Created on 15.10.2005 - 07:40

The OpenGL 2 works fine for me, but I hate the whole "internal resolution" thing. It's somewhat ironic that the OGL2 plugin has all those great advanced gaphics options, yet most people are limited to effecively rendering the game at 640x480, and the only way to AA is blur the entire screen.

So I've been trying to use the older OpenGL plugin, but I've had no luck getting the battle swirls to work. Anyone know the settings needed to get the work?

I'm using SSSPSX for my emulator and my video card is a Radeon X800XT.

-PS I can't get the swirls with OGL 1.76 in ePSXe either so it doesn't seem to be related to the emulator.

Pete: Anyway chance of an advanced plugin that doesn't do the whole internal resolution/render to image thing? Or at the very least offers a higher internal resolution that works on most cards?

[Dieser Beitrag wurde am 15.10.2005 - 08:13 von stevedroid aktualisiert]

Created on 15.10.2005 - 09:35

Nevermind, figured out I had to set off screen drawing to full get get them too appear. I'm now Using 4-2-3 under the compatilibity section.

Swirls are not nearly as good as those in the OLG2 plugin, and a little glitchy (there's a bar at the top of the screen that doesn't clear during the swirl). However between higher resolution (with "real" AA for no jaggies) or better swirl effects there's not much debate in my mind on which wins out.

Question about a new plugin without interal resolution (or at least a better internal resolution) still stands. 640x480 just isn't high enough. The amount of screen blurring needed to elminate the aliasing is too much.

[Dieser Beitrag wurde am 15.10.2005 - 09:42 von stevedroid aktualisiert]

Created on 16.10.2005 - 12:57

The OGL2 plugin has some advantages in rendering 2D graphics thanks to shaders.

With the current situation Ati users have a slight disadvantage in running combined 2D+3D games.

One of the possible compromises is also to use 2xSaI textures with (SaL, 2xGLSL) shaders on level2 effect level. In this case the 2D gets "quasi 4xScaled" and the 3D part gets some AA.
May look nice in resolution higher as 1024x768.

At last but not least i must mention that there are other options (such as filtering, fullscreen filterin, AA, AF in the OGL1) and there might not yet be one universal solution, especially for ati users.

Created on 16.10.2005 - 18:34

Yeah but isn't it possible to have shaders and not render to an image? I mean there are certainly games out there that do just that. Actually I don't care about the shaders, jsut give me the improved frame buffer functionality of the OLG2 plugin with the 1.76 plugin and I'm happy.

Also I read that ATI can't runs very high X because their texture resolution is limited to 2048x2048, but just what the heck resolution is very high rendering at?

Is it not possible to render to texture at an internal resolution of 1024x768 or similar?

[Dieser Beitrag wurde am 16.10.2005 - 18:40 von stevedroid aktualisiert]

Created on 16.10.2005 - 19:48

It's true that Ati cards don't support textures bigger than 2048x2048. The OGL2 plugin tries to emulate the PSX gpu hardware, which has a memory section 1024x512x16 if i recall right. So 2x1024,4x512 is 2048,2048 which is the max tex size for current ati's. (HighX-VeryHighY) To ensure best compatibiliy and enhanced display the whole internal resolution thing is invented. Great idea IMO.

About shaders 1.): Without shaders the OGL1 or the Soft plugin give better visual results so no need to use OGL2 plugin with an ati card in 90% of cases. IMHO it's not plausible to construct a new plugin from scratch only to have 100% battle swirls.

About shaders 2.): you could try some shaders from the Ati smartshader bundle.

[Dieser Beitrag wurde am 16.10.2005 - 22:35 von guest aktualisiert]

Created on 17.10.2005 - 01:25

guest schrieb One of the possible compromises is also to use 2xSaI textures with (SaL, 2xGLSL) shaders on level2 effect level. In this case the 2D gets "quasi 4xScaled" and the 3D part gets some AA.

Could you link the appropriate thread? You've got a ton of shader threads an I don't know which one is the right one, sorry.

guest schrieb It's true that Ati cards don't support textures bigger than 2048x2048. The OGL2 plugin tries to emulate the PSX gpu hardware, which has a memory section 1024x512x16 if i recall right. So 2x1024,4x512 is 2048,2048 which is the max tex size for current ati's. (HighX-VeryHighY) To ensure best compatibiliy and enhanced display the whole internal resolution thing is invented. Great idea IMO.

