ajaxvs

Dev Notes: Materials, Shaders and Humans

Added 2021-04-27 13:42:01 +0000 UTC

It was a surprise for me to know some humans actually try to play PoE with "Null Materials" feature enabled. I understand it boosts fps a lot but obviously it's a bad idea due to the bright green color (default materials color) set by GGG. It's very unhealthy for your eyes.

So I've found the way to change the color using shader functions. We can also disable other material parameters including sun light reflections - that's an option for "special purposes" mainly. Coming next week with another option (separate "remove environment Audio") and some Ultimatum league optimizations.

Please note every time you change any ".ffx" or ".hlsl" related option, the game rebuilds shaders cache. It takes some time to do it for every single ingame material so you can notice invisible objects & enemies or even render stutters when you see them first time. Yeah, it's all about shaders, not Texture Streaming as a lot of redditors think. Don't worry, it's one-time-only operation - when the game finishes all rebuildings and you launch PoE next time, it won't rebuild cache again. The same situation appears during new leagues start even if you are not using pNE. That's why we can see so many topics about game performance right now. The game updates new shaders and you can get stutters for a while, that's how it works.