S24(8) Build 4167 - Beta Phase!
Welcome to the beta
Well, here we go! Build 4167 marks the start of the S24 beta phase. After a long stretch of early experimentation, the viewer is growing up and moving into the refine-and-polish stage.
There's a lot packed into this one, so grab a cuppa and let's dig in. And if you're running an AMD card, settle in, because you're in for a treat.
Team Red, this one's for you
Let's be honest: for the last 20 years the client has been unapologetically Nvidia-centric. The S24 beta sets out to right a few of those wrongs.
Just as Team Green has NVAPI, S24 now supports and ships with the AMD GPU Services Library (AGS). I've brought it up to at least parity with NVAPI in terms of features, including:
- Asynchronous shader compilation
- Shader caching options
- ...and a few other goodies along the way
Nvidia folks, don't worry, you haven't been left out. NVIDIA Reflex support is in this build too, so everyone gets a little something.
More toys in the box
The S24 engine controls have had a heavy revamp, and the new toys keep coming:
- AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) is now built right into the client. Upscaling, out of the box.
- DXVK can be toggled directly from Settings. No more fiddling with zip files, just flip the switch.
The big one: Unified Cubemap and Reflection System
The biggest change in this build is the culmination of about 14 weeks of slog: a brand-new cubemap system, or to coin a phrase, the Unified Cubemap and Reflection System.
Talk is cheap, so here's a legacy shiny object at mid-settings:
Its purpose is simple to say and was hard to do: replace more than 20 years of layered code with one complete solution. Legacy shine, reflection probes and materials now all live under one roof. Whether you're building a shiny boat deck or a full hall of mirrors, it's the same system, tuned by you to suit the power of your hardware.
In short, it lets even legacy shiny objects show off near mirror-like finishes without enabling either SSR or Mirrors. It's fully tunable, from performance-friendly levels all the way up to eye-watering, RTX 5090-class ultra detail.
As a bonus, the 2016-era 360 snapshot system now uses the unified cubemap too, so it can produce very high-resolution 360° JPEGs.
Over to you
Alongside all of this there's another batch of bug fixes, with still more to come. I think you'll start to see a much more cohesive, refined product rolling out of the factory doors.
As discussed previously, the plan is to carry on through beta and aim for a Release Candidate sometime towards Christmas.
In the meantime, I hope you enjoy messing about with the client and experimenting along with me!
Much love,
KL
PS: Almost Spooky Time :D
Given the availability of the Anaglyph 3D mode and improved rendering pipeline, I wonder if a route would be available to add in an efficient VR capability perhaps through SteamVR or OpenVR APIs?
ReplyDeleteWhere is best place to give feedback Kirsten? When I try to run the viewer it stops and sticks at "Compiling shader: Brdf Gen Shader" and nothing in the log file indicates an issue. I tried an earlier version also and the same thing happened, but thought it bst to report this as it seems also to be the case on latest Beta. My system is Windows 10, 32GB memory, Nvidia GTX 1080, all latest driver versions and updates.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteOK this paticualr shader is PBR related, and has caused woes in the past, however the problem is I cannot replicate the issue on a strong 5000 series card. Any running apps in the background? might narrow down the issue. I have a few suspect areas but need more info to figure out the main culprit, others have had the issue and running a second viewer has caused problems as has some browsers. Also sometimes it works on the second run.
DeleteIt had stuck for over 5 minutes so I assume dit would not continue. My system is old but quite a good setup with Xeon E5-1620 v3 (so AVX2 supported), 32 GB ram, SSD disks and Nvidia GTX 1080 8GB GPU. No other viewer (or foreground apps were running at the time). But you are correct in that when I ran it a second time (just now) it launched without any of the shader compile messages and login was successful Kirsten.
DeleteIt had set graphics level to High. When I alteredthat to Ultra some further shaders compiled but none jammed, so it did set to Ultra. Running with that fine in a test just now. So issue seems to be a problem with the "Compiling shader: Brdf Gen Shader" step on first run on my setup jamming (for 5 minutes before I terminated the process).
DeleteHi Austin, yes unlike GLSL once a setting changes the specific shaders compile once, subsequent changes are rapid as the shaders are pulled from cache, im working on a solution to the issue with the particular brdf shader, in this case to have the prebuilt roughness texture loaded, with a UE4 backup in the wings (fast approximation) should the system be altered or corrupted, either way it solves the problem, and as to your first question its on the todo list.
Delete