Well, it looks like HBAO+ is behind all that corruption in Gears of War.

[DocSwag]

Source: http://wccftech.com/nvidia-gameworks-visual-corruption-gears-war-ultimate-edition/

You guys have probably all heard about the visual corruption with Gears of War and how it is such a big failure blah blah (if you haven't either your computer is a potato or that rock you live under must be quite comfy).

Well, it looks like the culprit has finally been discovered!

Quote

As it turns Nvidia’s HBAO+ ambient occlusion feature was the culprit behind the horrible artifacting / visual corruption issue that plagued some of AMD’s Radeon graphics cards. What’s more eyebrow-raising is the fact that there isn’t even any mention of HBAO+ inside Gears of War Ultimate Edition’s graphics settings menu. There’s only an option to turn “Ambient Occlusion” on or off, with no mention of what type of ambient occlusion it is.

 

Typically when a vendor specific visual effect is implemented in any game it ends up listed under its vendor specific designation . For example HairWorks would be listed as HairWorks and HBAO+ under HBAO+ rather than given generic “hair physics” or “ambient occlusion” designations. When no such specificity is present it’s assumed that the visual effect in question is a developer specific, hardware agnostic implementation.

 

In the case of Gears of War Ultimate Edition it was Nvidia’s proprietary HBAO+ GameWorks feature listed under a generic name. In fact we only learned that the ambient occlusion implementation in Gears of War : Ultimate Edition was in fact HBAO+ when Nvidia’s Andrew Burnes announced the availability of Game Ready drivers on the GeForce.com blog and named it as one of the game’s features.

 Well, it looks like HBAO+, Nvidia's lighting mechanism, that is causing it. Futhermore, in the settings for Gears of War it isn't even called HBAO+, but instead some weird "Ambient Occlusion."

Quote

Simply turning off ambient occlusion in the settings will completely resolve the artifacting that we witnessed while testing the AMD Radeon R9 Nano and R9 380 graphics cards.

As it turns out HBAO+ wasn’t the only thing hidden behind a veil. Whilst digging into the game’s files a friend of WCCF – youtuber Blindrun – spotted a very interesting hidden game file. The file is BaseEngine.ini and it can be found in the following folder path on Windows 10 : C:\ProgramFiles\WindowsApps\Microsoft.DeltaPC_1.6.0.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe\Engine\Config

Just by turning off the setting, you can fix all of the game corruption. 

But wait, there's more!

Quote

In BaseEngine.ini we spotted a very peculiar entry. “bDisablePhysXHardwareSupport=False”. More peculiar is the fact that this file cannot be edited in anyway. If it is, the game will simply overwrite any changes once it’s booted up and connected to Microsoft’s servers.

The entry means that hardware accelerated PhysX is enabled by default in the game and because any changes to the file are overwritten automatically upon game start-up means it can’t be disabled. For those of you unaware PhysX is Nvidia’s proprietary game physics engine and can only be accelerated by Nvidia’s own graphics cards. If a competing GPU is detected by the PhysX driver, the work will instead be automatically offloaded onto the CPU. This in turn means that the feature will run disproportionately slower on non Nvidia equipped systems.

In the past, all games that included hardware accelerated PhysX features such as debris, water physics and so on included the option to turn it off.  This was critical because these features directly influenced how the game performed. The option was also necessary when evaluating AMD and Nvidia graphics cards to ensure that the testing  was done on an even playing field.

Additionally, because hardware accelerated PhysX features are only visual and aren’t part of the game’s core mechanics ;disabling them would not affect the game’s behavior in any way. Sadly because we are unable to turn off hardware acceleration in Gears of War Ultimate Edition we don’t know what it’s actually doing. And whether it could account for some of the performance disparity we’re seeing between Nvidia and AMD graphics cards. Right now we simply don’t know what affect it has because we can’t test it.

As well, it seems Gears of War implements PhysX in it. As most of us know, PhysX can make your game look a lot better. However, this comes at a performance penalty, especially for AMD graphics cards, since whenever an AMD graphics card is found to be in the system all the PhysX work will be offloaded to the CPU which can cause severe bottle necking for the GPU and so drastically reduce performance.

