StoneMason Posted December 20, 2019 I use Software pretty much almost exclusively. Hardware rendering in GZDoom can look pretty good with the right settings, but in the end, I just prefer how Software looks with Doom. 3 Share this post Link to post
CorianderCastor Posted December 20, 2019 Well I use EE nigh exclusively, so... 2 Share this post Link to post
Xaser Posted December 20, 2019 Software rendering for me, mostly. I usually opt for Eternity when playing non-ZDoom stuff, and though for GZD I have a keybind that flip-flops between OpenGL and Software, I tend to stick to the latter unless there's performance troubles or a map requires it. Semi-on-topic: @Spectre01's screenshots are a fantastic example of how close you can make GZDoom's GL renderer look like the software mode nowadays -- all the important stuff (lighting, texture detail, etc.) is spot-on, though frankly it's a bit of a pain to find the right settings unless you know all the geek lingo. :P 7 Share this post Link to post
Spectre01 Posted December 20, 2019 (edited) 1 hour ago, P41R47 said: Where i can find this maps @Spectre01? They look outstanding! Thanks! It's currently a work in progress and may be finished some time next year. 1 minute ago, Xaser said: Semi-on-topic: @Spectre01's screenshots are a fantastic example of how close you can make GZDoom's GL renderer look like the software mode nowadays -- all the important stuff (lighting, texture detail, etc.) is spot-on, though frankly it's a bit of a pain to find the right settings unless you know all the geek lingo. :P The main options for "Software in GL" for me are: Sector light mode: Software Banded SW light mode: On Tonemap mode: Palette Texture Filter mode: None, or (nearest mipmap) Pretty sure everything else is GZDoom default video settings. Edited December 20, 2019 by Spectre01 2 Share this post Link to post
VanaheimRanger Posted December 20, 2019 2 hours ago, Gez said: ZDoom's software renderer has no problem with slopes, unless you're specifically talking about sloped 3D floors. Yea that's the thing. There are some other things as well I thought, but I don't remember what they are. Also, doesn't software mode still shear when looking up and down? 0 Share this post Link to post
Mayomancer Posted December 20, 2019 Well i still use choco/crispy doom whenever i can, prboom+ with opengl rendering takes second priority and gzdoom for the stuff that needs it. 0 Share this post Link to post
Pablo_Doom_Guy Posted December 20, 2019 i mainly use Dosbox at 320x200 , crispy doom for the wads that are not playable on dosbox and software rendering if i ever try a gzdoom specific wad 0 Share this post Link to post
Erick Posted December 20, 2019 I have grown to appreciate the diminishing lighting and palette making some maps more atmospheric and having colors pop out nicely, so I end up preferring the software renderer. That's not to say OpenGL can't do the same with some tweaks on the settings, but I get more out of the software renderer in my experience. These days, I only find myself using OpenGL if a map or mod requires it or if the software renderer is having framerate issues. 1 Share this post Link to post
maxmanium Posted December 20, 2019 Yes. I only use OpenGL rendering with GZDoom. 0 Share this post Link to post
THEBaratusII Posted December 20, 2019 I always prefer software rendering unless, OpenGL is a requirement (like GZDoom modifications with 3D models for example). 1 Share this post Link to post
little egg Posted December 20, 2019 1 hour ago, Baratus II said: I always prefer software rendering unless, OpenGL is a requirement (like GZDoom modifications with 3D models for example). Same 1 Share this post Link to post
ReaperAA Posted December 20, 2019 I was always a fan of Hardware/GL rendering due to better performance and features like dynamic lights and brightmaps. However just recently after working on palette modifications, I actually started liking limited color SW rendering over HW rendering in places (especially in Heretic). Just look at the screenshots: HW rendering: SW rendering: SW renderer just looks so much better here. 11 Share this post Link to post
Spectre01 Posted December 20, 2019 @ReaperAA Why does that wall with the waves appear to have brightmaps in Software while looking dull in Hardware? 0 Share this post Link to post
Uni Posted December 20, 2019 I prefer software settings, the way I remember playing Doom in the early years. I also use low resolution for that extra blurriness, classic. 0 Share this post Link to post
