Lod and Shadow Issues

[MeowCats]

It's been known for a while that the DX11 Shadows are ugly and buggy.. and having LoD issues.. but there's also a LoD issue with objects popping or rather fading in like 5 meters away from Booker even though all settings ingame are maxed out.. and there's also another thing.. Dynamic shadows on characters dissapear like when walking away 5-8 feet from them.. i guess that's unfixable aswell?

[RStriker69 ♥]

There's a few ini settings that you can tweak relating specifically to the time taken to apply texture data and LoD, as well as shadow quality. I don't have them memorized, but you can find a good place to start here:

http://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/BioShock_Infinite

Search on that page for texture streaming. That will tell you the proper ini file to edit and some of the settings that will be helpful to change, as not all of them even do anything, and others would be bad to change.

If you want to mess around with your ini file(s) be sure to back up any ini (lol) you're gonna edit BEFORE you edit it, so you can just pop the good ini back in after any changes you make that you don't like.

Good Luck and be well!

[MeowCats]

Thanks for the kind answer, but i'm afraid i can't see any tweaks that affects how far the Dynamic shadows are being loaded.. they just dissapear in like 5-6 feet distance when walking away from a NPC as example :/

[RStriker69 ♥]

You're talking about the sort of "line of detail" where there's this visual effect of a line past which everything gets less defined and more blurry, and on the close to you side is darker, well defined and has solid edges?

[MeowCats]

Originally posted by RStriker69 ♥:

You're talking about the sort of "line of detail" where there's this visual effect of line past which everything gets less defined and more blurry, and on the close to you side is darker, well defined and has solid edges?

That too, but sadly this is a UE3 Engine issue and only turning Shadows down to High fixes this, but i'm talking about the Dynamic Shadows being no more cast at all when being 5-6 feet away from NPC's as example.

[RStriker69 ♥]

Okay, let me line up some ideas. What I was refering to in my earlier post was that you'd have to open up xengine.ini and do some poking around yourself, I don't think there's a guide specifically for these settings, and there's a lot of them to mess around with. I'll post in another couple minutes some settings that I have tried that I think make it look better, YMMV.

[RStriker69 ♥]

It's simpler to just go through these line by line where they're relevant.

I'd find an area in the game that's both bright and has nearby shade, a place (maybe near the raffle at the start) that has lots of shadowing and directed light so you can tell at a glance what these settings are doing. Once you've nailed down what changing them does, you can change them in smaller incremements than the 30% I suggest starting with.

These you want to be set just like this, so that it's not trying to use both software and hardware shadowing, etc at the same time:

AllowD3D10=True
AllowD3D11=True
AllowRadialBlur=True
EnableSoftwareOcclusion=False
EnableGPUOcclusionQueries=True
EnableDepthPrePass=False
EnableScreenSpaceAmbientShadows=True
EnableSPUScreenSpaceAmbientShadows=True
UseHighQualityLightShaftRendering=True
EnableHDAO=FALSE
HDAOHighQuality=True
DisableAOFiltering=False
EnableSM5ShadowSystem=True
EnableSM5ShadowBlur=True

After that there's some decimal and integer settings controlling lighting and shadow distances (I would look at these specifically and any other distance/shadow correlations you can find. Everything between

SM5ShadowSunWidth=0.100000

and

NewNonCSMSoftTransitionDistance=60.000000

should produce some noticable effect. My recomendation would be to change them by a factor of at least 30% relative to the value to make sure you can notice what's changing. Thus if you changed the first settting there, you could make it either .13 or .07 (30% in either direction) while the last setting in the group you'd want to make either 40.0 or 80.0 (30% again, but dealing with larger relative numbers).

And with these, you probably want them set to what I have set here. I recommend FXAA stay off and if you need some AA, force it on in your video card as many people, myself included, have issues with FXAA causing shadow bugginess, everything from blurriness to total absence of shadows. Though if you haven't been using FXAA, now would be the time to try, and do note that you don't want SM5FXAA and FXAA both set to true. One or the other, try both seperately!

You might try changing dynamic shadows settings here, I don't think 6 does anything, and 4 would technically lower the setting, but may make things more appealing to you as it changes a lot between levels.

