So, as I mentioned in another thread, one of the earlier patches for Elite gave me very good performance in direct mode on the 0.6.0.0 drivers (on DK1). I believe it was 1.3.02 that was the one that worked best for me. And by "best" I mean it worked better than any other version, allowing me a higher frame rate, even was able to raise my quality settings from low to medium.
I was playing around with direct mode on the latest version (1.3.04) and I noticed that the game was rendering on my monitor, as well as my Rift. That got me thinking: technically, there's no reason to have any output on the monitor at all in direct mode.
So I did some experimenting and noticed that I could set my resolution lower, and it did NOT affect the Rift (I've heard direct mode forces certain values like refresh rate and v-sync, so I assume resolution is also a forced value) and it didn't really affect the monitor rendering either. But then I decided to switch to windowed mode.
Now my game is rendering at full res (Maybe slightly less because of a recent bug) but the on-screen rendering is now running in a 640x480 window. I noticed that it improved my framerate slightly.
I don't remember, and I can't check (No way to roll back to previous versions) but it's possible that on the version that was working nicely, there was no additional rendering happening on the window/fullscreen buffer. This is purely speculation at this point.
In any case, maybe FD should consider disabling the window/blanking out the rendering when in direct mode to reduce the amount of pixel fill rate overhead?
I was playing around with direct mode on the latest version (1.3.04) and I noticed that the game was rendering on my monitor, as well as my Rift. That got me thinking: technically, there's no reason to have any output on the monitor at all in direct mode.
So I did some experimenting and noticed that I could set my resolution lower, and it did NOT affect the Rift (I've heard direct mode forces certain values like refresh rate and v-sync, so I assume resolution is also a forced value) and it didn't really affect the monitor rendering either. But then I decided to switch to windowed mode.
Now my game is rendering at full res (Maybe slightly less because of a recent bug) but the on-screen rendering is now running in a 640x480 window. I noticed that it improved my framerate slightly.
I don't remember, and I can't check (No way to roll back to previous versions) but it's possible that on the version that was working nicely, there was no additional rendering happening on the window/fullscreen buffer. This is purely speculation at this point.
In any case, maybe FD should consider disabling the window/blanking out the rendering when in direct mode to reduce the amount of pixel fill rate overhead?
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