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Steam News12 November 20223y ago

Darwinia 2.3.0 release

There have been several changes since the previous release, v2.2.0-296. Major changes: Vulkan/Metal: Multi-sampling Antialiasing (MSAA) performance is dramatically improved on some systems.

Full notes

Full Darwinia update

Read the full published notes in a cleaner layout. The original post stays linked below.

What changed

8 fixes5 additions13 changes0 removals
  • Performance
  • UI and audio
  • Fixes
  • Gameplay
  • Server
  • Maps
changedVulkan/Metal: Multi-sampling Antialiasing (MSAA) performance is dramatically improved on some systems. When supported, we now use Multisampled Render To Texture (MSRTT) instead of a render followed by an explicit blit to resolve. This benefits tile-based rendering GPUs especially (e.g. Apple M1/M2, etc), since Vulkan and Metal can both use very fast temporary “memoryless” textures for the multisampled color and depth buffers.
addedVulkan/Metal: Apple GPUs can now use lossless compression for textures and framebuffers, which dramatically reduces memory bandwidth and improves performance.
addedVulkan: AMD GPUs can now use lossless compression for textures and framebuffers (DCC, or “Delta Color Compression”), which improves performance.
addedVulkan/Metal/Direct3D: On systems with multiple distinct GPUs (e.g. laptops with integrated graphics + discrete GPU, or with external GPUs), you can now select which device you want to render on in the Screen preferences.
fixedVulkan/Metal: Fixed some awful-looking incorrect shading results around the edges of primitives affected by lighting. There seems to be either a shader compiler or hardware bug causing this, but we have worked around the problem by setting a [[sample_mask]] output in the Metal shader (even when multisampling is off). Unfortunately, this same bug is still present in Apple's built-in OpenGL-on-Metal implementation, and a workaround is impossible there since we have no influence on the generated Metal Shading Language code. It's strongly recommended to only use the Vulkan/Metal renderers on macOS.
fixedOpenGL: Fixed a bug where glTexStorage* calls were incorrectly being used on OpenGL 3.3-compatible systems which did not have the GL_ARB_texture_storage extension.

There have been several changes since the previous release, v2.2.0-296.

Major changes:

  • Vulkan/MetalMulti-sampling Antialiasing (MSAA) performance is dramatically improved on some systems. When supported, we now use Multisampled Render To Texture (MSRTT) instead of a render followed by an explicit blit to resolve. This benefits tile-based rendering GPUs especially (e.g. Apple M1/M2, etc), since Vulkan and Metal can both use very fast temporary “memoryless” textures for the multisampled color and depth buffers.
  • Vulkan/Metal: Apple GPUs can now use lossless compression for textures and framebuffers, which dramatically reduces memory bandwidth and improves performance.

  • Vulkan: AMD GPUs can now use lossless compression for textures and framebuffers (DCC, or “Delta Color Compression”), which improves performance.

  • Vulkan/Metal/Direct3D: On systems with multiple distinct GPUs (e.g. laptops with integrated graphics + discrete GPU, or with external GPUs), you can now select which device you want to render on in the Screen preferences.

  • Vulkan/MetalFixed some awful-looking incorrect shading results around the edges of primitives affected by lighting. There seems to be either a shader compiler or hardware bug causing this, but we have worked around the problem by setting a [[sample_mask]] output in the Metal shader (even when multisampling is off). Unfortunately, this same bug is still present in Apple's built-in OpenGL-on-Metal implementation, and a workaround is impossible there since we have no influence on the generated Metal Shading Language code. It's strongly recommended to only use the Vulkan/Metal renderers on macOS.
  • OpenGLFixed a bug where glTexStorage* calls were incorrectly being used on OpenGL 3.3-compatible systems which did not have the GL_ARB_texture_storage extension.
  • Direct3DEnabled support for DirectComposition, to allow using the D3D "Flip" model.
  • SMAA/FXAAFix sampler bugs on some systems, which resulted in a completely black screen when either of these antialiasing methods were enabled.
  • SoundFixed some significant channel mapping bugs if using fewer channels than the device supports (e.g. 2-channel on 7.1-channel hardware)
  • Renderer: Shaders are now pre-compiled on startup, which should eliminate a lot of random frame hitches.

  • Renderer: Textures are now pre-loaded on startup, which may eliminate frame hitches when previously unused textures are required.

  • Renderer: Implemented caching for shader binaries and render pipelines.

  • Renderer: Worked around a long-standing Windows AMD Vulkan graphics driver bug that caused the game to crash whenever alt-tabbing out of full screen mode.

  • Renderer: Borderless Fullscreen mode now respects the resolution preference, and scales the image to fit the desktop resolution.

  • RendererReduced memory usage for several textures that internally require only one or two color channels.
  • Windows: The FPS overlay (Shift+F5) in the top left now can display system and GPU memory utilized by the game.

  • Windows: Fixes for filesystem unicode path handling on Windows versions older than Windows 10 build 17134.

  • macOSImproved performance on Apple Silicon.
  • WindowsImproved audio latency.
  • CameraFixed some FOV bugs with cutscenes.
  • CameraFixed some movement bugs when skipping cutscenes.
  • DarwinianFIxed some bugs with Darwinians not detecting nearby enemies quickly enough.
  • Darwinian: Now will recognize certain building types as enemies and flee from them.

  • Spiders: Made spiders look less ridiculous when landing after a jump.

  • Gun Turret: Now will recognize certain building types as enemies and attack them.

  • Fixed broken savegame behavior for Launchpad (the Prologue game map).

  • Modified automatic UI scaling to better handle ultrawide aspect ratios (e.g. 21:9).

  • Fixed another bug where Spiders might stetch in weird ways to attempt to attack Air Strike units.

  • Greatly improved performance of the sphere world's "Internet" render.

  • Sound system performance is much better and more consistent.

  • Updated

Source

Steam News / 12 November 2022

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