In past games, PhysX could always have been disabled. However, it seems with Gears of War, it is currently impossible to disable PhysX. There is no setting in the game, and when you try to edit the file that dictates whether or not PhysX is enabled, it changes the setting once your PC connects to the Microsoft servers.

 

Gears of War is, to be honest, quite a failure as of now. What with all the HBAO+ issues as well as this other PhysX issue, it is sure to drive away customers. We can only hope that Microsoft will resolve these issues, and possibly let the user dictate whether PhysX is enabled or not.

[Citadelen]

Nvidia has lost what little respect as a company it had left to me, that they haven't got Asynchronous compute in their drivers six months after AotS but they've DX12 Gameworks up and running say's a lot about what their priorities are.

[TechGod]

Screw Nvidia. 

[Starelementpoke]

8 minutes ago, DocSwag said:

Source: http://wccftech.com/nvidia-gameworks-visual-corruption-gears-war-ultimate-edition/

You guys have probably all heard about the visual corruption with Gears of War and how it is such a big failure blah blah (if you haven't either your computer is a potato or that rock you live under must be quite comfy).

Well, it looks like the culprit has finally been discovered!

 Well, it looks like HBAO+, Nvidia's lighting mechanism, that is causing it. Futhermore, in the settings for Gears of War it isn't even called HBAO+, but instead some weird "Ambient Occlusion."

Just by turning off the setting, you can fix all of the game corruption. 

But wait, there's more!

As well, it seems Gears of War implements PhysX in it. As most of us know, PhysX can make your game look a lot better. However, this comes at a performance penalty, especially for AMD graphics cards, since whenever an AMD graphics card is found to be in the system all the PhysX work will be offloaded to the CPU which can cause severe bottle necking for the GPU and so drastically reduce performance.

In past games, PhysX could always have been disabled. However, it seems with Gears of War, it is currently impossible to disable PhysX. There is no setting in the game, and when you try to edit the file that dictates whether or not PhysX is enabled, it changes the setting once your PC connects to the Microsoft servers.

 

Gears of War is, to be honest, quite a failure as of now. What with all the HBAO+ issues as well as this other PhysX issue, it is sure to drive away customers. We can only hope that Microsoft will resolve these issues, and possibly let the user dictate whether PhysX is enabled or not.

The fuck? I don´t mind gameworks but this is just low.

[Atmos]

Why would anyone use hbao+ anyway.

Looks the exact same as hbao, just with way more performance impact.

 

Anyway, gameoworks just needs to die now, either that or developers have to start actually coding for their game's effects again instead of dishing out cash to buy effects from nvidia that run like shit on the other side's hardware.

 

 

 

 

 

[Aereldor]

10 minutes ago, DocSwag said:

However, it seems with Gears of War, it is currently impossible to disable PhysX. There is no setting in the game, and when you try to edit the file that dictates whether or not PhysX is enabled, it changes the setting once your PC connects to the Microsoft servers.

There's no doubt that this is a slimy move, but couldn't you edit the file, change its permissions to 'read-only', and make it so that you require an administrator password to change said permissions back?

[QueenDemetria]

This is why Microsoft needs to abandon gaming entirely, and let someone with more passion and understanding of their customers run a game service.

[Demonking]

3 minutes ago, Atmos said:

Why would anyone use hbao+ anyway.

Looks the exact same as hbao, just with way more performance impact.

 

Anyway, gameoworks just needs to die now, either that or developers have to start actually coding for their game's effects again instead of dishing out cash to buy effects from nvidia that run like shit on the other side's hardware.

 

 

 

 

 

Or you can just turn it off. in this case you can't, but this may not be Nvidia fault since this is a windows store game & we know how that limit options in games this maybe 1 of those.

[Sauron]

Ambient occlusion is buggy garbage? Why am I not surprised?

[DXMember]

cool article, but is it really necessary to rephrase every quote from the original article?

 

also why are so many people buthurt about gameworks? I mean 80% market share is on nvidia, right?

[Atmos]

2 minutes ago, Demonking said:

Or you can just turn it off. in this case you can't, but this may not be Nvidia fault since this is a windows store game & we know how that limit options in games this maybe 1 of those.

