BF2 HD Remastered 3.0 Beta - 2017 - Official

[B4rr3l]

Well that's would be relatively easy.

hehehehehe LOL!

[AfterDune]

Haha, made me chuckle, rpox

[B4rr3l]

Haha, made me chuckle, rpox

yep loved the quick pick repply

[salutcestbooby]

Can you show us a pic of OperationNerfcas ?

[Rhino]

Can you show us a pic of OperationNerfcas ?

[B4rr3l]

And now the fat one

[AfterDune]

What a handsome fella

[B4rr3l]

What a handsome fella

elegant hehehe

[B4rr3l]

Had to fix that little *******, that I found only after 47 revisions...
so I decided to try something new I had in mind before, I think a picture says more than a thousand words..

[B4rr3l]

one more

[B4rr3l]

and that's the difference a single GLS texture can make
Rainbow power! lolz


Same poly count, same performance..

[Rhino]

Nice work.

Same poly count, same performance..

Are the texture sizes the same as before? If they are bigger than before, then it will be harder for clients to render, not to mention more memory usage, so will have an impact on performance.

[B4rr3l]

Nice work.



Are the texture sizes the same as before? If they are bigger than before, then it will be harder for clients to render, not to mention more memory usage, so will have an impact on performance.

That's a 256kb texture m8, any modern videocard has plenty space in the video ram for that. But you can reduce it to 128kb as the vanilla one and it will still with the same difference, but of course, pixelated as vanilla.


Texture size or quality usually don't change anything on FPS, only if you are running out of video Ram and are doing Ram swapping.

I've tried 512kb lightmaps / 512kb Detail textures vs 1024 light maps / 2048 Terrain detail textures, difference in performance is NULL! Whe are not talking about a single 256kb DXT1 texture at this time, but more like a hundred of HD 4mb DXT5 textures and not a single FPS drop.


So, most of your texture stuff will be handled by your Video RAM.

Objects on it's way, are loaded on RAM and that's a critical problem.... lots of polys, lots of lods will scale to Engine RAM limit pretty quickly. And even if we could allocate more RAM.. the engine will have problem to process too much polys cause it's dual core only, change your grass density or view distance, overgrowth lod distance and sees where the impact hit is. You can scale from 300FPS all the way down to 70 with a 1 digit change.

Of course it went from 512Mb Video RAM requirement to 2GB and it does reach 1.9GB of video ram usage, but well that's it, I'm definitely not remastering a game to run on 2005 computer.

So if you have a 1GB card and try to play it on High settings it will run with bad FPS and performance as any other modern game. But that's why we have medium and low also (all the new HD effects have lods)

Also only displacement map textures will bring impact to the FPS cause those are real time rendered with true 3D geometry (as the HeightMap.raw)

P.S. I'm not sure how the shaders handles the Static objects textures, that one can go to RAM instead of Video Ram and it might be a problem also, But I haven't tested HD statics yet.

[Rhino]

Well you won't feel any difference in FPS just from doubling the size of one or two textures. But if your doubling the size of basically every single texture ingame, you will feel a performance difference.

I also take it you referring to the head as a 128kb, 512*256 texture (actually 170.7kb if including all mips instead of just the first) and if so, increasing it size will quadruple, not double it, to 512kb for a 1024*512 texture (with mips, 682.7kb, 4x the amount of it's original)

A quick example of making a single head normal texture bigger, note the memory usage in the bottom right of the texture:

512*256:


1024*512:


That is not to mention since BF2 is a 32bit game, which means you have a ~3gb memory limit to contend with, which if you go over that, the client will CTD on load. We hit that limit some time ago in PR and had to do drastic action, scaling down pretty much all our vehicle textures to only a fraction of the rez we originally made and had them at in early releases, which is why many of our vehicle textures look so low rez, and optimizing their formats so they take up as little memory as possible with being as high rez as possible, is quite a lot of work and something I have been doing slowly over the years. Things like the Chinook have high rez textures again as I tweaked the textures to be in an optimized format with diffuse not using an alpha channel etc so then it could be seriously scaled up, with only a 23% overall increase in memory, for pretty much visually quadruple the detail than before.

