🎮 COGBox 0.6.1: up to 77% faster, no more Vulkan shader freezes

Join the COGBox Discord to find people to play with, organise matches and get help.

Quick start: download COGBox-0.6.1.zip, right-click it > Extract All... to a folder of its own (for example
C:\Games\COGBox), start CogBox.exe, and add your game copy and its title update.

COGBox is on RecompLauncher, the free home for recompiled PC games. Get it straight from its developer:
https://recomplauncher.com/game/cogbox

Launcher

• Add your game without drag and drop. Every player now has Choose a file..., Choose a folder... and
  Paste a path on the main screen and on each game's About tab - for the Steam Deck's Game Mode and the Linux
  desktops where dragging onto a Proton window doesn't work. Under Linux, Paste a Linux path and Look for my
  games are still there.
• Import saves... (a game's About tab): your own saves of that game from Xenia (its content folder) or from an
  Xbox 360 (the Content folder copied from the console's USB stick or hard drive), with the profile's game progress.
  Whatever it replaces is moved to a _saves-before-import-... folder in the game's saves folder, never deleted; if
  anything can't be put in place, nothing is changed.
• COGBox says when it's in the wrong place: started from inside its zip or from a folder it can't write to (such as
  Program Files), it explains on start-up where to move it (it already warned about OneDrive / Dropbox folders).
• A save dropped onto COGBox is imported: an Xbox 360 save or profile package (one file) dragged onto the window (or
  onto a game's page) goes through Import saves instead of "This package isn't a title update or downloadable content".
• Title updates are found after moving COGBox (Discord): a COGBox folder set up on one PC and copied to another
  (a Steam Deck, say) saw the games and DLC but not the title updates, which it looked for at the first PC's path.
• COGBox says when drag and drop can't work: run as administrator, Windows doesn't let Explorer drop files onto
  it; it now says so on start-up and points to Choose a file... / Choose a folder....
• Gears 1 has Insane from the start too (GitHub #284): the game part has worked since 0.5.0, but the launcher still
  hid the option for Gears 1. It's now offered like in the other three games (Gameplay > Original unlock rules off).
• The tested versions are shown: each game's About tab and the title-update notice name the game and title-update
  versions COGBox is made for, and how many other copies players have reported working. The README on GitHub lists them too.
• Japanese discs: the Japanese Gears of War 2 and Gears of War: Judgment discs now count as tested (no "untested version" notice), and the Japanese Gears 2 disc is recognised as Gears 2 when you drop it on COGBox.

Vulkan

• Vulkan's first-play shader freezes are gone. Playing a chapter for the very first time (no shaders built yet,
  as for every new player), Vulkan froze again and again while the graphics driver built new shaders: saving the
  shader cache, every ~15 seconds, had to wait for that work and stopped the game until it was done. It now saves in
  the background. Measured on an RTX 3080 Ti, true first run, during play:

  Game	0.6.0	0.6.1
  Gears 3	6 freezes, longest 1.4 s	0 freezes, longest frame 0.12 s
  Gears 1	4 freezes, longest 0.5 s	0 freezes, longest frame 0.02 s
  Gears 2	2 freezes	0 freezes
  Judgment	none	none

  The fix is in the renderer all four games share.

• Still being tested (off by default): building a chapter's shaders behind its loading screen before play starts, a
  background thread for new shaders, and Vulkan pipeline libraries (the method DXVK uses).

Judgment

• Judgment finally looks like it does on the Xbox 360. The game measures how bright each scene is and sets its exposure from that, and that measurement never reached it, so every scene came out about twice as bright as on the Xbox 360 (washed-out skies, grey shadows). It now does, at no cost in frame rate. Checked against Xbox 360 footage. GitHub #185, #250.
• The launcher's Brightness setting for Judgment is gone: it only existed to hide this, and could not bring back the washed-out highlights. A saved Brightness value is ignored.

Performance

• Up to 77% faster. Real 0.6.0 release against 0.6.1, same PC (RTX 3080 Ti), 2560x1440, uncapped, vsync off:

  Game	DirectX 12	Vulkan (experimental)
  Judgment	78 to 105 fps (+34%)	47 to 84 fps (+77%)
  Gears 2	148 to 174 fps (+17%)	123 to 169 fps (+38%)
  Gears 3	93 to 101 fps (+8%)	104 to 97 fps (-7%)
  Gears 1	about the same	123 to 117 fps (-5%)

• Vulkan is much faster once a game has loaded (Windows; still experimental). Vulkan now skips everything the camera can't see ("real occlusion") in Gears 2, Gears 3 and Judgment, as DirectX 12 already did (Gears 1 keeps it off on both). Not yet under Proton / Wine, where real occlusion still has to be tested.

