SweetFX

mymmo

Hej Guys. 

I got information about SweeFX from Guru3d and Ive to spread the world. SweetFX is a tool that are tweaking the game so it looks better. That is the short version of it. Here comes the longer one  

In case you're new to SweetFX Shader Suite (or just SweetFX), it's a mod built on the InjectSMAA shader injector, that allows you to apply a suite of post processing shader effects to your games.

 

You may have tried another shader injection mod before, like InjectFXAA, InjectSMAA or FXAAtool. SweetFX improves upon all of these.

 

You can add SMAA anti-aliasing , sharpening and tweak the color, gamma , exposure and more.

It's meant to allow you to improve the look of your games and change the look and mood of it to your liking.

If you use SMAA antialiasing instead of MSAA or an even more expensive antialaliasing technique you can also make the game run faster (than with MSAA)

 

Effects included:

 

* SMAA Anti-aliasing : Anti-aliases the image using the SMAA technique - see [B][url]http://www.iryoku.com/smaa/[/url][/B]

* LumaSharpen : Sharpens the image, making details easier to see

* Bloom : Makes strong lights bleed their light into their surroundings

* HDR : Mimics an HDR tonemapped look

* Technicolor : Makes the image look like it was processed using a three-strip Technicolor process - see [url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technicolor[/url]

* Cineon DPX : Makes the image look like it was converted from film to Cineon DPX. Can be used to create a "sunny" look.

* Lift Gamma Gain : Adjust brightness and color of shadows, midtones and highlights (avoids clipping)

* Tonemap : Adjust gamma, exposure, saturation, bleach and defog. (may cause clipping)

* Vibrance : Intelligently saturates (or desaturates if you use negative values) the pixels depending on their original saturation.

* Curves : Contrast adjustments using S-curves.

* Sepia : Sepia tones the image - see [url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sepia_tone#Sepia_toning[/url]

* Vignette : Darkens the edges of the image to make it look more like it was shot with a camera lens. - see [url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vignetting[/url] )

* Dither : Applies dithering to simulate more colors than your monitor can display. This lessens banding artifacts - see [url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ditheri...age_processing[/url] )

* Splitscreen : Enables the before-and-after splitscreen comparison mode.

 

It works with all 32bit DirectX 9 , 10 and 11 games (and many applications).

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=368880

 

Without SweetFX EQ2

 

With  SweetFX EQ2

 

Quizzical

You can see the increased saturation and darker colors (basically reducing the gamma correction) in the second picture, but I don't see any other differences.

A lot of the things you list would make a game look worse, not better.  Graphical artifacts from various types of film are bad things, and recreating them in games when it isn't necessary is silly.

Dithering is pretty thoroughly obsolete unless the monitor you're using is absolutely ancient.  It's completely stupid at 24-bit color or higher, and of dubious benefit even at 16-bit color.

Post processing anti-aliasing effects need to have some knowledge of the geometry of the scene in order to know what they should anti-alias and what they should leave alone.  Otherwise, you blur text and it looks horrible.

That's not to say that post-processing anti-aliasing effects are a bad thing; they're great if done properly.  But they can't be done properly as purely a post-processing effect.  They need the game designer to flag some things for use by the anti-aliasing algorithm, and the details of what needs to be recorded and how depends on arbitrary decisions made by the game programmer.

QSatu

Avtually SweetFX has superior aa to fXAA used in GW2. It's night and day when you compare the 2. It's surprisingly good at finding edges and it doesn;t blur anuything as FXAA.

Quizzical

Originally posted by QSatu
Avtually SweetFX has superior aa to fXAA used in GW2. It's night and day when you compare the 2. It's surprisingly good at finding edges and it doesn;t blur anuything as FXAA.

Anti-aliasing is all about blurring things together.  Even the traditional MSAA just computes several values and averages them--that is, it blurs them together.  It's possible to have a badly-designed algorithm that makes things blurrier than necessary.  Depth of field does exactly that.  But if it doesn't blur anything at all, it's not an anti-aliasing algorithm.

QSatu

Originally posted by Quizzical

Originally posted by QSatu
Avtually SweetFX has superior aa to fXAA used in GW2. It's night and day when you compare the 2. It's surprisingly good at finding edges and it doesn;t blur anuything as FXAA.

