Sweet Fx for Age Of Conan

Doogiehowser · February 2013

I have been experimenting lately with sweet fx and results are satisfactory so far. it makes color, lighting and shadows pop out more. I also got 10 FPS increase as i am using swet fx HDR, bloom and AA. Which is less taxing than in game settings.

Some before and after screenshots..

I am still playing around with settings and would like a more sharpened image. If any of you guys use Sweet Fx share your settings with us;)

Mdpats · February 2013

Great looks greater. Good work.

Doogiehowser · February 2013

Thanks. Still tweaking the settings. I can not imagine playing AOC without it now

Doogiehowser · February 2013

Originally posted by Ppiper
that looks great. But please tell me what Sweet FX is?

It is a visual mod with a lot of graphical settings completely controled by the user. You can downlaod it here.

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=368880

You can use it with any game you like.

Ortwig · February 2013

Just tried with AoC, and it really makes a huge difference. Very nice -- thanks. Tried it with TSW, but I don't think it's quite as good -- looks a bit saturated, but then TSW with DX11 and a nice card looks pretty great as is. Gonna have to experiment with some others.

jpnole · February 2013

Rift looks better, even though it's only DX9.

sibs4455 · February 2013

yup, them pictures are spot on ... just how i remember AoC .. not a soul about

Quizzical · February 2013

I assume SweetFX is the second picture from each pair? I say that because it looks like it would be easy to generate the second picture from the first and impossible to go the other way around. Look at the washed-out colors in the second picture of each pair, where you lose a lot of detail because broad areas get clamped to solid white.

If you want to make everything brighter, then HDR as a post-processing effect is entirely the wrong way to do it, precisely because you'll lose so much detail. If you want to grab an external program to make your game look worse, that's your choice. But I don't really see the point of it.

Also, getting a 10 frames per second increase by using SweetFX as opposed to the same in-game settings without SweetFX should be impossible. Adding additional post processing effects means more work for the GPU, and that should bring your frame rates down. If you turned down some in-game settings in addition to using SweetFX, then that would explain it.

tom_gore · February 2013

I think it's great because it adds choice.

Some (like the OP) prefer high-contrast graphics with vibrant colous, although it makes the graphics look very unrealistic.

Some (like the poster above) prefer more muted down colours with realistic contrast.

Myself, I like the high-contrast graphics better.

Elsabolts · February 2013

How does the Bar Room Brawling look so far ?

tom_gore · February 2013

Oh look, someone's still butthurt that AoC was turned mid-development into yet another themepark. Let it go already, man

miguksaram · February 2013

Originally posted by Quizzical
I assume SweetFX is the second picture from each pair? I say that because it looks like it would be easy to generate the second picture from the first and impossible to go the other way around. Look at the washed-out colors in the second picture of each pair, where you lose a lot of detail because broad areas get clamped to solid white.

If you want to make everything brighter, then HDR as a post-processing effect is entirely the wrong way to do it, precisely because you'll lose so much detail. If you want to grab an external program to make your game look worse, that's your choice. But I don't really see the point of it.

Also, getting a 10 frames per second increase by using SweetFX as opposed to the same in-game settings without SweetFX should be impossible. Adding additional post processing effects means more work for the GPU, and that should bring your frame rates down. If you turned down some in-game settings in addition to using SweetFX, then that would explain it.

Normally I'd concede to your vast knowledge of the inner workings of all things software/hardware related but in this case I just feel you are ill informed or perhaps blinded knowledge. While I agree that the image quality in AoC doesn't really warrant a use for SweetFX I'd say that other games benefit greatly from what is has to offer. Please do a search of GW2 and SweetFX to see what I mean. If afterwards you are still not satisfied I'd ask you to provide an alternative that others can consider rather than simply critizing the generally known available options.

FromHell · February 2013

I dunno, I like the out of the box look with all options on, also the haze/bloom/godrays - isnt´there a contrast option in the menu anyway? I remember tweaking the contrast slider a little and it looks good to me.

