SweetFX deemed against the rules...

I think the only way to do that would be to write your own program that modifies the DX state as the game is being rendered, that's much more difficult than what SweetFX is doing. It's an injector in the sense that it's injecting some extra shaders into the end of the graphics pipeline, if it were injecting it into the middle or disabling shaders that Planetside uses it would have to know some pretty intimate details about how the game's rendering pipeline is set up. Obviously it doesn't know those things, because the whole point of it is that you can add it to any game with basically no effort.

If you think back to the beta we had this file materials_3.xml, which basically defined the various stages of the rendering pipeline. Then there was a second file that defined the pipeline itself, telling the game which buffer to use in which step and all that. Back then you could remove FXAA by breaking that definition in materials_3.xml, by just deleting the reference to the shader it uses. So while the game was rendering it would come across an undefined shader and just throw that step out.

Now that stuff is hidden away, and SweetFX has no way of figuring out which step in that process is the FXAA shader in order to turn it off. All it can do is wait for the game to say "Ok, I'm done drawing, swap the buffers now to push the finished frame to the screen" and then jump in saying "Wait, I've got a few extra things to do first".

Like I said, I could be wrong but I just don't see how it would work any other way.

Fact of the matter is: the performance improved for me thanks to SweetFX. I'm not a 1337-PC specialist and i don't know why i get a better performance with it, but it works.

Maybe my GPU works more when i have SweetFX enabled than in normal version thus relsuting in better FPS?

Actually that should be possible by adding the normal SweetFX files to the integrity scan if they are detected. If the files are unmodified, they are permitted, but if they are not, the integrity scan fails. Can't be that hard to implement at least for now.

If your graphics settings are set so low that the GPU is going into power saving mode then that might be it, maybe try setting your graphics settings a bit higher in game? Could also be that the framerate just seems higher, because it's very dependent on what's going on around you. Maybe one minute the warpgate is busier than the next, that could easily shave 10-20 fps off your performance depending on your specs.

It's tough to measure performance impact in a game that's CPU bound because it always depends on what's going on around you at the moment, your best bet is to go somewhere that's completely deserted and then see if your fps changes when you turn SweetFX on. I think it even has a hotkey so you can turn it on and off ingame to see the performance impact right away.

It is a structured FPS not a sandbox FPS like the last one. You are not allowed to do whatever you want.

It sounds like this is becoming an important "issue". I am not playing untill a better solution is presented or fxaa is removable from the game. Sweet gave way too much visually and performancewise for me to play without it. Add this option today.

It's so strange, that I have to play with 3 fps instead of 15 fps with SweetFX with all features disabled.
I hope they will do something this week.

LOL!
I continue to use SweetFX!
I use it for the most of my games incl. BF3 (since a long time) and other hack-prevented-online-games and there is no way to figure if anyone is using it (except checking the MD5 [hash])!

So try it...ban me ...lol



BTW: Don't waste your time to figure if anyone is using it. Better investigate more time to optimize the game and take care of your legit players!

Well, the effects are relatively easy and..."universal." That's why they say that ambient occlusion can significantly impact the performance cause the way they apply it isn't efficient. Same with SMAA, etc. It's still doing it to an unfinished frame. It would explain the performance difference. However it would also negatively affect your FPS if you go for some effects that haven't been properly optimized (i.e. AO) Since I haven't tested it myself...can't confirm a thing, obviously.
Even if the stuff is hidden, you can't hide it from the pipeline. That's what makes any DX injector a beast and is generally not wanted by any game. As I said it's very easy to add markers or w/e to all players, etc. To get models for example is pretty much one code-cave away. You just need to look for what is passed to the pipeline, log it, analyze and then write your own D3D detour and filter it out. Boom, done and that's when Punkbuster comes in and bans your a**.

There are ways to verify that the injector hasn't been tinkered with, but at the same time it's very easy to keep the size same and otherwise leave no traces of modifications made to it. If it's allowed by devs then it will most certainly become a backdoor to private hackers and being injector as it is, it does half the job.

If I'm honest I don't want SweetFX to be allowed, because I feel it can be easily exploited. Then again I haven't dealt with protection in ages, so I have no idea what can be done nowadays by those who protect and those who hack.

Yeah there is - it is in fact incredibly simple to detect injections. So I'll see you tomorrow in one of the "I got bannered" threads eh? heh...

1. Scan the game directory
2. If SweetFX folder exists, and the files d3d9.dll, d3d9.fx, dxgi.dll and dxgi.fx exist, then the person is using SweetFX
3. Take the appropriate action

It's so easy for them to detect that it's not even worth talking about. The question is whether they'll really ban for it, and judging by the post Twist made they will.

Yeah, but they did it for the "artistic" feel, no? I may be wrong, but the way you could get rid of them was by editing client files, not through options. Now they've simply done what had to be done - lock it down. As I'm hearing you could change pretty much everything. Well, that's a problem, because it doesn't take a long to write your own little shader that you can feed to the game which significantly improves w/e you want to improve. That's usually not acceptable outside beta.

Why they didn't add the options? Gotz no clue, wondering myself. Hoping to get them. Everything from bloom to AA to shadow map sizes and what not.

Yeah, like I said you can write your own program to mess with the DX state while the game is rendering and a lot of hacking tools do just that, but that's not what SweetFX does. That is why they have to disallow it though, because even if you only have the finished frame to work with you could do all kinds of things like make nights brighter or make infiltrators more visible, just by using SweetFX's built in post processing shaders.

The easiest way for them to fix this is to just take the shaders that people want to use from SweetFX and integrate them into the game. We shouldn't have to use a third party program to turn off FXAA, changing AA settings in PC games has been standard since AA was invented.

@Copasetic
Absolutely, but let's be honest, they don't need to take anything from SweetFX. They have their own people to make changes to their shaders. SweetFX is just a simple "tool" to let people play with (like artists), without having to do any coding, etc.
I'm actually kinda dumbfounded by it. I see only one reason why they "had" to use it. No doubt you can make these changes in the engine, but that means recompiling. Do that and you need to tell the server to accept it. Do that and all other clients are outdated which means a new patch. So, I guess they wanted to change few things and see it on live (beta) client rather than checking it on the engine. I don't know, it sounds weird to use it in the first place by devs. They have all the tools to do that anyway...

Yeah of course, I'm not saying they should integrate SweetFX into the game, just that they should change or add their own shaders to match what people want. For example, if people are using SweetFX to undo FXAA then they should add an option to turn off FXAA. Or add a sharpness slider to the graphics settings that just replicates what the LumaSharpen shader does in SweetFX. Or whatever else people are using SweetFX to do, so long as it's not something that impacts gameplay (like making cloakers more visible).

Neeeek...wrong!
My SweetFX is not in the gamefolder! It replaces my regular DX files and the planetside2 process has no access to search in this folder for other files and folders.

But i also hope i don't need to use SweetFX sometime for Planetside2.

Yep. We'll see if they allow the use of SweetFX or implement proper AA support and few other options. For the moment...time to sit back, relax and wait for God knows how long.

In that case it sounds like you've definitely outsmarted them. Who knew it would be so easy to hide modified files from the game?

Please don't be upset if they decide to ban people for this, I tried to warn you. But here's hoping it doesn't come to that.

I wouldn't exactly recommend replacing the system d3d9.dll with the sweetfx one as it really isn't supposed to be used like that and might cause unexpected trouble. Also telling your brilliant secret strategy on the forum isn't usually the best idea.

Eh, didn't do anything for me anyway.