GZDoom 3.8.2 Vintage Released

[Rachael]

Nothing that is OpenGL 2.1 is going to support Vulkan.

[drfrag]

The new Softpoly II (tm) will be a better alternative than the old GL2 renderer.
That said the blocking factor for everything in LZDoom i think is the old texture manager: porting the new one, making the adjustments and then undoing those i made would require a lot of work. Also i'm not interested in the localization feature at all, only for compatibility reasons. Besides porting stuff is getting harder after all the refactorings, Git patches really help.

[TDRR]

The new Softpoly II (tm) will be a better alternative than the old GL2 renderer.

Will there actually be a big update/rewrite to softpoly?
Would be nice if performance got increased and you could actually use filtering while in truecolor. Though, the performance increase is rather unlikely IMO.

And is it for GZDoom, LZDoom or both?

[Graf Zahl]

As it builds on recent refactorings, it won't be in LZDoom.

[drfrag]

It runs on D3D so no OpenGL required, there's a performance increase plus more features. It's still WIP.

[TDRR]

As it builds on recent refactorings, it won't be in LZDoom.

That's fine, all i hope is that there's a vintage build that contains it.

It runs on D3D so no OpenGL required, there's a performance increase plus more features. It's still WIP.

Wait, are you both talking about the same thing? I thought Graf dropped D3D support fully and had no plans to bring it back.

Whatever it is, i just hope it can run on my desktop PC and on this laptop semi-decently too. But maybe that's a bit too much to ask from a 1.4GHz CPU
Even if not on my own PC, i'm eager to see it running.

[Graf Zahl]

The new softpoly backend uses a very simple and basic D3D9 interface to render its contents to the screen, but this interface does not contain anything beyond that single rectangle drawer. It's not a complete backend with a full 2D renderer included - this new backend will do all actual rendering in software, fully driven by the hardware renderer.

[TDRR]

The new softpoly backend uses a very simple and basic D3D9 interface to render its contents to the screen, but this interface does not contain anything beyond that single rectangle drawer. It's not a complete backend with a full 2D renderer included - this new backend will do all actual rendering in software, fully driven by the hardware renderer.

Oh, now i understand what this is. That's quite nice then. I have a lot more questions but i'll only ask the one i care about the most: What does this mean for the current softpoly renderer? Will it get replaced by this whenever it's done or they will coexist?

And i guess this is going to be the fallback for pre-GL3 users so the Vintage build can finally rest in peace and only the current GZDoom will be updated once it's added?

[Graf Zahl]

The current softpoly renderer will be retired. It's quite incomplete and missing several features. The new backend is a software rasterizer for the hardware renderer and will have much better feature support - although its main use will most likely be a cheap canvas for the classic software renderer.

[TDRR]

The current softpoly renderer will be retired. It's quite incomplete and missing several features. The new backend is a software rasterizer for the hardware renderer and will have much better feature support - although its main use will most likely be a cheap canvas for the classic software renderer.

Nice. Thanks for the info, i hope this comes out soon.

[drfrag]

May be i'm wrong but i don't think it's that simple, AFAIK that backend uses the softpoly drawers and there's a lot of stuff there. I'd say it's still a different renderer.

[Danfun64]

The new softpoly backend uses a very simple and basic D3D9 interface to render its contents to the screen, but this interface does not contain anything beyond that single rectangle drawer. It's not a complete backend with a full 2D renderer included - this new backend will do all actual rendering in software, fully driven by the hardware renderer.

D3D9? I take it that the new softpoly renderer is not going to be cross platform then?

[Graf Zahl]

It should be just as eays to plug it into an OpenGL backend instead. But on Windows that doesn't make sense for something that needs to draw a single rectangle as quickly as possible.

[drfrag]

Yeah OpenGL is slow for the software renderer and i think on linux is even slower. Someone will go ahead and make a software SDL2 backend (may be even myself, i'm not a linux guy tough). There's still a lot to do i think but i don't know the percentage of completion, i guess only dpJudas could estimate it.

[Blzut3]

I don't know if you're referring to the 50% performance regression from awhile ago or something else. But I haven't noticed any regression since then on Linux where it got fixed. By default SDL2 will use OpenGL for its surfaces so there shouldn't be any advantage there besides the flexibility of changing between their back ends. One of which is pure software. Based on a quick test with ECWolf the OpenGL backend is faster, so while it's possible that some hardware combinations would benefit I'm not sure there will be change for most people. Of course for those like myself that occasionally find esoteric things to run Doom on, having a pure software path available is helpful, but it's not something I'd expect anyone to care about. I mean, I might find some time to implement it just for the heck of it, but realistically I expect the recommended default would be to just use the internal OpenGL backend.

On Windows D3D is special since there seems to be some kind of fast path being triggered, so there's a clear performance benefit.

What would potentially be interesting is to play with various APIs on the Mac. Back when ZDoom got an OpenGL based Cocoa backend it got a massive uplift over the software code path of SDL 1.2, but I'd be curious to know if that was just SDL 1.2 being absolutely terrible on the Mac or if OpenGL is the optimal API. I suspect it is (assuming Metal isn't faster at it, but if Vulkan didn't show promise on Windows I'm not sure I'd get my hopes up), but it is an unknown.