The Enhanced Graphics Engine

[Urlan]

44 minutes ago, DhatZ said:

Guys if you can play the open worlds in deferred now, it should only improve from that.

At least for my own experience and those of allies with similar hardware setups, deffered reduces fps by about 8-10 points and slows Plains, Vallis, and Deimos initial loads.

[Lorechill]

1 hour ago, Medane said:

So I'm going to offer two perspectives here - subjective and objective.

Objectively I get it.  Makes it easier to work on one unified rendering system.  Lets the game look more modernized to keep up with competitors, and keeps people from screeching that the game looks old. 

Subjectively, yeah I straight up dislike this and it goes against every fibre of my being.  I've played pretty much since open beta launch and frankly this is one of the best running games period, while looking as good as it does.  No other game can one set this game to max on modest hardware.  The game looks fine to me as is - most of the visual things I don't like are a matter of style preferences. 

Looking at the comparison images - one can barely tell the difference.  And I guarantee 99% of people wouldn't be able to tell the difference once you're actually playing, moving, and dealing with DOF and motion blur and god knows what else most AAA games love throwing into their game, even with it off.  There's a point of diminishing returns and it comes to my next point - visual busyness.  Warframe is incredibly visually busy that I strongly believe that this enhanced rendering only pushes the floor of performance demands higher without really raising the ceiling of visual improvement.  Graphics no longer make a game in 2020.  I would argue they haven't made a game since the early 2010s.  And when you're actually moving and running around, that higher performance minimum is going to be significantly more negatively impactful while adding I would argue is not a whole lot when you're in the thick of it.

Like I said though, I get it.  But I don't like it.  So I'll implore this - ensure the game is not only "well optimized" for higher end systems at max quality, but ensure scalability so that disabling visuals doesn't run worse while looking worse than the old rendering system.  Basically, as long as there are graphical options to minimize the impact of the new rendering engine while maintaining a relatively static level of fidelity to performance, I won't see any problems.

Obviously this is a goal for most developers, and it's probably not perfectly achievable, but as it stands, "enhanced" kills my performance by around 15-30% doing nothing while adding very little directly to the visuals.  I seriously hope to see this improve over time, not get worse, as seems common for many other games.  Hence, my relative skepticism and uncertainty, and general dislike of this move.  Keep on trucking DE. 

I feel you. As a lover of advancing technology, I highly appreciate this upgrade. As a cheap arse who's been affected by the pandemic economically, no thank you. Can't afford to 'escape' out of my 1050 Ti so i'm not sacrificing a 20-30 fps drop. But this is a good thing strategically don't you agree? When we get the chance to be in the top 3% of the bourgeoisie gamers then I guess this'll come into play.

[Jarriaga]

Yay for pretty graphics! 

[LordPantaloonsthe3rd]

This has quite a performance hit for me(R5 2600, GTX 1080, 16GB RAM. 5760x1080 Mostly max settings), in plains of eidolon captura with no enemies I drop 30 fps from 90 to 60 in the same spot. On Earth I went from 108 to 80 in the same spot again with no combat or anything going on. Didnt really do anymore testing as I wasnt in the mood but I hope theres some room for improvement here, looks good though.

 

 

 

[(XBOX)Lmacncheese]

I miss those bouncing particles after using abilities can we get those back and whats the progress on the dirt and muck on our warframes you showed awhile ago with the shower to clean us

[SteammannXs]

Where is the beautiful glossy effect of the materials in the orbiter? I mean... that floor is horrible now, looks like flat-coloured opaque plastics instead of the gorgeously shiny metal it was before. It's just the first thing I noticed and that's delusional. I had to say it!

[Hashie1000]

1 hour ago, [DE]Steve said:

We’re moving into “Next Gen” by phasing out our old rendering engine! The launcher option has been moved into the Options screen as we want to get more Tenno onboard for testing it!

Enhanced (formerly referred to as ‘Deferred’) is a complete redesign to achieve more accurate reflections and give us the ability to utilize dynamic lighting and shadowing across the entire game.

