|
Post by Gamesoul Master on May 16, 2008 12:25:57 GMT -5
Alright, to start... As we all know, sometimes it's necessary to use an emulator like ePSXe to get around problems. And at times, I like to play around with ePSXe a bit, just to see what my video card can do. This has led me to a complaint that has been bothering me for 3 video cards and all plugins that aren't specifically software-renderers. I don't know how many people here actually make use of ePSXe as a secondary PS1 emulator (or primary... just anybody who knows it somewhat fluently), but hopefully somebody (::cough:: patrickp ::cough: comes along with a possible answer. When playing many of my games, I notice that as nice as ePSXe may be for people who use it, it doesn't seem to like filtering text. At all. And to make this as easy to understand as possible, I have taken a screenshot of the same exact spot in the game, at the same exact resolution, as well as making ePSXe have as similar settings to pSX as possible. So what you should be seeing is both images rendered as similarly as possible. ePSXe ScreenshotpSX ScreenshotAs you see, I have bilinear filtering turned on in pSX. In ePSXe (both v1.52 and v1.60), I'm using "Pete's OpenGL Driver 1.76", but this problem happens for all his other plugins as well (except the software renderer, as stated before). And don't tell me to try to OpenGL2 driver, because my card apparently can't handle it (error messages about pixel shaders and such as soon as I try to start it). All I want is for ePSXe to filter *at least* as good as pSX can do, if not better. The reason I'm asking here is because I very much dislike other forums who just say stupid crap in response to questions like this, when I *have* tried as much as possible to make this situation better. I have tried just about all the settings I could in these plugins, but nothing seems to fix the filtering. The only option I saw that I haven't tried (and I'm sure would work, but much more slowly than filtering should) is the "Screen smoothing" option. If this is indeed the only option that actually provides any kind of filtering, let me know. But otherwise, I'm pretty sure ePSXe is supposed to be able to do much better than this. Edit: Wow, I take that back about the screen smoothing option possibly being useful. Not only did it barely scratch this filtering problem (*lack* of filtering, to be exact), but while doing nothing, it managed to drop my in-game FPS to 15-25.
|
|
|
Post by Sune on May 16, 2008 12:37:10 GMT -5
Try running at a higher resolution?
The higher the res, the less filtering artifacts you should see.
|
|
|
Post by Gamesoul Master on May 16, 2008 12:57:18 GMT -5
Well first of all, I've tried running at 1024x768 fullscreen, which is as high as my monitor can go (pretty sad for an LCD that's only a few years old), and the same thing results (with or without that screen smoothing or any other settings). And there doesn't really seem to be any filtering occuring for there to be "filtering artifacts" in the first place. That is pretty much the base of my problem here. No filtering is occuring. To verify this, I took a screenshot of pSX with the bilinear filtering turned off, and it looked *exactly* the same as what ePSXe is outputting.
|
|
|
Post by stranger90 on May 16, 2008 14:22:42 GMT -5
Yeah but, I think you should use another plugin for ePSXe such as PEOP's Soft Driver 1.17
|
|
|
Post by patrickp on May 16, 2008 15:58:55 GMT -5
I haven't run ePSXe since I started using Linux, GM, because, apart from anything else, it's such a pig to install and configure. For the last year or two I was using ePSXe, I used to run the Pete's OGL2 plugin, as well.
But I'm pretty sure there was some form of filtering in Pete's OGL plugin that enabled filtering on a par with pSX' Bilinear filter with little or no hit to resources. How about posting a screenshot of the configuration window to jog my memory; I'm pretty sure it wasn't an option in the game fixes section.
|
|
|
Post by Gamesoul Master on May 16, 2008 16:05:38 GMT -5
stranger90: That's the only one that *does* work. The only problem is that at times it can lag a bit because all the rendering is done via software and with filters, it takes up more resources than pSX. And currently, I can't have that kind of CPU usage, because as soon as my CPU use goes above like 25%, the CPU temperature starts rising at about 1 dC per second, until around 55-60 where the computer shuts down without warning. When kept at extremely low speeds, the temperature hovers around 43-45 dC. Both fans are running at full (100% speed) to try and combat this, but it only somewhat slows down the quickly-increasing temperature. Not sure why this is happening either... It used to either not overheat or not shut down at so low a temperature (all I've done is updated the audio/video drivers to their latest "official" versions, as opposed to the latest official drivers that my PC "supports" (damn HP/Compaq like thinking their stuff is so special when it's just the standard crap that everybody else has)). Here is a screenshot of Pete's OpenGL configuration menu.
