tangerineturtle1/NX2navi v0.7.1

NX2navi 0.7.1

on GitHub

A performance and fix release for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for Nintendo Switch 2 (game version 1.1.1):
a much higher frame rate in open areas, a single-frame flicker found and fixed, fewer hitches when shaders are first
used, and a texture detail setting for cards with little video memory. No game files are included: the setup builds
the game on your PC from your own dump.

Install or update

• Already have 0.6.0, 0.6.1 or 0.7.0: start the launcher; it offers 0.7.1, updates itself and keeps the game it
  compiled and the shaders it prepared. Only what changed is compiled again.
• Already have 0.5.0: the same, and the game's code 0.5.0 compiled is kept as it was compiled (for any x86-64
  processor); Rebuild the Game in the launcher's home compiles it again for yours.
• New install: download NX2navi-Setup-0.7.1.exe below, put it next to your .nup dump of the game and start
  it. Windows SmartScreen warns on the first start because the setup is not signed: choose More info and Run
  anyway. The launcher checks your game files, builds the game (10 to 25 minutes, once), prepares every shader and
  starts it.

Requirements: Windows 10 or 11; an x86-64 CPU with SSE4.2; 16 GB of RAM; about 30 GB free for the game and 1.5 GB
for the launcher; a GPU with Vulkan 1.3, VK_EXT_external_memory_host and VK_EXT_mesh_shader (current NVIDIA and AMD
cards).

Faster

• Open areas. What the game's shaders write into its memory was copied back from the video card after every GPU
  submission, in case the game's CPU code reads it: 66 MiB a frame in Hyrule Field, more than half of the frame's GPU
  time. It is now copied once and after that only when the CPU touches it. 0.7.0 had this as Experimental FPS boost,
  off, because single frames flickered with it on; the cause is fixed (see below), so it is on by default on Windows
  and the menu row is gone. Standing in Hyrule Field on our test PC (RTX 5090, DLSS Performance) that is about 90 fps
  instead of 65. wb_lazy = 0 in nx2navi.ini brings the old behaviour back; on Linux it stays off unless you set
  wb_lazy = 1.
• Hitches when something is shown for the first time. A draw whose pipeline was not ready made the game wait or
  left the draw out while one thread linked it. Now the rest of the submission is read ahead and the pipelines it
  will need are queued at once, several threads link them, and pipelines whose shader reads a target of its own pass
  are linked the fast way like the others. Walking into Kokiri Forest for the first time, the worst frame went from
  434 ms to 89 ms and the frames over 50 ms from 5 to 3, in one measurement each.

New

• Texture detail (Screen tab; texture_detail in nx2navi.ini): Reduced makes the large surface textures
  without their largest mip level and Low without the two largest, so a loaded area fits the video memory of small
  cards; surfaces seen up close look softer, and interface art, small textures and shadow maps are unchanged.
  Automatic, the default, picks by the video memory Windows grants the game: full detail on cards of 10 GB and more,
  Reduced on 8 GB cards, Low on cards of 6 GB and less. Pick Full to keep every texture as it is on any card.

Fixed

• Single frames with the whole scene lit differently (a flicker, brighter with the shadows off, most often while
  other programs kept the processor busy, and far more often with the FPS boost on). Each frame the game signals the
  renderer once it has written the frame's data; the renderer took its copies of that data just before it looked for
  the signal, so a signal arriving in between let the frame be drawn from copies made too early. A signal now counts
  only if it came before the copies. In captures of every picture shown, runs without the fix had up to 38 flicker
  frames in 1,800 and no run with it had any.
• DLAA now reaches the screen in gameplay: its picture went into a target nothing read any more, so gameplay showed no
  anti-aliasing at all in that mode.
• With a picture of 1080 lines, each DLSS and FSR mode renders the scene at the size its name says (Quality drew
  960x540 instead of 1280x720). That is sharper and costs some frame rate at 1080p; pick a lower mode to get the old
  speed.
• Cards with 6 GB of video memory: once an area's textures had filled the card, the game's vertex, index and
  storage buffers were refused a place in video memory and read over the bus at every draw (5 to 13 fps in two
  reports from RTX 3060 Laptop cards). The buffers now keep their place, up to half of the video memory.
• A crash when a texture slot brought back a texture whose memory the game had already freed.
• The settings menu says "after restart" only while a restart would change something, and the Restart button counts
  the settings that wait.
• Lines in the log could come out of order when several threads logged at once.
• The log now says when NVIDIA's shader cache is too small to hold the prepared shaders. If play stutters at every
  start on an NVIDIA card, set Shader Cache Size to Unlimited in NVIDIA's settings (Graphics, Global Settings).

Known issues

• The first visit to an area after an install can still pause while the graphics driver builds what it has not seen.
• When the system's memory is nearly full, towns re-upload many textures and the frame rate drops; closing other
  programs helps. Machines with 16 GB of RAM can run out of system memory in Hyrule Field.
• Texture detail and the 6 GB fix were measured with the video memory limited on a larger card, not on a 6 GB card.
  Tell us how it runs on yours.
• Integrated AMD GPUs can fail at the title screen (their host memory heap is too small for the game's memory).
• Opening the game's settings menu can crash on some AMD Radeon GPUs.
• Nothing in this release was run on Linux by us.

Thanks

Pull requests in this release came from mooki000, tarballz and TophC7, and the 6 GB fix follows two testers' reports
and measurements from RTX 3060 Laptop cards. Thanks to everyone who sent logs, captures and test reports.

Report problems as issues, with the game's log (logs\nx2navi.log in the game folder) and what you were doing; Export
Save with the bug report box ticked packs the log, your settings and your save into one zip.

NX2navi is an independent, non-commercial fan project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Nintendo. The Legend of
Zelda, Ocarina of Time and Nintendo Switch are trademarks of Nintendo.