The shipping default had NO anti-aliasing at all: the temporal resolve was removed, the
setting's first option went on saying "Temporal", and MSAA defaults to one sample, so
every machine without DLSS drew grass and needle cards with nothing smoothing an edge.
FXAA in the sharpen pass, which already reads the neighbourhood and runs last on the LDR
image. No history, so it cannot drag or smear a reflection. 25.5% less single-pixel
staircase on edge pixels.
The trap, recorded because it inverted the result: the unsharp delta must be computed
from the RAW image and only then applied to the anti-aliased colour. Centre from FXAA and
neighbours from the raw texture measures half smoothing and half signal, so the mask
sharpens precisely what FXAA softened - 29% WORSE than no anti-aliasing at all.
Depth of field for the photo mode: a disc whose radius is the circle of confusion,
normalised by focus distance so a landscape shot is not a macro, with taps rejected
unless they are at least as out of focus as the pixel they blur into - which is what
stops a sharp foreground haloing into a blurred background. Between the scene and the
bloom, so a blurred highlight still blooms. Skipped whole when the aperture is shut.
400 frames in ordinary play: GL 7.1 s, VK 7.2 s - the lens does not draw there.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Everything before this made the air a COLOUR APPLIED TO A SURFACE. Nothing put light
in the space between surfaces, so the basin had no shafts, no pooled mist and no rays
off a ridge at any hour, whatever was done to the fog.
A half-resolution march from the camera to the depth buffer, asking the same shadow
the rest of the frame asks - the cascades, the baked height-field shadow and the cloud
mask - so a shaft is cast by the actual trees and the actual ridge and a passing cloud
dims its own rays. Henyey-Greenstein scattering, because real air throws light forward.
Density and a separate ground-hugging mist layer ride the sun's elevation, so mist
forms in the cold at either end of the day and burns off by mid-morning.
Composited with the bloom pyramid's own tent upsample under ONE/ONE - what was wanted
and already there - and before bloom, so a shaft blooms. Into post_hdr, not post_scene:
post_scene is what the water refracts and shafts added there would sit under the lake.
The tuning that mattered was the sky term, which is added at every step: at 0.06 it
accumulated into a flat grey wash lifting lit and shadowed air equally, which is the
contrast a shaft is made of, and the valley came out one pale sheet. At 0.012 the sun
dominates and there is light rather than fog. I cut the density and mist three times
before the frame looked like air instead of paint.
R3D_NOVOL=1 for an A/B; Off in Settings skips the pass whole.
400 frames at 07:00: GL 7.1 -> 7.3 s, VK 7.2 -> 7.4 s. Backends agree to 0.08/255.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The chunked grass path draws each chunk as one mesh-shader dispatch when the
setting asks and the card has VK_EXT_mesh_shader: work group y is a tile, x a
batch of 16 of its blades, and a blade the placement, density, frustum, water
or slope tests reject emits nothing - the instanced path still runs its eight
vertices to a degenerate position. grass.mesh generates the same blades as
grass.vert (grass_blade_mesh(4)'s rows, the same hashes, sway and lighting
normal), capped at the instanced path's 65535 a tile.
Vulkan: VK_EXT_mesh_shader with meshShader, and maintenance4 (glslang's mesh
stages declare LocalSizeId); vkCmdDrawMeshTasksEXT looked up per device, as the
Streamline interposer exports none; a *.mesh program's pipeline takes the mesh
stage and no vertex input, its bindings the mesh stage bit. gpu_has_mesh,
gpu_draw_mesh_tasks; r3d_mesh_grass and R3D_MESH_GRASS / R3D_NO_MESH.
bin/ludic-dev rebuilt: the committed binary predated the shader tool's mesh
support and compiled grass.mesh as a vertex stage.
