Motion Blur and other FB effects

[sheik124]

last I remember, the only plugins capable of this were Glide64, and I think a recently released version of Rice's plugin. with the new cards here (GeForce 6, Radeon X) have any of the GFX plugin devs thought of taking advantage of this?

 

[Powerlord]

Direct64 has motion blurs... or at least it does in the opening to Majora's Mask.

 

[sheik124]

yes i remember Direct64, that was it, but, is there anything new that is desinged to take advantage of things like Pixel Shader 3 (can write longer shaders) or with faster gfx cards in mind?

 

[-Shadow-]

Maybe Orkin is facing that problem already, but who knows? His activity ran very low since his last life sign :down:

 

[Powerlord]

Well, as far as I know, Direct64 is the only one that takes advantage of Pixel Shader 2.0, let alone 3.

Anyway, I've heard that Pixel Shader 3 isn't that much better than Pixel Shader 2... not as much as the transition from 1.x to 2, that is.

 

[cooliscool]

That's.. stupid. SM3 for N64 emulation.

I swear..

 

[sheik124]

dude, i was just making a suggestion, no need to get angry. think about it, if they could write longer shaders (which is why SM3 exists) it wouldn't be as hard to code full FB emulation, of course, i know jack squat about n64 vid plugin coding, but still.

 

[Allnatural]

I don't think pixel shaders of any revision are going to help framebuffer emulation. Though to be honest I don't know what tricks orkin and Rice are using to speed up the effects. The limitation, as I understand it, is in PC architecture, the AGP bus specifically. It just wasn't designed for the multiple reads and writes required by framebuffer effects. I'm curious to see if PCI Express will help.

In the meantime, there's always the software approach. A software plugin will perform framebuffer tricks just fine, but, of course, has its share of trade-offs in other areas.

 

[Reznor007]

Modern cards can render to textures and use that instead of having to read each frame from the card into system RAM and reload it.

 

[BFeely]

Is the framebuffer in a format that current video cards can read? If so, then try rendering to the framebuffer then giving the emulator access to that memory. Of course, this would limit the graphics to 320x240 resolution, but might make for more accurate emulation.

 

[CanSee]

Glide64 has pretty fine motion blur FX emulation, as far as I compared it to the original (I am thnking of Majora's Mask in particular). Have you tried wrappers? Dunno if they are capable of doing it. Not really SmartShader niveau, yet I think you would get sth nearly Voodoo5 quality (or GeForce2 to compare) Can't guarantee though. Hacktrux is a good wrapper shown as compatible to Glide64. It'd be good if some1 familiar to Orkin would push him a bit to work on that. Or if some1 would get Pete to make OpenGL2 plugin just like for PSX emu right?