Repository navigation
v0.72 — Improvements on by default · AMD FSR 4.1 upscaler · PS4 grass in play modes
Install the game on an SSD or NVMe drive for area changes without stutters.
🚀 Improvements Now On by Default
The page pool fix of v0.71 (T38) removed the cause behind several features that used to crash the game or bring back the colour mosaic. Tested on every Time Attack colossus at Maximum textures with PS4 Pro mode, with no crash and no mosaic, so they are now on by default (the update also turns them on for existing installs):
• Fast GPU Readbacks: About 25% more FPS at the Shrine.
• Sharper Textures: The port now measures which mips are on screen, and streams finer mips (High uses mip 1, Maximum uses mip 0; both used mip 2 before).
• Maximum Textures: Texture banks stay sampled for 3 seconds before leaving, so they no longer drop out and stream back in.
• Heap Guard Shortcuts: Restored (they had been off since v0.70 for a crash that came from the same double free).
🎨 New Upscaler: AMD FSR 4.1 (Experimental)
• Uses the official AMD FSR SDK 2.4.0 on Vulkan, with AMD's signed DLLs shipped next to bb-probe.exe (AMD's license is in bin/licenses-amd).
• The SDK picks what your GPU runs: FSR 4.1 (machine learning) on Radeon RX 6000, 7000 and 9000 cards and recent Ryzen AI processors; FSR 3.1.6 on every other GPU (NVIDIA, Intel, older Radeons).
• It uses the same inputs, render sizes and sharpening as DLSS. Select it in the launcher: Upscaler > "AMD FSR 4.1".
• Tested with FSR 3.1.6 on an RTX 2060 SUPER. FSR 4.1 itself still needs testing on a Radeon RX 6000 or newer: reports are welcome!
🌿 Play Modes Keep the Grass as on PS4
• Normal, Pro and Extreme no longer change grass detail, distance, height, weeds, grass shadows or fade; only Custom does.
• The update puts saved grass settings back to "As on PS4".
🔧 Fixes & Optimizations
• Fewer Area Change Stutters: The staging area for GPU uploads now keeps a small reserve (128 MB system memory, 64 MB video memory), made ahead at startup. Before, it was released after a few idle seconds and rebuilt in the middle of the next area change, which once cost 95 ms in a single frame. (SOTC_STAGING_KEEP_MB / SOTC_STAGING_KEEP_VRAM_MB, 0 = as before.)
• Faster Texture Copies: Large texture copies now map their memory pages in one call instead of one page fault per 4 KiB page. At the forest entrance, a 311 MB burst took 6,500 page faults instead of 59,000 for 175 MB before. (SOTC_COPY_PREFETCH=0 turns it off.)
• Integrated GPUs (AMD/Intel): The video memory budget is now at least the memory the driver reports, instead of a 2 GB floor meant for dedicated cards (3.9 GB instead of 2 GB on a Ryzen 7 5700U). (Set it manually with SOTC_IGPU_BUDGET_MB.)
• Launcher: The Advanced page buttons now wrap into two rows ("Clear shader cache" no longer falls off narrow windows); extra variables typed with a leading "=" still apply; "Clear shader cache" warns when the game is still running.
🧪 Diagnostics (Off by Default)
• SOTC_RB_AGE=1: Shows which game instructions wait for GPU readbacks, and which shader wrote the page.
• SOTC_CLEAN_GUEST_READS=1: Plain game reads of bytes the GPU did not write are served from memory without waiting for the GPU (experimental).
• SOTC_FORMAT_LOG=1, SOTC_FORMAT_FALLBACK=1, SOTC_NAN_GUARD=1, SOTC_AMD_AS_NV=1: Tests for the dust flashing on AMD Vega/GCN integrated GPUs. Each shader test switch gets its own shader cache folder, so there is no need to clear the cache.
• Area changes still lose some frames, worst at the forest entrance. The cause was traced this release: the game scans a visibility bitmap that compute shaders rewrite every frame and needs the current frame's bits. A deeper fix is planned.
• Dust from footsteps can flash white on AMD Vega/GCN integrated GPUs (still under investigation).