PC (RTX 3070 Ti): the camp matches the chunked path; validation only the
no-window present-id message.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
HDR output: an HDR10 swapchain (A2B10G10R10, ST 2084 over BT.2020) when the
setting asks and the display offers it, with HDR metadata. The tonemap's HDR10
variant keeps the SDR picture up to a 200-nit paper white and rolls highlights
on to 1000 nits; the overlay's converts the interface to the same white. The
screen and LDR images go 10-bit with it; screenshots refuse while it is on.
OpenGL and the Vulkan SDR frame are unchanged. The instance asks for
VK_EXT_swapchain_colorspace. HDR metadata only where the loader has
vkSetHdrMetadataEXT: Streamline's interposer does not, and calling the thunk
crashed the game the moment the swapchain came up HDR10. PC 4K monitor: HDR10,
validation 0. R3D_HDR overrides the setting.
DLSS:
- the vertical jitter offset flips with Streamline's image (rows from the top):
unflipped, Quality resolved the ground into concentric rings;
- preset K in every mode: the default M put Performance at 18 ms a frame at 4K
on an RTX 3070 Ti (33 fps against 41 with DLSS off; with K, 60);
- the camera is jittered only while this frame holds a token and the last
evaluate worked.
R3D_DLSS_PRESET, R3D_CAM_LOG (the camera and DLSS state a frame) and
R3D_NOGRAIN for measuring.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
tersun.frag rasterised every terrain patch a second time into a screen buffer, because on OpenGL the
cascade read inside terrain.frag fell off a driver cliff (about 6 ms a frame). Vulkan has no such
cliff: its terrain programs are the SUN_INLINE variant, which evaluates the same two tiers with the
same normal and cross-fade in the ground's own shader, and terrain_draw skips the pass - in the frame
and in the water reflection. OpenGL keeps the pass. R3D_SUN_PASS=1 keeps it on Vulkan, for comparing.
Mac Vulkan town 1759 -> 1692 draws; frames within 2/255 of the pass (15331 px, float rounding). PC camp
1984 -> 1882 draws, 3.9 s for 400 frames either way, self-tests 59/59, validation 0. OpenGL frames
byte-identical.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Grass (Vulkan with multi-draw indirect): every visible tile is a record in one buffer, uploaded once a
frame, and each band draws its records 256 at a time. A record's firstInstance is its place in the
chunk times 65536; grass.vert's TILES variant reads that place's corner and indices per cell from
u_tiles. R3D_GRASS_TILES=1 keeps a draw per tile. OpenGL is unchanged.
Casters: a LOD level with no impostor is drawn into a shadow cascade only when its distance band,
widened by six times its height, the camera's height over the ground and the frustum's corner reach,
can touch that cascade's receivers. The flowers' mesh levels (6 - 30 m) leave the three outer
cascades. R3D_CAST_ALL=1 draws every level everywhere. OpenGL frames byte-identical at all five
viewpoints; alpha-tested shadow draws at a 460 -> 244.
gpu_has_mdi() guards both this and the GPU-culled trees' multi-record draws.
Camp: Mac Vulkan 2645 -> 2191 (grass) -> 2034 draws; PC 2657 -> 2046, self-tests 59/59, validation 0.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Vulkan cannot compile GLSL when the game starts, so the programs render3d builds are listed
(shaders/variants.list, 45 of them, collected with R3D_PROGRAMS_LOG across the self-tests, the
screens, the viewpoints and the debug switches) and `ludic-dev shaders` compiles each into
shaders/spv/<id>.vert.spv and .frag.spv with a manifest of what the backend needs: each
stage's uniform block and member offsets, the samplers' bindings, the vertex inputs.
The GLSL is the renderer's own, assembled as programs.ludic assembles it, through glslang's
relaxed Vulkan mode, so gpu_uniform / u_* can write the same uniforms into a block on Vulkan.
Bindings are assigned by the tool (glslang's own numbering put several samplers of one stage
on binding 0): the vertex block is 0, the fragment block 1, samplers from 2 in name order,
shared across both stages. Every stage passes spirv-val; `ludic-dev test` rebuilds and compares
wherever the Vulkan SDK is installed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
