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OpenGL benchmark
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Kaminari
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PostPosted: Tue Nov 23, 2004 8:47 am    Post subject: OpenGL benchmark Reply with quote

OpenGL Infos from Jérôme Hoibian (of Pygmy Productions fame, for the Amiga oldtimers amongst us!) is a tiny tool that displays extensive information about your OpenGL driver.

If the Renderer string indicates something like "GDI Renderer" instead of "GeForce" (or whatever your card is) and the main window only displays a couple of supported extensions, then it means your graphic drivers are not hardware-accelerated and your system is using by default the generic and awfully slow software renderer from Microsoft. You definitely need to install appropriate drivers directly from your graphic card manufacturer.

For an excellent and full-fledged OpenGL benchmark program, I suggest GL Excess from Paolo Martella. Alternative downloads are available at Major Geeks.

Note: 3dfx and Matrox cards are known to have very poor OpenGL support. Nothing much can be done about it, except trying third-party drivers.

PS: David, which minimum OpenGL version is required by Magic Engine 1.0? Btw, you can make this post sticky if it proves useful.
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dmichel
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PostPosted: Tue Nov 23, 2004 5:25 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hmm, I think there's only OpenGL 1.0 functions but there might be some 1.1 too but I don't use any extensions.

BTW today I run the program through an OpenGL debugger, my code is clean, no errors where detected. Smile
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David Michel
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Chris
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PostPosted: Wed Nov 24, 2004 2:32 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

As for Matrox, There's NO 3rd party driver...that means I can't use full-screen mode....Why Directx isn't default ? OpenGL should be optional...Magic Engine is PCE Emu which doesn't need 3D rendering...and I believe many people still use Matrox for there sharp 2D image

so please support option for color bit and openGL enable/disable in the future version..
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Kaminari
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PostPosted: Wed Nov 24, 2004 10:03 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Chris wrote:
Why Directx isn't default ?


Because of portability. ME doesn't need 3D, but it needs some kind of filtering and hardware acceleration, and OpenGL is a common and fast way nowadays to achieve just that (DOSBox, UAE...), providing that you have a decent 3D graphic card of course. With the previous versions, the Mac build was always lagging behind because the rendering code had to be painstakingly ported from DirectX to QuickDraw.

David could have chosen the SDL library instead, but for many reasons (limited performance, awkward portability, legal licensing in a commercial product), I guess it was out of question. Now about re-implementing a fallback to a 2D rendering method, David will have to clarify his position about it. But I guess it won't happen (at least, any time soon) for the very reasons explained above.
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Chris
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PostPosted: Wed Nov 24, 2004 2:00 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Well..If this is freeware I agree with you 100%...but this is commercial software and people paid price for this as this software is clearly marked as "Windows 9x/Me/NT/2000/XP, using DirectX!"

In this case, compatibility have priority over portability
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Kaminari
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PostPosted: Wed Nov 24, 2004 2:52 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Heh, good one :)

Come on, that page you're referring to hasn't been updated since the 0.9x versions. You've been on those forums long enough to know that DirectX applied only to those previous versions, and it was announced very early on that OpenGL would be the next path. Hopefully you didn't register ME back then, thinking that this would be different?
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Chris
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PostPosted: Wed Nov 24, 2004 3:53 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I registered ME about 2 years ago but ,to be earnest, I really missed the OpenGL part.......then what ? Should I replace my loving Matrox with OpenGL compatible video card to get Magic Engine keep rolling ?.... I really don't need any extra features like hardware accelation or bilinear filtering.....
There's probably other ways to solve this problem..like v99b Gui with some bug fixed (or only pce/tg16 source updated) for example...as a directx version...
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Alexsource
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PostPosted: Wed Nov 24, 2004 4:11 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Weird as it may sound, the emu works, but the OpenGL Infos thingy hangs up over here RazzRazzRazzRazz SiS cards and drivers are 1v0l!!!!!!! Shocked
I guess david can make a direct x versión for windows usrs, or a patch to enable directx... but i'm pretty sure it would take him a long time, if it were to look exactly like the current OGL powered version...
A stripped down of new graphic features and whistles version could be a nice option, though... Think
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Tomasz
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PostPosted: Wed Nov 24, 2004 4:42 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Chris wrote:
I registered ME about 2 years ago but ,to be earnest, I really missed the OpenGL part.......then what ? Should I replace my loving Matrox with OpenGL compatible video card to get Magic Engine keep rolling ?.... I really don't need any extra features like hardware accelation or bilinear filtering.....
There's probably other ways to solve this problem..like v99b Gui with some bug fixed (or only pce/tg16 source updated) for example...as a directx version...


Chris,
You have a G400, right? Could summarize or give examples of the visual problems that you experience with OpenGL.

Out of curiosity, I tested ME 1.0 on a system that has my G400 MAX as its video card. For the most part, everything looked the same as on my ATI based systems! I really didn't find any unusual in-game or gui glitches. I tested: Air Zonk, Bonk's Revenge, TV Sports Basketball, etc.

