phryxolydian Posted June 11, 2014 Posted June 11, 2014 Ah, the dynamically created plugin stuff. Don't worry about it, you can deactivate it when rebuilding your Bashed Patch or simply load the combined esp after it, it only has one Leveled list record anyway.
EssArrBee Posted June 11, 2014 Posted June 11, 2014 https://github.com/EssArrBee/STEP-Patches Just get the Combined plugin from the 2.2.9 folder. It has HF and no HF versions and I am 90% sure that I corrected the version error in those.
Spock Posted June 12, 2014 Posted June 12, 2014 (edited) I just wanted to input some findings for the ENB for parallax and shadows question: Today, a friend of mine and me tried to lift up some of the performance cost of ENB when enabling effects with all individual effects disabled hoping some of it comes from shaders running. We found the performance cost most likely comes from the d3d9.dll and is caused by intercepting API calls requiring additional render time (necessary for any injector).You should be able to replicate this by only installing the d3d9.dll+enb.ini+enblocal.ini, disabling all features and then test the difference between UseEffect=true and false. Just intercepting the API calls costs as much as 6-7 FPS on my machine (faulty r9 290, i7 920@3,8 gHZ) but this probably shouldn't differ too much from machine to machine. There is pretty much no way around it except for asking Boris (unlikely) or reverse engineering the binaries (very time consuming and probably against Boris' wishes).Reverting to older binaries (afaik 0.221) might help a little as it may make less intercepts but you would miss out on some ENBoost updates (from my understanding some of those updates are in the .dll file, please correct me if I'm wrong). I didn't test this because of the later. I still think the ENB shadows and Parallax are worth it, but there pretty much isn't anything that can be done about the performance loss if you wish to use the latest ENBoost. The vast majority of STEP:Extended users will probably want to run an ENB anyway and their systems should be able to handle the performance hit. Imho Project Parallax Remastered and Vivid Landscapes would make great STEP:Extended candidates with a Parallax/Shadow/SSS ENB provided (I could do that if you want). Edited June 12, 2014 by Spock 1
EssArrBee Posted June 12, 2014 Posted June 12, 2014 What approach are you taking to the .fx files? Are you just commenting out the stuff that isn't needed or are you just turning them off in the enbseries.ini? I think it would be good to do something that people could use and have <10 FPS hit on a mid-range gaming PC. The way packs set up it could be a modular edition to the Extended pack, one my favorite parts of the pack template.
Octopuss Posted June 12, 2014 Posted June 12, 2014 SMIM was just updated with merged esp this time... hah. And changes to the plugins as well.
Spock Posted June 12, 2014 Posted June 12, 2014 What approach are you taking to the .fx files? Are you just commenting out the stuff that isn't needed or are you just turning them off in the enbseries.ini?Before we started looking at the code we started deleting stuff. You can run the d3d9.dll with ini files only (we deleted the palette and fx files). I don't know much about engines, injectors and shaders but the friend I did this with does. He told me this is most likely caused by the dll itself. The FPS loss might not be very system dependent but only testing can tell.
oqhansoloqo Posted June 12, 2014 Posted June 12, 2014 So you are saying that even just using the d3d9.dll for ENBoost alone is causing a performance loss to a degree? But isn't the performance loss from using the d3d9.dll made up for by the performance enhancing function of ENBoost, when using that feature without the rest of the ENB functions? I guess you are suggesting that there may be a way to eliminate the performance loss suffered simply from using the d3d9.dll while also gaining the benefits? That would be sweet if someone can figure out how to do that.
Aiyen Posted June 12, 2014 Posted June 12, 2014 There will always be a drop of about 5-6 FPS even if you only use parallax. The .dll has to load up all dependencies and all the other good stuff inside of it and all of that cost something as well. You can get a bit more performance if you use the forceLodBias to reduce the overall texture quality.
EssArrBee Posted June 13, 2014 Posted June 13, 2014 With the addition of the SMIM merged plugin, I'm not sure that I should add his work to the STEP Patches. It seems that it is quite a lot of work for one plugin, where as it used to be six. This also completely removes the need for the Combined plugin I was offering since that was probably 95% of the contents that plugin included. The difference anyone that would use that plugin would be 2 slots, since NPC Greeting distance and No Spinning Death Animation would added back in. I don't see that as being such a bad thing, but I would like some input from users about this. Much of it depends on the direction of SMIM and how much upkeep would be required for me/us going forward. Do people care that much or is everyone happy that the STEP Patches just cover all the other patches so they don't have to install them?
TechAngel85 Posted June 13, 2014 Posted June 13, 2014 With the addition of the SMIM merged plugin, I'm not sure that I should add his work to the STEP Patches. It seems that it is quite a lot of work for one plugin, where as it used to be six. This also completely removes the need for the Combined plugin I was offering since that was probably 95% of the contents that plugin included. The difference anyone that would use that plugin would be 2 slots, since NPC Greeting distance and No Spinning Death Animation would added back in. I don't see that as being such a bad thing, but I would like some input from users about this. Much of it depends on the direction of SMIM and how much upkeep would be required for me/us going forward. Do people care that much or is everyone happy that the STEP Patches just cover all the other patches so they don't have to install them?With the merged plugin, I don't see the need for us (you) to constantly be updating the Patches due to SMIM updating once a week. This will take some overhead off of the patch work. As long as the SMIM merged patch is maintained upon every update of SMIM, then leaving it out of the STEP patches seems reasonable.
Spock Posted June 13, 2014 Posted June 13, 2014 So you are saying that even just using the d3d9.dll for ENBoost alone is causing a performance loss to a degree?No, this is about using the dll for parallax and shadows as well. The performance loss occurs as soon as you enable effects in the ENB.ini. I do not know if ENBoost costs performance, I would assume it's neglectible. The .dll has to load up all dependencies and all the other good stuff inside of it and all of that cost something as well.The way I understood it, the dll does even more, it has to "talk" to the renderer. This takes render time every frame.
TechAngel85 Posted June 13, 2014 Posted June 13, 2014 No, this is about using the dll for parallax and shadows as well. The performance loss occurs as soon as you enable effects in the ENB.ini. I do not know if ENBoost costs performance, I would assume it's neglectible.As far as I can tell, enabling graphics and making sure parallax is enables work with ENBoost. The result using parallax textures with it enabled/disabled looks different at the very least. Would need someone to test this specifically with ENBoost. I also experienced no additional FPS loss by doing this in ENBoost. Disclaimer: this was a very short and quick test to screenshot some parallax textures so don't hold my statement with any weight here.
EssArrBee Posted June 13, 2014 Posted June 13, 2014 With the merged plugin, I don't see the need for us (you) to constantly be updating the Patches due to SMIM updating once a week. This will take some overhead off of the patch work. As long as the SMIM merged patch is maintained upon every update of SMIM, then leaving it out of the STEP patches seems reasonable.I think I'll do one more update and see where SMIM goes. The patches are in beta and I can delete records much easier than I can add them and document them now that I do that. It almost seems that Brumbek got someone to do the merged versions for him so he might end up adding more plugins in the future. He's been actually playing through Skyrim, so now he sees all kinds of things that he never saw before, things no one even knew was broken until he shows us. I imagine this playthrough of his will lead to all kinds of things.
Octopuss Posted June 13, 2014 Posted June 13, 2014 I still like the combined plugin for the rest of the stuff. Just remove the SMIM stuff from it...
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