2 gig update?? no update notes!

[Assassi7V]

??

[AlenL]

http://steamcommunity.com/app/465240/discussions/0/340412122402588256/

[Assassi7V]

ahhh ty!!

[shponglefan]

- Fixed a crash that would occur to players with improperly installed DirectX runtime. Instead, a warning message is now displayed when starting the game.
- Improved performance with LiquidVR on AMD driver 16.10.

That needs a ~2 gigabyte download?

[AlenL]

No it doesn't, that was a mistake in a hurry. I explained the mess-up in that thread. Sorry, it will be an incremental update the next time.

[TheGoodSheperd]

The real question, what is the dev roadmap? Are you going to release more conent for Halloween? Pumpkin heads and ghauls and stuff?

[AlenL]

Didn't think about making Halloween content. Nice idea, not sure if there's time, but will see.
As for roadmap...
- fixes for issues that people have found (some crashes, performance cornercases, etc...)
- smaller features/options requested (trigger sensitivity, health bar hiding...)
- more planets (a lot of work on that has been done already, as you could see in the trailer, but needs time to complete and put it all together)
- skill tree and other gameplay improvements/tunings.
- larger tech improvements for performance, mainly supporting LiquidVR and VRWorks fully. Right now, we only support LiquidVR with two GPUs, which literally makes is almost 2x faster. But we still need to implement:
- support for LiquidVR with one GPU (it reduces the driver overhead, mainly)
- VRWorks for multi GPU
- VRWorks for single GPU (gives performance on geometry side for single-gpus in 10x0 series.
- Doing multiresolution/foviated rendering for both LiquidVR and VRWorks. It gives improvements in fill rate. Maximum theoretical improvement is up to 2x I think. But this feature will take a lot of time to get it to work correctly.
- Also support for Vulkan and Linux once that becomes available. In Vulkan, huge CPU overhead reduction can be made for rendering with two eyes. But still need to wait for support for that from the API.

[rusty_dragon]

Originally posted by AlenL:

Didn't think about making Halloween content. Nice idea, not sure if there's time, but will see.
As for roadmap...
- fixes for issues that people have found (some crashes, performance cornercases, etc...)
- smaller features/options requested (trigger sensitivity, health bar hiding...)
- more planets (a lot of work on that has been done already, as you could see in the trailer, but needs time to complete and put it all together)
- skill tree and other gameplay improvements/tunings.
- larger tech improvements for performance, mainly supporting LiquidVR and VRWorks fully. Right now, we only support LiquidVR with two GPUs, which literally makes is almost 2x faster. But we still need to implement:
- support for LiquidVR with one GPU (it reduces the driver overhead, mainly)
- VRWorks for multi GPU
- VRWorks for single GPU (gives performance on geometry side for single-gpus in 10x0 series.
- Doing multiresolution/foviated rendering for both LiquidVR and VRWorks. It gives improvements in fill rate. Maximum theoretical improvement is up to 2x I think. But this feature will take a lot of time to get it to work correctly.
- Also support for Vulkan and Linux once that becomes available. In Vulkan, huge CPU overhead reduction can be made for rendering with two eyes. But still need to wait for support for that from the API.

Wow. So you're saying that SeriousSamVR currently supports Crossfire with almost twice perf increase?
Why this wasn't all over news like typical nvidia promotion, I wonder..

And actual question? What can you tell us about two GPUs and Vulkan?
Also I'm intrigued about two GPU support of LiquidVR. How it actually works technically?
Is it MGPU based or Crossfire based? Are there publicly available articles to read?

[AlenL]

It's not Crossfire. It is what they call "Affinity mGPU". Nvidia calls it VR SLI (though it is not really "SLI"). Each GPU renders one eye. That requires special support in the engine, quite a bit more involved than Crossfire. Crossfire can essentially work automatically, but it has a lot of problems, whereas this really fits the purpose nicely (once you implement it).
Our support for it is not widely promoted yet because it didn't work correctly before yesterday's patch, and we still need to test it thoroughly to be sure we are not trumpeting something that doesn't actually work. But once we do, there will be articles about the tech, don't worry.

Two GPUs with Vulkan will require Vulkan mGPU support, which - as far as I know - has not yet been incorporated into the standard. But when it is, I hope it will work very similar to LiquidVR above (and VRWorks).

[Swolern]

Originally posted by AlenL:

It's not Crossfire. It is what they call "Affinity mGPU". Nvidia calls it VR SLI (though it is not really "SLI"). Each GPU renders one eye. That requires special support in the engine, quite a bit more involved than Crossfire. Crossfire can essentially work automatically, but it has a lot of problems, whereas this really fits the purpose nicely (once you implement it).
Our support for it is not widely promoted yet because it didn't work correctly before yesterday's patch, and we still need to test it thoroughly to be sure we are not trumpeting something that doesn't actually work. But once we do, there will be articles about the tech, don't worry.

Two GPUs with Vulkan will require Vulkan mGPU support, which - as far as I know - has not yet been incorporated into the standard. But when it is, I hope it will work very similar to LiquidVR above (and VRWorks).

Thanks for the hard work. Very excited for VR mGPU support. I have 2x Pascal cards. Paused all my Serious Sam VR gameplay until the support releases and I can completely max the game out graphically + Supersampling on the Vive.

Any estimation on VR SLI release date for Serious Sam VR? Is the holdup on the Nvidia side? If so we can ask more support on the NV driver end. Even the VR SLI supported NV demo "Funhouse" seemed not to be working properly as the GPUs were using largely different usage % amounts when VR SLI activated in Funhouse. Thanks for the info AlenL.

[AlenL]

We have great relationship with Nvidia, don't worry. It's just our engineering time. We are currently implementing single-GPU optimizations through LiquidVR (*) and will then go to first mGPU through VRWorks (Nvidia), and then sGPU through VRWorks.

(*) I know that this will not help you with your Pascal cards, but we started with LVR first, and have to wrap up that work first. Though the APIs are very similar - once it works on LVR, it should be simple make the same for VRW. I hope this will all take a few weeks at most.

[Swolern]

Originally posted by AlenL:

We have great relationship with Nvidia, don't worry. It's just our engineering time. We are currently implementing single-GPU optimizations through LiquidVR (*) and will then go to first mGPU through VRWorks (Nvidia), and then sGPU through VRWorks.

(*) I know that this will not help you with your Pascal cards, but we started with LVR first, and have to wrap up that work first. Though the APIs are very similar - once it works on LVR, it should be simple make the same for VRW. I hope this will all take a few weeks at most.

Wow only a few weeks, awesome!! Good to hear the APIs are similar. Thanks for the info AlenL.

Devs like Croteam are the VR devs people should be supporting! 👍🏼 I have extremely enjoyed Serious Sam VR since release day, and can't wait for more! Hopefully by the time VR SLI support is out I will have my Subpac M2 to add to it. Going to be nuts!

[rusty_dragon]

Hey, folks!
I've found article about LiquidVR Affinity Multi-GPU
http://gpuopen.com/implementing-liquidvr-affinity-multigpu-in-serious-samvr/