Sweet FX: not allowed, broken or unusable?

tav67

For those wondering, Sweet FX is a third party graphics shader program that enhances various graphical aspects of a game by utilising the PCU rather than the GPU of your PC and I must stress does not alter the game code, programming or anything of your installed game, nor violate the EULA.

It makes no changes to the game files or anything else. It runs entirely from the user's end from a graphics perspective and simply serves to make a better experience. Any Google search will find the website for this program.

However, after a few attempts, I've found it tends to crash CO upon launch and I'm putting it out there for those more knowledgeable than I to perhaps look at this and offer suggestions and alternatives. I believe it could truly make CO look gorgeous for players and wish to see if it's possible. If, however, this is deemed to be undesirable third-party software, I won't pursue the matter. I will however say there are several other MMO's who are aware of this program and have said it violates no EULA provisions.

Can anyone help?


S.

foosnark

I have experience in game engine development (none of the companies involved here) but I'm not a graphics guru per se... so I'm commenting with that perspective.


SweetFX is a post-processing shader. Basically it takes the "final" image that would be rendered, and runs it through a shader on your GPU (not your CPU; that would be all kinds of horrible for performance since readbacks are expensive) to muck around with contrast in various ways.

I would think that gameplay-wise, it's fairly harmless (if you trust it to do what it says it does and no more, that is). Not a gameplay exploit, but a possible security risk for anyone using it.


As far as stability goes, it's just a matter of luck. PW has no motivation at all to support it themselves, so if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. It would be easier for them to add their own fancier post-processing shaders as it would to support a third-party thing that basically uses a hack to get it done. Maybe it'll work for you with different drivers, or different hardware, or in fullscreen but not windowed or vice versa, or maybe not at all.

sanguineviper

CO has an aversion to running with any sort of modification of its EXE or addition of any .dll files or injections. The engine is simply too flaky and unstable to support the use of a post processing Direct X injection method I'd guess...

Either that, or it's using some sort of odd Direct X version/.DLL that's not going to work with an injector at all...

I know for sure that whatever form of SSAO the game uses, is not even considered to exist by my Nvidia control panel or tray tools, as it still lists the game as "Does not support SSAO" in both. So that's what's pushing me towards the above conclusion.

aiqa

InjectSMAA worked fine for me when I was using DX9 mode, unfortunately with DX11 I get a completely black screen. Same black screen problem with sweetFX and DX11, no suprise since the antialiasing is the same in those.

To bad crypticis very unlikely to add SMAA to the game itself, the licence would permit it without any problems.

edit
If you have an AMD card, you could try the preview version Radeonpro, using that you are able to use sweetFX in a slightly different way, that even seems to work with DX11. So you can have comic outlines and anitaliasing, and nice shadows (due to DX11) yay, that is, if you do not mind a slight distortion of all text.