directdraw

[Sc0rcheD]

Ive been a lurker for a while now while and I just recently built my own cab ( will be posting pictures soon).  I am now in the process of setting up an older computer to run mame.  I am trying to run a nvidia tnt on winxp.  I have managed to get everything working except mame was running choppy.  I played around with the settings and determined the problem.  Apparently when ddraw is enabled it doesn't seem to work and everything is choppy, but if i turn of ddraw and enable d3d it works fine.

This leads me to my questions which hopefully someone here can help me with.  What could cause this? I have tried several different drivers for the vid card with no difference.  I have run dxdiag and everything seems fine.

Also is there any differences running d3d or ddraw?  I usually had run ddraw and everything worked fine on other comps, but i don't know much about these settings.

[elvis]

Nvidia tend to optimise their current drivers for current cards (who can blame them, really).  If you want directdraw on older hardware, you'll need to source older drivers.

My old TNT card wouldn't run on anything in the double-digits.  I had to go back as far as the 6.39 drivers to make them work!  Guru3D has a great download area with all of the old drivers if you need them.  Remember that most of the win2k drivers will work on XP.

http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?id=10

DirectDraw on nvidia uses an automatic bilinear filter on stretch images.  This gives the game a blurred appearance, which some people like, and others hate.  The D3D blitter was introduced by the MAME devs to give the end users greater control over the final output filter if they so chose.  With D3D you can of course use point filtering (ie: just stretch the image with no blurring, leaving a blockier image) or bi/trilinear and anisotropic filtering.  Not that it makes squat difference on a flat 2D image at 90 degrees to the viewer past bilinear of course.  Plus I understand it is easier with D3D to put overlay filters to do neat things with different simulated grill apatures, scanlines and whatnot.  All stuff that doesn't interest me in the slightest (if you want scanlines, buy a real arcade monitor! ).

If D3D works for you at full speed, then I wouldn't bother chasing down older drivers, to be honest.  All the same, the info's there if you need it.

[Sc0rcheD]

Thank you very much.  I guess I kind of figured it was the drivers.  I didnt go back as far as single digits though.  I appreciate all the information. I think I should just leave on d3d then and play that way.  I dont really see any visible difference and with the games I play, I doubt any performance problems.

[elvis]

As long as you're getting 60FPS or better, then extra performance really doesn't matter.

Press F10 ingame to see your framerate, or visit my benchmarking site for more:

http://benchmark.mameworld.net/