Sorting out NVIDIA drivers crashes

Sadly, there is still one problem that makes me concerned about releasing final 0.3: sometimes, NVIDIA drivers seem to crash. I’m not sure what could be the culprit, and so far, I couldn’t recreate the issue locally, but I have a suspect — the whole new shaders cache purging mechanism I introduced earlier when working on 0.3 previews. It was meant to prevent AC from taking forever to initialize DirectX 11. It was a particularly aggressive solution, and I believe it was causing performance hiccups and CPU spikes on updates (that’s where it would purge caches), so now it’s disabled by default. But also, the implementation is a lot more chill now, so even if re-enabled, it should be less crashy.

Another concerning change was the whole car extrapolation thing. I have no idea why for some users, it would introduce jitter in VR, but the option is back. Plus, a new option in VR tweaks (disabled by default) for timing the game with the headset. I’m not sure if it’d help, but it might improve smoothness in some cases.

Thanks to all the reports, I also noticed and fixed a few other problems. Shadows should be less jittery and a bit more detailed, smoke collides with the car again, and behaves a lot cleaner, cooldown lap got a lot of fixes and a time limit option, fade out after the race is finished is working again, “fuPBR” shaders are compatible with VAO, surface audio shouldn’t stutter anymore, upscalers shouldn’t have as much ghosting with car shadows, OpenVR now uses background image only if it’s the original SteamVR backend, to prevent issues with OpenComposite and such, amount of rain on windscreens is tuned, splashes land on windscreens again, marbles particle system is back, and more. Here is the full list of changes, and here is the new build.

And, of course, OpenXR should be compatible with the OpenXR Toolkit now. Inverted eye tracking has also been fixed, and it should work without post-processing as well now.

My apologies for all the delays. If NVIDIA crashes stop now, that should be the final pre-0.3. And if you still experience those crashes, please DM me.