DefectiveByDesign

Give us citation for that. There was optimizations done in the recent GZDoom versions increasing performance.  Anyone who runs GZ and LZ can see the compressed texture mode has been removed, you mentioned GZ's texture scaling tanks FPS, and this highlights how bad it was to remove compressed texture support. The performance issue only affects lower end hardware, not high end. I suspect Vulkan is to blame. GZDoom will stutter and tank FPS in situations that LZDoom shrugs off. It doesn't even make sense for some situations. FPS drops to single digits by standing in a specific location but not in another, the game stutters for no reason, and FPS is much lower. Dynamic lighting also has a much bigger performance hit in GZDoom for whatever reason. You aren't going to notice it unless you test on low end hardware. Try some cards that predate Vulkan like Kepler or Maxwell, but it probably hits mobile systems the worst, being they have much lower specs. The most common complaint I've seen is stuttering, while APUs are outright unplayable in GZ, unless you disable 90% of the graphics, and it still only gets ~45 FPS, compared to full performance in LZDoom. Due to this nature, people who aren't affected don't care. There is no incentive for them to care. Meanwhile, this hurts indie developers like the Hedon team, who is not updating GZDoom, although there may be side issues like breaking compatibility, which seems to be a problem with GZ in general. Mods like Doom Slayer Chronicles are only playable using specific older versions of GZ for example. This isn't a good path for updates, as it is mirroring the old school linux vs windows issues, where old linux games would get completely broken from OS updates, and it took steam to start addressing it. This isn't a sustainable update model. Compatibility and performance need more focus.

Yeah, "voxels" have a performance hit, so that explains a lot. They haven't been officially supported since 3dfx era hardware and games, and the tech hasn't gone anywhere since. I doubt true voxels perform worse than converted voxels, it's more likely that the gzdoom guys don't know how to implement it, being a dead technology. The most modern use of voxels would be voxel based global illumination for raytracing, while actual voxel engines seem to be dead. That said, Ken Silverman has made some demos and released source code for voxels, but I don't think anyone has done anything with it, other than voxelstein.

Until and if they even consider it, it's possible to edit the PB mod to disable conflicting decoration objects. Other than the increased monster variety, I'm not a fan of this mod. They add too many redundant and useless weapons, balancing is rather poor, and many replaced decoration graphics like the pickups look terrible. They also don't use voxels, which at this point is a requirement for me to use a doom mod. Total conversions are excused, but not supporting voxels in a "modern" doom mod is poor taste. Smooth Doom is ultimately superior for graphics and gameplay. I wonder about wadsnip being used to upscale mods like this, but the documentation is lacking for regular people, not to mention lack of binaries, and requirement to compile your own binary files. The utility is mostly unusable for non programmers. It might produce better results using the lollypop model instead of waifu, which looks like glorified xBRZ. Lastly, the utility doesn't support OpenCL/Vulkan, so performance will be terrible on any non-nvidia system. I'd try to use it regardless, but the lack of pk3 documentation and binaries make it near impossible. It hasn't been updated since 2019 either, so future updates should consider modernization and usability improvements. Until then, Cupscale can be used, but it is not designed for doom files like wadsnip. Considering the lack of mod updates and gzdoom changes, I wonder if upscaling is dead. GZDoom in particular seems to have removed texture compression and ruined performance in newer versions. Texture compression is pretty important for keeping upscale mods viable on low vram hardware, and performance regression on anything not pro-vulkan is also bad. Hardware today is hard to come by, and many people still use old cards. Doom went from running on a 486 and ported to SNES, to requiring expensive and unavailable RTX nvidia cards. Those people lucky enough to have one probably don't care about doom either, so gzdoom is clearly taking the wrong approach, and no other engine is compatible with these mods. Unless people start making doom accessible again, I think enthusiasm will die off, as it seems to have already peaked.

vulkan helps bypass the api and drivers, so that makes sense. On the other hand, there are many games that perform worse in vulkan and especially dx12, because the optimization isn't better than driver performance in dx11/opengl. That's the case for my laptop. It uses a FX9800 CPU, which is a derivative of bulldozer that has FPU sharing modules, while the APU has xbox 360 era specs. 8 ROPs, 32 TMU, 512 shaders. While vulkan+async compute is well known to boost AMD hardware like Vega/Fury that has ~4000 shaders, that is more because they have 4000 shaders, which can be API limited. Gzdoom isn't API limited for my laptop, it's optimization limited. The engine is too bloated for low spec mobile APUs. It's not that you even need high end hardware, because the graphics are colored lighting with sprites, it's that the engine is slow. The original Serious Sam could run on a pentium 2/3 + tnt2, with better visuals than gzdoom, so they're screwing something up. No idea what exactly. Gzdoom also removed options for texture compression, so they're either not doing it at all now, or found an acceptable default mode. If they're not doing it, that just points to further removal of optimization. There probably are improvements to gzdoom, but it seems to all be focused on high end hardware and modern features, and not low end or efficiency. Web browsers have similar issues, as firefox vastly outperforms chrome, while chrome can get better results on a desktop. lzdoom gives me the same graphics as gzdoom with higher FPS, so they've done something to ruin performance in the newer version. Of course, mods contribute to this too, as nash's gore mod reduces fps a lot, but this is aside from the native engine performance. As a side note, most ports I've tried are too dark under the pure "software" lighting model, and it can't be fixed via gamma, which would wash out the colors at higher levels, and still not raise brightness enough. I have only been able to fix this using gzdoom/lzdoom standard lighting mode. It doesn't look as good, but at least I can see. The "doom" lighting mode seems to be tolerable, but it highly depends on what map you're playing, and how poor the visibility is. It would be nice if there was a "standard" mode for software because it looks better, but it's better than nothing. This obviously is the fault of the laptop screen, but these things are designed for mobile and don't adhere to desktop standards.