I mean, foggy areas are supposed to look foggy.. eg. Conarch village/Conall valley looks cold and cloudy and low on contrast like a real world place.

btw great video here, I think it looks very realistic

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEQRwPuq8Rg

Doogiehowser · February 2013

Originally posted by Quizzical
I assume SweetFX is the second picture from each pair? I say that because it looks like it would be easy to generate the second picture from the first and impossible to go the other way around. Look at the washed-out colors in the second picture of each pair, where you lose a lot of detail because broad areas get clamped to solid white.

If you want to make everything brighter, then HDR as a post-processing effect is entirely the wrong way to do it, precisely because you'll lose so much detail. If you want to grab an external program to make your game look worse, that's your choice. But I don't really see the point of it.

Also, getting a 10 frames per second increase by using SweetFX as opposed to the same in-game settings without SweetFX should be impossible. Adding additional post processing effects means more work for the GPU, and that should bring your frame rates down. If you turned down some in-game settings in addition to using SweetFX, then that would explain it.

You can go the other way around too because that is how much you can control how your games look like. When i use in game HQ AA my fps goes down to 35 from 40+. With Sweet FX AA 0 FPS loss and it actually looks better than in game AA.

Same with Bloom and HDR. Since Sweetfx mimics the HDR it is also less taxing on your system. I like colors which pop out more and since AOC devs went for realistic graphic look, the vibrant settings fit right in with the game.

The before screenshot look washed out where as in second one colors look richer and lighting looks more realistic.

Anyways, this was something i came up wiht in a rush. I didn't spend too much time tweaking the look.

Quizzical · February 2013

Originally posted by miguksaram
Originally posted by Quizzical
I assume SweetFX is the second picture from each pair? I say that because it looks like it would be easy to generate the second picture from the first and impossible to go the other way around. Look at the washed-out colors in the second picture of each pair, where you lose a lot of detail because broad areas get clamped to solid white.

If you want to make everything brighter, then HDR as a post-processing effect is entirely the wrong way to do it, precisely because you'll lose so much detail. If you want to grab an external program to make your game look worse, that's your choice. But I don't really see the point of it.

Also, getting a 10 frames per second increase by using SweetFX as opposed to the same in-game settings without SweetFX should be impossible. Adding additional post processing effects means more work for the GPU, and that should bring your frame rates down. If you turned down some in-game settings in addition to using SweetFX, then that would explain it.

Normally I'd concede to your vast knowledge of the inner workings of all things software/hardware related but in this case I just feel you are ill informed or perhaps blinded knowledge. While I agree that the image quality in AoC doesn't really warrant a use for SweetFX I'd say that other games benefit greatly from what is has to offer. Please do a search of GW2 and SweetFX to see what I mean. If afterwards you are still not satisfied I'd ask you to provide an alternative that others can consider rather than simply critizing the generally known available options.

I don't think that the problem is so much using SweetFX in the first place as using bad settings with it. Some games will have in-game brightness or bloom options that you can use to make the game look awful. The problem isn't the setting options so much as choosing the options badly.

Elsabolts · February 2013

Originally posted by tom_gore
Oh look, someone's still butthurt that AoC was turned mid-development into yet another themepark. Let it go already, man

Hey Tom, Im just trying to help Funcoms unempolyment numbers go up. Well they seem to be a pretty good job without my help?

Quizzical · February 2013

Originally posted by Doogiehowser
Originally posted by Quizzical
I assume SweetFX is the second picture from each pair? I say that because it looks like it would be easy to generate the second picture from the first and impossible to go the other way around. Look at the washed-out colors in the second picture of each pair, where you lose a lot of detail because broad areas get clamped to solid white.

If you want to make everything brighter, then HDR as a post-processing effect is entirely the wrong way to do it, precisely because you'll lose so much detail. If you want to grab an external program to make your game look worse, that's your choice. But I don't really see the point of it.

Also, getting a 10 frames per second increase by using SweetFX as opposed to the same in-game settings without SweetFX should be impossible. Adding additional post processing effects means more work for the GPU, and that should bring your frame rates down. If you turned down some in-game settings in addition to using SweetFX, then that would explain it.

