Arnie Pie said:
I've personally done weird stuff with the GS in terms of frame buffer management (and texture management as a whole, which includes off-screen render buffers, and dynamic texture uploads to the upper 8 bits of the active display area).. And I know many other developers who do the same kind of things. I would expect even the big 1st party titles such as GT4 to do similarly weird processes to get things like 1080i support to work in the limited VRAM space available.
I think we've all done similar kind of stuff, my last game also overlaps a bunch of offscreen and texture buffers in the same address range via time-sharing as well as moving main backbuffer around the memory mid-frame at some times.
My point was that generally we wouldn't want to touch stuff outside backbuffer for changing resolution anyhow. So what if reflections and shadowmaps are still rendered at 128x128 or whatever, or motion and glow blurs are still computed at 1/8 the SDTV res - the increased resolution of the backbuffer will still make things look nicer.
Btw, GTs 1080i is a field render with horizontal scaling through CRT, at worst it needs a couple of extra lines over what you render normally (540 instead of 512/448). The only trick to it is of course running the game at 60hz.
Well, it's not so much the texture filtering that plagues PS2 games
Right, it's the GS lacking proper miplevel selection, but because of it, there's also a lot of PS2 games (especially early on) that have simply forgone the use of mipmaps.
Anisotropic would help this at least a little - and it would also help with titles that do mipmap, since the per-object mip-coefficients are only 'correct' on certain polygon angles(usually screen facing).
but then what to do if the application is choosing its mip level for a reason.. maybe it's not supposed to be a function of the derivatives that selects it.
Emulator does 'know' what the number of mipmaps and offset mip-koefficient are - I wasn't suggesting we'd just toggle the mipmap computation on and pray the default parameters will somehow work with PS2 games.
And yes, there may be some exceptions that will still fail - but that's no different then the occasional issues with enabling bilinear on PS1 games. It won't always work right - that's why it's optional.
as such it would be stupid to not handle this. And for this it's technically a very simple thing to do.
Ken was talking about storing DVDs on some network storage and then "aging" them - basically running them through fancy offline scaling processing, converting the MPEG2 into some auto-magic generated HDTV stream.
While it generally makes things a little better, having it fully automated is hardly any guarantee it will always do things right.
