[BUG] Textures for smoke get too small with too high AA

[Blackdragonbird]

Ok, I don't know if anyone has saw it already, because I searched and haven't see it in any place.

I was messing with various AA levels in nVidia Inspector and noted that if I use any AA that use Supersampling, 16xS or 32xS, the smoke texture is not scaled up by the game, it simple became very small, the only AA that you can use that don't mess with it are the common ones, 2x, 4x and 8xQ Multisampling.

There are any way to make these textures get correctly scaled up when using Supersampling AA?

I looked already in base_config.lua and settings.lua and have found nothing about smoke texture in these two files.

Another thing I noted is that if you use Reshade to apply new effects to the game it stops rendering Smoke and the Dot you see when building tracks. Maybe there are some rendering bug in the engine of the game that cause these two issues?

[Thork]

Why would that be a bug?
You're using anti-aliasing, which basically adjusts pixel colour to neighboring pixels.
That does not necessarily increase picture quality and can even reduce details when pixels already fit perfectly. It only really makes sense when texture size/resolution is lower than the processed resolution displayed on the screen. I often find it better to use native monitor resolution without AA, especially because it also needs quite a lot of performance.
F.ex. I used a 21" with native 1600x1200 resolution and no AA at a time when most people still used 17" @1024x786 resolution and were proud if they could use AA. I found both quality and performance to be superior on my setup and still rarely make use of AA today.

There is a smoke texture you could change, but I doubt that would help much unless you make it very dense. Just search it, it's named appropriately ;)

It's probably the same problem that makes the dot disappear and supersampling only makes it worse.
If you use a post-processor, that should apply its effects after the game is done with rendering. Some are just not fully compatible, but that can hardly be blamed on the game.
You should really understand what these settings actually do, not just listen to marketing or some "experts".

Ofc. I did not test it myself, so the problem might be different to what I suspect.

[ChunkHunter]

It sounds to me like this "bug" is exactly what I'd expect with high levels of anti-aliasing...

[Blackdragonbird]

No, it's not supposed to be this way. Look at these two pictures. I uploaded them in Imgur to avoid compression and loss of quality:

8X AA

https://i.imgur.com/5W0Tz0i.jpg


16xS AA

https://i.imgur.com/aFimfIa.jpg

See that the texture is smaller in the second picture? The texture is getting scaled down, it's wrong, the correct way is to it to maintain it's original size.

[Thork]

You can't avoid compression and loss of quality if you upload in jpg ;)
You might be right that the texture itself is displayed at a "smaller size". Is it really just AA or also DSR?
I'd guess it is DSR not applied to the full processed image, but before these effects.
Not sure whom to blame then...

[Blackdragonbird]

What in hell. Imgur converted the PNGs in upload. =(

No, I'm not using DSR anymore, the game is buggy with it, sometimes it start ok, sometimes it was broken.

Only using AA now.

Not blaming anyone, only looking if anyone else have faced it to see that is not a isolated case. If not a isolated case maybe the devs look into it.

[Thork]

Doubt I can be of much help. Would need to do some tests myself.
Rather strange that would be caused by only changing AA setting, although some of these AA settings are not natively supported (either by game/driver) anyway.

However, it's rather rare that (this much) AA improves image quality anyway. Doubt you'll miss out on much.

[ChunkHunter]

I'd still say it's caused by the driver and not the game.
It almost looks like each element of the smoke is being processed by the AA filter separately.

[Blackdragonbird]

@Thork, horsepower is being wasted here, like I said before, my GPU not ever reach more than 50% usage even playing at 1440p already. I was using Reshade to improve image quality, and it reached around 90% with it, but, without the smoke of the trains I lost immersion and stoped using it. You can look at the screenshots I took with Reshade in my profile.

Believe me, 16xS looks much sharper and clean than 8xQ, only my eyes maybe. And I think the way the devs used to render smoke and the dot in the mouse is not compatible or have some bug with Supersampling.

@ChunkHunter, maybe it is, maybe not, don't hurt to see if the devs look into it. If is a issue with the way they choose to render these effects and they can patch it, good to all of us. If not, well, I have lost nothing reporting it.

=)

[Thork]

Yes, TpF is mostly limited by CPU not GPU and some post-processing might be viable if you see improvements. It's just that I personally prefer higher-res to AA and when running a high native-screen resolution, AA usually does not make a lot of difference.
Apps like Reshade often read/inject out of/into V/RAM buffers rather than change driver settings, so there can always be some incompatibility with certain games and how these handle render process/interface.
I was not in a very good mood when I made my first comment and might have been harsher than intended.
I also sometimes used post-processing tools, mainly for improved effects, for example on XCOM: Enemy Unknown. It can be quite impressive sometimes, especially on older games.

As said, I would need to run some tests on my own to be able to provide some useful help.
Not sure if I'll do that (anytime soon).

[Blackdragonbird]

No problem by me. Maybe someone else read the thread and give some information.

I sent an email to the devs with this information and the 2 screenshots. Hope they say something.