Bloodborne PC 1.9.8.5

What's new since 1.9.8.4.

Picture fixes

• Smeared picture fixed (two causes):
  • After a load, the game sometimes rewrote a command buffer it had already handed to the GPU. The picture then stayed broken or smeared until the game was restarted. Every submitted command buffer is now copied first (BB_COPY_GPU_BUFFERS=0 turns this off). The same cause was behind "Unimplemented PM4 type 0" and "PM4 header ... rest of the buffer dropped" in logs.
  • After a start with an empty shader cache, one saved pipeline could be lost for the whole next session. The game's motion blur then kept blurring the last frame, so the picture looked smeared and frozen from the first camera turn on.
• Rainbow tiles on hit enemies and a light line along the top in cutscenes are fixed.
• NaN and infinity: shaders follow the PS4 GPU's rules where Vulkan leaves NaN and infinity open (min/max, clamping, legacy multiplies, compares). A NaN or infinity written to a float render target becomes 0 or its largest value. This targets the black blotches on characters and floors after Vicar Amelia's cutscene with screen-space reflections (BB_GCN_FLOAT=0 and BB_NAN_GUARD=0 turn them off).
• Geometry:
  • A vertex input without data reads as zero instead of an undefined format (an NVIDIA device loss followed).
  • A draw without a pixel shader takes its clip-plane discard from its own vertex shader, also from a preloaded cache.
  • A vertex shader is reused only with the same bindings.
• Stale descriptor tables and vertex inputs, constant engine waits, shared-memory barriers in compute shaders, every mip level in depth copies, and draws without an index buffer are fixed.

Crash fixes

• The copy shader with foreign buffers, switching frame generation off, and a damaged command buffer no longer crash the game.
• Nothing is sent to the GPU while the swapchain is made again (resizing, HDR, frame generation).
• A damaged shader cache record no longer stops the game.
• A sampler taken out of the cache is destroyed only once the GPU is done with it.
• Closing the window ends the game at once (a driver could keep it running in the background).

Upscaling and frame generation

• FSR 4.1.2 uses AMD's SDK 2.4 (Vulkan and DX12).
• FSR 4.1 sharpening works with SDR output.
• Radeon RX 6000 cards now get object motion vectors through a new storage-buffer path; before, they were off on RX 6000 and older. If you see problems on an RX 6000, turn Object motion vectors off.
• DLSS Frame Generation gets its jitter and motion vectors in the units NVIDIA's SDK asks for.
• The motion-vector cache frees its oldest targets first, so its memory stays bounded, and the motion-vector debug view works with upscaling.

Smoother play

• Shaders are built in the background: a place or effect seen for the first time no longer stops the game while its shaders compile; it is not drawn for a moment instead. In our tests, the worst frames with a new shader cache went from 41–236 ms to 10–23 ms. Launcher > New shaders while playing > Wait for each is the old way.
• Fewer frame drops when the game writes to memory the GPU uses: one fault opens a larger window, and a fault where no texture lives skips the texture lock.
• 6 or more CPU threads: the GPU thread runs small copies itself instead of waiting for them (up to 20% more FPS on 6-core CPUs in our tests).
• Frame rate: more of what the game ties to a 30 FPS frame follows the frame rate, and a frame cap holds its number (a cap of 120 held about 118.5).
• The shader cache is built again at the first start, so the first load takes longer.

Game

• Game of the Year dumps with the 1.09 code get the 1.09 patches again (they started without them).
• Patches for the Laurence cutscene hang, a crash when talking to NPCs, and the render command limit.
• US and other retail editions start on older CPUs, and the launcher accepts them.
• Offline Chalice Glyphs: glyph dungeons without a server.

Launcher

• Borderless fullscreen option.
• "Check the game files" no longer calls a clean game damaged.
• Model detail "Highest" is never set automatically, and every new installation gets its automatic settings.
• Save backups are also kept outside the port folder (%APPDATA%\bbport-launcher\save_backups), so a new or reinstalled port folder can restore them.
• The launcher opens where it was closed.
• Signing in keeps asking after "already signed in" instead of staying offline.
• Discord Rich Presence shows hunter stats.
• Korean: text input, PC Settings and launcher texts.
• Report Tool: "FSR 4 is very slow" is said only on Radeons before RX 7000.
• Fault reports name the thread and the driver's frames, and a hang writes thread snapshots to the log.

Seamless co-op

• Desktop shortcut and Add to Steam on the Seamless co-op page: Bloodborne Seamless co-op starts Seamless co-op straight away with your saved settings. The normal game keeps its own shortcut and Steam entry.
• A teammate whose character comes back without a body after a re-join (only the name and HP bar showing) is shown again; the log says when it happens.
• A third player can join a team that already has a guest.
• The Seamless co-op engine has every fix above.

Seamless co-op is BBSC by CLSAMG22 (https://github.com/CLSAMG22/BBSC). The source of this release's bb-probe-seamless (GPL) is bb-probe-seamless-1.9.8.5-source.zip. The source of the bundled fsr4vk provider (GPLv3) is fsr4vk-v0.4.3-amdfix-src.zip.

1.9.8.5 by Medo, with contributions from EricDar12, erezeth, Joaovitor404silva, kanggu12, NathanMBR, rattensuppe, scarletcs2 and YangStark. Thanks to everyone who tested the betas and sent reports.