The user asked for it: the mode no longer gains frame rate, and the mesh shader fallback covers the cards it was written for. Its switch in the settings menu's Game tab is gone with the rows under it, and so are their 57 text ids and strings.
low_end_gpu itself does nothing any more. It is still a known key, so an older nx2navi.ini gives no unknown-key warning, and while it is on the log says once that the mode was removed in 0.10.2. The preset that gave nine keys other defaults is gone, and so is the rule that read the mode's keys only while it was on: each of them (mesh_emulation, tex_clobber, foliage, vram_heap_limit, vram_reserve_mb, upload_batch_mb, mirror_stage, mirror_hot, submit_finish_gpu and the others) is an ordinary setting with the default of its row or of its reader, so a line a player wrote by hand keeps counting and a file with only the switch runs the game as it runs for everyone else. guest_opt in nx2navi.ini counts for the next rebuild without the switch too (tools/make_game.py).
The recorder thread read the switch itself: on an AMD card without mesh shaders the mode turned it on. It is off on every AMD card now unless vk_recorder = 1 is set.
nx2navi.ini.example lists the former mode's settings as single settings, the 0.10.2 notes have a Removed entry and name the foliage fix of the commit before this one, and the comments that said what the mode sets say so in the past tense. tests/cfg_parse_check has the new reading of the switch and of the keys without it; the test matrix is at 90 ok with the same two not ok as before (installer_test, worktree_test), and a clean build compiles 169 runtime files and links. Not run in the game.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.2 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The low-end GPU mode sets mesh_emulation = 1, and on a card without mesh shaders the emulation then draws the game's task and mesh programs in place of the mesh fallback. On NVIDIA's cards without mesh shaders that ended the game at the first mesh draws of an area with an access violation inside the driver, at nvoglv64.dll+0x10cdffe on a GTX 1050 Ti and on a GTX 1070 (both 0.10.1), and a Titan X (Pascal) report names the same mode. The GTX 1050 Ti's owner set mesh_emulation = 0 and played on through the fallback with the rest of the mode on.
The decision (vk_mesh_path.h) takes the card's vendor: an NVIDIA card is drawn for as if the emulation were not asked for, and the boot line says so. The replay and the pipeline code read the decided path from the device context where each read the setting itself. tests/mesh_path_check.c has the new cases.
Not run in the game: no GTX 10 card here. mesh_path_check passes and every file that includes the changed headers compiles.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.2 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Every RX 6000 loss whose pass marks named a pass was in one that starts with a native mesh draw, on every version from 0.6.0 to 0.9.2 and with every other setting tried each way; RDNA 1 cards on the same driver draw through the fallback and RDNA 3 and 4 on AMD's other driver draw natively, and neither has such a report. That the native mesh path is the cause is not shown. The decision moves into vk_mesh_path.h with a test of each device kind and setting; has_mesh_shader keeps saying what the hardware has, so the recorder thread and the low-end card test do not change. On those cards no native mesh pipeline is built any more: the seed list and the boot prewarm skip them. The early tail stays off with the fallback, a combination never measured. The fatal line names the mesh path, and NX2NAVI_VK_NOOPT's default applies with mesh_fallback = 0 alone.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
