Pete's OGL1 (pixelated 2D)

[megidolaon]

Is there a way to make 2D on OGL1 looks good without reduce screen resolution(I'm playing at 960x600)? because some games like chrono cross, FF series combine both 3D and 2D. Character looks good but the background is pixelated, I tried 2x Sal, texture filtering, screen smoothing, etc. Still same, noticeable blocky. I know OGL2 support shader, but I can't run games at full speed on OGL2.

Any help will be appreciate.
Spec :
1.6ghz
512 RAM
FX5500

P.S : Sorry for bad english

[Titus03]

Usually it's texture filtering that does the job...

Have you updated your drivers lately? Your computer should be able to play some of the games smoothly with OGL2-plugins with High Internal Resolution -option.

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[Princess Garnet]

The resolution plays a huge part in 2-D pixelation. At 640x480, which is twice what most of those PSX RPGs were, it takes alot of filtering, smoothing, and shader smoothing to make it look almost perfect. That's about as good as you'll do though. Going any more times larger, you have to live with it. If none of those techniques work, no, you've perhaps seen the best you'll get.

P.S. The image in my signature leads to a configuration for a setup that gives near perfect 2-D, but you need OpenGL2. I did have a similar setup for OpenGL I used on a Pentium III and GeForce 4 Ti4200 long ago, but I wasn't quite as good (it's essentially the same minus the shader smoothing, but that plays a good deal in helping the 2-D).

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"The heart has it's reasons that reason knows nothing of."

[megidolaon]

take a look at this picture, look at the background. Noticeable blocky like checkerboard.

Attached Images

blocky.JPG (129.8 KB, 46 views)

[Princess Garnet]

Yes, that is tiling. I believe "high resolutions textures" set to "stretched" fixes that.

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"The heart has it's reasons that reason knows nothing of."

[megidolaon]

hmm, when i set hi res texture to streched. The tiling is gone, but the background looks blocky like i'm walking on a paint picture. Do i need to live with this if i wants to play at 960x600?

P.S: Sorry for bad english

[Princess Garnet]

I'm not sure what you mean. Post a picture of what you mean.

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"The heart has it's reasons that reason knows nothing of."

[megidolaon]

With Hi-Res texture, looks pixelated. But the tiling is less noticeable.

Attached Images

untitled.JPG (146.5 KB, 31 views)

[LensLarque]

Ther's a much better way if I may, using Pete's OGL2 like a common scaler:

1. Use Pete's OGL2 with X & Y internal resolutions set to 0: low/native.

2. Don't use texture filtering, no 2xSaI, no shaders. Nothing.

3. Only tick the 'screen filtering' option.

4. You can control the level of blurriness with the fullscreen desktop resolution settings: the lower the blurrier, the higher the sharper.

5. Don't worry about speed, because when using native internal resolutions the cpu/gfx requirement are much lower.
I had this working at full speed on an old 1GHz Pentium laptop with a 32Mb Geforce4.

6. For speed, see if this render mode works: 1 (render to pbuffer, copy to texture)
If it crashes the emulator, go back to: 0

7. Remember to set the compatibility settings to:
off-screen drawing: 1
framebuffer effects: 2
framebuffer uploads: 2
These are the 'basic' settings that work with most games.
If you still have slowdowns, like during the 'battle swirl' sequences, you may have to try various framebuffer combinations.

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Last edited by LensLarque; November 12th, 2010 at 20:01..

[megidolaon]

yeah, I can play OGL2 with medium settings without lag, but my problems with OGL2 is when there's framebuffer effect. FPS will always drop like 10fps-15fps. I already tried all OGL2 framebuffer combination and it'll still drop. Even with OGL1 sometimes my fps will drop, example : Xenogears opening scene(village battle), LOD battle encounter. I went to task manager and saw everytime there is framebuffer effect, my CPU usage will jump from 20-30% to 100%. Is that means my processor isn't enough? It's 1.6Ghz. Thanks

[Princess Garnet]

A GeForce FX 5500 is essentially a higher clocked GeForce FX 5200. Only difference. Even a GeForce FX 5600 is much better. The GeForce FX 5500 should have been named the GeForce FX 5300 or 5400 really. While the GeForce FX 5200/5500 can run OpenGL 2, I'd stick to OpenGL 1. You shouldn't get problems with framebuffer effects slowing down on a GeForce FX 5500 if the settings aren't cranked up though. I had a GeForce 4 MX440 64MB (much weaker) perform flawlessly at OpenGL 1 (and it had a lesser CPU, Pentium III 800MHz, too).

