Gamma issues was apparently a Nvidia driver bug, clean reinstall fixed it. Still curious why resolution forcing doesn't work. Not important though as there's another method for it that works just fine.

I reinstalled this game, and my solution (d3d8to9 + URC) is still the best way to force resolution for this game. Because unfortunately, while 2.7 actually made resolution forcing work in the 32-bit D3D8 render, it has shadow artifacts.

The artifacts seems unrelated to getting the resolution forcing to work though, as the 64-bit D3D9 render has the same problem. But the resolution forcing worked fine for that render in 2.62.2, before it broke in 2.63 with the exact same issue.

So an improvement that can't be taken advantage of because of a regression 🙁.

Also on the gamma issues, the issue there was pretty simple. dgVoodoo opted for a 59.94hz refresh rate, while native used 60.00hz, not sure how the latest version of dgVoodoo does it. Nvidia drivers see 59.94Hz as a TV mode and sets output dynamic range to limited, rather than full. Fixing it can be done by going to Nvidia Control Panel > Change resolution > Set "Use NVIDIA color settings" (rather than default) and set Output dynamic range to always be full.

I don't know why the general resolution upscale got fixed, and even, what was the cause of the problem. I remember it but never looked into it.

However, you can disable option DirectXExt\RTTexturesForceScaleAndMSAA for this game to disable upscaling the shadow textures, the cause of the shadow artifact.
I've just tried it with the debug layer and it didn't complain about it + the shadows seemed to have no edge-artifacts.

But the resolution forcing worked fine for that render in 2.62.2, before it broke in 2.63 with the exact same issue.

That was the version where I changed the scaling formulas a little bit. That's where Splinter Cell light aura "got broken" too. 😐

Dege wrote on 2021-07-02, 16:05:

However, you can disable option DirectXExt\RTTexturesForceScaleAndMSAA for this game to disable upscaling the shadow textures, the cause of the shadow artifact.
I've just tried it with the debug layer and it didn't complain about it + the shadows seemed to have no edge-artifacts.

You know, I did try that with the D3D9 render. It did not work, but I tried it again now and it works for the D3D8 render. Just not the D3D9 render.

I also figured out while testing that the annoying faulty view shaking is way less frequent in the D3D9 render (again: not a dgVoodoo issue), so maybe I'll just use the D3D9 render + an old dgVoodoo version. At least until I remember why the D3D9 render was terrible.

ZellSF wrote on 2021-07-02, 17:29:

I also figured out while testing that the annoying faulty view shaking is way less frequent in the D3D9 render

Well I hoped that was the case. It isn't. The view shaking, to illustrate what I mean:
https://youtu.be/AVOhe7qHPuQ?t=226 (note how the entire screen shakes whenever he gets hit, not the red arrows).
The reason that looked to be fixed in the D3D9 render was because the 64-bit version uses a different ut2004-win64.ini , and that had a lower difficulty set. Why is that screen flashing dependent on difficulty? Maybe it happens more when the middle of the tank is hit and the bots are more accurate? I'm really not sure why that would be the case since there really isn't critical hits for tanks... I should setup a multiplayer game to test if it's actually that or some weird malfunction with the bot code.