RELEASE NOTES

Features

Rendering

• FidelityFX Stochastic Screen Space Reflections (SSSR)
• FidelityFX Single-Pass Downsampler (SPD)
• FidelityFX Denoiser (DNSR)
• Motion Vectors
• Scene Render Visualization Modes
  • Lit
  • Depth
  • Normals
  • Roughness
  • Metallic
  • AO
  • Motion Vectors
  • Albedo

Engine

• Graceful exit with error reporting upon device lost instead of crashing
• Extended EngineSettings.ini: added EnvironmentMapResolution, Reflections options
• Improved shader compilation
  • PIX can now debug SM6 shaders
  • Extended support for DXC compiler flags
  • Release/Debug shaders are now separately cached
• Added more built-in materials: Checkerboard_Glossy, Checkerboard_Rough, Checkerboard_Metallic, MetallicBlack_VerySmooth

Scenes

• Default scene: assigned PBR material to the ground, swapped cylinder with the boombox model, load an environment map
• Stress Test scene: crank up object count, add randomized materials with compile-time toggles

Bug Fixes

• Fixed RenderDoc not being able to attach / device lost upon launch
• Fixed build script failing with file paths with spaces in them
• Fixed shader include path not resolving correctly
• Fixed assertion when the window is minimized

RELEASE NOTES

Features

Renderer

• FidelityFX Super Resolution 1.0 integrated with minimal support
  • EASU (Upscaling) & RCAS (Sharpening) passes with sharpness slider, presets and custom upscaling ratio between [0.5, 1.0]
  • TAA, MipBias & HDR are NOT supported with this release and will be added at a later date

Engine

• Added UI using Dear ImGui
  • Profiler, Graphics Options, Debug Panel and Scene Editor windows with various controls
• Updated camera controller and mouse capture behavior
  • Left Click : Orbit Camera
  • Right Click : 'FPS' Camera
  • Mouse is now only captured when right or left click is held to operate the camera, and will stay uncaptured while interacting with the UI
• Removed pipelined Update+Render threads, merged them into a single Simulation thread
  • This change is added to support the ImGui integration as ImGui didn't provide a deferred context without global state, which made the engine architecture incompatible with ImGui by resulting in a race condition when the update thread is writing into the global context that the render thread is reading to draw
  • A preprocessor define VQENGINE_MT_PIPELINED_UPDATE_AND_RENDER_THREADS was added to toggle between the two architectures, although the separate update+render threads disable UI rendering
• Added frame stat collection

Bug Fixes

• Fixed the DownloadAssets.bat script after the texture website updated its URL for the assets
• VSync can sometimes add some frame delay

RELEASE NOTES

AMD FidelityFX CACAO

Features

Renderer

• DXC / SM6.0 support
• Ambient Occlusion
  • AMD FidelityFX - Combined Adaptive Compute Ambient Occlusion (CACAO)

Engine

• Multi-threaded command recording
• Bounding Boxes & Multi-threaded view frustum culling
• Add RGP & PIX markers
• Skip loading materials if they're not used in the scene
• Add image downsizing for Environment maps

Bug Fixes

• Black line at the bottom of the screen when CAS is enabled

Release Notes

Features

• Forward Renderer w/ Lighting System
  • Spot Lights (5x w/ shadows)
  • Point Lights (5x w/ shadows)
  • Directional Light (1x w/ shadows)
  • PCF Shadows for all lights
• UE4's PBR Model Pipeline
  • BRDF
    • NDF : Trowbridge-Reitz GGX
    • G : Smith
    • F : Fresnel_Schlick / Fresnel_Gaussian
  • Metallic / Roughness Maps
  • Emissive Maps
  • Built-in PBR Materials w/ textures from cgbookcase
• Environment maps
  • Real-time Image-based lighting
  • Cubemap convolutions for pre-filtered diffuse & irradiance maps
• Post Processing
  • Added AMD's FidelityFX Contrast Adaptive Sharpening (CAS)

Known Issues

• Repeatedly changing scenes crashes due to the static heaps
• Alt+Enter might crash on some laptops
• VSync can sometimes add some frame delay
• Black bar at the bottom few pixels when CAS is switched on

Controls

Key
WASD+EQ	Camera movement
Page Up/Down	Change Environment Map
1-4	Change scenes 1 - Default Scene 2 - Sponza 3 - Geometry Test Scene 4 - Stress Test Scene
Shift+R	Reload level
C	Change scene camera
V	Toggle VSync
M	Toggle MSAA
B	Toggle FidelityFX-CAS
Alt+Enter	Toggle Fullscreen
Esc	Release mouse

See README.md for details.

