[rau89]

I figured since I was gonna do this for myself anyway, I might as well share it with the rest of you who have no time, or will to do this.

I just happened to start playing Final Fantasy Tactics, so I decided to do this experiment on it. There are 3d objects, sprites, as well as text in the screenies, making it a good test subject.

Unless otherwise noted, these are the options I had on Pete's OpenGL2 plugin v2.9.



I tested a variety of filters at high resolutions (1024x768) as shown in the image posted below. It's a huge file, so if you're too impatient to wait (the file is 9MB [5176x4804]), I found that the 4xScale shaders > 4xGLSoft shader was the best in terms of readability and improved graphics. The AA Shader v2.o - Bloom shader adds a bit of light bloom at the cost of sprite edge antialiasing/smoothness.

It's also important to note that the 2xSal that is applied in Pete's OpenGL2 plugin v2.9 options menu may be the reason some shaders look terrible. I'm not gonna go through and test them all for that though.

I don't remember where I found these shaders, but I'm sure a quick google of "epsxe plugins" or "epsxe shaders" will bring them up.

Big File-->
<a href='http://myfreefilehosting.com/f/96a0ec8291_9.17MB'>http://myfreefilehosting.com/f/96a0ec8291_9.17MB</a>

The following image is a test to see the difference in 4xGLSoft when having different Texture Filtering and High Res Textures options applied. There were small differences between them, but I thought the extended + smoothed sprites and 2xsal looked the best. It may be kind of hard to tell with the jpeg compression.



Also, if anyone can think of better image hosts I can use, tell me! And if you think this is useful, ask a Moderator to stickie it!

Cheers,

Ryan

 

[godfromdfo]

what game is that? it looks like an rpg I havent played yet 0_o

 

[sgsavvy]

you haven played before? its a good man, you're missing out dude, go get it from amazon or something man

 

[jonc2006]

generally its best to use the software plugin with that game, using the hardware plugins along with certain types of texture filtering settings has been known to cause seveal issues, the most common being the black overworld map glitch.

 

[godfromdfo]

What is the games name?!?!?!?!?!? pineapples!1111

 

[rau89]

The games name is Final Fantasy Tactics for you lazy people who don't read past the first sentence. And as for jonc2006's post, I had no clue it created glitches, I hadn't gotten past that screen yet, so I wasn't able to test anything out. Thanks.

If you look at the bigger picture though, the screenies will be an easy way to see how these filters might look in other games. =D

 

[jonc2006]

get past the first two battles so you can get to the part where you are able to move around on the world map and find out if this issue has been triggered.

 

[Mako Eyes]

generally its best to use the software plugin with that game, using the hardware plugins along with certain types of texture filtering settings has been known to cause seveal issues, the most common being the black overworld map glitch.

Yeah, I noticed that too when I was playing this game. It's because FFT's overworld map uses all kinds of wacky framebuffer calls for what appears to be no reason at all.

Regardless, this is a pretty interesting experiment you got going here, rau. Of those, my favorite would have to be the 4xMSAL because it seems to be the only one that effectively softens up the borders of those sprites.

Oh and a bit of advice: the next time you plan on doing this, you should probably work on compressing the image. If you're worried about it being lossy then you can always make it a .PNG. Bitmaps are kind of unnecessary. There really is no need for an image to be 70MB.

 

[godfromdfo]

oh yea.. played it on gba... just looks alot diffrent 0_o

 

[LensLarque]

It's not the same game at all on GBA.

 

[jonc2006]

there is a port for this but it is on the PSP, the GBA has tactics advanced however its a totally different game.

 

[godfromdfo]

and heres me thinking it wouldnt be that diffrent all along.. damn, I have to buy fft now... >_> lols

can you upload that shader btw please?