Anti-aliasing is all about blurring things together.  Even the traditional MSAA just computes several values and averages them--that is, it blurs them together.  It's possible to have a badly-designed algorithm that makes things blurrier than necessary.  Depth of field does exactly that.  But if it doesn't blur anything at all, it's not an anti-aliasing algorithm.

ok... FXAA blurs everything far more than the technique used by SweetFX. Besides I tought that FXAA blurrs the whole picture while other forms of aa blurr only the edges..

Quizzical

Traditional MSAA looks for boundaries between triangles and blurs those.  Post-processing anti-aliasing effects look for adjacent pixels of very different colors and blurs those together sometimes.  How it blurs them and when the "sometimes" occurs varies by algorithm.

In order to do it right, you need a game developer to flag some things as okay to blur, and some things that must be left as-is.  For example, any 2D user-interface components must be left as-is and not blurred.  It's pretty easy to for a game programmer who is implementing FXAA or whatever to mark things that shouldn't be blurred.  For example, one trivial (though typically not optimal) algorithm is to draw the 3D stuff, then apply the post-processing anti-aliasing effect, and then draw the 2D stuff on top after anti-aliasing has already been applied.

But if all you see is the frame buffer that the program tried to send to the video card to display on the screen, then you don't have that information, and don't know what is 3D stuff that needs to be anti-aliased and what is a user-interface pasted on top.  That's why post-processing anti-aliasing effects as implemented through video drivers (which has advantages over external programs like SweetFX) are ugly.

Badaboom

There are some pretty good examples of improvement in this guild wars 2 thread. 

https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/game/gw2/better-colour-overall-graphic-FXAA

Panther2103

This program is against the rules in most games that don't allow third party programs. Even if it does something as simple as making the game look better, the GM's on the GW2 forum stated that it was not allowed to be used.

mymmo

Originally posted by Quizzical

You can see the increased saturation and darker colors (basically reducing the gamma correction) in the second picture, but I don't see any other differences.

A lot of the things you list would make a game look worse, not better.  Graphical artifacts from various types of film are bad things, and recreating them in games when it isn't necessary is silly.

Dithering is pretty thoroughly obsolete unless the monitor you're using is absolutely ancient.  It's completely stupid at 24-bit color or higher, and of dubious benefit even at 16-bit color.

Post processing anti-aliasing effects need to have some knowledge of the geometry of the scene in order to know what they should anti-alias and what they should leave alone.  Otherwise, you blur text and it looks horrible.

That's not to say that post-processing anti-aliasing effects are a bad thing; they're great if done properly.  But they can't be done properly as purely a post-processing effect.  They need the game designer to flag some things for use by the anti-aliasing algorithm, and the details of what needs to be recorded and how depends on arbitrary decisions made by the game programmer.

Why you cant see the AA changes is manily because off mmorpg compression of the picture combined with it being jpeg. If you would have gone to the source that I linked you would have seen better pictures  In the pictures I provided you can see the good AA around the staff and the glowing skull. 

And the things that the author listed is optional, if you dont like it you dont need to use it. I personal like to fix some dark edges around the the screen. 

Post processing and anti-aliasing works well with SweetFX, they are done properly with the script. Games that have horrible AA ,such as EQ2/Dead space/bulletstorm, gets much pretties and you dont need to stare at the jaggies. The text gest blurry if you use rather bad AA´s such as FXAA. 

For better pictures: 

http://iceimg.com/i/58/ef/23f9422ef7.jpg

http://iceimg.com/i/d6/7a/0ccac771b8.jpg

Quizzical

Originally posted by mymmo

Originally posted by Quizzical

You can see the increased saturation and darker colors (basically reducing the gamma correction) in the second picture, but I don't see any other differences.

A lot of the things you list would make a game look worse, not better.  Graphical artifacts from various types of film are bad things, and recreating them in games when it isn't necessary is silly.

Dithering is pretty thoroughly obsolete unless the monitor you're using is absolutely ancient.  It's completely stupid at 24-bit color or higher, and of dubious benefit even at 16-bit color.

Post processing anti-aliasing effects need to have some knowledge of the geometry of the scene in order to know what they should anti-alias and what they should leave alone.  Otherwise, you blur text and it looks horrible.

That's not to say that post-processing anti-aliasing effects are a bad thing; they're great if done properly.  But they can't be done properly as purely a post-processing effect.  They need the game designer to flag some things for use by the anti-aliasing algorithm, and the details of what needs to be recorded and how depends on arbitrary decisions made by the game programmer.

Why you cant see the AA changes is manily because off mmorpg compression of the picture combined with it being jpeg. If you would have gone to the source that I linked you would have seen better pictures  In the pictures I provided you can see the good AA around the staff and the glowing skull. 

