SweetFX and ReShade

[scottb613]

Hi...

Sorry to hear that - I just ran Derek's poly monster 4-8-4 Hudson plus 16 BLWZT coaches out of downtown Chicago on Rick's Monon - an area typically pretty hard on the frames - and I couldn't do anything to make the frames fluctuate off of 60 FPS... I'm running an older Sandy i2700K@4.7Ghz and a Nvidia GTX970 - around six years old - not state of the art by any means... Performance is astounding on my rig...

Regards,
Scott

[qballbandit]

Thanks Advut and Scott, very much. I am very excited to play with this over the upcoming week.
This is all great stuff!

[Erick_Cantu]

I tried it, it wasn't to my tastes. The effects are too pronounced and the performance hit is huge.

OR doesn't really need any help in the lighting department. Advanced materials aside, its capabilities are roughly equal to TS2018. In fact, I was just playing around in TS2018 just a few moments ago, and the major difference (aside from framerates in the 60s versus the 20s I get in OR) is the higher overall texture quality. There's nothing preventing OR developers from drawing better textures. The complexity of the default scenery objects isn't really any different from the objects on the average MSTS/OR route. The textures are what makes the difference. Even the track shapes are basically the same, aside from the corrected rail width.

[=FI=Ghost]

I tried it, it wasn't to my tastes. The effects are too pronounced and the performance hit is huge.

OR doesn't really need any help in the lighting department. Advanced materials aside, its capabilities are roughly equal to TS2018. In fact, I was just playing around in TS2018 just a few moments ago, and the major difference (aside from framerates in the 60s versus the 20s I get in OR) is the higher overall texture quality. There's nothing preventing OR developers from drawing better textures. The complexity of the default scenery objects isn't really any different from the objects on the average MSTS/OR route. The textures are what makes the difference. Even the track shapes are basically the same, aside from the corrected rail width.

Eric, just yesterday I published a text on my blog about computer simulators. When I described MSTS/ORTS my conclusion was the same - it is shadowed by new train sims only graphicswise.

[Erick_Cantu]

Well, you end up with the problem of how much mileage do people really think they can get with colour-shifted Danny Beck textures?

[longiron]

I was hoping that ReShade or SweetFX would give model builders the ability to use more shaders, Right now!!! Things like Ambient Occulusion, Bump maps, etc.

[advut]

ORTS is way behind when just compared with Railworks, let alone TS2018. Where is distant blue haze, depth of field, dark tunnels, appealing smoke, automatic swaying grass, reflective water, proper shadows under each loco and coach among other things? I love sweetfx/reshade effects with ORTS but it blows my mind to see the statement ORTS doesn't need help to it's lighting effects.

I also think, Euro Truck Simulator 2 is a very good example of what can be done with ancient technology. It looks like a DirectX 11 game while only using DirectX 9.0c.

[qballbandit]

I have the ReShade properly installed, and can see the potential when adjusting settings. May really help improve night running too, if adjusted properly.

My issue - am I the only soul who can not get any anti-aliasing to work in monogame? This is driving me nuts! I have an ATI 5770 card, and use Radeon Pro to adjust settings and create profiles. Have tried adjusting the AA settings six ways from Sunday with no luck. On, off, on with variable settings, multisampling, supersampling, etc. No matter what I do, AA is not working when monogame/OR runs.

I use SweetFX and ReShade in MS Flightsim with excellent results, so know my system is quite capable of producing. There's just something not happening with AA and monogame.

[scottb613]

ORTS is way behind when just compared with Railworks, let alone TS2018. Where is distant blue haze, depth of field, dark tunnels, appealing smoke, automatic swaying grass, reflective water, proper shadows under each loco and coach among other things? I love sweetfx/reshade effects with ORTS but it blows my mind to see the statement ORTS doesn't need help to it's lighting effects.

I also think, Euro Truck Simulator 2 is a very good example of what can be done with ancient technology. It looks like a DirectX 11 game while only using DirectX 9.0c.