|
|
|
Post by Sune on May 16, 2008 17:11:32 GMT -5
If your CPU is an AMD, maybe all you need is to go to their website and get the proper CPU drivers and "cool & quiet" software for it.
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on May 16, 2008 17:58:38 GMT -5
Back when I used ePSXe on a more regular basis, and played Vagrant Story with it, I never could get any of the ogl plugins to render the text so that I could read it without trouble. There was always something wrong with it. It probably doesn't help that Vagrant Story uses a fairly odd typeface for the text as well. If your CPU is an AMD, maybe all you need is to go to their website and get the proper CPU drivers and "cool & quiet" software for it. Cool & Quiet works as a way to "underclock" your cpu by reducing the multiplier and the voltage when the cpu usage is low. As soon as cpu usage climbs, the undercloking stops, so it wouldn't help with overheating issues. For example, my cpu idles at 1ghz with cool and quiet enabled, thus keeping the cpu cool and the fan quiet. Only when I game or encode or whatever more cpu intensive, it will turn off the underclocking and use the full 2.8ghz. GM, have you opened the case recently? Maybe there's a swarm of dust bunnies setting a nest in your cpu fan. Maybe the cpu sink/fan has somehow loosened and the contact between sink and cpu isn't solid anymore.
|
|
|
Post by Gamesoul Master on May 16, 2008 19:02:49 GMT -5
Actually, I opened it and completely cleaned it out a few days ago. Had to even remove the heatsink to clean the fan (no viable way to remove the CPU fan without removing everything short of the processor itself). Everything is completely clean, but I intend to check and make sure I put it back on correctly (as in... the correct rotation, as it doesn't tell you which way it goes on by means of arrows or words or anything). I don't think I put it on wrong, but there isn't much that could've gone wrong.
And the processor is Intel... And though Intels are usually known for running pretty cool, mine is running as hot as the average AMD, which is a bit odd to me. Well either way, it might very well just be my graphics driver being stupid (it always happens when I load FFXI, which happens to be something that kicks my processor up to 100%). To be honest, just about *everything* on this computer that requires any decent processor power (*any* emulator, for instance) kicks my processor up to 100%. Apparently that isn't normal. It's always done that though, for as long as I've had this computer.
And back on this topic... based on Mika's experience, it may be just that ePSXe has no method for smoothing out certain types of text in games? I certainly hope not, but it does seem possible, considering I've messed with just about every option I could... even ones that didn't seem related to what I'm trying to do.
|
|
|
Post by patrickp on May 16, 2008 20:14:15 GMT -5
Here is a screenshot of Pete's OpenGL configuration menu. AIR the one that provides some filtering without a performance hit is Color dithering, GM. It's a good idea to set the Gfx card VRAM specifically; AIR the Autodetect setting is not supposed to be very reliable. AIR I used to set most of the settings in Textures and Compatibility to the Standard settings; some of those do dig into your resources. I think Texture filtering, Hi-Res textures, Off-Screen drawing and Framebuffer access might have been the ones. AIR of the Special games fixes, it was essential to enable the Odd/Even bit hack for ATI cards. I'm somewhat guessing, of course; it's a long time since I've used ePSXe, especially in Windows and with the OGL (as opposed to the OGL2) plugin.
