WinVice: Render to DX primary surface

[BillyHW]

I normally use MacVice, but today I was playing with WinVice on my work computer and there is an option in the video settings to "Render to DX primary surface". It is turned off by default.

 

Does anyone know what this does, and whether it is better to have on or off?

Edited January 21, 2016 by BillyHW

[landgraf]

It will make the emulation run a tad faster when in warp-mode, but may introduce more tearing at normal speed.

[BillyHW]

Well since I don't really use Warp Mode (unless I'm tired of waiting on a really long load), I guess I'll leave it off then. Thanks.

 

Oh, I also noticed another setting in the Options menu: "Disable DirectX9 video driver". I think by default it is unchecked, which means it's enabled. Should I just leave it unchecked? What effect will it have if I check it?

[landgraf]

If you disable dx9, recent versions of vice won't be able to go fullscreen and a lot of other display options become unavailable.

 

The effect is also visible in windowed mode: with dx9 enabled the output will be scaled to somehow fit the window size, what allows to resize the c64 picture freely to your liking but may lead to a wrong aspect ratio (if you also have scanlines enabled they may look very uneven due to that).

 

With dx9 disabled the output is either the true size of a c64 picture in pixels or twice of that (if double size is enabled), and any surplus space in the window is padded with black pixels. Given the high screen-resolutions typically used by modern PCs this results in a rather tiny c64 picture, even with double size selected

[BillyHW]

Thanks.

 

I wonder how they do the true (pixel) aspect ratio for small window sizes when modern screens have square pixels and the C64 (NTSC) had about .75 pixel aspect ratio. You'd need like 4 times the square pixel density to accurately approximate the true ratio. And for PAL you'd need even more cause it's like .92 or something.

 

So yeah, I wonder how they do it.