The state of the mod (Patreon)

Hey dear friends,

it's been a while since my latest post, so I wanted to give you a status update and let you know where we are in terms of advancement on the various fronts (wow, that almost sounded like we're at war).

As you'll remember from my teaser of a month ago, Let's do the Space Warp again!, I have been working like a madman to improve the R.E.A.L. mods framework, addressing what is by far the most commonly reported issue: the ghosting, or doubling of borders for objects in fast lateral motion, that comes from the use of Alternate Eye Rendering. If you haven't been following the discussion, you can go to the linked Space Warp teaser to find many details and an explanation of what AER is, why it is needed for AAA modding and which limitations I am striving to overcome in the next releases.

[Sidenote: the above-mentioned ghosting from AER, which only occurs on laterally moving elements of the scene and which cannot be captured on video because it's actually an illusion triggered in the brain of the observer, is a totally different phenomenon from the haloing that TAA, or temporal anti-aliasing, causes when rendering in stereo, which instead can be spotted on video captures.
They can look similar at times, so some confusion is understandable, but in fact they're easily distinguishable because: 1. haloing usually manifests as a shimmering aura, while ghosting looks like the borders had been cloned a few times; 2. haloing also affects stationary objects, whereas ghosting only occurs when things move sideways; 3. haloing is present around close elements of the scene, while ghosting also affects the background; and 4. if you shut your left eye you will see that haloing happens only on the right side of the nearby object, and vice versa if you shut your right eye you will only see the shimmering on the left side, but ghosting is always symmetrical.
I am aware that after the 1.61 patch Cyberpunk seems to exhibit stronger haloing than it used to for a few players, and I'm still trying to find the root cause. Unfortunately I cannot repro the issue on my system, which behaves normally—with haloing that is sporadic and hardly noticeable, just like Beardo Benjo's in his video here—so I suspect that some specific combination of graphics settings and/or other conflicting mods might be at fault. The matter is still under investigation, and as usual your help with savegames and remote experiments is invaluable.]

Back to the matter at hand: I have been really slaving away days and nights, because I wanted to give you guys at least a preview version by the end of November. I wanted that badly, because I truly love this community! You all have been so supportive, and you deserve the best... But I couldn't make it, and I'm so sorry about that.

Now, the news is not all bad. While my prototype is still in a state of constant flux, with choices and options and behaviors and quirks that change daily or hourly (so nowhere stable enough to release, even as a preview), at least yesterday for the first time I saw the technology actually work on a real game from the current lineup. It was only for a few minutes before it crashed, sure, but it was long enough for me to get a glimpse of what the future holds. Aaaand... it's gonna be good.

There will be no miracles of course. An old GTX 1080 (glorious in its day, but its day was 6 years ago!) is never going to make your game look as crisp as a shining new RTX 4090. As usual AAA VR wants all that your hardware can give, and that goes double for modding. But I spent a lot of time optimizing the hell out of the new technique, and I also expect to roll out incremental improvements to it in the future, as there are still many directions of research and hand-tuning strategies that I haven't been able to explore during this last couple of months. Also, AMD card owners will be out of luck with the first release, because it's going to be NVIDIA only (the mods will still work with AMD GPUs of course, but AER v2 will be accessible only on NVIDIA hardware). I just read that NVIDIA holds 92% of the market, so the situation is even more unbalanced than when we did the HW poll last year, but I'm not abandoning you Team Red guys: it's only a matter of priorities (and me needing to make contact with some developer liaison in AMD because I would need access to certain functions that if I'm not mistaken are not curently available in their public APIs).

Now, there will still be some artifacts, but if manage to stabilize what I first glimpsed yesterday, basically all the ghosting that comes from strifing (no matter whether it's you doing it, or the NPCs) will be a thing of the past. In other words, 90 fps with AER v2 is going to look almost as good as 180 fps does with the current AER. That will allow players with older hardware to have a much better experience in VR, while those with state-of-the-art machines will be able to to push their hardware to even higher resolutions.

I can't give any ETA yet on the new release. Due to the way reprojection works, it really needs to be made adaptive (i.e., the behavior must be decided and changed in real time according to many factors like GPU type and usage, general system load, frame rate, game API, and so on), which takes a lot of effort and development time. But as soon as I can stabilize a prototype that works at least partially, even if it still requires manual adjustments during gameplay, I will upload it for you guys to evaluate and experiment with. Also, sorry that this endeavor has been clogging the pipes for some time: there are a few games which are pushing to come out, but as usual I strive for quality and not quantity, and I feel that especially the new titles which are down the road will benefit immensely from the new AER!

Additional note for Pico 4 users:

Great news! The Pico engineering team has been hard at work, and the jittering in one eye that can be seen in the headset while using my mods should be solved already! They sent us an internal version which Guy Godin has successfully tested on Virtual Desktop, and the official fix will be rolling out soon!!