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Scalers, Shaders and Direct3D

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First post, by m.q.

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Hello everyone. I'm using DosBox 0.63 together with gulikoza's CVS (precompiled, v. 051009). What I'm trying to do is to run DOSBox in fullscreen with a scaler to reduce pixelation in the graphics. The reason I installed this CVS, is that I'm trying do the video processing w/ my Radeon 9600 instead of the CPU, using the Direct3D patch (included in the CVS). Previously, I was using the advinterp2x scaler, which is a software scaler.

But I'm trying to run a hardware scaler, and the thing is, apparently the output=direct3d only seems to make a diference when hwscale>1.00. Since I'm trying to run in fullscreen I get a message "D3D Pixel shader not needed", and in fact, since I was told to put scaler=normal2x following instructions at gulikosa's page, I noticed no further graphic enhancements.

To sum up, my .conf has these lines:
fullscreen=true
fulldouble=false
fullfixed=false
fullresolution=1024x768
output=direct3d
hwscale=1.00
pixelshader=2xsai.fx (for instance)
...
scaler=normal2x
...
core=dynamic

How can I configure DOSBox so as to allow hardware scaling (or is it shading?) in fullscreen, preferably using Direct3D? If it is not possible, why so? Am I missing something here? I know CVS are not supported, but since this seems like such a simple question... and yet, I couldn't find an answer anywhere in these forums.

Thanks in advance for any assistence, and congrats to gulikoza and the DOSBox Team.

My spcs: AMD XP 2600, ASUS A7N8X-X, 1GB RAM, Windows XP Pro, ATI Radeon 9600Pro 256MB.

Reply 1 of 6, by eL_PuSHeR

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Interesting question. I also have a 9600 and I would like to know more about this issue.

Intel i7 5960X
Gigabye GA-X99-Gaming 5
8 GB DDR4 (2100)
8 GB GeForce GTX 1070 G1 Gaming (Gigabyte)

Reply 2 of 6, by gulikoza

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Only low-res games are scaled. Try starting a game and see if the shader is working. Using your config options I get scaling in prince of persia. Command prompt is never scaled in fullscreen since it runs at 640x400.

Reply 4 of 6, by m.q.

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You're right, gulikoza, most of the times I only started the c. prompt and, since I got a msg saying: pixel shader not needed, I assumed something had gone wrong and quit. Now I see that as soon as I load a game (in my case, ultima 😎, I get a new msg: "pixel shader active". Thanks again!

Now, perhaps this is common, but here it's slower to use a pixelshader (such as 2xsai or scale2x) than to use a software scaler (such as advinterp2x or advmame2x). In the case of u8, using timesynched=true I got:
some 20000 cicles using none+advinterp2x;
some 3500 cicles using 2xSaI+normal2x;
some 13000 cicles using scale2x+normal2x;

So for some reason it appears that my Radeon is not helping my cpu, and that the direct3d is slowing the emu (I was hoping it would be the other way around). I admit that 2xSaI looks a lot better than the others, but that's beside the point. Is it supposed to be this way?

Btw, using fullresolution=640x400, it didn't seem to matter whether fullfixed was true or false.

Reply 6 of 6, by gulikoza

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It depends on your graphics card. Also, be sure you disable AA and AF in your control panel. There is some room for optimizations (make it threaded) but DirectX does not like threads very much so at the moment I'm not woking on it...

edit: also set frameskip=1

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