(Squinting) Aside from our landscapes, the frame to frame differences will be subtle. Precomputed reflections in the very shiny Gas City floors will be less distorted. The reflective glints on your Warframe won’t ‘pop’ each time you move between tiles. This is intentional as we’ve been diligent with ‘back porting’ our rendering upgrades to Enhanced to the Legacy rendering system. Our continuous upgrades to static path-traced lighting, parallax projected cubemaps, volumetric lights, lit fog, character light probes… work quite well in the legacy rendering engine and have allowed us to ‘keep up with the Jones’ over many years. But there has always been a glaring weak-point on the Legacy Rendering Eximus...

To stretch a Bene Gesserit/Dune analogy - “There is a place - terrifying to us”: Dynamic lighting! Since Warframe’s launch, the number of dynamic lights we’ve typically used per-frame has been kept in the low single digits. Your gun, maybe a flashlight, maybe an ability cast… everything else was precomputed, stored in textures (light maps) and point clouds (light probes) or faked with ‘glow sprites’. The reason for this: for every dynamic light we’d add to the frame (*), the legacy rendering engine would have to render everything it touched again. In a small hallway with a few Grineer muzzle flashes, this would create wild fluctuations in the rendering complexity… in the outdoor Landscapes it was a faceplant - one muzzle flash light = draw the whole valley again!!! Not only smashing your GPU but also choking the CPU with additional work…

Enhance! This is where the new rendering engine excels. It renders out the attributes of the scene (colors, glossiness, shape) to offscreen buffers. After this, proper dynamic lighting costs hardly more than those terrible glow sprites we’ve used in the past. For realtime shadows, what the light sources ‘see’ are cached and reused when nothing changes. All lighting and reflection probes are stored in a 3D camera voxel texture and applied in single passes where the costs grow linearly, proportional to their size on screen, without incurring huge CPU and GPU penalties to ‘draw the whole world, again and again’.

Show me the money! As you experiment with the new rendering engine keep in mind that until we phase out the legacy system and ensure our new one scales well across High-end PC, consoles, toasters and thermostats, we will not be just turning on dynamic lighting everywhere. We have years of content built with the fear of using dynamic lighting… but there is one place you can go to see the dramatic lift it brings: Landscapes! There in the Vallis, the Plains and the Drift those fuzzy, ambiguous shadow blobs are replaced with dramatically realtime sun shadows! Subtle in many tiles, but not so here!

Using some handy Spoiler Tags, why don't we take a look at some before / after shots?

 

  Hide contents

 

CETUS BEFORE:

CETUS AFTER:


PLAINS OF EIDOLON BEFORE:


PLAINS OF EIDOLON AFTER:

 

 

 

Toast. While it is our intention to phase out the old system we do intend to keep performance and scalability a priority in the new rendering engine. While the new system is dramatically faster for dynamic lighting and shadows, these are not a ‘free lunch’ (**) in any system and we will be vigilant to add additional options giving you the flexibility to tune the new system’s performance for the best Warframe experience possible.

RTX ON? What’s next? Phasing out the legacy system will allow us to focus our efforts on one. This will open the doors for future exploration in new technologies. There’s a lot going on in ray-tracing and machine-learning augmentation of rendering… stay tuned!. 

(*) Technically the old system would render dynamic lights in batches of three. So scene CPU/GPU complexity would double for every 3 lights.

(**) Realtime shadows require you to render the scene from the ‘lights perspective’. This is much faster than the main scene but is extra GPU workload to consider.
 

all good..i actaully tested the beta new engine today..the lighting and shadows are amazing

[Raezor_7091]

This reads as if it would perform better on older hardware but my old PC says otherwise, especially in Orb Vallis. I mean I already had problems with playing at a stable frame rate in Vallis with some weird hiccups here and there but with the new engine it is almost never at a stable framerate on the lowest settings

[(PSN)venomwraith]

Cool is this going to affect ps5/Xsx too? These examples look great

[ponyridingbear]

1 hour ago, fdge said:

DirectX 12 or Vulkan planned?

It’s Directx 11 but Steve has said there working on DX12 rendering 

[-SMV]

wait that is just RTX ON / RTX OFF

[DrivaMain]

Ray tracing coming soon? Welp looks like time to start gathering funds for the new graphics card!