Spoiler for from the dev fourms:

High Rez Chinook textures again with only a 23% increase in memory usage, for quadruple the diffuse detail of before and far more optimized setup for multiple Chinook colours on the same map!
(including 1p textures that also got increased, total of 8.98mb for a single chinook on a map, 11.6mb for two colour versions on the same map. Excluding 1p textures its 5.98mb for a single chinook, 8.64mb for two)
Also the Normals are the correct way round now too
Also fixed up the Chinook CH1 texture to be the famous "Bravo November" Chinook

NOTE: The French and Dutch Chinook textures need to be resaved in 2048 DXT1 from their .psds since currently, I've had to just resave their 1024 textures into DXT1 from DXT5, so they are not at the correct size and are suffering a bit from re-re-compression from that.
http://redmine.realitymod.com/issues/4377
http://redmine.realitymod.com/issues/4376

If we take all the PR US Army Solider textures (although PR has more faces than vBF2), at their current rez they come to 17.5mb. Ift we quadruple that, assuming we up the rez of all the textures to the next level, then that comes to 70mb. Then also assuming we do the same to the other faction they are playing and they have the same sort of texture setup for their soldiers, your talking 140mb, just for the players on the map, where currently they use 35mb. Now 105mb increase might not sound like much, but that will have in impact both on performance (although just that extra you probably won't be able to notice any FPS difference on a decent PC with plenty of memory) and does bring you closer to the 3gb memory limit which if you go over, no matter how much memory your PC has, it will crash on load.



BTW just for the record, I'm not saying you shouldn't increase the size of the textures, I'm all for that, I'm saying you should be aware of both the performance impact and memory limitations of the game while doing it and try to only increase the textures that will mostly benefit from it.

[B4rr3l]

Rhino;2174358']Well you won't feel any difference in FPS just from doubling the size of one or two textures. But if your doubling the size of basically every single texture ingame, you will feel a performance difference.

I also take it you referring to the head as a 128kb, 512*256 texture (actually 170.7kb if including all mips instead of just the first) and if so, increasing it size will quadruple, not double it, to 512kb for a 1024*512 texture (with mips, 682.7kb, 4x the amount of it's original)

A quick example of making a single head normal texture bigger, note the memory usage in the bottom right of the texture:

512*256:


1024*512:


That is not to mention since BF2 is a 32bit game, which means you have a ~3gb memory limit to contend with, which if you go over that, the client will CTD on load. We hit that limit some time ago in PR and had to do drastic action, scaling down pretty much all our vehicle textures to only a fraction of the rez we originally made and had them at in early releases, which is why many of our vehicle textures look so low rez, and optimizing their formats so they take up as little memory as possible with being as high rez as possible, is quite a lot of work and something I have been doing slowly over the years. Things like the Chinook have high rez textures again as I tweaked the textures to be in an optimized format with diffuse not using an alpha channel etc so then it could be seriously scaled up, with only a 23% overall increase in memory, for pretty much visually quadruple the detail than before.

Spoiler for from the dev fourms:

High Rez Chinook textures again with only a 23% increase in memory usage, for quadruple the diffuse detail of before and far more optimized setup for multiple Chinook colours on the same map!
(including 1p textures that also got increased, total of 8.98mb for a single chinook on a map, 11.6mb for two colour versions on the same map. Excluding 1p textures its 5.98mb for a single chinook, 8.64mb for two)
Also the Normals are the correct way round now too
Also fixed up the Chinook CH1 texture to be the famous "Bravo November" Chinook

NOTE: The French and Dutch Chinook textures need to be resaved in 2048 DXT1 from their .psds since currently, I've had to just resave their 1024 textures into DXT1 from DXT5, so they are not at the correct size and are suffering a bit from re-re-compression from that.
http://redmine.realitymod.com/issues/4377
http://redmine.realitymod.com/issues/4376