|
|
|
Post by Gamesoul Master on May 16, 2008 22:28:50 GMT -5
Well currently I'm using my Intel 915GV integrated card, because it works better than that nVIDIA card I had, and of course my ATI Radeon 9250 fried itself quite a few months ago. I guess the Intel 915GV doesn't really like OGL2... >.>
I'll be trying out those settings in a little while. So you know, the odd/even bit hack is only useful in v1.52 or earlier. Didn't know about the VRAM setting. Dithering would only apply if I wasn't using 32-bit color depth (nothing to "dither"). But either way, you've given me more ideas to play with, and that's always appreciated... ^^
|
|
|
Post by patrickp on May 17, 2008 5:23:02 GMT -5
Ah, I thought you were still using an ATI card, GM - yes, some of those Intel integrated chips have a poor performance in Linux, as well.
|
|
|
Post by Gamesoul Master on May 17, 2008 14:37:30 GMT -5
Well, I wish I didn't have to use it, but it seems to provide better performance than most PCI cards I could get (as long as I'm not playing something that requires a newer graphics card *and* processor). OpenGL support could be better for the time period this computer is from, but at least it works.
Pretty sure that problem I was having was related to the video drivers I recently installed, btw. I went back to the newest drivers "supported" for this particular computer, and I'm not having any more reboot situations. Though I don't think it's a matter of the drivers not being supported... I just think that the newer drivers have some issue specifically with FFXI, as that was the only time it'd reboot. And apparently, many people using integrated Intel graphics chipsets from around the time period these were released, have problems with FFXI and certain sets of drivers. This processor indeed just runs hotter than most P4 chips of its time (idle temp averages about 43°C, full usage around 60°C, though harder to find an average for that one as there are too many variables).
I ended up going to bed a bit early last night, so I didn't get a chance to play around with ePSXe some more, but I'm going to do that right now while I'm not busy and it's on my mind. I have little hope, but what can I expect from an emulator like ePSXe anyway, right? XD
Edit: Oddly enough, it seems to be a problem with the texture filtering. If I set it to any option besides the regular "Standard" or "Enhanced" filtering (the other options provide sprite and 2D filtering options), the text gets really ugly. When it's just set to Standard or Enhanced, some of the text gets really nice (like pSX), while some of it is still somewhat ugly (though better than before). I have no idea why that happens, since the text *definitely* shouldn't be related to sprites at all, and everything else that's 2D filters nicely, except for the text. Either the FFT programmers or Pete did something really odd in how they handle things...
Funny thing is... on the world map, the text and location points all look ugly, with rough edges and such, but as soon as I pull up the menu (which still leaves the map almost completely visible, except for a small menu box obstructing part of the view), all of a sudden the stuff on the map looks nice and filtered. Not sure how that can happen though. And when looking at a character (such as the screenshots I posted earlier), the stats themselves look relatively nice (though a bit "blurred" around them, as if each number/letter is in a barely noticeable box), and the names of the equipment and all that (the bottom half of the screen) has the half-ugly text similar to on the world map when the menu isn't up. All very odd, but at least I'm on the right track it seems. Now if I can just clean things up a bit more...
|
|
|
Post by Gamesoul Master on May 17, 2008 16:20:16 GMT -5
Sorry to double-post, but I just wanted to update the thread itself because...
I'm giving up on this. It just seems that the hardware-based plugins are simply not capable of rendering the text the way it should be rendered. I'll just have to go back to using the software-based one, which works (almost) perfectly. Just a small problem with the world map background sometimes disappearing (and needing to use frameskipping for a constant 60 fps of course). It's otherwise nice and sharp when using the HQ2x filter, and I don't use ePSXe all that often anyway. Thanks for the help everybody, but it just seems that unless some updates are made to those (outdated) plugins, I'll have to be sticking with the software-renderer.
|
|
|
Post by Heihachi_73 on May 19, 2008 1:43:00 GMT -5
To me, it's the lack of coders who are willing to make use of the ePSXe (PSEmu Pro) interface in this day and age. Basically, everyone's happy with Pete's plugins, but it's mainly because there's no decent alternative this side of the year 2000! I'd be only too happy to see a software plugin which has slightly better than 5fps on 'framebuffer-intensive' games, like Devil's stage in Tekken 2 (which apparently works perfectly on any and every nVidia 3D card tested). I literally get faster gameplay in MAME than in ePSXe or ZiNc using that range of plugins.
|
|