You can also find another game engine called Evolution Engine, but its complete name is Evolution XNA Game Engine. There is nothing to worry about then.

Well, I'm curious if it's using the deferred lighting "variant." That one takes separates the first pass into two passes of, trading off rendering twice for the benefit of using less G-buffer. Seems to be popular - I assume the G-Buffer (or VRAM in general) is a bottleneck and/or it's not terribly efficient.

[Raitoning]

16 hours ago, theMangoose said:

Well, I'm curious if it's using the deferred lighting "variant." That one takes separates the first pass into two passes of, trading off rendering twice for the benefit of using less G-buffer. Seems to be popular - I assume the G-Buffer (or VRAM in general) is a bottleneck and/or it's not terribly efficient.

          I throw my two grain of guessing here and I'd say they use the Deferred Lighting variant, since my GPU is quite VRAM limited (Radeon HD 7950 with only 3GB of VRAM), and I didn't notice the game using more VRAM than before, and that would also agree with the fact that this Deferred Rendering mode is quite slower than the Forward rendering mode, meaning there's much more computation to do than before, sometimes twice slower. But rendering geometry (without shading) is basically free nowadays, so I don't really know. Also, this would explain why MSAA SMAA is still available in Deferred Rendering, because of the additional geometry pass making it possible in Deferred Lighting. Deferred Lighting makes also sense when you take in account the fact that DE is still testing their engine on 10 years old + computers, so limiting the impact of their engine on the VRAM is an absolute necessity (and more generally, the memory of your computer is always your most important resource in programming and you may use it only and if only it makes sense).

Edited March 26, 2020 by Raitoning
Correction on the antialiasing name

[NightmareT12]

6 minutes ago, Raitoning said:

Also, this would explain why MSAA is still available in Deferred Rendering

Warframe doesn't use MSAA, it uses SMAA! 😛

I do wish it had more options 😢

[theMangoose]

3 hours ago, NightmareT12 said:

Warframe doesn't use MSAA, it uses SMAA! 😛

I do wish it had more options 😢

Holy crap, I didn't even notice. Mostly because I've run most of my games via SMAA via Sweetfx, Woops.

Also the only reason I mentioned Epic games was merely that it was a clue. It's possible (probable?) for DE to ask for advice from Epic Games on this or that (or old connects).

 

3 hours ago, Raitoning said:

          I throw my two grain of guessing here and I'd say they use the Deferred Lighting variant, since my GPU is quite VRAM limited (Radeon HD 7950 with only 3GB of VRAM), and I didn't notice the game using more VRAM than before, and that would also agree with the fact that this Deferred Rendering mode is quite slower than the Forward rendering mode, meaning there's much more computation to do than before, sometimes twice slower. But rendering geometry (without shading) is basically free nowadays, so I don't really know. Also, this would explain why MSAA SMAA is still available in Deferred Rendering, because of the additional geometry pass making it possible in Deferred Lighting. Deferred Lighting makes also sense when you take in account the fact that DE is still testing their engine on 10 years old + computers, so limiting the impact of their engine on the VRAM is an absolute necessity (and more generally, the memory of your computer is always your most important resource in programming and you may use it only and if only it makes sense).

Wow, thanks for the knowledge.

And I apologize to de-railing the thread to weird.. game.. philosophy.

[Matheoryon]

It needs some work. Its mainly obvious in POE, but normal missions not really. Optimized flip especially needs work. Lots of wonderful potential btw.

[kapn655321]

I'd seen it before the new lighting, but I hope there's some way THIS (Black/Green pixel) can be addressed:

[Kaggelos]

Personally I'm experiencing low fps in Railjack, the Plains, and the Vallis, especially near vegetation. Turning it off until further improvements are made. Other than that, in other areas/levels/missions the game looks stunning! GJ DE ^^

[NikkMann]

On 2020-03-30 at 2:04 AM, kapn655321 said:

I'd seen it before the new lighting, but I hope there's some way THIS (Black/Green pixel) can be addressed:

uuuuh, artifacting like that is usually a gpu issue. If you're overclocking it might be too much for your gpu to handle, or you need to update your drivers, or you gpu is getting too hot while gaming, or its just old and is finally starting to crap the bed. You should seriously check your gpu.

[kapn655321]

1 hour ago, BeatAirBreaker said:

uuuuh, artifacting like that is usually a gpu issue. If you're overclocking it might be too much for your gpu to handle, or you need to update your drivers, or you gpu is getting too hot while gaming, or its just old and is finally starting to crap the bed. You should seriously check your gpu.

Thanks for the heads up. I'll look into a replacement if I can't figure out a remedy.

[Raitoning]

On 2020-04-01 at 5:34 AM, BeatAirBreaker said:

uuuuh, artifacting like that is usually a gpu issue. If you're overclocking it might be too much for your gpu to handle, or you need to update your drivers, or you gpu is getting too hot while gaming, or its just old and is finally starting to crap the bed. You should seriously check your gpu.

You are wrong. My GPU is stock and I have the exact same artifacts. What is happening is simply some color grading being so aggressive that the colors go beyond the limit of addressable colors on whatever bit depth they're using in the engine to compute colors, so the colors then go in overflow and are at the opposite of the RGB color wheel. Somes fixes for this issues are: reducing the power of the color grading to put those colors back in addressable range OR clamp the colors to the limit of the bit depth.
 

On 2020-04-01 at 7:15 AM, kapn655321 said:

Thanks for the heads up. I'll look into a replacement if I can't figure out a remedy.

Your GPU is perfectly fine man, I have the exact same issues with a stock GPU. I already reported this issue earlier on this thread.

[kapn655321]

1 minute ago, Raitoning said:

Your GPU is perfectly fine man, I have the exact same issues with a stock GPU. I already reported this issue earlier on this thread.

I would hope so.. my GPU refuses to take the newest nvidia update, and it'd been about 4 months since I dusted it out, so I figured it was possible. No overclocking, but couldn't rule out the possibility of the drivers.