• Vulkan, for testers: a shader optimiser and an on-disk store for converted shaders are in this version but switched OFF (--gow2_renderer_vulkan_spirv_optimise=true and --gow2_renderer_vulkan_spirv_store=true in extra-args.txt). They halve the graphics driver's work per new shader pair (364 to 195 ms on an RTX 3080 Ti) and later start-up waits, but as wired today they make the first start much longer, so they stay off until Vulkan shaders are prepared in the background.

• If a first play still stutters on your PC (slower processors and graphics cards build shaders more slowly), "Prepare all shaders now" on a game's Graphics tab does all of that work up front.

• The graphics card no longer waits for the whole frame. It now starts on each frame while the rest of it is still being prepared, instead of sitting idle until everything is ready. No setting to change. (--gow2_renderer_submit_draws=0 in extra-args.txt turns the early start off if it ever causes a problem.)

• Smoother sound and frame pacing: a stall when the sound output device is checked is gone, and several small renderer costs were removed.

HDR (by legoliamneeson)

• Native HDR in Gears 2 and Gears 3: the picture is carried in high dynamic range from the game's own lighting to the screen, instead of being expanded from the standard picture. Gears 1 and Judgment keep the HDR of 0.6.0. --gow2_hdr_native=false goes back to it in every game. GitHub #267.

Online play (by Flippage)

• Smoother online and System Link matches in Gears 2, 3 and Judgment: the games' 2008 Xbox Live network limits (7000 bytes a second per player, 45 updates a second from the host) are raised to 100,000 bytes a second and 60 updates. In testing, the old limit held the game back for about 40% of a round. A full lobby's host may now upload up to about 7 Mbit/s in the busiest moments.
• Open matches (an idea from Shagg): the Social tab and the in-game Social menu list the public matches in Gears 2, Gears 3 and Judgment that have real players in them, such as "KOTH · 6/10 · Gears 3 · US · In progress", with a Join button. Join in progress puts you in a bot's place. Only matches are listed, never parties, and no names are shown. Gears 1 isn't included (it has no join in progress).
• Online privacy: the games' lobby search no longer shows join codes, and a hosted lobby no longer carries your PC's local network address. The search now signs in, so the server can require it later (see PRIVACY.md).
• Matchmaking finds the mode you picked: searching one playlist (for example Social Guardian) could put you into another mode's lobby (Horde). Searches now only return lobbies of the playlist you chose.
• Gears 2 hosting after a quit: COGBox's 30-minute lift of the game's quit penalty (with its popup) never ran in Gears 2, so a player with a quit could not host versus at all. It works now.
• Show ping (Display tab): your ping to the host of the online match or party, in the FPS bar, or in a bar of its own when the FPS counter is off. When you host, it shows the worst ping among your players.

Fixes

• DirectX 12 on graphics cards with Shader Model 6.5: COGBox no longer refuses to start with "Shader Model 6.6 is not available"; it runs with Shader Model 6.5 shaders instead (cards and drivers that have 6.6 are unchanged).
• Gears 3: the path choice follows its prompts with a mouse again - the left mouse button (fire) had picked the right-hand path; the swap is on by default again (by KiltedKernel).
• Gears 3: a crash with a "disc read error" when a level or a Horde match starts should be gone (the game was told that parts of the disc had failed a check that has no meaning here). GitHub #271.
• Mods added from a .zip unpack into the mod's own folder.
• The updater refuses oversized downloads and duplicate files in an update.
• Safer handling when the graphics device is lost while the game waits for it.

Known issue

• Gears 3 and Gears 1 on Vulkan run a few percent below 0.6.0's frame rate; DirectX 12 is the same or faster in every game.
• Gears 3: DLC sometimes missing at the main menu (GitHub #283). With several DLC packages the game can open only the
  first one at start-up. Workaround: at the main menu open Options > Storage Location and pick the storage (the game
  checks the DLC again), or go back to the main menu once after loading in. Keeping only the DLC you use also helps.