Unreal Tournament 3 Running On Linux

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  • Dragonlord
    replied
    Originally posted by Chris View Post
    For windowed, because the resolution you render to is normally proportionate to the physical size of the window. So if you needed to render to something weird like 520x370 to get an accepetable framerate, how would you handle that? In windowed mode, you'd end up with a tiny window. In fullscreen mode, you'd probably have to drop to 320x240 or go up to 640x480. In both cases, if the game's HUD or text isn't designed for such low resolution, you're SOL (notice in those pics that the text and HUD is still sharp.. it's just the scene that's lower res).

    You gain not having to run complex pixel shaders as often (196,608 times for a full scene in 512x384, versus 786,432 times in 1024x768; not counting overdraw or any other offscreen rendering). And if you're running on something like a GF6 (which is fully DX9/SM3 capable), or even a GF7 or lowend GF8, removing that extra processing could be the difference between a playable framerate, and a bad gaming experience.
    I guess I see where you are coming from. I'm still though a bit astonished this does the trick in such low resolutions. I could understand if we talked here about something like 1280x1050 or even 1680x1050 I run on my system ( where fill-rate really does explode ) but at this resolution range I somehow would expect the blit to not have too much influence. At last I played UT3 on a 6600GT with 600x800 resolution ( upscaled on TFT with 1680x1050 ) with acceptable framerate and this is the smallest resolution the game offered me.

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  • D0pamine
    replied
    Originally posted by marakaid View Post
    Do you think is too late for the game in terms of skill required? I mean, Windows players will have nearly one year of experience more than me, that's a bad side effect of waiting many months!
    I started playing ETQW 2 or 3 months after buying it in October 2007, and the first weeks were not nice, too much learning curve.
    thats a good point...neh i'll prawn them

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  • marakaid
    replied
    Do you think is too late for the game in terms of skill required? I mean, Windows players will have nearly one year of experience more than me, that's a bad side effect of waiting many months!
    I started playing ETQW 2 or 3 months after buying it in October 2007, and the first weeks were not nice, too much learning curve.

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  • Chris
    replied
    Why do you need to switch to a larger resolution? Or rather said... what gain is there from something weird like let's say 520x370 or something like that?
    For windowed, because the resolution you render to is normally proportionate to the physical size of the window. So if you needed to render to something weird like 520x370 to get an accepetable framerate, how would you handle that? In windowed mode, you'd end up with a tiny window. In fullscreen mode, you'd probably have to drop to 320x240 or go up to 640x480. In both cases, if the game's HUD or text isn't designed for such low resolution, you're SOL (notice in those pics that the text and HUD is still sharp.. it's just the scene that's lower res).

    You gain not having to run complex pixel shaders as often (196,608 times for a full scene in 512x384, versus 786,432 times in 1024x768; not counting overdraw or any other offscreen rendering). And if you're running on something like a GF6 (which is fully DX9/SM3 capable), or even a GF7 or lowend GF8, removing that extra processing could be the difference between a playable framerate, and a bad gaming experience.

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  • Dragonlord
    replied
    I still don't get the problem with the resolution. Why do you need to switch to a larger resolution? Or rather said... what gain is there from something weird like let's say 520x370 or something like that?

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  • Chris
    replied
    And you do not need this strange resolution of yours. TFTs are not required to use all pixels on their display. If the TFT is smart the screen is stretched to fill the available pixels best without too much quality loss.
    But that still only applies for known fullscreen modes. If you want a bigger windowed resolution, you either need to increase the rendered resolution, or render offscreen at whatever resolution and stretch to the window. And if you want a resolution that your card and/or monitor doesn't support, you either must use the next bigger or smaller, or set a mode that's bigger, then render offscreen and stretch.

    Also don't forget, the game allows you to pick any size above 50%, IIRC. So that's a significant amount of personal control over selecting the speed of the game, versus visual quality (some people might not be as bothered by 20FPS as others, while others might need to turn it all the way down and hope to get 20FPS).. Both without having to sacrifice physical window size, or worry if the mode is supported for fullscreen.

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  • Dragonlord
    replied
    And you do not need this strange resolution of yours. TFTs are not required to use all pixels on their display. If the TFT is smart the screen is stretched to fill the available pixels best without too much quality loss. I did for example play UT3 in 800x600 on a 1680x1050 monitor and it looked good. And this had been not a factor two scaling. That said box-filtering is not required to be of an exact integer multiple to work reasonably well.

    EDIT: I overlooked you mentioning glBlitFramebufferEXT. That's a bit a different story since that's an accelerated blit. In that case the speed bit is a bit different ( edited out text above ).
    Last edited by Dragonlord; 20 September 2008, 04:42 PM.

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  • Chris
    replied
    And... render resolution not available as graphic mode... that ain't working. To upscale to a resolution it has to be supported. You can render off-screen into any resolution you want to but once it gets on-screen it has to match a graphic mode ( if fullscreen ) or the window size.
    Exactly. So how could you render at 512x384 if you can't set a 512x384 mode? Or if you wanted a window the same size as 1024x768, but rendered at 512x384?

    In the end though it's not much worse than what the graphic card would do so... again... why doing it then in the first place wasting fill-rate ( which could be spend for a higher resolution instead )?
    UE3 is a rather advanced engine, no doubt using rather complex shaders. No matter how fast the GPU is, long shaders still take a more time to compute than a simple stretch blit. It makes it so it doesn't have to run those complex pixel shaders as often (1/4th less often at half the res), and instead substitutes them for a (faster) glBlitFramebufferEXT call. They can even stretch it using nearest filtering, so you get the hard edges you'd normally have on a CRT (which personally I actually prefer), instead of the blurring you'd have from an LCD.

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  • Dragonlord
    replied
    Yeah, but it doesn't really help much. Only a good machine helps to make it run well. And... render resolution not available as graphic mode... that ain't working. To upscale to a resolution it has to be supported. You can render off-screen into any resolution you want to but once it gets on-screen it has to match a graphic mode ( if fullscreen ) or the window size. I somehow don't get the problem.

    And about interpolation... graphic cards do box-filtering. That's similar to what TFTs do in their interpolation units ( interpolate between 4 nearest pixels ). Some TFTs are better at this, some less. In the end though it's not much worse than what the graphic card would do so... again... why doing it then in the first place wasting fill-rate ( which could be spend for a higher resolution instead )?

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  • Chris
    replied
    Lower resolutions on LCDs is awful (it often blurs badly, or even worse, may just be centered and not scaled). CRT upscaling is much better, true. However, that doesn't help for a) windowed modes, or b) systems where the target rendering resolution isn't available as a graphics mode. How many systems do you know that can display 720x450, half my current LCD native res? Mine doesn't. I was lucky to get a working 512x384 (half 1024x768) on most CRTs I had.

    Plus, the game lets you pick almost any percentage for a speed vs. sharpness tradeoff.

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