Aliens vs Predator 2 Raytracing

[Corporal Hicks]

2560x1920 + Predication SMAA + fidelityFX + HD texture mod

EVEN IF YOU HAVE A 1080P SCREEN BUFFER THE 4K VIDEO OPTION. Remember youtube compression erodes quality, but if you are starting out at a higher resolution than you monitor can show you will get essentially a supersampled imaged with a bit of compression as well. The point is, it will still be HIGHER QUALITY.

"...when a 4K video gets uploaded to YouTube, YouTube will compress that video with a different codec than most other videos. Most user videos on YouTube get transcoded into a codec called MPEG-4 AVC. However, 4K videos will get transcoded into a newer codec called VP9."

On a measly GTX 1660 Ti OCed. In fact if you have a better GPU, feel free to render it and share in the comments. This is unmistakably the pinnacle of the series. I showed it immense love. It also somewhat forces you to go back in time, to how the 3DFX cards rendered scenes. Its no 22 bit dithering CRT, but its a nice throwback, yet legitimately a step forward from the future.

I wouldnt try to go beyond 60fps in this game unless its multiplayer you want.

Use SMAA (Fakes higher resolution by smuggling pixels right past the visually attentive PC Master Race) in reshade instead which is comparable to 4x MSAA and works on sprites unlike MSAA. Go to source code for SMAA, SMAA, scroll down through gibberish and find predication=0 and change the value to 1. If you can afford it performance wise, go above the games max resolution to stack supersampling without changing the aspect ratio the game was intended to be played at.

Nvidia users go to control panel:
Do not stack image sharpeners!
Thou shalt not use FXAA, ever!
Texture filtering - Anistrophic sample optimization make sure is OFF!
Texture filtering - Trilinear optimization must be set to OFF!
Vertical sync set to Fast if you dont have g sync.
Low latency mode: Ultra
Texture filtering: High quality

AMD users are set out of the box.

Turn on anistrophic filtering to 16x in the dg Voodoo control panel, DirectX tab. You need to run as admin to make changes. I recommend you right click, and make that open as admin everytime automatically. Uncheck dg Voodoo Watermark. Check fast video memory access. Choose resolution in this box for supersampling if you can run it. DO NOT use the Antialiasing (MSAA) function or raytracing WILL NOT work.

Turn on fidelityFX (Anistrophic filterings intelligent wingman), also called CAS, or adaptive sharpen and set to .255.

SSR (Light spectrum bounce, into texture colors, which share these blendings with another textures color, subtle is always best):
Reflection intensity .050

Minimal color grading (Keeps art direction roughly the same as original except less vibrance to a limited extent):
Exposure 2.5
Saturation .885

MXAO (Top of the line ambient occlusion, Shadowing on geometry):
Sample quality high
Sample radius 11.320
Ambient occlusion amount .795
Fade out start .950
Fade out end .999

PPFX bloom (Compliments the geometric based element):
Enable HDR ("16 bit texture" trade off for depth maximization)
Tonemap exposure 8.020
Tonemap contrast 1.035
Tonemap black saturation .770
Bloom overall intensity 0.1

Ambient light (More general layer with more range of effect):
allInt 7.440 (Lower value helps dithering at a cost to hiding ambient occlusion)
allInt threshold 13.889

PPFX SSDO (Geometric glow, was the hardest part to tune):
Intensity .666
Amount .500
Indirect bounce color saturation .667
Sample count 15 (Performance relevant)
Sample range 35.680
Filter radius 19
Light position 1.0, 0.4, 1.0

Godrays (Light scatter since its not very mathematically stable if made super obvious):
Sample amount 20
Frequency 1.000
Threshold .958

DO NOT use the vsync in the game since its double buffered.

Reshade 4.8.2
Nvidia driver: 457.30
Windows 10 build 19042.630
Game patch 2.4

Someone needs to make it possible to avoid using texture compression in this game. To some extent its going to help bump things away from pseudo 16 bit land and mostly just give more accurate data where it loses some using ancient methods im not even sure why but are still being forced on us as if such a option to dismiss it were hard to implement. I remember in crysis 1's cvar commands you could force 3DC on nvidia hardware under the DX9 path. Good luck finding that information anymore. Im not a programmer or even a graphics artist but im also not stupid.

[x-M-x]

Yeah, we heard about this (several vids have posted) and it comes with all sorts of problems.

But still looks sweet :-)

[XSlayer300]

Aaa, video has been removed.

[Yodas Raytracing Studios]

Yeah, we heard about this (several vids have posted) and it comes with all sorts of problems.

But still looks sweet :-)

Dont use these old settings. They are obsolete now. I have an improvement available on my channel but my aim is to further improve it in several ways.

I merged my progress into the redux mod thread since its the next logical step. The problems associated with injection are fixable if someone codes a middle man between reshade and the game app that lets the effects pass from the game itself be done AFTER not before reshades effects. Order matters. Basically the full screen color effect is taking place before the ambient occlusion so it bleeds through. If the ambient occlusion was applied first this would not be a problem. Same with screen space reflections though i have those turned so far down no defects arise based on that layer of treatment.

Its still overall a superior render. There you will find the video showing off its present limitations.

Working on other fixes. I work part time IRL so progress will come in waves.

Next step is level specific reshade presets that id like to run automatically at a certain point in the future. My goal is to get more than just random disjointed effort for an objectively superior end result. We have the tools to remaster the game. Its a matter of skill and desire. Help me.

Also the ability to do this with reshade might become the holy grail of retro enhancement since it would erase injections weaknesses. It just depends how that translates, it might be that we cant generalize and must make per application drudgery our only option of improvement. So far no one has achieved this as far as i have seen anyway. Its not impossible.

Look at Doom 3 raytracing. To get that working you need to play the discord game. Same with goldeneyes textures. This to me cheapens the end result because you should be doing it prosocially without the whats in it for me. Superior art you get to share. A few dollars here and there for something that can be spread around anyway seems like a bad long term investment. What i get out of it is a good project based learning experience.

Let this thread die. Comment on redux thread instead.