Demo completely blurred when hardware acceleration is enabled?

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Demo completely blurred when hardware acceleration is enabled?

(26 posts) (7 voices)

Started 9 months ago by xLite
Latest reply from xLite

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xLite

Senior Bird
Joined: May '12
Posts: 111

http://i45.tinypic.com/2usfj90.png

So all of a sudden the demo is now blurry. It was never like this before so I'm not sure if it's on Flash's end or something went wrong when you updated the demo recently.

I am on Chrome 21.0.1180.57 beta-m with Flash 11.3.31.222.

What's strange is when I go into the Flash settings and disable hardware acceleration, the demo goes back to it's crisp/clear normal self. It only seems to be when hardware acceleration is enabled that it goes blurry. Something to do with supporting older graphics cards perhaps? (constrained mode?)

I can confirm that even though it's blurry my benchmark results are amazing! Double the FPS at 60 with over 2000 objects compared to 340 objects at 30fps. So yeah, figured I'd mention that. (this is all with the hardware acceleration box ticked in settings before and after the demo/flash was updated)

Posted 9 months ago #
zsbee

Novice Bird
Joined: Jun '12
Posts: 11

Its not blurry for me with flash 11.3.300.265 on Chrome 21.0.1180.60

But for me its saying "DirectX9 (Direct blitting)" even if i uncheck the hardware acceleration. Im using an ATI HD5750

Posted 9 months ago #
xLite

Senior Bird
Joined: May '12
Posts: 111

I should probably mention that my computer is considered of the lower range.. i.e. part of the "constrained" profile. Before this change, it was always software rendered. Now it's "OpenGL (Direct Blitting)".

Posted 9 months ago #
sHTiF

Moderating Owl
Joined: Oct '11
Posts: 828

You can't be using contrained profile in flash player 11.3 since its part of the 11.4

Posted 9 months ago #
xLite

Senior Bird
Joined: May '12
Posts: 111

Well my computer didn't magically grow its own graphics card so something must be new

Posted 9 months ago #
Ossi

Senior Bird
Joined: Apr '12
Posts: 117

I bet that is just a scaling issue.

I've seen situations where the demo calculates contentScaleFactor to 1 when it should be 2.

So probably you are seeing 1x textures scaled to 2x viewport.

Posted 9 months ago #
xLite

Senior Bird
Joined: May '12
Posts: 111

Any way to fix it?

Posted 9 months ago #
Ossi

Senior Bird
Joined: Apr '12
Posts: 117
Well you can quickly test that by changing one line in the Game.as
Assets.contentScaleFactor = Starling.current.contentScaleFactor;
to
Assets.contentScaleFactor = 2;
I think the problem is that there is no handling for the stage resize in the demos.

http://forum.starling-framework.org/topic/how-to-get-the-correct-stage-size-in-startup-constructor-for-multiple-devices#post-6484
Posted 9 months ago #
xLite

Senior Bird
Joined: May '12
Posts: 111

Testing it doesn't really help and even if it did return your predicted results it wouldn't fix the demo or rectify whatever's causing this in the first place.

Posted 9 months ago #
xLite

Senior Bird
Joined: May '12
Posts: 111

Bump.

Posted 9 months ago #
Daniel

Primary Feather
Joined: Jan '10
Posts: 2,461

Hm, I think a similar problem was mentioned a while ago in the forum. It looks like Stage3D is using the wrong mipmap (that is, the first mipmap instead of the original texture).

I'm afraid I can't do anything about it, though -- clearly a stage3D / driver problem. Have you tried with FP 11.4? Perhaps it's fixed in the latest release.

http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer11-4.html

Posted 9 months ago #
alchymi

Competent Bird
Joined: Mar '12
Posts: 23

I have a similar problem on a machine with ATF files, before ATF everything ok after blurred.

Posted 9 months ago #
sHTiF

Moderating Owl
Joined: Oct '11
Posts: 828

alchymi don't forget that ATF is a lossy compression so what you may view as "blurred" is simply the loss of image quality due to ATF compression.

Posted 9 months ago #
xLite

Senior Bird
Joined: May '12
Posts: 111

Okay turns out the Chrome beta channel seems to force a Flash version greater than the current stable release (didn't know this).

The current stable release is 11,3,300,268.
The version I had was 11.3.31.225.

