Raw danger (graphic problem)

[faekplastik3s]

There's a part during the intro cutscene where the camera moves towards the skylight of the underground Geo Tower where the Geo Opening Celebration is being held. When the camera enters the skylight, GPU usage drops sharply for me when using both HW/SW rendering. Do you experience a framerate boost during that part of the intro cutscene?

It's been something that has been tickling my curiosity for a while.

I get 60 solid once that happens, yes.

[MyDreamName]

Well, I mean, on HW rendering I jump from 120 to 400-500 FPS on that part of the cutscene, it's insane. I don't know if it's just because they made that atrium for the cutscene all one model or something and everything is unloaded, if it's some effect or filter isn't being used that is causing a lot of stress on the GPU or something. An insane difference nonetheless. It would be really nice if I could somehow unlock the game's framerate on my console and just see if it speeds up there.

Anyway, I was looking for 4-byte values that were 0 inside the atrium and 1 outside, and I found a handful of values. Nothing that seemed to provide a massive performance boost or anything though. I'll see if I can take a more indepth look later.

[faekplastik3s]

Well, I mean, on HW rendering I jump from 120 to 400-500 FPS on that part of the cutscene, it's insane. I don't know if it's just because they made that atrium for the cutscene all one model or something and everything is unloaded, if it's some effect or filter isn't being used that is causing a lot of stress on the GPU or something. An insane difference nonetheless. It would be really nice if I could somehow unlock the game's framerate on my console and just see if it speeds up there.

Anyway, I was looking for 4-byte values that were 0 inside the atrium and 1 outside, and I found a handful of values. Nothing that seemed to provide a massive performance boost or anything though. I'll see if I can take a more indepth look later.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking as well, either it unloads the previous open world scene and performs better in the simplified indoors scene, or an effect is rendered outside and not inside, even if it doesn't really look dramatically different (well, apart from the rain effects and such). However, once the next scene loads (with the speech) it slows down yet again, sub 30FPS, GPU usage maxed and there are blurring artifacts during the speech and following cutscene and gameplay. The percentage indicators on the top of the window also don't make any sense, barely keeping 30FPS and yet both EE and GS in the 10's or 20's with no outliers. If only there was a way to profile which operation is causing this... And of course, switching to software bumps it up to high 40's-50's, but it's easy to see it looks different and some filters seem to be absent entirely.

Thanks for looking into this, though!

[MyDreamName]

Okay, try this out. Hook Cheat Engine to PCSX2, manually add address 2048D824 as a 4-byte value, and set it to 0 while playing the game. Tell me if you get a speedup. For me, personally, it gets me to around 300FPS with 30-50% GS usage (CPU caps out) in the starting area (dining hall).

And to think it suffered such slowdowns on consoles.

The best part is that I was convinced there was no "magic bullet" and I found that completely by accident while trying to fix an artifact bug with removing a certain filter. This also significantly speeds up software emulation. Seems to break the color filter altogether, though, which is unfortunate. Wonder if it breaks anything else. If this does solve your problem, also keep in mind that you need the five addresses I listed on the previous page set to 0 (otherwise your screen is just going to start to be a mess when you spawn on the "wrecked dining hall" map, which is when you enter the women's locker room for Stephanie), although it causes some visual artifacts (like some geometry casting green shadows for some reason, which I was trying to fix), although it is much better than having the broken effects enabled. With the speedup, you may as well just play it in software rendering, though, if you can.

Another thing to note is that the game likes to manually change address 2048FBBD whenever a light model is spawned on the world, causing the purple and green lines to pop up, even if you have the value frozen. If you see that happen, just change the value back to 0. I'm not referring to the green/purple shadows (which you see more often on the secondary campaigns, rather than Joshua's), though, that's a bug caused by changing 2043EE3B to 0 (although it can also be caused by having 2048F5BC set to "1," which the game might do, regardless of whether or not you have the values freezed, so make sure to check that if you get the bug) You're also going to have rain/snow/etc. effects appearing indoors (although that's display only), but again it is better than the alternative.

In short - check these values after each loading zone, because the game will change them anyway. What I would recommend it a hotkey to change all five of those values that remove filters/effects to 0.

[faekplastik3s]

Oh man, never thought I'd see the day where this one would get fixed

It absolutely works, steady 60FPS in both Software and Hardware, GPU usage drops to low 20's during the intro, low 40's during gameplay, absolutely spotless! Thank you so, so much for this!

[MyDreamName]

No prob, I'm glad to see such a speedup myself, would be nice if it ran that fast with the color filter though. I'm gonna see if I can fix some of the green/purple areas that come up. Like I said before, some of the green/purple areas happen when a filter/effect is enabled (but others aren't), so what I think is that some of the filters/effects rely on other filters/effects, so those green/purple areas might be removable if another certain effect is removed. If that's the case, I should be able to find it fairly easily, like I did the other values for broken filters and the like.

[MyDreamName]

Hm, those green/purple shadows might just be purely the result of the game turning some effects back on at certain triggers, have to go back and manually check those areas now...

So basically, just whenever you see any sort of visual bug as a result of editing those addresses, just give a hotkey that you have set up to change them back to 0 and see if that fixes it. Also, all of those values need to be set to 0 for snow/rain effects to work, so if you see those disappear, that's why.

Edit: One of the best parts about scanning for these filters is that you find a value that, when changed to 0, brings you to a debug load menu that crashes the game when you try to load data, and you always hit it. (there's also one for a save)

[faekplastik3s]

Do you think some of these issues may also be present in Disaster Report? I remember playing it alongside my PS2 and there were also some glitches related to effects, and trying to use skipdraw to override them would make them disappear on the current scene and then either trigger them back on or be replaced by other ones when the scenes changed.

I'm going to macro these changes and play along like this: so far it seems like a good compromise and honestly, considering that before it was literally unplayable, I'm very happy with this. I hope a CRC fix or a more concrete solution can be developed in the future given your findings. Thanks again!

[MyDreamName]

Nah, the only issue I recall with Disaster Report (which is still present) is that the arrow in selection dialogs wouldn't show up. But since the top option was always selected from default, you could work it out from there.

[Blyss Sarania]

You should be able to convert your Cheat Engine values to pnach file codes right? That would be super useful for those not familiar with CE.