hlsl anomaly

[InfantSorrow]

Hi guys

permit me in lieu of my more commonplace sobriquet, to post a puzzle.

Scouring these very threads for info, I have come across a function in MAME that allows a quite glorious imitation of the aged CRT monitors.
I am of course, referring to the HLSL functions and presets you can enable in the mame.ini file.

The puzzling part is, when I enable these functions, the system slows down to 60% of normal speed. I initially thought the system was too slow to run these new nostalgic graphical inclusions, but when I disable the throttle (F10) the system speeds up far beyond normal speed (100%).
So, either the system is too slow or too fast with these scan lines enabled.
I have no such problems when not using the HLSL functions.

Has anyone come across a similar problem? I trust that you will not be disinclined to acquiesce to my humble educational requests.

[nitz]

There is an issue with the HLSL prescale. Check your mame.ini for this

hlsl_prescale_x           0
hlsl_prescale_y           0

You probably have them both set at 0. This is for automatic prescaling, but that causes problems on some systems. Try increasing them. The higher you go, the better it'll look, but the slower it'll run as well. A setting of 1 will look terrible, 2 should look ok, and 3 or 4 will look even better, but will require a very beefy video card for full speed.

I'm pretty sure that'll fix your problem. 

[InfantSorrow]

There is an issue with the HLSL prescale. Check your mame.ini for this

hlsl_prescale_x           0
hlsl_prescale_y           0

You probably have them both set at 0. This is for automatic prescaling, but that causes problems on some systems. Try increasing them. The higher you go, the better it'll look, but the slower it'll run as well. A setting of 1 will look terrible, 2 should look ok, and 3 or 4 will look even better, but will require a very beefy video card for full speed.

I'm pretty sure that'll fix your problem. 

Hi

Unfortunately, that did not sort out the problem.
Perhaps an error in ini?

Thanks for the assist.

[nitz]

I see you have both prescale settings at 4 in your ini - I would expect that to fix the problem provided your video card is up to the task. A setting of 4 would require a very stellar video card to get full speed though, so if you haven't already, I would try a setting of 2 and see if that works.

You should also check your hlsl folder and make sure you don't have any individual game inis that are overriding your mame.ini. For example, if you're testing this with pacman and you've got a file named pacman.ini in your hlsl folder, then mame is using that file for hlsl settings instead of mame.ini.

If neither of these suggestions fix your problem, I would try asking this question over at mameworld - some of the devs hang out there and answer questions like this. If it runs faster than full speed with throttling off, then it stands to reason that you should be able to get full speed with throttling on, so some setting has gotta be amiss somewhere. I'd be curious to know what the problem was when you figure this out.

Good luck! 

[InfantSorrow]

@ Nitz.

When changing prescales to 2, there is a slight increase to 75% of full speed when throttling is enabled, rather than 60%

When I change prescales to 1, then it runs at 100% but this is really foggy picture quality.

Thanks for the assist, I will query this with the mameworld guys, see what they have to say.
I'll keep you in the loop.

[BadMouth]

When changing prescales to 2, there is a slight increase to 75% of full speed when throttling is enabled, rather than 60%

When I change prescales to 1, then it runs at 100% but this is really foggy picture quality.

Thanks for the assist, I will query this with the mameworld guys, see what they have to say.
I'll keep you in the loop.

I've read that pre-scale is done by the processor (Pre-GPU).  Your processor might be underpowered for HLSL.
It also varies by game.  The old games that had discrete sound (Frogger for example) are more demanding that other games from the same era.

I have most games set to 4, but had to reduce it on games with discrete sound and 90's 3D games.
It doesn't make much difference to scale it larger than your monitor resolution.
For example, if the original game was 240x320, it doesn't make sense to scale it more than 4x on a 1080 monitor.
MAME scales it to 960, then your video card scales it from 960 to 1080.

At least that's my understanding of how it works and results of my tinkering are consistent with it.

[benll64]

Hi -

To the original poster, did you ever figure this out? I'm having the exact same issue.

My CPU/GPU are "budget" but they both exceed the specs that I've seen others post that are running HLSL smoothly.

Throttle on = speed 50-60%; throttle off = speed 500-800%. I've tried tweaking every setting (it seems), including setting the prescales from 1 through 6.