Written By: Ali, References taken from Pete's Documents

Version 1.0

Most of the newbies when have a very first look at the graphics configuration panel for the very first time on their life, they would usually get very scared by those whole lot of options there. My aim here is to provide then with the very basic knowledge of what each and every option there in the plugin do. Once you get the grip of that, then I guess you won't be having much of a trouble configuring these plugins. There are certain terms which are quite widely used in the configuration panel one of them being Textures, what are textures? the term very well explains it self. I won't be explaining them more scientifically, textures are all that we see in the game (saying it more comprehensibly) . Then there are filtering modes, which would help you to modify the appearance of the textures, (make then look better). Then we have the options which would help us to increase the speed of texture drawing.

1) Resolution Settings

The very first setting you will be faced with shown above. If you have been playing games a lot, then I guess you would be familiar with these settings the higher the resolution the better will be the graphics. But these settings directly effect your emulation speed, so don't set the values too high. The difference between the 16 and 32 bit color depth is quite un noticeable, so always keep it at 16 as 32 Bit colors would decrease the speed. So we summarize our configurations.

• Riva TNT 2 : 600x480 or lower with 16 Bit co lour Depth.
• Geforce 256, Geforce 2 MX, Geforce 2 GTS: 800x600 with 16 bit co lour depth
• Geforce 3 and greater: 1024x768 with 16 bit co lour depth
• ATI Rage 128: 600x480 with 16bit Co lour Depth
• ATI faster Models (7500, 8500): 1024x768 with 16bit co lour depth.

Windowed mode will allow you to have graphics in a small or your specified sized window. Don't forget to enable Change Desktop Settings . The "keep psx aspect ratio" will insure, that the x/y ratios will be the same as
on the real psx.

2) Texture Quality and Filtering Settings

Texture Quality settings would adjust the quality of textures rendered There are a total of four options available. (Remember 3dfx cards won't be able to facilitate from this option).

• Don't care: will not make any attempt the for making the textures look better, however they are the only solution available for the 3dfx card owners.
• R4 G4 B4 A4: With these settings textures quality will not be very optimized, however the speed will be good, this setting would be good for the TNT1 cards
• R5 G5 B5 A1: This will increase the texture quality, more colorful, I would recommend this setting highly for the Tnt2 and ATI rage 128 cards. Speed with this option will be the same as that with the previous setting i.e. R4 G4 B4 A4
• R8 G8 B8 A8: The most colors that you can have, well what your PC can provide. These are CPU intensive and would cost your speed. Recommended only for the Geforce cards and ATI 7500 or oboe.

Bilinear Filtering is not supported by a Actual playstation, however this plugins is providing us with this option. In many games it works like a charm no problems, but however it would cause glitches in some. There are two modes Standard and extended. Extended modes cost speed but are much better. I usually use Extended+Smooth Sprites with my Geforce 2 MX, and everything works fine. For lower end card I would recommend Extended mode.

To optimize the texture storage you the plugins has to know the size of your Vram, so specify it. If you don't know then select auto, however on all non-nvidia cards you will have to specify it manually. To help the gfx card in certain situations, you can enable "Texture garbage collection". That option will need additional cpu power, though.
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 gfx card has to support palettized textures (all GeForce cards can do them with newer drivers, while TNT cards cannot do them at all also ATI users should try to turn it off, if problems arise).

3) Frame Rate Settings

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

Offscreen drawing is used to detect drawing which are outside the Front/back buffer, these are done in software mode. There are a total of four modes minimum, standard, extended and enhanced.

minimum: takes care of most splash screens
standard: does an easy check, if software drawing/coord tweaking is needed
enhanced: does a more complicated check for soft drawing
extended: does the "enhanced" check, and adds some additional buffer

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

1. Set the Framebuffer Textures to emulated Vram, then enable full Vram primitives and offscreen drawing. These settings would require a bit of PC power.
2. 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.

Advanced blending would make the graphics have a nice look, in terms of color, Draws opaque texture pixels the way it should be. Of course it could be a bit slower (and if your OpenGL driver draws black rectangles around objects, turn
this option off).A really rarely used ability by the real PSX is the usage of mask bits to avoid drawing into some parts of the screen. Well, to increase compatibility you can turn the mask bit emulation on, but as far as I know only Silent Hill is really needing it. If you activate it, there are also some chances that 3D shutter glasses will work. Another hint: because most games don't need the mask detection, you can turn it off to get more available texture vram.

5) Miscellaneous Settings

Scanlines would create lines on your screen in such a way, that it would look like as you are watching a Television. Set the brightness level to 150. I never understood this lined mode so I'm ignoring it. 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 opengl plugin, the following system specification are recommended.

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

Well this rounds up the review of the opengl plugin, if you have successfully read the whole of it then I guess by now you might feel as you are ready to configure the plugin. Thank you for reading the whole reviews. All information is taken from the Pete's Readme files, for suggestions and comments don;t forget to visit the forums.

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