 

[jonc2006]

i think they come in the pack below

http://www.pbernert.com/pete_ogl2_guest_shaders_v1.zip

 

[godfromdfo]

Thank you, when I use 2xscal and 4xgl thing together I get really aweful fps I get around 20fps in the grandia save screen... =[

so I fidled around a bit and get 57-59fps with the following settings in the grandia save screen (in game is 59fps but dont know about movies yet or events...):

Plugin: Pete's OpenGL2 Driver 2.9
Author: Pete Bernert
Card vendor: ATI Technologies Inc.
GFX card: ATI Radeon X1250

Resolution/Color:
- 640x480 Fullscreen - NO desktop changing
- Internal X resolution: 1
- Internal Y resolution: 1
- Keep psx aspect ratio: z
>
- No render-to-texture: z
>

- Filtering: 6
- Hi-Res textures: 0
- TexWin pixel shader: on
- VRam size: 0 MBytes

Framerate:
- FPS limitation: on
- Frame skipping: off
- FPS limit: Auto

Compatibility:
- Offscreen drawing: 1
- Framebuffer effects: 2
- Framebuffer uploads: 1

Misc:
- Scanlines: off
- Mdec filter: on
- Screen filtering: on
- Shader effects: 5/4
- Flicker-fix border size: 0
- GF4/XP crash fix: off
- Game fixes: off [00015107]



is there any way I can improve the graphics more by altering the settings without getting less fps? my gpu is only a x1250 my cpu is 1.9ghz x2 dual core amd and 3gb ram.. I assume its my gpu thats letting me down, could anyone help? Thanks

 

[jonc2006]

http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/utilities/DCO_1.1.4.zip

try installing that, some AMD dual core models have performance issues with certain applications, epsxe being one of them. as for your GPU, make sure your drivers are up-to-date, you can try disabling the screen filtering setting as it uses up a bit of your card's memory and can lower the performance on some systems.

you should also enter the amount of video memory manually, the auto detect setting does not work for ATI users, not doing so can also lower performance and i would bet that part of your problem right now is due to it being set to that.

 

[godfromdfo]

http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/utilities/DCO_1.1.4.zip

try installing that, some AMD dual core models have performance issues with certain applications, epsxe being one of them. as for your GPU, make sure your drivers are up-to-date, you can try disabling the screen filtering setting as it uses up a bit of your card's memory and can lower the performance on some systems.

you should also enter the amount of video memory manually, the auto detect setting does not work for ATI users, not doing so can also lower performance and i would bet that part of your problem right now is due to it being set to that.

downloaded the file and changed settings to:

Plugin: Pete's OpenGL2 Driver 2.9
Author: Pete Bernert
Card vendor: ATI Technologies Inc.
GFX card: ATI Radeon X1250

Resolution/Color:
- 800x600 Fullscreen - NO desktop changing
- Internal X resolution: 1
- Internal Y resolution: 1
- Keep psx aspect ratio: E

- No render-to-texture: E


- Filtering: 6
- Hi-Res textures: 0
- TexWin pixel shader: off
- VRam size: 128 MBytes

Framerate:
- FPS limitation: on
- Frame skipping: off
- FPS limit: Auto

Compatibility:
- Offscreen drawing: 1
- Framebuffer effects: 2
- Framebuffer uploads: 1

Misc:
- Scanlines: off
- Mdec filter: on
- Screen filtering: off
- Shader effects: 5/4
- Flicker-fix border size: 0
- GF4/XP crash fix: off
- Game fixes: off [00015107]


is that better?

 

[jonc2006]

is it running better?

 

[rau89]

get past the first two battles so you can get to the part where you are able to move around on the world map and find out if this issue has been triggered.

I can see the overworld map. There's no black map bug for me.

...
Oh and a bit of advice: the next time you plan on doing this, you should probably work on compressing the image. If you're worried about it being lossy then you can always make it a .PNG. Bitmaps are kind of unnecessary. There really is no need for an image to be 70MB.

I thought to myself, PNG! Forgot about that file format. But it seems I thought too soon. The lossless JPEG file I had saved was 9.16MB, while the PNG file I tried saving was 11.4MB.

Also, bitmaps? Hahaha what do you take me for.

 

[Mako Eyes]

The lossless JPEG file I had saved was 9.16MB, while the PNG file I tried saving was 11.4MB.

Ah, fair enough. Whatever works for you, so long as it's compressed

Also, bitmaps? Hahaha what do you take me for.

But the original hosted image was a .BMP file...

 

[rau89]

But the original hosted image was a .BMP file...

?

I'm confused, I saved both as JPEG from photoshop. Then uploaded as JPEG onto the 2 different hosts that I used. Which file are you talking about exactly?