(01-14-2015, 01:27 PM)Shonumi Wrote: From what I can see, endrift is just using OpenGL for the drawing portion. In 2D systems like the GBA, rendering is the process looking up tiles and then determining what pixel data should be generated from that. OpenGL natively has no way of knowing what to do with the tile data, so you can't pass the data off to OpenGL and expect it to generate an image. You can determine the pixel data yourself first into a buffer, then pass it on to OpenGL to push those pixels to your screen. There's a very important distinction between rendering and drawing. Think of rendering as the computer getting an "idea" of what the final image looks like, but drawing is the computer actually showing you what the image looks like. A lot of people use "rendering" to mean the "drawing" bit, however.

Fwiw, it'd be possible to do hardware rendering with something like OpenCL. If you can treat your GPU just like another processor, you could tell it how it's supposed to interpret the GBA's tile data as actual pixel data (rendering) and from there push that image on-screen (drawing).


Of course. With software rendering, you're in control of everything. You're the one that gets to decide the value of each and every last pixel. You're basically unstoppable in this mode

(01-16-2016, 02:32 PM)Shonumi Wrote: I don't think you could reasonably expect to utilize it to "natively" render stuff like NES, or GB, or any kind of graphics like that. The main problem is that the data PowerVR expects is totally different from what something like the SNES or Genesis produced. Some amount of translation is going to have to happen, and usually that involves the CPU rendering things into a texture format the GPU can understand when we're talking about these kinds of gaming consoles.

Now, if you're just trying to do hardware accelerated drawing (software render a frame, use OpenGL or D3D or whatever to draw it on your computer's screen), this might help if it could somehow detect duplicate groups of pixels and cache them for later reference. But even then, I can't imagine you'd get another more than a minor or negligible boost in speed. I mean, it already doesn't take that much for OpenGL to blit something to a screen with GBE+ (and other emulators too) when it's all just a single textured quad, so you might be hard-pressed to find improvements that are noticeable.

(10-06-2012, 05:28 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: I can't seem to get myself excited about programming any more, what should I do?

(02-21-2016, 04:14 PM)NaturalViolence Wrote: Holy post necromancy!  That post is from 4 years ago.  I've moved on from that stuff a long time ago.

And yeah I did eventually start working on hardware projects.  Not really relevant to this thread though.

@IceStrike256

We can't help you with an issue if you don't tell us what it is.