Written by Ali, References taken from Pete's Documents

Version 1.0

Direct3D plugin is though a very capable one, but most of the people who own a Geforce or an ATI chip based card prefer using opengl plugin. Most people who use the plugins are those who have an Intel, SiS or Savage chip based cards or some other which do not support opengl. The configuration of the Direct 3D plugin are quite the same as that of the opengl, so if you know how to configure that plugin then it would be no problem for you to understand what this plugins has got. But my aim here is to provide you assistance for the configuration that would best suit your hardware, so lets goon with the review.

1) Resolution Settings

One thing that is missing in the image is the Device Selection Button, well I will just explain what is has to do here. If you have two graphic Cards installed then you have the option to select your desired one. How can this be possible, well you might have a Pci and a AGP card installed.

Now I come to the resolution settings, these settings you can say are inversely proportional to the frames per second (I said this just to explain you). The higher the value of resolution the lower the fps you will get. So try not messing with the higher values if you don't have a fast card. The difference between the 16 and 32 bit color depth is very low, 32 Bit mode is a but heavy and would cause fps decrease, therefore always keep it at 16 bit mode for all cards. As far as the resolution goes, well here is a little list for you.

  • Intel,S3 and SiS: 600x480 with 16bit Color Depth.
  • Tnt2 , ATI Rage 128/ATI 7500, Geforce 256/2 : 800x600 with 16bit Color depth.
  • Geforce 3/4: 1024x768 with 16 or 32 bit Color Depth.

Windowed mode is used when you want to have graphics in a customized sized window rather then full screen.

2) Texture Settings

These settings important, because while you are playing games the most of the stuff you see are the textures.

There are a total of five options for texture quality settings.

  • Don't Care : it's the first matching texture type your card can offer.
  • R4 B4 G4 A4 : Not very colorful, the textures will not look very good, but the gameplay will be fast. Recommended for lower end cards like Intel,S3 and SiS
  • R5 B5 G5 A5 : This option would give fine texture colors, Recommended for TNT2 and ATI Rage Cards
  • R8 B8 G8 A8: The most highest values, the most colors you can get in textures, graphics will be good, but using it would eat up to 10 fps, recommended only for Geforce Cards and ATI 7500 or Greater.

Texture Filtering modes will attempt to give you better looking textures, Bilinear filtering is not supported by an actual playstation, but this plugins would make an attempt to do that. There are a total of six options, I will not mention each and every, just use the 4th One i,e Extended w/o Sprites, works well with all Nvidia and ATI cards. For lower end cards no filtering modes should be used.

Texture Handling: To optimize the texture storage, the plugin has to know the size of your graphics card Video ram . You can try to let the plugin auto-detect the available vram memory, or you can enter the right amount yourself. To help the gfx card in certain situations, you can enable "Texture garbage collection". That option will need additional cpu power. Last but not least there is an option called "Faster palettized texture windows".That one will boost up performance in games which are using a big amount of that special psx texture type (for example Ghost In A Shell), but your Graphics card has to support palettized textures (all GeForce cards can do them with newer drivers, while TNT cards cannot do them at all).

3) Frame Rate

These settings would allow you to adjust the amount of frames that you get in the gameplay. Remember that you cannot increase the amount of frames that you get, as they depend on your hardware and the above settings. However you can limit your frames to a specific amount if you are getting frame greater then the actual required. For pal game the standard frame rate per second is 50 and for NTSC games the standard frame rate per second is 60.

If you want to limit the frame rate then check Use FPS (Frames per second) Limit and then you will have to specify the limit. You can do that in two ways, either let the plugins select the frame limitation itself by selecting Auto-Detect FPS or by specifying manually by selecting FPS Limit and entering the required value. Frame skipping can be used to gain a little speed.

4) Compatibility Settings

Off Screen Drawing is used to detect drawing outside the Front/Back buffer, which is done software mode. There are a total of five modes

  • None: No offscreen drawings will be done, glitches in splash screens/game gfx can happen
  • Minimum: Low detection, but would take care of the slash screens.
  • Standard: A medium check for the need of off screen drawing. Usually recommended lower end Intel, S3 and Sis cards, I still use this for my Geforce 2MX
  • Enhanced: A complicated check for offscreen drawings is done. Can be used for faster cards like Geforce 3
  • Extended: Does the "enhanced" check, and adds some additional buffer

Advanced Blending: These settings are used to get perfect lightening in the psx games. The modes available are software and hardware. Hardware mode is faster but is not supported by the 3dfx cards, therefore software mode is used. This option should only be used for cards faster then TNT2m64 and greater and ATI Rage 128 or Greater.

Frame Buffer Textures are for the whirling screen effects and psx motion blurring. According to the readme file, there are two ways of getting these effects.

  • Set the Framebuffer Textures to emulated Vram, then enable full Vram primitives and offscreen drawing. These settings would require a bit of PC power.
  • Disable full Vram Primitives and set framebuffer textures to Gfx Card buffer. Geforce cards are usually ideal for such settings.

If you have a slow PC then use Black Frame Buffer Textures, as it will not make any attempt for creating special effects

Frame Buffer Access : Sometimes the real psx is reading/moving the already drawn display to make special effects. Again depending on your hardware and the game you want to play you may need to set one of the available options to get all effects.The highest setting (Full software drawing) will cause the internal soft gpu to paint every polygon, etc. into the emulated gpu vram. That's helpful if you want to see most of the fancy psx effects, but also very slow. Ah, and another hint: never use the gfx card reads/moves with FF8/FF9.

Alpha Multipass: Draws opaque texture pixels the way it should be. Of course it could be a bit slower. Mask bit is required by a few games for compatibility issues, for example Silent Hills.

5) Miscellaneous Settings

To create a television like effect you will have to use the scanlines. Set the brightness level to 150.Mdecs are bilineared filtered by default, this option would remove the filtering and the mdecs would speed up a bit. In 16 bit mode, in order to enhance shaded objects the color dithering is used. Screen Smoothing would create a blurry effect making screen look smooth, very nice but would decrease speed quite a lot.

There are certain games, which contains glitches and their remedy is in this section.

6) System Requirements

For getting decent graphics with the Direct 3D plugin, the following system specification are recommended.

  • AMD or Intel Processor 700Mhz or greater
  • 3DCard i.e. Geforce, ATI, TNT2 Ultra and TNT2 m64 with 32 MB ram Minimum
  • Microsoft Windows 9x/Me/2K/XP
  • 128 MB of System Ram

This plugins is however the only solution for slower cards which only have D3D capability.

If this reviews is not good enough to solve your problem then feel free to come to our forums and discuss your problem there.

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