Update: LZDoom solves the problem. It works with the mods I want to play, and the software renderer looks better for the lighting effects.

I got gzdoom to run a bit better, averages around 45 fps now. I will stick to zandronum for multiplayer though. I just don't get why they don't work on performance. For example, some ports are optimized enough to run nuts. Does gzdoom even have multi-core optimization? That would help with anything cpu limited, since you can only do so much on a single core. Anyways, I generally stick to gzdoom for most single player mods, since zandronum is based on older code and not everything is compatible. That said, even gzdoom has issues with loading orders.

Your new version works pretty good with neural upscale and smoothdoom_hires but scuba steve's cleaner skyboxes break the weapon graphics if loaded after certain mods. I forget which particular one, but it doesn't make sense why it happens either. full screen hud also seems to be broken now, but that's not too important, and it doesn't break any graphics even if it isn't loading properly. edit: actually it might not be the skyboxes. It might be you have to load neural upscale before smooth doom. Also, fullscreen hud works if you lower it in the list. mod compatibility is a pain.

I have a FX9800P laptop that gets poor performance in gzdoom. The system has a second GPU it can use for crossfire, but that depends on compatibility, and the GPU is not faster or slower than the APU. It supports vulkan, so that's not a problem. GCN 1.2 architecture. The issue is that gzdoom barely performs better than Doom 2016, which gets around 30 FPS, while gzdoom gets a range of 35-50 top. I've tried disabling ambient occlusion, which helped, but other settings do not make a large difference. The hardware lights made a minor difference, but it's more likely the game itself is poorly optimized. Zandronum seems to run much better, for example. If there is no way to fix gzdoom, I could try zandronum, but gzdoom has better mod compatibility, and I want to use mods like smooth doom with neural upscale.

I got the mod to finally work, my original smoothdoom pak was from 2017 and was breaking something. The new version still does not work with the pistol, which is horrendously mis-aligned, and breaks the plasmagun idle state when using voxels, which can be fixed by disabling the plasmagun in smoothdoom and replacing the pistol textures in the 4x mod. edit: actually, disabling the pistol works as well, so now I have all the weapons working. That said, this requires disabling the decorate include statements, and editing doomguy.txt in deco-player to default weapon names, and you only get the standard weapon with HD graphics. I don't know how to fix what's breaking it other than disabling the broken parts, and the only real fix might be for smooth doom to directly implement this mod, or fix whatever is incompatible.

bug report: changing internal weapon names breaks mod compatibility with nc hud, and can crash the game into console. Example: Pick up shotgun, does not register as recognized shotgun in inventory, game does not let you switch BACK to the shotgun. Player types IDKFA in Doom1 wad. Cheat code gives player everything including Super Shotgun, player switches to regular shotgun, which player now has 2 of. Gzdoom crashes into console. Actually, this can just happen by picking up the shotgun with nc hud by itself, the first method works with other mods loaded. Please keep compatibility so that it doesn't break mods like nc hud. Also, this mod can't be technically called "Faithful" when you change sound effects, especially with ripped sounds from painkiller that isn't even an id game, and may be legally questionable. (secret noise) That stuff should be kept optional and default off. Also, if you want to include some decent weapon graphics, check out: That said, this mod needs work to fix some glitches. I was able to get the mod working by disabling all the weapons, barrels, doomguy, and removing the FDoomPlayer class. The shotgun is what crashes the mod, but I don't know how to fix it. The FDoomPlayer class is also non-standard and must be removed to load. Barrels must be also disabled to fix voxel support. Anything that is generally non-standard had to be turned off. I don't see why this can't just be a graphical improvement mod that doesn't break other mods.

This mod no longer works correctly with gzdoom 4.4.2 or smooth doom. I don't like the changes made with smoothdoom SE, which changes the vanilla atmosphere, and doesn't work with the mod either. The most I can get working correctly is the chaingun and BFG, while none of the other weapons work or have graphical corruption and mis-alignment. I'm not sure if this has incompatibility with other mods either, like the neural upscale.

Hey guys, I can't get this mod to work. It's just not loading properly, if at all. Whatever's going on is breaking a lot of older mods, not just this one. I can't run older versions of Johnny doom, mix smooth doom with SmoothDoomHudWeap4XUP, etc. edit: Found the problem. I think an outdated version of smoothdoom was overwriting/disabling textures, additionally the newer version overwrites the monster graphics, but the extra animations look better on most of the monsters, aside from mainly the bosses which look better using only the texture pack. Someone needs to update smooth doom for the 2x graphics, including the HD weapon mod, which is also broken and needs several adjustments to work. I don't know how to edit these mods other than disabling what is breaking compatibility, but if anyone can tell me how to do it, I might be able to fix the issues. The problem seems to be related to scripting and how mods change variable names or dependencies, which ignores the new textures.