I'm not sure I understand. PSX renders at 320x240 right? What do you mean when you say the memory section is 1024x512? By the way I'm not opposed to rendering to a texture, I just don't understand why we're locked in to so few resolutions. I'm sure there is a reason, and it's probably over my head, but I'm interested none the less.

guest schrieb About shaders 1.): Without shaders the OGL1 or the Soft plugin give better visual results so no need to use OGL2 plugin with an ati card in 90% of cases. IMHO it's not plausible to construct a new plugin from scratch only to have 100% battle swirls.

Well that's not really what I'm requesting. I don't know if the improved framebuffer effects are related to the OGL2 plugin's rendering to a texture or not. Surely though, some of the improvements Pete made in developing the OGL2 plugin could be applied to the OGL1 plugin. Did he stop working on the old plugin once he developed the new one?

I know pretty heady to make requests like that for something that Pete does on his free time, and please forgive me for that. It's just that if the OGL2 plugin only had more resolution options, or the OGL1 plugin was a bit more accurate with some the effects either would be perfect.

[Dieser Beitrag wurde am 17.10.2005 - 01:31 von stevedroid aktualisiert]

Created on 17.10.2005 - 11:49

The PSX can render manny resolution and not only in 320x240. There is a way to figure 'em out for each game and most games use different resolutions for different situations (like menus, battle scenes, world...).
The thing why we are locked to so few resolutions is a consequence of allowed texture sizes of the popular gfx adapters and the fact that a whole texture is used to emulate the whole PSX VRAM and not two textures or for only sections of VRAM.

[Dieser Beitrag wurde am 26.10.2005 - 16:10 von guest aktualisiert]

Created on 18.10.2005 - 01:19

guest schrieb The threads are named after shaders in most cases.

There's a couple that are close to what you said, but not exact. It's much more difficult for me to figure out which one you're talking about, than for you to simply cut and paste a link to the correct one. Please?

guest schrieb The PSX can render manny resolution and not only in 320x240. There is a way to figure 'em out for each game and most games use different resolutions for different situations (like menus, battle scenes, world...). The thing why we are locked to so few resolutions is a consequence of allowed texture sizes of the popular gfx adapters and the fact that a whole texture is used to emulate the whole PSX VRAM and not two textures or for only sections of VRAM.

So does the PSX interopolate all images the full size of the framebuffer before drawing them? If a game is switching resolutions and only using a part of the framebuffer, then something must be telling the hardware which section of the framebuffer to read.

[Dieser Beitrag wurde am 18.10.2005 - 01:26 von stevedroid aktualisiert]

Created on 18.10.2005 - 19:58

www.foren.de/system/thread-2xglslshaderver30kabyguestr-pete_bernert-266904-1890684.html

Use the OGL2Texture lookup shader to get a better understanding of the PSX VRAM. I'ts not an exact simulation (more an impovised) but you could observe the front and back buffer sizes, positions and proportions.

I think that the PSX gpu has some registers which tell what portion of memory to read and display, but you could study the psx gpu docu if you want to learn more (google + gpu.txt).

[Dieser Beitrag wurde am 26.10.2005 - 16:11 von guest aktualisiert]

Created on 19.10.2005 - 04:27

Thanks I'll check it out.

Here's my final thought/question. If I understand correctly, the OLG2 plugin currently achieves a high resolution by rendering to a very large texture (4096x2048 - 4x the PSX framebuffer). that texture then gets interpolated down the the actual resolution of the monitor by the video card - just like rescaling an image and looks less pixelated as a result. In this case the scaling is handled by the video card's texture iterpolation and is very fast.

However rather than immediately rendering to a texture, would it not be possible to dump the image to an array as you would basic image data and then apply a standard image rescaling algorithm at that point to resize to whatever the screen resolution is and then render to a texture at the screen resolution?

Granted running the resize algorithm for every frame may be prohibitivly expense, but I'm just throwing ideas out there.

I'd really like to see some way to achieve a higher effective resolution on Radeon cards. Rendering a game at an effective resolution of 640x480 shouldn't require a 2048x2048 texture.

[Dieser Beitrag wurde am 19.10.2005 - 04:29 von stevedroid aktualisiert]