Ultrawide, Megawide, and Megaultrawide DX11 thread

[rootwyrm.6408]

There isn't a thread for it yet, so hopefully this will help get some actual attention to these issues.

Not sure if your display qualifies? Allow me to be your guide:

* Ultrawide is aspect ratios of 21:9 only (so no 21:10)

* Megawide is an aspect ratio of 21:10 or with a total resolution width greater than 3440 pixels or but lower than Megaultrawide

* Megaultrawide is multi-panel or multi-display with a MINIMUM width of 5760 (3x 1920) and a vertical resolution that is 66% of the horizontal or less

 

An example of a Megaultrawide would be 3x 1920x1200 (16:10) panels in landscape orientation run in AMD Eyefinity or NV Surround, or 3x 3840x2160 (16:9.)

It'd be nice if for once the developers didn't just completely ignore us and leave us with a broken game or having to give up the whole point of big screens. Especially when things were working fine previously. HINT, HINT, ANET.

Seriously. D3D11_VIEWPORT is probably a good chunk of what you are looking for to fix the showstoppers.

 

So far already hit several outright game-breaking issues and smaller QoL issues myself at 5760x1200.

- Character creation? Yeah. No. This is completely broken. You literally can only see one third of the selection at most.

- Character selection is also horribly broken. I can rub my charr's belly and get slapped. My asura is a head and that's about it. My norn is a torso with arms.

- FPS limiter is fully broken for DX11 windowed fullscreen. Alt-tabbed away from the game, FPS uncaps (I can see 140+ in many areas.) Tabbed into the game, FPS instantly caps to 60. That's clearly backwards of the intended behavior.

- Ambient Occlusion + SMAA High + Supersample introduces extremely prominent and visible strobing bands on characters regardless of ambient occlusion and shadow settings. Literally epileptic warning bad strobing. Doesn't reproduce at 1920x1200.

- Depth Blur is completely non-functional (I'm guessing NYI for DX11 beta there though.)

- Chat, party, and map windows need to be made arbitrarily draggable. How has this never been addressed as a QoL issue?

- World map render needs some love. I love being able to see all of CT at once. Except now it looks absolutely terrible. (Art issue, I'm sorry! But it really is atrocious looking.)

- The top of the target window is rendered about 20 pixels lower than before. Doesn't reproduce with 1920x1200 DX11 either.

- Internal FPS reporting is not working correctly. Switching from Unlimited to 60 will instantly drop reported to 60. Switching back to unlimited has a 2-5 second delay before it updates. Did not reproduce at 1920x1200.

 

[Erazai.7054]

The UI on ultra+ wide is also far out on the corners in dx11 making them unusable too

 

[rootwyrm.6408]

• 5760x1200 is hitting OOM conditions on >8GB cards. The engine does not appear to be handling higher VRAM cards correctly. More in a moment here.
• Camera shake is WAY broken. It is detecting the full view (5760) and there seems to be a missing bound check. This translates directly to a drastic 'wobble' that quickly ramps to literally spinning. Reproduces very reliably in The Crystal Dragon.

 

So, OOM. "IBgfxTextureTryCopyRectToDeviceFull" - and I don't see any other reports of it here. Every one of those failures has been with VRAM below 5GB allocated. But also indicating a VRAM allocation failed. And not always popping the crash reporter . The game memory utilization is also WAY lower than I would expect. Even getting it to use a 4GB working set on a 64GB or 128GB system seems to be impossible now - it just fights like hell.

So I went for complete broke - Teq at reset. Absolutely fought exceeding 4500MB on VRAM. Turned on supersampling, and that only pushed it to an absolute peak of about 4800MB even as visible players kept going up, and the engine is clawing back every single kilobyte it can. So I went further. And it hits an absolute wall at 4900MB VRAM allocated. Just goes straight to freeing up VRAM at all costs. And repeated at LLA. WvW zergs? Yep. Same wall. Managed to push Gw2-64.exe to 4,230,000ish working but it's just an absolute brick wall at 4900MB VRAM with a very significant performance hit and failed renders (zero filled textures) as it actively fights pushing past that.

[Aza.2105]

I have no of these issues. Running the game at 2560x1080p. I’m using an amd gpu, are you guys using an nvidia gpu? Also it’s stated in the patch notes that anything over 60hz doesn’t work, To get around this run the game in window full screen mode.

