Deep Light 0.5.3: steadier frame generation
Today I spent the whole day on one thing: thin fences flickering by the road with frame generation on. It looked like PWM flicker on a cheap LED, and it was worse at high frame generation multipliers.
What I found
- The biggest cause was a ReShade sharpen filter in my own preset. Sharpening before frame generation turns every fence wire into a hard edge that moves a little each frame, and frame generation makes that worse.
- Some object motion vectors were wrong. Deep Light matched parts of the cabin and objects far down the road to the wrong position, so frame generation pushed pixels the wrong way. On the dashboard this showed up as streaks around the gauges.
What changed in 0.5.1
- Object motion vectors stop at 150 metres. Past that, the camera motion is more accurate than matching tiny objects.
- Depth matching for objects is stricter, so a moving object can’t be confused with the scenery behind it.
- The MV jitter term slider in the upscaler settings now goes from -1 to 2 in fine steps instead of three fixed values. 1 is the correct value for most setups; try a little more if thin objects still shimmer.
- The motion vector debug view is five times more sensitive, so small wrong motion is easy to spot.
Tips for thin fences
- Don’t use a ReShade sharpen filter together with frame generation. Use the game’s TAA sharpen at a low value instead.
- 2x or 3x frame generation looks best on fine meshes. At 4x and above, frame generation has to guess too much between real frames.
- Aim for at least 60 fps before frame generation.
Update, 0.5.2 (same evening): 0.5.1 also took the motion away from the steering wheel, so turning it fast smeared it over the gauges. 0.5.2 gives the cabin its object motion vectors back; the stricter depth matching is what keeps the dashboard clean.
Update, 0.5.3 (later that night): with object motion vectors on, the cabin trembled a little while standing still: Deep Light gave its tiny idle sway exact motion, which the upscaler shows as shake. 0.5.3 lets small cabin motion settle like the game’s own TAA and gives full motion only when you look around, so the interior stays calm, gauge text stays sharp and the steering wheel no longer leaves a streak.
The update is available from the download page, and Deep Light will show the update notice in game.