If we take all the PR US Army Solider textures (although PR has more faces than vBF2), at their current rez they come to 17.5mb. Ift we quadruple that, assuming we up the rez of all the textures to the next level, then that comes to 70mb. Then also assuming we do the same to the other faction they are playing and they have the same sort of texture setup for their soldiers, your talking 140mb, just for the players on the map, where currently they use 35mb. Now 105mb increase might not sound like much, but that will have in impact both on performance (although just that extra you probably won't be able to notice any FPS difference on a decent PC with plenty of memory) and does bring you closer to the 3gb memory limit which if you go over, no matter how much memory your PC has, it will crash on load.



BTW just for the record, I'm not saying you shouldn't increase the size of the textures, I'm all for that, I'm saying you should be aware of both the performance impact and memory limitations of the game while doing it and try to only increase the textures that will mostly benefit from it.

Yes I'm also trying to help from my trial and error database, what I mean is we have to keep the optimizations only on the shaders that uses RAM and do not try to use VRAM first,

For the videocard to allocate 2GB of textures and read it the performance is almost the same than allocating 512Mb and reading it.

At this moment I have almost every single terrain covered by textures Quadrupled or doubled in size of the original ones (yes, that means 4x or 16x times larger than vanilla in size/total area) and with almost everything I mean, all terrain details, Rocks, undergrowth, Roads, Water, only statics don't. Not no mention my "optmizations" most were on the opposite way going from DXT1 to DXt5 with alpha for all the terrain details and stuff that didn't have specular. That's why I need the alpha so I can have the terrain bump mapped.

If i put the vanilla init, undergrowth, overgowth .con files, the performance will be almost exactly the same as running Vanilla both over 250FPS

Total RAM usage for the whole Remastered pack is at around 1.85GB only cause all those shaders are allocating those HD textures on video RAM which ramped up from 512 to 1.9GB (Yes as you can see that is much more than the 3GB "limit" already)

If I do add BF4 soldiers in the other side, there is a much higher polygon count going on in the game, and the RAM usage increase to around 2.6GB only with that change! the FPS will also drop down drastically.

Also... In my case if you try to use this settings I'm using (2560x1080 / 8X High) with an 1GB video card that wil mean those extra needed 0.9GB will need to be allocated somewhere else.. the Ram will ramp from the 1.8GB it's using now to 2.7GB and than you might also have a problem, but anyway the FPS, would be unplayable anyway before a CTD.

So Yes PR has lots of LODs, lots of objects and Huge maps, and that's where most of the RAM usage lays down.

And if you try to use an 512MB video card in FullHD and High, it will instantly crash to desktop ans that's why minimum recommended settings is a 1.5GB videocard.


btw, that Chinook looks gorgeous, me want lol. And also good to know that vehicles also goes straight to RAM instead of Vram? Onboad should have your shared memory increased to 2GB mannualy also. Are you guys at windows 7 or something like that?

[Rhino]

I would recommend you find someone with a really low end and mid-end PCs to do some performance testing with since something that has no effect on a high-end PC can have a big impact on a low-end or even middle of the range PC.

That's why I need the alpha so I can have the terrain bump mapped.

Did you edit the shaders to enable that? Would be nice to see the results of that

Total RAM usage for the whole Remastered pack is at around 1.85GB only cause all those shaders are allocating those HD textures on video RAM which ramped up from 512 to 1.9GB (Yes as you can see that is much more than the 3GB "limit" already)

Interesting, PR could really do with that!

btw, that Chinook looks gorgeous, me want lol. And also good to know that vehicles also goes straight to RAM instead of Vram? Onboad should have your shared memory increased to 2GB mannualy also. Are you guys at windows 7 or something like that?