* Both bilinear and hires filtering worked properly. However, in some games (e.g., TV Sports Basketball) it slowed down the game to ~45-50 fps. Most games worked at full speed (i.e., 60 fps).

* I did find an issue with PR3 and full screen mode. Basically, I ran into the exact same problem that Kaminari previously described (silent crash upon trying to change to full screen mode):
Quote:
PR2 works great here, except that it will only run in Window Mode.

When setting windowed=n, it displays the Magic Engine 1.0 window, tries to switch to fullscreen (I can see a black screen for a microsecond) then it silently crashes to the desktop. The log file indicates nothing special, it stops right after the gamepad stats. PR1 didn't have this problem at all

Win2K SP4, DirectX 9.0c, GeForce3 Ti, ForceWare 66.93.

Has this been fixed yet?
The quote is from this thread:
http://www.magicenginefx.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=861

* PR1 works fine with full screen mode and exhibits no glitches that I can notice.

For reference, on that computer I am using Windows XP SP1 with relatively recent drivers from Matrox (I'll upgrade to the newest one's shortly).
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Kaminari
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PostPosted: Wed Nov 24, 2004 4:54 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

If that's the same problem I described, yes it has been fixed in the latest PR3 (PR3 was released two times the same day, you'd need to get it again).

The problem was due to fact that PR2 and PR3-1 tried to force the refresh rate to 60Hz, regardless of the refresh rates you may have forced yourself in your drivers (via RefreshForce, PowerStrip, whatever). My 640x480 mode is refreshed at 120Hz and that would clash with ME's fullscreen mode. PR1 and PR3-2 let Windows (or the user, for that matter) decide which refresh rate to use.
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Tomasz
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PostPosted: Wed Nov 24, 2004 5:07 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Yeah, I'm using the 1st iteration of PR3 because I haven't been able to find a good mirror to download PR3-2. The ME site went down the day it was released... I figure that I'll just wait until PR4 gets released.

Thanks!

EDIT: The refresh rate forcing that you cite is most likely the reason for my problem too because Matrox drivers have this functionality built-in.
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dmichel
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PostPosted: Wed Nov 24, 2004 6:43 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Guys, when I went the OpenGL way I really didn't expect that OpenGL was that poorly supported on some video cards, here all was fine during the tests (tested on TNT2, Radeon 9200, GF3), on my own (slow) PC it was even faster than the old MagicEngine with DirectX so I was happy and continued this way. And has Kaminari explained OpenGL was chosen for portability reason so that I could use the same code on Windows or OS X, or may be even Linux, who knows... It seemed a good choice to me but now if OpenGL makes troubles, it's not really a problem, I can add a DirectX driver to MagicEngine too, it's very easy to do, I wrote my graphics engine so that it is completely independant of the host OS, but give me some time please, the new version is only 5-day old, and with all the problems there was I was quite busy those past days, once the version will be stabilized and most features enabled sure I can look in making a DirectX driver, or even a Glide driver so that I could resurrect my old PC and its Banshee card, I'm sure it would make a few users happy too, but don't shoot me, else who will make the DirectX driver. Wink
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Chris
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PostPosted: Wed Nov 24, 2004 10:23 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Well..I'm using latest "win98" driver (tried old ones too)..and I'm getting swapped color and sprite has no color at all in full-screen mode ,also getting only 30 fps....I heard ,which is even worse, Matrox stopped supporting OpenGL in win98 platform....for the side note, I also have voodoo 3 as PCI which has similar problem but no sprites with garbled graphics..as far as I know, OpenGL is only fullly supported by nVidia cards and mostly by Ati (such as hardware TnL is missing) and partly by Matrox and Voodoo ,for example, performance is very poor and many compatibility issues like bad color, crash...

about direct-X driver...Yes I'll wait...

thanks..... Applause

I was just worried that I can't have ME.....that's all... Angel
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Tomasz
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PostPosted: Wed Nov 24, 2004 11:43 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Matrox stopped making new Win9x drivers over two years ago, around the time they released the Parhelia. Their Win2k/WinXP drivers are much better and still somewhat supported. Their OpenGL ICD is not too bad as far as compatibility is concerned; although, it has always been a bit slower compared to their Direct3D support. Of course the ICD does lack support for some extensions, but much of that is due to hardware limitations... remember this is a card that was released at the time of DX 6.1, before vertex/pixel shaders and even before fixed function hardware T&L. Nevertheless this is irrelevant for ME 1.0.

As I said before, the Win2k/WinXP driver works very well with ME using my Matrox G400 MAX. So, I guess you can either try to dualboot/upgrade to one of these operating systems or wait for native DirectX support.
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M1Savage
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PostPosted: Thu Nov 25, 2004 4:47 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

David -

I vote yes on adding the dx support and such. Those of us with "ancient" computers thank you! Applause
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