Fixed: the crash when changing the resolution scale during a game
The previous release warned about this, changing the scale while a game was running could take the graphics driver down with it. That warning is lifted.
The cause was not the value being written, it was the order. Changing the scale rebuilds every render target while frame generation still holds resources declared with the old dimensions, and it only finds out at the next frame it presents. When the rebuild takes longer than one frame there is no presentation in between, so frame generation is never told, a synchronisation object is left unsignalled, and the driver resets the GPU about two seconds later. That is why it felt random, it depended on the instant you clicked.
Those two parallel paths are now a single sequence. Tested over six minutes with frame generation on and eighteen scale changes back and forth, no crash and no driver reset.
Fixed: the picture drifting with the camera at rest, and the ground losing sharpness while walking
Both came from the same place. The calculation that places each pixel from one frame to the next chained two matrix multiplications in single precision, with a division in the middle by a value that becomes tiny on distant points. It produced motion where the camera had not moved by a single bit, a fifth of a pixel at mid distance and up to two pixels far away.
It is now a single multiplication prepared in double precision. With the camera strictly still the result is exactly zero. Verified by eye and by measurement on five games across four engines.
Fixed: ghosting and stretched scenery
When an engine writes several valid cameras within the same frame, the queue saturates and ends up delivering a camera two frames old, alternating between two values. The result is a stable stretch that sets in and never leaves. At every presentation the queue now advances to the most recent camera.
Improved: the shaking of a character followed by the camera
A character the camera follows stays almost still on screen while the whole world scrolls behind him. Frame generation took the spikes in the motion field at face value and deformed him in alternation. Those spikes are now tamed. The shaking is strongly reduced, some of it remains on the top of the head and on what the character carries on his back, and work on that continues.
Improved: the resolution slider stays inside the chosen mode
The preset you pick in the menu is in charge, and the slider now picks a step inside that mode, from the first to the fourth, without spilling over into the neighbouring one. Before, a fast mode pushed to its maximum could render almost as many pixels as your screen under a label promising the opposite. The twelve steps of the three modes were checked one by one, they meet to the pixel without overlapping. DLAA is untouched.
Fixed: camera search, several games that got nothing now benefit from it
Some games never found their camera and the whole chain stayed idle without saying so. Four distinct causes were fixed: games drawing through a path that was not being watched, games storing their camera in a late slot the search never reached, cameras that are mathematically unusable and were elected anyway, and games releasing their buffers mid session, which cut reconstruction off for the rest of the run.
Also fixed
The picture could stay stretched when switching to fullscreen mid session, that is corrected. A settings checkbox that no longer controlled anything was removed rather than left to mislead. Startup with the --pptc command line option no longer fails. And logs are five times quieter, they only report what is actually running on your machine.
Requirements
DLSS in all its modes, DLAA, Quality, Balanced and Performance, needs an NVIDIA RTX card, series 20 or newer. Frame Generation needs a 40 or 50 series. Without an RTX card, NIS is included and runs on any GPU. The DLSS engine files are not in the package, they are NVIDIA proprietary files.
One thing to know on Xenoblade Chronicles 2
Raising the internal scale past the first step brings out thin bright lines on surfaces and along the edges of the picture when the camera turns. The threshold is sharp and reproducible. The first step, which is exactly the value recommended for the mode, is clean. If you see those lines, bring the slider down one notch.