EnableLightShafts=True
EnableFXAA=False
EnableSM5FXAA=False
UseLowPrecisionColorBuffer=False
UseHalfResAmbientShadows=False
UseComputeShaderAmbientShadows=True
DynamicShadowsLevel=5
AmbientOcclusionLevel=4

These here are pretty straight forward, if you have a good system and video card (I was able to run the in game settings maxed on a GTX 460 (768 RAM) at 30+ fps, so if you can beat that, you can certainly set these higher) you can tweak the shadows upward. Don't set anything higher than what I have it set to here, except max multisamples, which should be an AA setting, but caused me to lose a lot of stability (crashes left and right with it turned up to 4. Max aniso should be 16, shadowfilterqualitybias goes lower for sure, might go 1 step higher. You'll have to experiment

ShadowFilterQualityBias=3
MaxAnisotropy=16
MaxMultisamples=1 - BE CAREFUL -
MinShadowResolution=128
MinPreShadowResolution=16
MaxShadowResolution=4096
MaxPerObjectShadowResolution=4096

Again, don't go higher than 4096 on the last two, even with a killer rig as the engine can't handle it well. The minimum shadow res I've doubled from the base settings and I wouldn't go too much higher, but you could try doubling it again...I wouldn't recommend any higher than that though.

ShadowFadeResolution=128
PreShadowFadeResolution=16

I haven't messed with those two settings but as they're set pretty low, you might consider raising their quality and seeing if you notice a difference.

[TextureStreaming]

This entire section has some neat toys, and a couple of them relate specically to shadows. Again, never higher than 4MB for ones near that setting (4096)

Okay, that's all I can do at the moment. If you want some more pointers in the engine file specifically for shadows I can direct you to more later, just let me know.

So...many...settings.....

[MeowCats]

Wow thanks for all the suggestions.. i tweaked like 90% of these things already and the Shadows are set at 8192 which does look way better than Ultra itself. And yeah my System is a Monster and the game is quite enjoyable all maxed out & Tweaked and runs at 150Fps and more.. since it's surprisingly well optimized.

[RStriker69 ♥]

Cool, glad 8192 is working for you. I've always heard U3 doesn't handle above 4MB very well so I've shyed people away from going that high. I'll have to try it though as I've got performance to burn as well.

What do you do for AA?

[MeowCats]

I'm using SweetFX Injector for SMAA since FXAA blurs too much and no other Antialiasing Method works.. though i wish i had two GTX980's so i could use this new Dynamic Resolution thingie.

[RStriker69 ♥]

Neat. I forced some specific AA that I can't remember off hand using nvidia nspector. I've never used Sweet FX much as it appears...what's the word?...Over processed? To me, at any rate. I know there's a lot of tweaking one can do with it and it's on my "will do someday" list.

Is there a generic, "minimum visual change" AA option for sweet fx? I haven't looked at it in a long time, so undoubtedly things will have advanced since when I tried it. I'd like something that just does good AA without any visual temperature or pallete changing. Cannot stand FXAA in pretty much anything. The blurrrrrrrrs. Dear god, the bluuuuuurrrrrs! lol

[MeowCats]

Let me make some screenies to show what i mean with the Shadow issues.

[MeowCats]

So here. http://cloud-4.steampowered.com/ugc/39727720950712187/2DF60C1D4A9AB9C9DDD97AC31EB82A46726AF17D/ and the second screenie http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=317577066

[RStriker69 ♥]

Ah, I see what you mean. I think I have a save in that location, let me boot 'er up and see if I get the same thing

[RStriker69 ♥]

Okay, so I'm not sure you'd be able to fix this as it looks like it's tied to that area, or rather it's related to current global settings for lighting wherever you are. I was careful to check out the shadows as I was coming in from battleship bay, and out in the brightness, the dynamic shadows were always there, I could see them as far away as I could get from any NPC, but inside that building where you took a shot, I'm getting exactly that behavior.

It fades out ultra fast and poofs before it's totally faded.

Try looking at battleship bay outside, if you can still get back there (maybe just load that chapter) and see if the shadows perform as they should out on the beach, like they did for me.