Sneaky Upgrade: Unofficial patch for Thief 3

[snobel]

With ReShade 4.9.1 there's no more "hint"/"interaction" interference - in DXIW - with the DB reconstruction process! Yeah!

That's good news.

Here's what I mean as "blur", you'll see it really well using 1/4 resolution (1280x720 instead of 2560x144) and then integer-upscaling

Hmm, I can't really pretend that I know what you're talking about. But it's not something I can fix, unless someone can tell me "this D3D API call is wrong in this way", or something very specific like that. I could do the implementation of a fix but I'm fairly clueless with graphics stuff.

[lowenz]

Just take a look to the "jaggies" (aliasing), they're not right (not SHARP, as they must be in a PNG lossless image), like there's some kind of filtering already applied (no AA, no Bloom) or wrong internal resolution.
Always thought (since 2003, LOL ! ) it was a bloom side-effect, turned out to be false!

You can see the issue very well on a Quad HD monitor using 1280x720 and then an integer upscaler (upscaling with no bilinear filtering, just brutal 1 pixel -> 4 pixels ).
There's something smoothing the image in the rasterization pipeline, as you can see in the 1280x720->2560x1440 image. That blurring along the contours would NOT be present otherwise.

[nbohr1more]

Just take a look to the "jaggies" (aliasing), they're not right (not SHARP, as they must be in a PNG lossless image), like there's some kind of filtering already applied (no AA, no Bloom) or wrong internal resolution.
Always thought (since 2003, LOL ! ) it was a bloom side-effect, turned out to be false!

You can see the issue very well on a Quad HD monitor using 1280x720 and then an integer upscaler (upscaling with no bilinear filtering, just brutal 1 pixel -> 4 pixels ).
There's something smoothing the image in the rasterization pipeline, as you can see in the 1280x720->2560x1440 image. That blurring along the contours would NOT be present otherwise.

Yeah, it looks like all 3D views are passed through bilinear filtering.

Maybe this was done to reduce the need for AA since the game was pretty brutal on hardware when it released?

[lowenz]

It's map-dependent (or so it shows itself): Intro (logo) "map" of DEIW, no issue at all -> https://www.mediafire.com/file/ab2e6...3_917.png/file

And in the same way for Thief DS.....it's strange.
Don't know if it's a quirk of the engine or a not.

[lowenz]

Thief DS behaviour:

As you can see the "logo" map has no blurring at all, the Moira map shows.....both!

https://www.mediafire.com/file/vf6zc...ujo/0.png/file
https://www.mediafire.com/file/69b1m...25w/1.png/file

[snobel]

Ok, I see what you mean.

Yeah, it looks like all 3D views are passed through bilinear filtering.
Maybe this was done to reduce the need for AA since the game was pretty brutal on hardware when it released?

Could be - or maybe there's a bug related to the 'reduced viewport size during rotation' feature? (Where I guess applying filtering would make sense?)

[lowenz]

In static stance? :|

Kind of "depth-based filtering" is possible?

[snobel]

In static stance? :|

Well, there would have to be bugs, i.e. filtering always applied. But yeah, probably not.

[Seckino]

It's the raised gamma that doesn't reset when you exit TDS.

Please, use this d3d8to9 wrapper (from the author of ReShade): https://github.com/crosire/d3d8to9/releases/tag/v1.11.0

Tried it but it didn't make any difference.. anyways, I guess its something I have to live with..

One last question; in some missions, framerates drop significantly when looking at certain directions if I use T3 Gold.. my laptop is an old one and probably can't handle the extra rendering load coming from the "no transition" feature.. but maybe, just maybe this d3d8 dll causing it?.. or is there any way to play with T3 Gold without using this no transition feature?

[lowenz]

d3d8 by Crosire performs BETTER than native d3d8 by MS on every 2010-today system with Windows 10.

On Windows 7 you can avoid it (probably), just remove the dll.