[Hashie1000]

no rtx at the moment..in the furture ..its written

RTX ON? What’s next? Phasing out the legacy system will allow us to focus our efforts on one. This will open the doors for future exploration in new technologies. There’s a lot going on in ray-tracing and machine-learning augmentation of rendering… stay tuned!

[Helmed]

steve your ambition is gonna kill us all, or my computer rather

I can barely squeeze out 50fps on a 960

 

[angetrox]

thanks @[DE]Steve  

[Hashie1000]

36 minutes ago, SteammannXs said:

Where is the beautiful glossy effect of the materials in the orbiter? I mean... that floor is horrible now, looks like flat-coloured opaque plastics instead of the gorgeously shiny metal it was before. It's just the first thing I noticed and that's delusional. I had to say it!

glad ..you not the only one who niticed it..since the 6.6 gig patch..i really see a downgrade  in textures

[Golden_Tatsuo]

"Deferred" gave me a cone of shame around my character, especially at nights.
"Enhanced" seems to be less janky than the prior beta engine test, but I still get the circle of shame. Its a large circular area, probably about 60-100m away. 

Sometimes it turns day into night outside of the circle, others it makes day look wrong compared to the old engine. Trees not TOO far away are a blobby blocky mess, while the normal engine lets them be tree shaped and improves even more as you get close. This goes from blobby, to "loading a tree", to finally a tree. It is easy to use operator or archwing to get a point blank view of these trees changing before your very eyes. It is very messy. 

 

Trying to do conservation in POE (not tried the others yet) with the new graphics is extremely difficult. The footprints of the animals we track have like a 0.25 meter range and are quite dull. If you go off of them, then return to them, sometimes it takes a second for the tracks to appear again. 

Also, could we get our Kubrows to be get trackers and animal finders or something. Say if we have a hunter companion kubrow, the tracks can be brighter, and if we tranq the animals far away, they will rush over and mark them for us.

 

Anywho!
Thanks for the patch. I love seeing the game grow and improve. 

[22eyes]

awesome... i was waiting for this! shadows and lighting look great!

[Captain_Rocket505]

Good and all but what about fixing the "modern" mobile forums?

[podbacx]

2 hours ago, kuryux said:

Woa, the before was already amazing! Yet, u managed to improve! good work DE

and people still ask why we love this game and the community? THIS IS WHY! <3

[--Nightcore--]

G^G 

[auxy]

3 hours ago, S1mplyFresh said:

Could we also get a 'Render Scaling' feature that allows us to supersample to 1440p or higher? This makes textures look so much sharper, and greatly improves Anti-Aliasing. I often increase my Render Scaling in games like Warzone, Siege, and Overwatch... and the increase in visual fidelity is quite noticeable.

For those who are still on native 1080p144hz monitors, but with 8GB graphics cards like 2070 Super or 5700 XT, this would be an amazing graphics feature to have.

I completely agree that this would be a great feature to have in-game, but in case you weren't aware, you can do this yourself quite trivially on both GeForce and Radeon graphics cards. I myself play in 4K240 on a 1080p240 monitor using an RTX 2080 Super. For GeForce cards it's called "Dynamic Super Resolution" and for Radeon cards it's called "Virtual Super Resolution". I'm sure you can find many guides around the web! ('ω')ノ

[Megalomaniakaal]

3 hours ago, R4zorCRO said:

I can barely launch the game at minimum req, dont ruin it for me

I'm qurious, whats the potato you are running?

[ESYLD]

I don't understand all the fancy tech talk, I just hope and pray the game will keep running on my i7-3770K and Radeon HD 7700 for another year at least. *please!*

[Megalomaniakaal]

3 hours ago, CFandCo said:

As someone who can't afford to move on from a 970 just yet, how heavy of a load will this bring? As it is now I get constant 60fps.

I'm using a RX 470(~970 to 980 performance) 8GB and a 75Hz Freesync monitor. Running the game pretty much maxed out and can hit 75fps no problem. Hope that helps.