You can go the other way around too because that is how much you can control how your games look like. When i use in game HQ AA my fps goes down to 35 from 40+. With Sweet FX AA 0 FPS loss and it actually looks better than in game AA.

Same with Bloom and HDR. Since Sweetfx mimics the HDR it is also less taxing on your system. I like colors which pop out more and since AOC devs went for realistic graphic look, the vibrant settings fit right in with the game.

The before screenshot look washed out where as in second one colors look richer and lighting looks more realistic.

Anyways, this was something i came up wiht in a rush. I didn't spend too much time tweaking the look.

While FXAA does bring a lighter performance hit than more traditional MSAA, it still brings a significant performance hit unless either you were entirely processor bound (in which case, MSAA might carry no measurable performance hit either) or it's a badly coded game that was leaving the video card idle for a substantial amount of time at the end of each frame.

FXAA that isn't built into a game also carries the problem that it blurs things that shouldn't be blurred, such as any user interface components. If FXAA is built into the game directly, then you can tell it that this should be blurred and that shouldn't, so that it will leave things like text alone, but SweetFX has no way to figure that out. Don't get me wrong here; I like shader-based anti-aliasing if it's implemented properly. But you can't implement it properly through an external program, or even video drivers.

High dynamic range lighting is the real problem, though. Look at the stone slab to the left in the third pair of pictures. In the top picture, there's a bunch of detail. In the bottom picture, the portion in the light is solid white. The detail is simply gone. The reason is that that's what high dynamic range lighting does if you implement it stupidly. And without details of the game, SweetFX has no way of knowing how to implement it properly.

The way that modern graphics works is that for every pixel on the screen, you have to specify red, green, and blue values in the interval [0, 1]. You likely have various multiplications, additions, dot products, and so forth to get there, and likely also one or more texture lookup functions. High dynamic range just means we're going to change the interval for internal computations to something else, and then scale it. What SweetFX might be doing is something along the lines of taking the RGB values that the game outputs and then multiplying them by 1.5 or some such.

If you knew that for various reasons, your original RGB values were all going to be in the range [0, 0.5], then doubling them to use the whole color range makes sense. If you knew that they were going to be in the range [0, 2] and use that whole range, then multiplying them by 0.5 might make sense unless the only way to reach the numbers near the top are some glare where you're okay with it being clamped to solid white.

But making a sensible choice depends on knowing the internal details of the program, and how you arrive at the numbers you pick. You can easily have different max values in different circumstances (the "dynamic" part of high dynamic range). That's information that SweetFX doesn't have, though they likely rely on the end user picking sensible numbers. If broad areas get clamped to solid white, you're brightening it too much. That's not high contrast. That's no contrast in the white areas. I wouldn't be surprised if there are portions of the game that are completely unplayable at the settings you've chosen because colors that you need to be able to tell apart all go to solid white.

And that's why I said that you can't go backwards. If red, green, or blue values of either 0.8 and 0.9 both get mapped to 1.0, then that's not an injection, so it's not invertible. You can't take a solid white image and recover detail from it, as the detail was lost when different RGB values all got clamped to 1.0.

FromHell · February 2013

ok tried it out, looks good so far, does it mean ingame antialiasing should beturned off? Or does smartFX SMAA override ingame antialising setting?

Doogiehowser · February 2013

Originally posted by Quizzical
Originally posted by Doogiehowser
Originally posted by Quizzical
I assume SweetFX is the second picture from each pair? I say that because it looks like it would be easy to generate the second picture from the first and impossible to go the other way around. Look at the washed-out colors in the second picture of each pair, where you lose a lot of detail because broad areas get clamped to solid white.

If you want to make everything brighter, then HDR as a post-processing effect is entirely the wrong way to do it, precisely because you'll lose so much detail. If you want to grab an external program to make your game look worse, that's your choice. But I don't really see the point of it.