Hi Folks,

Graphically - not physics and operation - at least from what I gathered... Part of the issue is - as group in general - we seem far more reluctant to change than any other groups I participate with - what - you mean in order to use OpenRails I need to upgrade to a currently in production and supported operating system - NEVER... Insuring outdated legacy compatibility effectively handcuffs what the developers can do... In Flight Simulator we're constantly pushing the envelop - trying to get just a little bit more - from everything... I have one of the oldest machines I know of in that group...



Regards,
Scott

[scottb613]

Hi Neil,

I didn't specifically look for but I also didn't notice any "jaggies" during my test - using ORTS AA setting only...

I'm using Nvidia - can anyone confirm positively that AA works on Nvidia ? Possibly an ATI issue ?

Regards,
Scott

[advut]

Yes, I can say that. I have NVIDIA GTX 660 and I can get a pretty nice anti-aliased image in ORTS monogame. Of course, you can't get complete AA on some things like fences but overall it works.

To Neil, you said you use radeonpro 3rd party drivers instead of the official drivers, why?

[scottb613]

Hi Folks,

I tried to make a quick and dirty video demonstrating the effects - but the quality is substantially reduced by YouTube - so much is lost anyway...

https://youtu.be/-CoUWdsfPuw

Regards,
Scott

[tbundy1982]

Outstanding. Ossie gave me the heads up on Monogame, and it works very well for what I needed. I had a route mod that was causing ORTS to drop to unplayable fps. For example, the middle of the big yard was bringing ORTS to ZERO fps! Yes, just like if I had pushed the pause button, though I still had perfect control of the viewing angle and could restart the game moving again by shifting the view to the side. That was at a 2000m draw distance. With ORTS Monogame 40xx installed, the fps at a 5000m draw distance was 18 fps at that location, and ran completely smooth at 3500m. While I was originally concerned that the route may be too detailed, Monogame saved the day for my aging computer.

Tyler

[qballbandit]

Hi advut,
I believe I have the latest (remember, this card type is close to 10 years old) drivers available. Radeon Pro is the tool I use for "tweaking" the cards settings.

[Erick_Cantu]

ORTS is way behind when just compared with Railworks, let alone TS2018. Where is distant blue haze, depth of field, dark tunnels, appealing smoke, automatic swaying grass, reflective water, proper shadows under each loco and coach among other things? I love sweetfx/reshade effects with ORTS but it blows my mind to see the statement ORTS doesn't need help to it's lighting effects.

I also think, Euro Truck Simulator 2 is a very good example of what can be done with ancient technology. It looks like a DirectX 11 game while only using DirectX 9.0c.

Let me clarify. When I say "lighting," I mean the ambient light, amount of contrast, and so on. OR does all that just fine. It's relevant because 90% of the "differences" that people are hyping up when using reshade amount to adding a touch of brightness and way too much contrast. That hasn't made anything look better.

Does TS2018 have much more advanced shaders and materials? Absolutely! But that's only about 10% of a good image (you've seen some of the mediocre texture work from developers who think an AO render and some colour layers makes perfect, I'm sure). The first 90% of a good result is all in the basics - smart model building and good textures. The extra shaders just push the result over the edge and out of the uncanny valley.

I was exploring the nooks and crannies of one of the default routes last night, and it struck me that most of the scenery models are very simple, but textured well, and smartly built. The swaying grass is very simple, just animated cruciform polygons with gradient alpha textures that smooth out the edges and make it all look seamless. The trees are magnificent in their efficient simplicity, and look orders of magnitude better than the cruciform ones that end up in OR, without actually being terribly complex (the key is that certain faces always face the camera). The amount of stuff actually rendered is quite minimal despite the visual complexity. That's what building a good game is all about.

If we could somehow port all of the legacy MSTS/OR content over to TS2018, even with the water and all of that other stuff, it wouldn't magically look any better. Some of it would look great. I've yet to purchase 3DTrains' Feather River Canyon, but I've seen shots and it would no doubt look spectacular. So would the latest Blackfoot (if I could figure out how to get USTracks working with it, it'd probably look better in OR than it already does). But, on average, most MSTS/OR content would look like inefficient models plastered with crude textures made from overexposed or washed out photographs, but rendered by a better graphics engine.