Release Notes

Features

• XML Scene/Level files & Scene loading
• VQE is now DPI-aware and will scale properly on high DPI displays
• PIX GPU Markers
• Multithreaded Model loading with assimp
  • .glTF
  • .obj

Bug Fixes

• App sometimes hangs on exit

Known Issues

• Repeatedly changing scenes crashes due to the static heaps
• Alt+Enter might crash on some laptops
• VSync can sometimes add some frame delay

Release Notes

Features

• HDR Display support w/ FP16 Swapchain & HDR10 Static Metadata
• HDR Environment Maps using HDRI Haven
• PostProcess: Reinhard Tonemapping & Gamma Correction
• MSAA & VSync support

Bug Fixes

• Mouse isn't captured when debug window is not initialized
• Window focus capturing mouse causes inconsistent behavior

Known Issues

• Alt+Enter might crash on some laptops

Release Notes

Features

• Keyboard/Mouse input handling
• First-Person Shooter Camera Controller
  • Mouse Input using Raw input
• Improved Window behavior for Resizing, Alt+Tab & Alt+Enter

Fixed Issues

• Alt+F4 hits assertion on exit
• Exclusive Fullscreen startup crashes
• Minimizing window hits assertion

Known Issues

• Mouse isn't captured when debug window is not initialized

Release Notes

Features

• Textures & Constant buffers
• Transformation pipeline (Model-View-Projection)
• Generic Geometry generator for various Vertex/Index Buffer types
• Loading Screen Rendering: 1 second 'loading' simulation by rendering a fullscreen triangle
• New Shaders
  • Fullscreen triangle: requires only index buffer with values {0, 1, 2}
  • Hello-Cube: supports textures + transformation matrix

Utilities

• Added Camera, Transform & Quaternion classes
• Added Timer class
• Added Image class to load common image formats, including HDR
  • Supported Image formats: .png, .jpg, .hdr, etc.

Bug Fixes

• Memory leak on Window events (resize + fullscreen)

Known Issues

• Alt+F4 hits assertion on exit
• Exclusive Fullscreen startup crashes
• Minimizing window hits assertion

Release Notes

First version release of the modern VQEngine: v0.1.0 - Hello Triangle!

Features

Multi-threading

• 3 Independent threads
  • Main Thread : Handles Windows events and buffers the events for consumption in other threads, ensuring seamless application behavior
  • Update Thread : Simulates scene, prepares data for the Render Thread, doesn't run ahead more frames than the back buffer has.
  • Render Thread: Picks up scene data from the Update Thread and issues draw commands
• Thread Pools as worker threads for the Update and Render thread for parallelizing workloads, scaled by available threads on the system.

DXGI Window Management & D3D12 Rendering

• 3 Display Modes supported
  • Windowed
  • Borderless Fullscreen
  • Exclusive Fullscreen
• Multiple windows supported on multiple monitors
• Alt+Enter Fullscreen transitions for both Borderless & Exclusive modes
• Hello World Triangle rendering in D3D12 with synchronized Update & Render threads

Utilities

• Logging to File and a separate Console window
• Command-line parameters
• Configurable settings through EngineSettings.ini file in Data/ folder next to the executable
  • Set resolution
  • Set preferred monitor
  • Set fullscreen window
  • Set Debug window properties (visible, resolution, fullscreen, preferred monitor)

Automated Build & Testing

• Build/PackageEngine.bat to sync dependencies, generate project files, build in release mode and package the binaries for distribution
• Build/GenerateProjectFiles.bat to sync dependencies and generate project files
• Scripts/TestVQE.bat to test run VQE.exe for a specified number of frames (1000 default)

Known Issues

• Memory leak on Window events (resize + fullscreen). This'll be fixed on v0.2.0.