[rootwyrm.6408]

8 hours ago, Aza.2105 said:

I have no of these issues. Running the game at 2560x1080p. I’m using an amd gpu, are you guys using an nvidia gpu? Also it’s stated in the patch notes that anything over 60hz doesn’t work, To get around this run the game in window full screen mode.

I've tested with both (yes, I have multiple GPUs.) Certain things can't be 1-1'd with AMD due to addon limitations. The resolution you're at is simply not enough screen to even get near high VRAM utilization. Especially with textures as they currently sit.

And I've already confirmed three times that the frame limiter is broken. Period. Patch notes are wrong, it's just broken. Even my machine can't do 5760x1200 full screen, has to be full screen windowed.

Edited September 24, 2021 by rootwyrm.6408

[hunkamania.7561]

Camera turn producing low fps unlike DX12 where it was butter smooth

[Stadsport.8714]

A good amount of these issues were present on DX9 too, most notably the cropping issues. Most cutscenes (especially in core story), character creation, and character select are almost unusable. My norn looks like a Grindr torso on the character select screen. I also agree with being able to arbitrarily undock and move windows, it would help a lot for these types of monitors. 

[rootwyrm.6408]

On 9/24/2021 at 12:58 PM, Stadsport.8714 said:

A good amount of these issues were present on DX9 too, most notably the cropping issues. Most cutscenes (especially in core story), character creation, and character select are almost unusable. My norn looks like a Grindr torso on the character select screen. I also agree with being able to arbitrarily undock and move windows, it would help a lot for these types of monitors. 

 

So interesting fact:

The character select screen and cutscene issues were not a consistent problem on DX9. In fact, it was very difficult to reproduce after I fixed it once. But I can also tell you exactly why as well. These were restricted to the UI viewport. Which on a triple head setup, is the maximum resolution of a single monitor, and automatically centered (or on Eyefinity will go to the priority display.)

Which is why the UI is a good two feet wider - physically - for me. The UI layer is now equal to the full viewport, taking it from 1920x1200 to 5760x1200. It definitely was a locked layer previously. And cinematics appear to run in the UI layer and do not have a bounding box.

That makes cinematics in particular virtually impossible to fix easily, if at all. One way ANet could fix cinematics would be to re-render them at MUCH higher resolutions (which also would make them much larger on disk.) This is, frankly, not going to happen nor should it. Dredging up assets that date to launch and reworking all the textures for a tiny percentage of players that would benefit? I'd be the first one saying "hell no." The second way would be to create a 'cinematic' layer with a strict bounding box. But that comes with it's own issues; transparency outside the box ruins them one way (imagine the regular game on either side of the cinematic. Yuck.) And putting a black box layer over the entire screen plus a UI cinematic layer presents it's own problems. Both cost a lot of money to implement. And again, this would only benefit a very small percentage of players - ANet might have stats, but I'd be absolutely shocked if more than 5% over the past year are playing on anything other than 16:9.

So I am more than willing to give ANet a complete pass on cinematics. It sucks that we miss out on them, but it's just a cost that can't easily be justified. (But who knows. Maybe they'll read this and go "hey, we can do that layer thing in 10 minutes. Can you test it for us please?" And if so: yes, I will gladly help test anything.)

 

However, super not giving them a pass on character creation, selection, and UI element dragging. These are very much game breaking defects. Not simply "quality of life." I'll concede that UI elements are the lowest priority of the three, but still, they're a must fix not a "nice to fix." That inability to drag UI elements means that you literally have to take your eyes completely off the action to check the party for any reason. That's a real show stopper for support. Character creation and selection being completely broken is just glaringly obvious.

Edited September 29, 2021 by rootwyrm.6408
gix typo

[Johann.3854]

I just want to add, that it would be really nice, if it could be fixed, that characters in cutscenes don't get cut on top and bottom.

I have a screenshot of the issue here. It is not totally gamebreaking, but just unpleasant

 

[Erazai.7054]

As of today's patch the issues with the UI no longer being centered, character select being zoomed in so all you see are your characters' midsections, cut scenes zoomed in, etc. have not been addressed. All these being "issues" also haven't been mentioned by developers anywhere. Please I just want to keep enjoying the game on 3 screens when dx9 goes away ;-;