I disabled the, I'm guessing, beta version and now it goes back to the old software fallback in the demo

I also noticed at the bottom of the demo: "Software Hw_disabled=unavaiable (Direct blitting)"

"available" is spelt wrong, missing an "l". Not sure if that's on your end but figured it's worth pointing out.

I'll try 11.4's beta and see what happens.

Posted 9 months ago #
xLite

Senior Bird
Joined: May '12
Posts: 111

Just tried 11.4 beta. That's fine. It isn't blurred but it uses the software fallback also. They must have enabled hardware acceleration by accident for 11,3,300,268. Oh well, was fun while it lasted. Benchmark is back to the usual numbers.

Posted 9 months ago #
turbidwater

Novice Bird
Joined: Aug '12
Posts: 9

So, I've updated my FP to 11.4 beta and the demo is still very blurry for me in both Chrome and Firefox. I tried the suggestion of changing the contentScaleFactor and that made it worse. Anybody have any suggestions on what I might try to fix it? I'm giving a demo on Starling for a big group in a few days and would love to have the graphics not look bad.

Posted 9 months ago #
xLite

Senior Bird
Joined: May '12
Posts: 111

Try disabling hardware acceleration from the Flash settings menu.

Posted 9 months ago #
turbidwater

Novice Bird
Joined: Aug '12
Posts: 9

That did the trick! Thanks! But uh ... aren't GPU acceleration and hardware acceleration the same thing? Am I losing one of the main benefits of Starling by turning off hardware acceleration? I'm still a little fuzzy (pun half-intended) on any distinction between the two.

Posted 9 months ago #
xLite

Senior Bird
Joined: May '12
Posts: 111

GPU/hardware acceleration are the same. The only difference when disabling is Flash uses a software fallback, which is still faster than using the native display list API but not as fast as utilising the GPU hardware. Although considering it's blurry with h/w acceleration, looks like you're stuck with the software fallback for now.

Posted 9 months ago #
sHTiF

Moderating Owl
Joined: Oct '11
Posts: 828

xLite software fallback is not faster than using display list, depends on a particular case and optimization but its almost always slower.

Posted 9 months ago #
xLite

Senior Bird
Joined: May '12
Posts: 111

I knew someone would mention that, I didn't bother saying its specific case but most of the time you can accomplish the same thing faster using the software fallback than with the display list if you're not looking for vector type stuff etc etc.

Posted 9 months ago #
sHTiF

Moderating Owl
Joined: Oct '11
Posts: 828

xLite actually its quite the opossite, 99% of the usecases the native display list will be faster I tested this since Genome2D had its own software renderer using native display list which was way faster than the software fallback, in some cases even multiple times faster!

Posted 9 months ago #
xLite

Senior Bird
Joined: May '12
Posts: 111

Really? The main reason I liked Starling was the fact that it would be a performance increase for everyone using my application, even when using the software fallback.

Do you have any proof/sources? 99% doesn't make Starling worth the effort.

Posted 9 months ago #
turbidwater

Novice Bird
Joined: Aug '12
Posts: 9

Thanks for the info!

So, is there any way as a developer I can detect if a user's video card is going to render blurry or nor? I brought the same samples that were blurry on my home machine into work and my work machine doesn't have the same issue. So I'm guessing that it is a hardware issue. I see that Thibault Imbert has a library that can detect the hardware acceleration mode. Is there a mode that is known to run blurry with Starling?

And if I can detect that the user might be seeing blurry content, can I attempt to disable/enable hardware acceleration programmatically or do I need to give a prompt to the user to have them change those settings themselves?

I know Adobe is planning on continuing to expand the video cards it supports for GPU, but it's going to hurt game development now if a swath of users are getting a poor visual experience. I hope there's a way now to handle blurry content gracefully, if not seamlessly.

Posted 9 months ago #
Daniel

Primary Feather
Joined: Jan '10
Posts: 2,461

Could one of you try what happens if you disable mipmapping? That is, in the demo, change the Assets class so that it loads the textures without mipmaps?

Because if the problem is that the GPU accesses the wrong mipmap level (for whatever reason), this would be a very simple workaround for that bug.

Posted 9 months ago #
xLite

Senior Bird
Joined: May '12
Posts: 111

The issue is fixed in 11.4 beta and the version I had seemed to be bleeding edge so I guess it's not surprising there was a bug.

Posted 9 months ago #

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