Regarding Emulators

[Borde]

I guess you're talking abount New Super Mario Bros e1sunz. Well, sure it's a great game, but let's face it, it's no technological wonder. God of War, on the other hand, it's pretty nice for a PS2. PCSX2 has been developed for way longer and allways has led the advances in the exploitation of the newer equipment capabilities. The usage of dual core, specialicez CPU instruction sets, DirectX 10 and now even multicore support (a feature that Dolphin team is still to implement, supossing it's possible to do it at all)...

[jeffdamann]

Trust me, you may not think you can force AA in these emus, but its possible. Not to say I havent had to do some (crap) hacks to get it pulled off but when I get back to my pc I will take some funny Screenshots.

Examples will be Mario's perfectly hemispherical butt in SM64(as I said the extreme AA rounds everything off, and mario's model winds up looking very funny) Or many games in Epsxe.

Also to covarr, you said you would like Epsxe until you ran up on one of the handful of games it refuses to run... I dont understand this. I have the entire psx collection(1.5 TB) and have played everything through Epsxe. I believe the only games I couldnt get to work were Amazing Virtual Sea Monkeys(Ill play ANY title I havent tried once, you find gems that way) and Matt Hoffmans Pro Bmx, And I believe this was from file corruption rather than them being broken... I have been wrong many times in the past before though.

To the other fellow who said you cant force in Pcsx2.... You know that I use the directx plugin right? How in the world could I possibly use any direct x programs and not have my AF forced. Im not really sure how forcing works, but Its not just for new games. Ive taken countless OLD OLD 3d titles and brought them up to PS2 quality graphics with extreme resolutions mixed with high levels of AA, Anisotropy, and Filters.

I have seen the physical change in the models of the games I play with. Remember how blocky cloud is on PSX? I can show you cloud in ALL his round glory, his hands are balls(like fists) and every part of his clothing and limbs are rounded off in a much more appealing manner.

[Hellbringer616]

Still doesn't use more then one GPU. and i can't speak for ATI, but i know for a fact you can not force it with nVida's drivers. I will ask about ATI later. (GSDX is the only plugin worth using, just sayin haha)

Case in point, this thread here: http://forums.pcsx2.net/Thread-Does-Anisotropic-Filtering-work-in-the-emu?page=6

I know it worked at some point, the thread above is trying to figure out why it no longer works now.

And i didn't say all emulators, I simply said pcsx2 (if it came off as anything else thats a my bad haha) i am trying with ePSXe when i get home.

[jeffdamann]

Yes epsxe definately does it, if you want really extreme results, make sure your internal resolution is as high as you can muster, extend your vram, and make sure you have good framebuffer settings(im sure you know all of this,just dont cheap out on any of your graphical options.) Ive been away from my house for a few days but when I go back I will take comparison pics going from ps1 native, to ps1 enhanced with filters, to ps1 with filters and AA. Thanks for you info though, all I have played on pcsx2 is FFX, and their models are in pretty good shape, so you wouldnt really see any deformation anyway...

[Borde]

But using fancy filters to the level of making a cube look like a sphere has it's drawbacks. You end up losing definition and/or detail. If you were to smooth the actual geometry that would certaily look interesting, but would be way too expensive, error prone and in several cases just imposible. I recall seeing some experiments years ago on Project 64, but I guess they didn't get too far.

As for not being able to use AA on a specific applications, there can be several reasons. Some rendering modes and render targets impose several restrictions. For example, you can't enable AA when writting to multiple rendere targets (which is the reason why you can't use driver's antialiasing when using deferred shading). I'm not sure about Antisotropic filtering, but I guess there are cases where you can't use it either.

[Covarr]

Also to covarr, you said you would like Epsxe until you ran up on one of the handful of games it refuses to run... I dont understand this. I have the entire psx collection(1.5 TB) and have played everything through Epsxe. I believe the only games I couldnt get to work were Amazing Virtual Sea Monkeys(Ill play ANY title I havent tried once, you find gems that way) and Matt Hoffmans Pro Bmx, And I believe this was from file corruption rather than them being broken... I have been wrong many times in the past before though.

EVERY title? Including every region revision? There are many instances where the US and Japan versions work great, but the European versions have trouble. And do recall that I said "refuses to run properly". Games such as Shockwave Assault and Ore No Ryouri (both excellent games) start up just fine in it, but have some serious issues in-game.

Trust me, you may not think you can force AA in these emus, but its possible. Not to say I havent had to do some (crap) hacks to get it pulled off but when I get back to my pc I will take some funny Screenshots.

I can't speak for AMD, but with NVIDIA drivers it's really easy to force AF and AA not just for this, but for almost anything.


Don't try it on Minecraft though. Most nvidia users have all sorts of graphical glitches with it, chances are slim that it'll work right.

[jeffdamann]

Using extreme levels of filters and AA definately has its drawbacks, but it is refreshing to see the rounded geometry when the model is more suitable for it. The ones that have the most problems are EXTREMELY low poly,  but if you take it with a grain of salt, most other things look wonderful.

There are some major drawbacks in some games. For instance, in legend of dragoon, when using high AA, any object that is part of the foreground develops thick blue lines against the background, making much of the game's scenes look very ugly, with only slightly better looking models.

Thanks for that information Covarr, Now we know Nvidia has no problem with this. Also I havent tried any regional variants or (J) games, but my time for emulation has been limited as of late.

Also Im basically talking out of my ass because I moved to california and sold any sweet hardware I have, Id love to say I still have the 3 6970's, but sadly I now just have one . I dont even have enough budget to offord bulldozer, who interestingly enough beat out the 2500k in Official MT benches, but was destroyed in the ST tests. Im getting off topic, Ill make a thread of it. Sorry about that guys.

Anyways Ive really enjoyed the emulation discussion, Any info anyone has on Advanced filters and shaders, and crazy new ways to improve the graphics, lemme know.