Not sure if many know of this injector but it's quite promising and pretty powerful. I have been messing with it since last night really and am still trying to find something that fits all times of day in rF2. The injector itself allows you to adjust stuff like exposure, bloom, HDR and so on. I think it's quite new i only found it yesterday on Guru. My problem with rF2 right now with lighting is the dusk and dawn and it lacks any punch IMO. Normal midday looks great IMO, possibly better than iRacings which i still consider the best right now in spite of stuff like the Madness engine from SMS. I also find rF2 quite pale sometimes and the colour pallete a little flat. rF2 seems to have an almost fog like effect alot of the time, it's weird to explain, so i won't but it lacks a little punch. I like a little more exposure and some richer colours. Below is my settings so far. I have adjusted sharpness slightly, exposure and bloom. Digital Vibrance is interesting but right now i can not find a decent setting for it so have left it off. It seems to go a little too far with saturation for me. So instead i used the exposure to get some richer colours as well as some more punchy looking overall lighting. The biggest thing for me as i said is dusk and dawn in rF2 and the sun rising etc on the horizon for me always seemed way to flat and uninspiring. Some shots below of some sunrise shots at Putnam. Again these are my first settings but already i just prefer the more punchy look. My settings are fairly subtle but i think it looks better. You can go crazy with this tool though, it's really powerful. But i feel on the whole rF2's lighting is already pretty good. It's just the shaders, models and so on that are lacking right now. If you don't like them then adjust to your taste, it's a great tool with some cool features. Like i say, it's new to me, so it's all a learning process. But try it and see what you guys think, play around with times of day within rF2 with enabled and disabled. You can see it change in real time by the press of a button. I will now add a guide below on how to use the tool and how to use NV inspector alongside it for AA as the inbuilt SMAA does not seem to work for me with rF2. I find it shows a little more subtle detail. My settings SweetFX OFF SweetFX ON SweetFX ON SweetFX OFF More to follow
Ok how to use this injector and still use AA. Maybe the SMAA built into the injector works with rF2 but as said i have literally been playing with this one day. Maybe in the future i will work it. First thing first to use these shaders you will need to disable the in game AA if you are using rFactors. The shaders don't seem to work with the in game AA applied. Below is my settings that you guys can try. http://www.mediafire.com/?tc658xx5qjpu3p2 Unrar all the package into your rF2 root folder and then move the d3d9.ll file into the core folder and leave all the rest where you unpacked them into the root folder. The shaders are now applied by default when you start the game. You should notice a subtle difference in the menu and when loading a track, at about 90% you will see the full suite of shaders enable, you will know this by the exposure and colours boosting on the loading screen. In game you can mess around with enabling and disabling the shaders by using the pause/break button on your keyboard. So go out and run some laps, do a few laps and then try disabling it and you will see the difference. Again i have had one night with these so without doubt it's not going to look right in all situations but it has on the most part for me so far. I think bloom can be reduced still. If you want to adjust levels yourself, it's just a simple case of going into rF2 root folder where you put all the files earlier. And opening up the " SweetFX settings txt " file and adjusting the stuff to your taste. Go careful because you can literally go insane with this tool. Adjust one thing at a time and go in game and see if it's to your liking. Just do one at a time until you learn the program - Obviously people with experience will know what they are doing. Next applying AA alongside SweetFX via NV Inspector
Obviously as far as i know NV Inspector can not be used with AMD hardware, i'm not sure, so i do not know what to suggest with applying AA with AMD. But i'm sure forcing AA via the CCC should work. Should also say that you can expect a hit on performance using these. But if you are clever enough with setting in game you should be fine. I'm running maxed still on a single GTX570 using these shaders. I'm running the settings below via Inspector, it's easier for me just to post a screen and you just copy over the stuff. Anything above my GTX570 you can run 8xQ MS as oppossed to my 2xMS and then use 8xSGSSAA. You can use this fine on a GTX570. You could possibly get away with 4xMS on a GTX570, i will test some more. Optimal PQ AA settings i found was using the 8xSGSSAA and 4xS combined and obviously above, but you will need a real beefy rig to run this with decent fps. And it also creates the bubble bug with some combos using the combined so i would stick to 8xQ AA if you have the rig to do so. Be good to get a sticky for this as i'm sure we can improve this quite a bit with time. Still new to me. OFF ON
