Broken shadows on Nier Replicant again

[stanhoff]

Quick summary

Sequel thread to #11350, same graphical issue.

Details

In the previous thread, the weird shadows were only seen on Vulkan. I'm experiencing the issue on Vulkan and OpenGL, regardless of Shader Quality setting or different Resolution Scale Thresholds.

I experience the bug in the exact same way the first thread specifies:

• Boot NieR Replicant with default settings and Write Color Buffers
• Select New Game
• Don't skip the initial cutscene, wait around 1 minute for it to get to the frame displayed below
  

The most recent build wasn't taking an RSX capture during this cutscene, which was also verified by discord user Jonathan44062 in the help channel. The log and RSX capture were taken on build rpcs3-v0.0.29-15717-c4113008_win64, but the issue still persists on the most recent build.

Attach a log file

Log file:
RPCS3.log.gz

Attach capture files for visual issues

RSX Capture:
BLJM60223_20231205013419_capture.zip

System configuration

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 2600X Six-Core Processor
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660, driver version 546.29

Other details

No response

[kd-11]

This really isn't actionable. It stems from the differences in arithmetic behavior between modern NVIDIA cards and RSX. Consequently this doesn't happen on AMD GPUs because the math is a little different there.
Now, of course we could throw away the rasterizer and write something that renders in software, but that is a very long-term academic thing that may never come to fruition. I don't think the visual impact is prevalent enough to warrant a workaround either as its basically a minor artifact on one frame.
That said, there are some other games that are much worse affected by the precision issues and will only be resolved fully once a software renderer is in place. I do have plans for a partial software mode though, where we emulate the depth buffer, but that is a long way off and may likely end up unusable due to poor performance.

[stanhoff]

Gotcha! Yeah I totally agree that it's minor. I do want to note that the artifacts appear in the rendered cutscenes later on as well. I didn't take any logs or RSX captures, but if you're familiar with Nier I'm referring to the cutscenes when you first meet grimiore weiss, as well as kaine. I suspect it'll probably show up in every rendered cutscene, but even so it's minor and not a game breaking priority. Thank you for the reply!