And the things that the author listed is optional, if you dont like it you dont need to use it. I personal like to fix some dark edges around the the screen. 

Post processing and anti-aliasing works well with SweetFX, they are done properly with the script. Games that have horrible AA ,such as EQ2/Dead space/bulletstorm, gets much pretties and you dont need to stare at the jaggies. The text gest blurry if you use rather bad AA´s such as FXAA. 

For better pictures: 

http://iceimg.com/i/58/ef/23f9422ef7.jpg

http://iceimg.com/i/d6/7a/0ccac771b8.jpg

You do have a good point that the compression of the picture makes it so that you can't see the anti-aliasing.  I'd add that the clearest way to see anti-aliasing is in motion, with a nearly but not quite horizontal line slowly moving up or down on the screen, and that can't be seen in screenshots at all.

But you're also going out of your way to pick screenshots that don't have any UI on them, which aren't typical of real games.  Let's see what it does to skill icons or lifebars or minimaps.  And let's definitely see what it does to quest text or a chat box.  Blurring 2D interface segments is where post-processing anti-aliasing effects with no knowledge of the geometry of the scene invariably collapse.  Even in the tiny bit of text in your last screenshots, notice how the "498m" looks dramatically worse in the first picture than in the second.

mymmo

Originally posted by Quizzical

Originally posted by mymmo

Originally posted by Quizzical

You can see the increased saturation and darker colors (basically reducing the gamma correction) in the second picture, but I don't see any other differences.

A lot of the things you list would make a game look worse, not better.  Graphical artifacts from various types of film are bad things, and recreating them in games when it isn't necessary is silly.

Dithering is pretty thoroughly obsolete unless the monitor you're using is absolutely ancient.  It's completely stupid at 24-bit color or higher, and of dubious benefit even at 16-bit color.

Post processing anti-aliasing effects need to have some knowledge of the geometry of the scene in order to know what they should anti-alias and what they should leave alone.  Otherwise, you blur text and it looks horrible.

That's not to say that post-processing anti-aliasing effects are a bad thing; they're great if done properly.  But they can't be done properly as purely a post-processing effect.  They need the game designer to flag some things for use by the anti-aliasing algorithm, and the details of what needs to be recorded and how depends on arbitrary decisions made by the game programmer.

Why you cant see the AA changes is manily because off mmorpg compression of the picture combined with it being jpeg. If you would have gone to the source that I linked you would have seen better pictures  In the pictures I provided you can see the good AA around the staff and the glowing skull. 

And the things that the author listed is optional, if you dont like it you dont need to use it. I personal like to fix some dark edges around the the screen. 

Post processing and anti-aliasing works well with SweetFX, they are done properly with the script. Games that have horrible AA ,such as EQ2/Dead space/bulletstorm, gets much pretties and you dont need to stare at the jaggies. The text gest blurry if you use rather bad AA´s such as FXAA. 

For better pictures: 

http://iceimg.com/i/58/ef/23f9422ef7.jpg

http://iceimg.com/i/d6/7a/0ccac771b8.jpg

You do have a good point that the compression of the picture makes it so that you can't see the anti-aliasing.  I'd add that the clearest way to see anti-aliasing is in motion, with a nearly but not quite horizontal line slowly moving up or down on the screen, and that can't be seen in screenshots at all.

But you're also going out of your way to pick screenshots that don't have any UI on them, which aren't typical of real games.  Let's see what it does to skill icons or lifebars or minimaps.  And let's definitely see what it does to quest text or a chat box.  Blurring 2D interface segments is where post-processing anti-aliasing effects with no knowledge of the geometry of the scene invariably collapse.  Even in the tiny bit of text in your last screenshots, notice how the "498m" looks dramatically worse in the first picture than in the second.

I usually take pictures without the ui, a easy way to hide  the characters name. The horizontal nasty line in games can  be removed by tweaking how many fps can be shown inside the game.  In BF3 I need to have my fps set to 58, no more no lesss, while in Lotro Ive to limit the fps to 62.  My Pc can push the fps to above +100 fps in lotro but then the horizontal line will show up. I dont know why it is like that, but the solution works.

That the 2d interface will be changed is true, but that it will collapse is exaggerate. I tried to find a scenery that could compair the changes in best way just for this discussion

Without Sweetfx

 

With SweetFX

 

  Now try it yourself You will be most happy with how nice the games wil look like and without taking a fps hit.