4xMS is fine on my rig after testing. One thing i have noticed is all the tintops suffer worse from over exposure with these injectors and with mid day settings. If you switch to bonnet it's fine. This is a problem with default rF2 though as far as i'm aware and the cockpits are always brighter for some reason. I had only tested with the F2 and Brabham previously. Later in the day is not so bad or early morning, so test these with the open wheelers first so you can the effect proper. Not sure how to get around the cockpit brightness of the tintops
Hi Foni! OK the pics with "sweet FX" on are brighter and seem to have more dynamics in lighting. The thing is the following: as I see and was mentioned before (by Tosh for example) the actual engine have already included all these effects and possibilitys! So I dont think that such a injector is necessary! Its a matter of calibrating these effects in the engine! What I find funny: ALmost everyone was moaning in the past that the colours where to cartoonish and oversaturated, where I agreed in. Now the colours are a little sober and you want more colors!!! LOLOL!! What have to be done in the final product is the possibility to adjust all lightning and color to ones liking! Not more and not less. Greets Pete
This would be great! About it's all within the engine well maybe so but not right now. At the moment any time of the day has this misty/foggy look to the lighting which i don't like. It can be seen in all the pics here. Colours are good here i think, they look rich but not overpowering, in fact not alot different to default. The main aim for me is to lift this misty stuff until ISI do something
User HDR profiles will be much better for image realism than any kind of injected post-FX. The problem with such plugins is that they work on allready post processed and tone mapped 32-bit image from game - the one prepared for displaying it on monitor. Compare any pair of examples posted above and note more pronounced color banding on the sky with SweetFX on - that's the result of working on final image. Built-in postprocessing in games works on 64-bit images. During process of tone mapping this image is converted to final 32-bit image ready to display on monitor. Changing brightness / contrast using external plugin that works on this final image is actually worse option (quality-wise) than simply changing brightness / contrast of your display device Not only it affects image, but also eats up some GPU. If you're into eye-candy postprocessing effect offered by such plugins and don't mind some color precision loss, then of course go ahead. For me it's rather "user HDR profiles or bust"
Yes banding is quite apparent, i noticed it myself and also noticed an option within SweetFX to limit the banding because of what the Injector does. Whether this works or not i don't know as it's not something i have tried yet. Your right of course user profiles will always be better. Tbh i would just be happy with ISI applying a little more exposure to the lighting and also getting rid of this misty feel the sim has under all conditions, it's a really odd distorted look and flat. You could aswell adjust your monitor but then it messes up other games which in general are fine.
Very similar to FXAA Tools suite, which will enable us to not only using FXAA, but also applying lots of post processing effect. Here's my old video about my FXAA test. I stop using FXAA Tools when rF2 includes HDR and FXAA. I'm still using it for rF1 though.
Have you disable in-game Antialias? Where did you extract files? You need to extract all files in main rFactor folder, and only d3d9.dll in the "Core" folder. Then start RF Launcher, go to Configure Sim and disable antialias settings. Then start the game. If you want antialias you can configure it with SweetFX or in your Catalyst or nVidia panel. I set my antialias through Catalyst and turned it off in SweetFX. I'm using SFX just for some color corrections and a bit sharpening.
Cheers, got it working now. Some screenshots of my config (Will tweak more but somewhat satisfied for now.) : SweetFX off: View attachment 6234 SweetFX on: View attachment 6235 SweetFX off: View attachment 6236 SweetFX on: View attachment 6237 SweetFX off: View attachment 6238 SweetFX on: View attachment 6239 SweetFX off: View attachment 6240 SweetFX on: View attachment 6241 edit: My SweetFX settings if anyone wants them: http://www.mediafire.com/?c0ggagu1mxmv6l3