As for the pixelation when activating stretched high resolution textures, I use it, but that's with OpenGL 2, and with alot of smoothing and such. So, I didn't know it'd create such pixelation. I just knew it cured the tiling problem.

Edit: Just messed around on OpenGL 1, and it seems activation high resolution stretched textures when using a texture level of 2 appears to simply use no filtering at all, hence the pixelation.

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"The heart has it's reasons that reason knows nothing of."

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Last edited by Princess Garnet; November 13th, 2010 at 08:34..

[LensLarque]

megidolaon, you should really try the settings I recommend.

Trust me, everything was fine on a computer with specs lower than yours, and looked much more beautiful than texture filtering or hi-res settings.

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[megidolaon]

Originally Posted by LensLarque

megidolaon, you should really try the settings I recommend.

Trust me, everything was fine on a computer with specs lower than yours, and looked much more beautiful than texture filtering or hi-res settings.

Plugin: Pete's OpenGL2 Driver 2.9
Author: Pete Bernert
Card vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
GFX card: GeForce FX 5500/AGP/SSE2

Resolution/Color:
- 960x600 Window mode
- Internal X resolution: 0
- Internal Y resolution: 0
- Keep psx aspect ratio: off
- No render-to-texture: on

- Filtering: 0
- Hi-Res textures: 0
- TexWin pixel shader: on
- VRam size: 256 MBytes

Framerate:
- FPS limitation: on
- Frame skipping: off
- FPS limit: Auto

Compatibility:
- Offscreen drawing: 1
- Framebuffer effects: 1
- Framebuffer uploads: 0

Misc:
- Scanlines: off
- Mdec filter: off
- Screen filtering: on
- Shader effects: 0/1
- Flicker-fix border size: 0
- GF4/XP crash fix: off
- Game fixes: off [00000000]

i dont know what's wrong man, but trust me. I already tried all framebuffer combination on OGL2(1,2,2 | 1,1,0 | 1,0,0 | etc) but it'll still lag. ePSXe will eat all of my CPU usage when there is framebuffer effect, take a look at the picture. I already have the latest graphic card driver, and set all of nvidia settings to 'performance'. Or OGL2 issues got something to do with directx? because i never update my directx.

P.S : Sorry for bad english.

Attached Images

	untitled.JPG (51.4 KB, 20 views)
	untitled1.JPG (48.1 KB, 12 views)

[LensLarque]

Mmh...

Not sure about some of the settings you wrote.

I didn't notice you played in windowed mode: this eats up more, if not much more, cpu/gpu power.
You should play in full screen mode.

Also: render mode 1: render to pbuffer, copy to texture is very important.
Did you try it ?

I don't tick 'use pixel shader for PSX window emulation'.

Regarding framebuffer settings, try to keeping'em at 1,2,2 and activate frame skipping.
Frame skipping will only be used during the 'battle swirl' heavy sequences so you probably won't notice it much, and it might help a lot.

But be careful: sometimes frame skipping de-activates itself when switching to fullscreen, so you may have to activate if during gameplay using the ingame menu (FS>1)

Below is an example of how I do it myself, though I use higher fullscreen res most of the time (1280x800 to 1600x1200).
(By the way; what's your monitor's native/max resolution?)

Attached Images

settingsh.jpg (251.3 KB, 6 views)

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[Princess Garnet]

ePSXe will use as much CPU as it can regardless, so Task Manager is a bad example.

Also, why are you're not using a 4:3 ratio if you're playing window anyway? The only real reason to use anything else is if you're using a widescren LCD fullscreen and just can't bare using the fullscreen in widescreen option. I've never understood running these older 320x224 games at 1680x1050, 1920x1080/1200. Not only is it stretched beyond belief (then people wonder why it's pixelated), but it's fattened too. Then people say they can't notice this!?

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"The heart has it's reasons that reason knows nothing of."

[LensLarque]

Yeah, looks horrible when stretched to 16:9 / 16:10.

That's why I love the custom screen size feature in OGL2.

Attached Images

	ScreenShot001.jpg (117.1 KB, 31 views)
	ScreenShot002.jpg (117.2 KB, 23 views)

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