DirectDraw opengl renderer

[Alexander Nicolaysen Sørnes]

Hello everyone,

I know this has been discussed before (and not that long ago), but I think I 
have some wonderful new information to add to the debate of whether or not to 
add an option for this in winecfg.

As I understand it, there is still a long time before the opengl renderer will 
become the default one.  With Wine 0.9.45, some bugs were fixed allowing the 
opengl renderer to be used for C&C Tiberian Sun, and I must say the speed 
improvements are dramatic! Without any FPS tools I would definitely say 
performance has increased by several hundred per cent.  Now the game is so 
fast I may have to turn down the game speed setting. :)  If you move the 
mouse it still slows down, though, as it does with the gdi renderer.

Anyway, I think this should apply to several other games as well (and I will 
test more). But I was wondering is this is enough to add an option in 
winecfg?

Alexander N. Sørnes

[Roderick Colenbrander]

> As I understand it, there is still a long time before the opengl renderer
> will become the default one.  With Wine 0.9.45, some bugs were fixed
> allowing the opengl renderer to be used for C&C Tiberian Sun, and I must
> say the speed improvements are dramatic! Without any FPS tools I would
> definitely say performance has increased by several hundred per cent.  Now
> the game is so fast I may have to turn down the game speed setting. :)  If
> you move the mouse it still slows down, though, as it does with the gdi
> renderer.

There are roughly three bottlenecks for 2D games:
- GetDC/ReleaseDC which are used to draw to the framebuffer using GDI 
functions (requires nasty framebuffer downloads/uploads)
- Depth conversion (mainly for palette p8 games like starcraft / c&c1 / red 
alert)
- LockRect/UnlockRect which give direct access (a pointer) to framebuffer 
memory

In 0.9.45 I added PBO support for use with LockRect/UnlockRect. PBOs provide 
us with a pointer to DMA memory or video memory (depending on what the 
implementation prefers). This greatly helps Tiberian Sun and Red Alert II 
(the games I tested this code with a lot).

There are some other remaining issues (some PBO regressions) but I hope to get 
those fixed soon. After that I plan to add some more optimizations to the 
upload/download code (in some cases we have to flip a surface in software 
which is slow) and I will add an accelerated P8 backend to make 
C&C1/RedAlert/StarCraft a LOT faster.

If you are interested in using DirectDrawRenderer=opengl also make sure to 
play with the RenderTargetLockMode (default=readdraw). In case of Tiberian 
Sun 'readtex' is a lot faster.

Regards,
Roderick

[Vit Hrachovy]

Grand news, and thanks a lot for pointing this out - Zork: Nemesis and 
Zork: Grand Inquisitor are now finally playable using these two options 
opengl/readdraw. There is a small glitch with screen redrawing, but hey 
- it works after YEARS!

Regards
Vit

Roderick Colenbrander wrote:
> If you are interested in using DirectDrawRenderer=opengl also make sure to 
> play with the RenderTargetLockMode (default=readdraw). In case of Tiberian 
> Sun 'readtex' is a lot faster.
>
> Regards,
> Roderick

[Roderick Colenbrander]

> Grand news, and thanks a lot for pointing this out - Zork: Nemesis and 
> Zork: Grand Inquisitor are now finally playable using these two options 
> opengl/readdraw. There is a small glitch with screen redrawing, but hey
> - it works after YEARS!

Thanks, I have had reports of other games suddenly working in this version but I doubt my patches have caused it.

There are still a few issues in the code to which fixes have been submitted by Stefan and me. Hopefully after those patches things will still work.

I would ask people to monitor git closely this week to see if no regressions will appear.

Roderick