The Khan Artist
Warrior for God
Well, Pete just updated his PSX GPU plugins with a special "ATi release", and here is an exceprt from the changelog:
I thought I read something that with recent driver updates, the Radeon 9700 Pro was about 5 times faster than anything else at copying framebuffer to system memory. So is it really not? Or is Pete doing something wrong?
# Now I started up several psx games which are known to use framebuffer textures/framebuffer access. Nice: in OpenGL the framebuffer texture option works very fast on ATI cards (at least on the R9700 Pro). But the framebuffer access (reading vram to system memory) has an horrible speed... at least 5 times slower than my old GF3. I've tried all kind of different color formats, and read through the ATI OpenGL extension specs, but no luck: slow. So I decided to do a new 'special game fix' (I should rename that section into 'special hardware fixes', it seems), calling it 'Mixed software FB access'. What does it do? It minimizes the real vram reading to a minimum, whenever the 'framebuffer access' modes 1 (reads), 2 (moves) and 3 (read&moves) are used, and uses software drawing instead. Unlike the FB access mode 4 (full software drawing) it will not use the soft funcs all the time, only if they are really needed, when a psx game is doing such special effects.
# Then I moved on to the D3D plugins... didn't expect much problems, but then I noticed an horrible slowdown with 'FB access' and even with 'FB textures'. Well, I did know that my D3D code to emulate such effects were optimized for older (DX6/7) hardware, but I never suspected that newer ATI cards were choking that bad at it. Anyway, since the new OGL plugin is working really nice on new cards, I didn't change anything with the D3D code, I just added the new 'Mixed software FB access' special game fix as well. Therefore: if you want to play psx games with my plugins with an ATI card, I suggest to use the OGL plugin. If (for whatever reasons) you want to use one of the D3D plugins, you should at least enable the new fix, and set the 'FB textures' option to 3 (card buffer + software), never to 2 (card buffer).
I thought I read something that with recent driver updates, the Radeon 9700 Pro was about 5 times faster than anything else at copying framebuffer to system memory. So is it really not? Or is Pete doing something wrong?