Is anyone aware of this bug (2 screenshots included)?

[Captain N.]

Just out of curiousity, is anyone aware of this bug:

it shows up in Pete's Hardware excellerated plugins, but not in the peops soft gpu.

[Captain N.]

here is the shot from the peops soft GPU:

[Gendo]

Originally posted by Captain N.
Just out of curiousity, is anyone aware of this bug:

it shows up in Pete's Hardware excellerated plugins, but not in the peops soft gpu.

You can solve this problem by unchecking "special game fixes" in Pete's GPU plugins.

[fivefeet8]

What bug are you talking about? The background? The pixelation?

[Kellicros]

The background, I think, they're different in the pics.

[Gamer1]

in the background, the soft plugin fades, while the hardware accelator one, doesn't.

[campi]

I've also noticed something in ff7. With pete's opengl plugin the top of the screen in battles flickers while with the direct3d it doesn't anyone got a clue how to solve this with pete's opengl (I am using the newest version of the plugin)

[fivefeet8]

enabled "smart garbage collection".. ?

[liquid]

that is an example of subtract alpha blending, it is only available in OpenGL and Peops. D3D does not support this effect. Futhermore, it will not work if you have Fake subtract blending fix (For FSAA) turned on in Pete's OpenGL.

[Pete Bernert]

liquid is almost 100% right: the fading effect is done with the psx subtractive blending mode, and from my hw/accel plugins only my OpenGL plugin can do it 100% right, if the gfx card is supporting it (like any GeForce card).

On ATI cards the blending is not supported (ATI drivers report they can do it, but they can't... ATI knows about that, but choose to ignore it), therefore on this cards you need to enable the mentioned special game fix.

With that fix enabled (or if a gfx driver is reporting correctly that the card cannot do it, or if you are using one of my D3D plugins instead of OGL), the plugin will fall back to a 'fake' blending mode which will work on all cards, but that one is not 100% perfect (usually the blending is brighter, and sometimes not visible at all, like above).

Ah, and final note: any soft gpu will always be more compatible than any hw/accel plugin.
Usually you have to choose:

better gfx and (most times) speed -> hw/accel plugins

better compatibility -> soft plugins

[Captain N.]

Thanks for the replies.

I would have responded sooner, but I lost this thread .

Those shots where from Peops Soft GPU and Pete's OpenGL, on my TNT 2 Ultra (32Mb Ram), with the latest Detonator 40.72 (beta, not certified) drivers (see *rant* at the bottom about nvidia driver support).

I tried all the suggestions made in this post (and some others) but nothing seems to correct the problem, do you think it is a driver bug? If so, I guess it is time to upgrade (I'd like to go radeon, but to be honest, I mostly use my comp for playing playstation games , but I keep hearing bad stuff about their drivers, and from my bros comp I can see that those problems are not made up).

Anyway, thanks for all the hard work, and your plugins kick ass. I love to play psx games in high res glory, and am grateful to be able to do it.



*Rant* Nvidia has been attrocious with there support of the TNT2 driver-wise. When I got this card it supported cool things like polygon edge anti-aliasing, and many levels it and anisotropic filtering, and dozens of other features. Over time each of these features disapeared and the image quality even got worse for a while. The newest drivers add back anisotropic filtering, but it still doesn't do polygon edge antialiasing, and the image quality isn't quite back where it was at one time. It's kind of disapointing and makes me question whether I should buy another Nvidia product. If they wanted to stop supporting it, I would understand, it is an old card. But they could at least say so, instead of "pretending" to support it.

[Pete Bernert]

afaik the TNT chip sets don't support that kind of subtract blending in hardware, so it's not a nVidia driver problem, but a lack of hardware features.

On the other hand Radeon cards should be able to do the reverse-subtract blending I am using in hardware (they can do 'standard subtract' just fine), but the ATI drivers have a bug with it, so you cannot get that effect on ATI cards as well.

The only known fine working cards are the GeForce ones (GF1 - GF4, doesn't matter).

Oh, and btw, no consumer nVidia card ever supported polygon-antialiasing... some earlier drivers simply ignored the AA-request, so it seemed to work fast, but the image quality was the same as without AA... later drivers activated polygon-AA by falling into a software mode, which was too slow for anything but maybe some 3D modeler tools.

The only nVidia cards which are supporting polygon-AA are the 'professional' Quadro ones (though theoretically you can turn every nV card with an hacked bios and special drivers to a Quadro one).

[Captain N.]

Thanks for the info, I guess its time to start looking for some upgrades ;-)

The card did definately do some kind of (what I thought was polygon-edge, since the polygon edges looked softer) anti-aliasing, but it was very slow on maximum quality and had to be supported by a program (and enabled). bleem! was the only program that it worked with, kinda (and is still the only program I've ever seen with built in support for anti-aliasing). It was software I guess, but it still ran at full speed at 320x240 at maximum anti-aliasing, and full speed at higher resolutions at lower quality settings, on my old AMD K6-2 350Mhz. Unfortunately the shipped drivers where DX5 and bleem! needed DX6 drivers (bumber). The feature only ever worked with the shipped drivers, although it had a multiple levels/performance settings slider and everything. The slider even remained in quite a few driver versions after the feature seemed to stop working.

I'm sure they have that all worked out by now, I'm just peeved that it used to work and now doesn't.


Side Question (related to polygon-AA): Is it possible to generate a wire frame rendered scene, while hiding hidden surfaces (so that you don't see through what should be solid)?

If so, is it possible to overlay that wireframe over the rendered scene and use it as a mask that would blur just the polygon edges (since the wireframe would represent the polygon edges) using a frame buffer (or whatever is used in Pete's HW accel plugins)?

If that is possible would it be usable without totally killing performance?

Just curious.

Thanks again.

[mocharock]

Does a small issue really make that much of a differance. I know that you want the games to be 100% perfect or even better, but In my opinion that small of a thing is like splitting hairs. I am personally am more concerned with issues like fps and sound. MDSEs per say than a small fade not coming in clear. Really it is interesting, more of a attention to detail.

[Captain N.]

There are plenty of other reasons to upgrade, this is just one of the things that I would like to fix with an upgrade. If I'm going to spend a couple of hundred dollars on upgrading, I might as well make sure everything works :-)

By the way, what video card do you all recommend? Radeon, GeForce, Parhelia (pricey)? Should I start a new thread?

[liquid]

Originally posted by Captain N.
....Side Question (related to polygon-AA): Is it possible to generate a wire frame rendered scene, while hiding hidden surfaces (so that you don't see through what should be solid)?

If so, is it possible to overlay that wireframe over the rendered scene and use it as a mask that would blur just the polygon edges (since the wireframe would represent the polygon edges) using a frame buffer (or whatever is used in Pete's HW accel plugins)?

If that is possible would it be usable without totally killing performance?

Just curious.

Thanks again.

To put it in layman's terms, any extra work you have to do to emulate features that are not supported in hardware, means an extra price you have to pay in performance.

As far as I know, the Kryo-based cards were one of the only cards that did tile-based rendering (the result was that didn't show non-viewable ploys)...but Ninja has a terrible expirence with them, so I wouldn't recommend even touching that card.

as for software AA...the closet thing would probably be Pete's screen smoothing option.