Another request for DX9 support

BlitzMax Forums/BlitzMax Programming/Another request for DX9 support

Grey Alien(Posted 2008) [#1]
Hi, up until last week I was happy with DX7 support in BMax until I got a new video card and discovered that it had shockingly poor DX7 performance in my game (OpenGL was fine, very fast in fact). I went through all sorts of things to try to get the DX7 performance faster, see this thread:

http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=80423

Then I found DStastny's unofficial DX9 graphics driver and tried it out and suddenly the framerate has massively improved to be on par with OpenGL.

So it appears that my graphics card stinks at DX7 and is fine at DX9. I don't know if there are other graphics cards on the market like this and if there will be more in future (It's a Radeon HD 2600XT AGP). But if there are, then standard DX7 BMax games will perform very poorly. Thus my request for official DX9 support. We need to be able to detect if DX9 is installed, and if so use the appropriate driver.

One thing that MAY be affecting it. In DX7 there was a "lag" problem in BMax a while back which was worked around in the DX7 module. Perhaps the new video card is just not handling this well? The DX9 driver doesn't appear to show any lag.


markcw(Posted 2008) [#2]
How does B3d perform on your new card?


Grey Alien(Posted 2008) [#3]
markcw: I don't have it. Maybe if someone could make a benchmark I can test it.


MGE(Posted 2008) [#4]
Good question Markcw!


Grey Alien(Posted 2008) [#5]
Or a C++ demo without the lag fix.


MGE(Posted 2008) [#6]
There's some b3d games in the showcase section. ;)


Grey Alien(Posted 2008) [#7]
Sure but I'm looking for a game with an FPS counter or better still some kind of B3D sprite render test/benchmark.