I'm not that knowledgeable about how BF2 handles its memory but from what I understand, meshes and textures are loaded into the Video RAM until that runs out, then it starts to use up normal RAM. That post was also from two years or so ago but yes, I'm still on Win7, best windows around at the moment

[B4rr3l]

I would recommend you find someone with a really low end and mid-end PCs to do some performance testing with since something that has no effect on a high-end PC can have a big impact on a low-end or even middle of the range PC.



Did you edit the shaders to enable that? Would be nice to see the results of that



Interesting, PR could really do with that!



I'm not that knowledgeable about how BF2 handles its memory but from what I understand, meshes and textures are loaded into the Video RAM until that runs out, then it starts to use up normal RAM. That post was also from two years or so ago but yes, I'm still on Win7, best windows around at the moment

Humm...

I'm using Coronas shaders.

I have a RX 560 with 4GB that's far away from a High End PC, and that's todays mid-end PC, it runs the game smooth as butter and probably looking better than BF4 if you consider the whole scenario (view distance, map size, vegetation, gameplay, effects, terrain details, clouds, flares... they are all giving BF4 a run for it's money. Of course it doen't have all those BF4 Post-processing which sux anyway lol, prefer pure RAW and clean HD graphics.

I think the shaders treats stuffs different, That's all on how you set it up to read your materials, but I know there is stuff that don't need the cpu at all (if you do have spare video memory) and some stuff that the CPU is processing needs to allocate the Ram anyway. Probably terrain as it is much more complex than anything else in the game and it's linked with the vegetation/navmesh it's all handled by GPU

Terrain is tesselated and run on Shadermodel 3.0 so that most probably goes straight to the video card, bundled meshes needs to be computed at every moment and linked with the python code and server stuff in real-time, so that probably is much more CPU intensive, which is the drawback of this engine.

I mean, do what you can with textures before adding polys lol

But will be good if we could develop a test pattern or something like that or just find some shader specialist to point the right direction.

Cof Bad cof Santa

About the windows 7, I do know it don't share memory between VGA and CPU as easy as in Windows10

[Mineral]

Nice! Didn't know about the terrain normal shaders. Gonna try those out. Doubt it has tessellation though

Read a thread where you also wrote in:
Corona's Shaders - Page 2 - Final Showcase - Official BF Editor Forums

How do you go about adding the normals to roads? Didn't understand what you meant with Remdull tools.

[B4rr3l]

Mineral;2174377']Nice! Didn't know about the terrain normal shaders. Gonna try those out. Doubt it has tessellation though

Read a thread where you also wrote in:
Corona's Shaders - Page 2 - Final Showcase - Official BF Editor Forums

How do you go about adding the normals to roads? Didn't understand what you meant with Remdull tools.

Who has tesselation is the standard BF2 terrain, actually tessalation received a few improvements in DX11 but it was born with the displacement maps (heightmapdata.raw)

Use a very detailed 2048 16 bit heightmap in 0.5 scale factor with a true HD 2k heightmap picture and you will have a terrain with all those amazing details as any other newer game.

Mesh view!

Have a look at vanilla Tarmac_mirror_fall or something like that...it does come with bumpmaps in it's original form. The _b texture is there and it is also on the matrial list of the road mesh

[worldlife]

Who has tesselation is the standard BF2 terrain, actually tessalation received a few improvements in DX11 but it was born with the displacement maps (heightmapdata.raw)

I doubt tessalation is available in DX9. What I know about tessalation is that it needs a different rendering pipeline that is only available in DX10+.
The terrain heightmapdata is not used as a texture in video card. It's a .raw picture, not .dds, which means it contains numeric data but not texture data. The terrain was computed and constructed by CPU programs. It's not true tessalation.
But it is worth looking into if you use those bump maps with parallax technic, for example, Parallax Occlusion Mapping described in DX9SDK in (DirectX SDK install dir)\Samples\C++\Direct3D\ParallaxOcclusionMapping. I once tried to implement this in staticmeshs but without success. I wonder it can be implemented in road or terrain.