ShadowBoost 1.1.30.0

[Bonnie Lass]

Bonnie Lass
Can't release it, because ShadowBoost is the project of Alexander Blade, i'm just making the code which is too hard for him, while he is doing the code which depends from game exectuable version and i prefer to ignore, also he is much better and faster in reverse engineering than me.

Well fuck.

[Dorak]

Dorak
With current version you will have issues only if fps is equal to desired fps in shadowboost.ini, shadow distance will stuck and not change until fps will no be bigger or lower by 5% than desired. You may not even notice the issue, mostly visible for users who set desired fps to 57-60 fps and have game quality setting which mostly give them 60 fps cap (when vsync enabled game capped to 60 fps on most displays).

Thanks.

Also i got rid of the NV Inspector cap, like Bonnie suggested, and capped my game with the ENB Limiter instead. Feels way smoother indeed. Also now that i activated DisableFakeLights i just can't go back to the old fake ass character lighting anyway.

Also for reference, Bethesda shadow distance per quality settings :

Ultra : 20000.0000
High : 14000.0000
Medium : 3000.0000
Low : 3000.0000

Low and medium are identical.

[Marcurios]

I don't understand why people set the desired framerate almost to the capped framerate with shadowboost.
Cause if you give the code a few frames to work with it's obvious that there's going to be problems.

optimal would be to set the desired framerate to a framerate in which the game still runs smooth, in my case that is 40 fps.
then the code can use the shadowrange 2000~10000 between 40~60 frames, that works beautifully.

having done a little bit of coding myself i understand why things can go wrong if the margins are to narrow.
You should make a note of that in the readme file, or Alex ofcourse.

make the desired framerate the framerate in which the game still plays comfortable and the shadow transition will be smooth too.

but as always, i could be talking nonsense.

[bongpig]

Anyway, did the trick seems works properly now and instead of dead zone it stays on the edge of it, always trying to increase shadow distance. Oscillation is visible in this case, tried to reduce it as much as possible, but it's cannot be eliminated at all. Check mod page from time to time for update.

I can totally see the problem Boris. If our framerate is locked to 60, how is the mod supposed to know if theres enough performance spare to increase the shadow distance? Its quite some puzzle. I can see how constantly raising the distance could work - as you suggest - but dont you run the risk of the game dipping below 60 as the mod tries to find the upper limit?

I had a thought. It seems the shadow rendering is done on the CPU. Could you not use the CPU usage to drive the shadow distance instead of in-game fps? To put it as simply as possible, we define a threshold - say 90% - and if cpu usage drops below this then raise the shadow distance. This way, if the game is locked at 60fps, you can still tell if there is any shadow performance spare?

Feasible, or am I talking nonsense?

[tapioks]

Hi Boris,

Can I ask how Shadow Boost is affected by the game's own Shadow Distance launcher option (or the corresponding Fallout4Prefs.ini values)? Are the game settings completely ignored? Or is the game setting used as a 'cap', or perhaps does it affect Shadow Boost in some other way? Just curious...

[Marcurios]

@bongpig, i think the CPU is only used to give instructions to the GPU, what the GPU needs to do, the CPU itself doesn't render anything, it's not built for that, so the shadows are rendered by the GPU, just like everything else in the game, the CPU is used for AI and instructions to the GPU what to draw, it handles the scripting too.

And the game doesn't Utilize more then 60% of the CPU, so using 90% usage of the CPU would do nothing.
Tha amount of drawcalls (instructions to render things) is a important thing in holding the game back, if your CPU can't give enough instructions it starts to degrade performance, while your vidcard (if you have a strong one) could probably handle more instructions to render things, then you get a bottleneck there.
So the trick to get a smooth performance for this game in particulair cause it's badly optimized is to have a very fast CPU.

However, if bethesda would optimize the game so that it truly would utilize 100% of the CPU, then the game would run a lot better for many people with higher shadow distances.

@Tapio, i think the shadowboost mod just changes the game's shadowdistance in memory when the game runs, normally the game would take the value out of the ini file, but that value can be changed dynamically in memory when the game runs. Much like what NVSE does with it's functions, it hooks into the process that is running.

[ENBSeries]

bongpig
Cpu usage is the less important thing in B*da games. And shadows are not rendered on cpu, draw calls bottleneck do not increase cpu usage linearly.

tapioks
Game shadow distance is ignored for directional light (which is sun).

[ENBSeries]

Smoothing filters failed to eliminate oscillation without entering deadzone, including 1Euro filter. The last one i'll try is wavelet transform to remove high fluctuations. Damn it.

[tapioks]

Hi Boris,

Thanks for the input. Does this mean that Shadow Boost only affects fDirShadowDistance, while fShadowDistance is still governed this value in the .ini file (i.e. by the FO4 Launcher setting)?

[ENBSeries]

tapioks
fDirShadowDistance only modified.

Well, Alexander gave up with the mod, too many stupidity in comments everywhere, players are brainless with the ai of Fallout 4 characters. They have crashes with the ShadowBoost uninstalled, crashes with it, they call it useless because can't get 60 fps all the time, russians of course trolls #1 with only posts about dick and asses. I will not waste any more time trying to fix real issues, may be Alex will make update with external speed factor for shadow distance manipulation, but i'm quit helping with this.