S24(8) DX Build 4255 Beta 1.1

 

Reflections without SSR :)

Oh, hello! Build 4255 is making its way to the download page right about now. Please clear your cache when you install it, as the shaders have had quite a bit of work done.

The image above shows the gist of what I mentioned last time and shows off the new unified cubemap system nicely. You get convincing reflections at a fraction of the cost of turning on full screen-space reflections (SSR).

Fixes and improvements

• No more flicker on vertical surfaces. A nasty flicker caused by the temporal lighting and ambient occlusion has been stamped out.
• UI polish. The interface has had a round of QA, and there are extra reset points in case things go south for you :)
• Better environment presets. The environment settings now respect your tonemapping when you pick a sunrise, sunset or other preset from the menus.
• DXVK updated. DXVK is now synced to the latest release.
• Multithreaded avatar animation. Avatar motions can now be processed across multiple threads, which is a real boon in large crowds.

Behind the scenes

The old Linden Lab–style draw pools have all been retired, and the rendering pipeline that has existed since the beginning of time has finally been removed and replaced. The OpenGL extensions and headers have also been scrubbed from the client’s build process.

One particularly stubborn bone of contention has been the BRDF shader, which controls how light reflects off materials depending on their roughness. It has been a pain point on a lot of GPUs, so it has been replaced with a pre-generated lookup map. If the map isn’t available, the client falls back to a fast approximation shader based on an Unreal Engine example.

A quick note

I apologise in advance for the fairly constant updates, but I get the sense that anyone using this client is already the same sort of person as me: obsessed with patching and upgrades!

Finally, a big shoutout to the lovely people who have sent me some truly stunning images made with various GPU technologies. As it happens, they all play nicely with Direct3D. Who would have thought? 

Have a Lovely Week!

Warm Regards,

KL