Why would microsoft demand that the game only use hbao+? Especially when their own console isn't running nvidia architecture. Its just lazy work on the dev's end, not some microsoft dictation, and you can quote me on that.

[Daegun]

Guys, chill with all the Nvidia rage. This is entirely on Microsoft. I'm pretty sure that Nvidia didn't hold a gun to Microsofts head and tell them to do this.

[Citadelen]

Just now, Daegun said:

Guys, chill with all the Nvidia rage. This is entirely on Microsoft. I'm pretty sure that Nvidia didn't hold a gun to Microsofts head and tell them to do this.

I wouldn't put it past them...

[ivan134]

Wow. From the article:

Quote

[UPDATED 03/05/2016 03:35 PM] We’ve just learned that no one at AMD was informed by Microsoft that review codes were being handed out to journalists for performance testing earlier this week and only found out after the fact.

 

[Dabombinable]

Just FYI, PhysX can be run off the CPU, just no where near as well as any graphics or PhysX card.

[Prysin]

12 minutes ago, Daegun said:

Guys, chill with all the Nvidia rage. This is entirely on Microsoft. I'm pretty sure that Nvidia didn't hold a gun to Microsofts head and tell them to do this.

no, guns are not needed. Just a brown paper bag full of benjamins

[PopReference]

First the Windows Store crap and now GameWorks? All that's left is for Denuvo software and it'll be the perfect trifecta of shit ports.

[Humbug]

LOL- a PC gamers worst nightmare? Windows store game combined with gameworks tech.

 

question- is it possible to benchmark windows store games using standard 3rd party utilities... Since they run sandboxed.

[Humbug]

26 minutes ago, Daegun said:

Guys, chill with all the Nvidia rage. This is entirely on Microsoft. I'm pretty sure that Nvidia didn't hold a gun to Microsofts head and tell them to do this.

it's on the dev. Supposed to test the game properly before release.

it seems they didn't test any GCN 1.2 graphics cards.

[Nineshadow]

And it's the fault of the devs for not including right options nor caring about how their game is going to run.

[Humbug]

1 minute ago, Nineshadow said:

And it's the fault of the devs for not including right options nor caring about how their game is going to run.

since only GCN 1.2 graphics cards are affected... I suppose what happened is that they tested whatever AMD graphics cards they had available which happened to consist of GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 parts only. And they probably thought well if it runs well on these it's going to run fine on the 380 and fury series too.

[Starelementpoke]

30 minutes ago, Dabombinable said:

Just FYI, PhysX can be run off the CPU, just no where near as well as any graphics or PhysX card.

We know.

[BuckGup]

Why is an Nvidia technology running poorly on AMD a surprise? Of course it isn't going to work as well for two reasons obviously the cards are different with drivers, gpu cores and so on, second what company wants to help the rival. I think they should be helping them though as a monopoly would split Nvidia

[AlexGoesHigh]

42 minutes ago, Humbug said:

LOL- a PC gamers worst nightmare? Windows store game combined with gameworks tech.

 

question- is it possible to benchmark windows store games using standard 3rd party utilities... Since they run sandboxed.

Nope, this is why there's no PCPer or Anand article, Fraps, DXtory, OBS and any other recording doesn't work (expect for MS own version that is on the Xbox app but is very barebones and by design is limited to a certain amount of recording time), and it also blocks any kind of overlays, unless is in the games code to allow it, in fact unless they fundamentally change how the sanboxing works or add some sort of pass though API, any apps that wants to touch a store app, the store app must have code that whitelist those apps and its functions.

[CyanideInsanity]

1 hour ago, Aereldor said:

There's no doubt that this is a slimy move, but couldn't you edit the file, change its permissions to 'read-only', and make it so that you require an administrator password to change said permissions back?

It doesn't look like you can. https://gearsofwar.com/en-us/forums/a35773093fe74d3d9970e0a896b16d6d/threads/please-add-21-9-support-to-the-pc-version/79d3a490-42c9-4191-8904-b5b1ac46a4f4/posts .ini files seem to have an unclearable read only tag already...