RealRTCW XR Early Access 0.2.0 (performance update)

Hello Patrons

Firstly, my apologies, I promised a RealRTCW XR update "imminently" some time ago, however a combination of the Quest 3 Release and technical issues subsequently got in the way and so this has taken way longer than I intended. However I do hope that this belated release does actually bring some good news..

With the update I had planned to drop I admit I had rather ignored the elephant in the room.. the performance, which even running on a high spec PC seemed to not be able to deliver enough frames to escape triggering ASW and so it would then stick to 45fps (assuming you were playing at 90hz). I spent far too long chasing dead ends and going down rabbit holes trying to figure it out, to the point where I had pretty much decided to ship a double build, containing RealRTCW and ioRTCW (which doesn't have quite the same performance problem).

Anyway, with some excellent analysis by BaggyG using Nvidia Nsight, it became apparent that the bottleneck was the CPU. and we all know what to do when the CPU is the problem... well, maybe we all don't, however you may remember back to when RazeXR had a performance issue and adding MultiView to that gave it a rather dramatic speed boost. MultiView is the technique whereby instead of individually processing and rendering two views for each frame, we render one but with the 3D separation data passed to the GPU so it can do all the hardwork. Generally this means CPU intensive tasks only happen once, instead of twice. We've applied the same approach here and I think you'll all agree the performance increase is impressive.

It's not without some issues at the moment, which I will cover shortly, but hopefully those can be ironed out (or worst-case, skirted around) and it should now be playable at 90hz without dropping frames and ASW kicking in. For the record, this is now port #4 that has had MultiView added: Doom3Quest, Quake3Quest, RazeXR and RealRTCWXR. 

Some of the improvements you can find in this build:

• The aforementioned MultiView implementation
• Grenades / Grenade-type weapons are now properly throwable
• More of the weapons are better aligned
• A much better recoil system when firing one handed - some of the bigger guns are a bit wild and need to be two handed to shoot properly

I'm sure you're itching to fire it up and see how much smoother it feels, so I'll list the known issues and things you MUST do, and then let you get on with downloading and trying it:

• Sky box is rendered with bad stereo (messes with your head)
• There's a 180 degree arc in which fog will appear/disappear and change intensity, the whole scene will go grey:  I have no idea how this has appeared and if anyone finds the offending shader / effect it'll be most appreciated!!
• I have found some old saves don't work, they load up but I get constant "connection interrupted" messages, haven't investigated this yet and am not sure if it affects news saves as well (feedback appreciated)
• The desktop screen mirror is completely screwed (as is the view in the menu)
• HDR is disabled for the time being - it may or may not make it back

ONE THING YOU MUST DO IS THE FOLLOWING

Go into the configuration file:

C:\Users\{username}\Documents\RealRTCW 4.0\main\realrtcwconfig.cfg

and find and change r_hdr to the following:

seta r_hdr "0"

Installation instructions are the same as before:

Here's a link to the previous patreon post with all the details on, rather than rewriting them all here again:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/realrtcw-xr-0-1-89423336 

So, there's not a lot more to say, take it for a spin, compare it to the previous build, and see what you think. We're leaving the download to the previous release up on the downloads page, should performance have been okay for you and you don't want these new issues. As ever we'll be making more improvements and have some fun things planned on the road to release. 

Thanks again for your support, appreciated as always!

- DrBeef / Team Beef