Also, getting a 10 frames per second increase by using SweetFX as opposed to the same in-game settings without SweetFX should be impossible. Adding additional post processing effects means more work for the GPU, and that should bring your frame rates down. If you turned down some in-game settings in addition to using SweetFX, then that would explain it.

You can go the other way around too because that is how much you can control how your games look like. When i use in game HQ AA my fps goes down to 35 from 40+. With Sweet FX AA 0 FPS loss and it actually looks better than in game AA.

Same with Bloom and HDR. Since Sweetfx mimics the HDR it is also less taxing on your system. I like colors which pop out more and since AOC devs went for realistic graphic look, the vibrant settings fit right in with the game.

The before screenshot look washed out where as in second one colors look richer and lighting looks more realistic.

Anyways, this was something i came up wiht in a rush. I didn't spend too much time tweaking the look.

While FXAA does bring a lighter performance hit than more traditional MSAA, it still brings a significant performance hit unless either you were entirely processor bound (in which case, MSAA might carry no measurable performance hit either) or it's a badly coded game that was leaving the video card idle for a substantial amount of time at the end of each frame.

FXAA that isn't built into a game also carries the problem that it blurs things that shouldn't be blurred, such as any user interface components. If FXAA is built into the game directly, then you can tell it that this should be blurred and that shouldn't, so that it will leave things like text alone, but SweetFX has no way to figure that out. Don't get me wrong here; I like shader-based anti-aliasing if it's implemented properly. But you can't implement it properly through an external program, or even video drivers.

High dynamic range lighting is the real problem, though. Look at the stone slab to the left in the third pair of pictures. In the top picture, there's a bunch of detail. In the bottom picture, the portion in the light is solid white. The detail is simply gone. The reason is that that's what high dynamic range lighting does if you implement it stupidly. And without details of the game, SweetFX has no way of knowing how to implement it properly.

The way that modern graphics works is that for every pixel on the screen, you have to specify red, green, and blue values in the interval [0, 1]. You likely have various multiplications, additions, dot products, and so forth to get there, and likely also one or more texture lookup functions. High dynamic range just means we're going to change the interval for internal computations to something else, and then scale it. What SweetFX might be doing is something along the lines of taking the RGB values that the game outputs and then multiplying them by 1.5 or some such.

If you knew that for various reasons, your original RGB values were all going to be in the range [0, 0.5], then doubling them to use the whole color range makes sense. If you knew that they were going to be in the range [0, 2] and use that whole range, then multiplying them by 0.5 might make sense unless the only way to reach the numbers near the top are some glare where you're okay with it being clamped to solid white.

But making a sensible choice depends on knowing the internal details of the program, and how you arrive at the numbers you pick. You can easily have different max values in different circumstances (the "dynamic" part of high dynamic range). That's information that SweetFX doesn't have, though they likely rely on the end user picking sensible numbers. If broad areas get clamped to solid white, you're brightening it too much. That's not high contrast. That's no contrast in the white areas. I wouldn't be surprised if there are portions of the game that are completely unplayable at the settings you've chosen because colors that you need to be able to tell apart all go to solid white.

And that's why I said that you can't go backwards. If red, green, or blue values of either 0.8 and 0.9 both get mapped to 1.0, then that's not an injection, so it's not invertible. You can't take a solid white image and recover detail from it, as the detail was lost when different RGB values all got clamped to 1.0.

Oh boy you really know how to suck fun out of things don't you? thanks for the detailed information though.

You can always download sweetfx and mess around with it and see what picture quality you can come up with in other words i would like to see your sensible choices. That is the only reason why i amde this topic so for those who are using sweetfx can share their settings with others.

Originally posted by FromHell
ok tried it out, looks good so far, does it mean ingame antialiasing should beturned off? Or does smartFX SMAA override ingame antialising setting?

Yes. SweetFX works a lot betetr when you disable ingame AA.

FromHell · February 2013

Originally posted by Doogiehowser

Yes. SweetFX works a lot betetr when you disable ingame AA.

Yep, that looks much better, thnx. Really crispy ) They should put it right into the engine as an option

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Sweet Fx for Age Of Conan

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