Edward850 Posted December 20, 2019 (edited) 2 hours ago, Spectre01 said: @ReaperAA Why does that wall with the waves appear to have brightmaps in Software while looking dull in Hardware? This thread's existence is the answer to that question. The colour map used for lighting in the 8bit renserer can produce stronger colours at a distance and at particular light levels due to rounding and algorithmic shortcuts (or even intentionally) than the linear and unrestricted lighting of 24bit colour rendering (it can just pick any colour, so darker areas can pick colours that ordinarily don't exist in the intended palette). They can produce two very different looks simply by the nature of what they are. Edited December 20, 2019 by Edward850 6 Share this post Link to post
Phobus Posted December 20, 2019 GZDoom, 4k resolution, hardware rendering (possibly still OpenGL rather than Vulkan, though, I haven't checked), maximum AA with "vanilla" lighting mode. I've also got dynamic lights on with the automatically generated shadows and the Uncharted 2 shader enabled as it does nice stuff like darken corners. Bloom and bright maps are also a thing. I'm pretty sure I'm not using an explicit texture filtering, though, as the AA does a lot to smooth things out anyway. I only go back to software rendering to test compatibility in prboom+ or watch the very rare demo. I'd certainly never go back to play like that. Smooth, modern and shiny is where it's at. Also, fuck autoaim, mouselook for life! 1 Share this post Link to post
anotak Posted December 20, 2019 we would laugh at the idea of reprinting a novel and swapping out the words for "higher quality" words using a thesaurus. while games & play as an art form may pre-date all other forms, the serious study of the design of games seems to have mostly only started in the 20th century under capitalism. the culture of games, especially that of fps games, especially that which was encouraged by id software, has often seen newer graphics technology as superior. devs & publishers had a strong financial incentive to endorse this behavior. improved technology is more quantifiable than other concerns like design or aesthetics. hardware manufacturers also had strong financial incentive to endorse this. marketing people happily embraced talking about graphics on the box. doom itself was no stranger to this, as we can see about all the quotes about "256-color texture mapped mazes". even consumers, unsure about what game to buy, couldn't rely on a box to quantifiably explain that it has better game design, but this box over here has a postage stamp sized possibly-fake screenshot and a bigger number of bits than this other box over there. today, this trend is less extreme (graphics advancements have slowed down and become unsustainably expensive). but, we live with its legacy. and, even today, there is financial incentive to keep it alive, as companies offer "new and improved" HD remasters. yet. imagine someone cleaning up the vinyl clicks from the samples in a hip hop track, and declaring they have improved it. imagine someone "adding detail" to a Monet painting. it's overtly ridiculous. it's a lucky accident that we ended up with the game we got. are unintended elements a part of Doom? it gets awfully difficult to point to what is and isn't intended. what i like about the game isn't what id & friends wanted or expected me to like. during the video of "a visit to id software", romero runs into a HoM bug, and he's upset, but bobby prince is watching him play and is talking excitedly about how cool the HoM looks! to make good art, it must be larger than the creator can really conceive of. you have to let it form something else in the viewer's mind. many people default to hardware renderers without seriously considering the choice, as it's simply newer. there's the obvious question: "how could an older technology be better?" or at least, it seems obvious, in the cultural lens we have. i will say though, that software rendering y-shearing makes some people motion sick, so there's a good argument there for those people to use hardware rendering. anyway: if a hardware renderer existed that properly replicated a lot of the stuff like the banding, the palette, y-shearing, etc, i would happily use it. 17 Share this post Link to post
Guest Unregistered account Posted December 20, 2019 (edited) Software looks grittier, obscures details from afar in the best possible way, colourmaps make for cooler light/dark transitions and low resolution keeps the game feeling more cathartic. Plus the small previously-mentioned things like sprite clipping. OpenGL makes vanilla levels look sterile and often colours become blander. Playing at a high resolution only exposes how basic the maps and edges are and the movement always felt too artificially smooth to me, both from the player's perspective and when looking at the pixelated monsters smoothly travelling as though on a wire (though most of this hasn't bugged me until now lol). I don't think it's necessarily inferior though, if I'm playing a map specifically targeted towards GL port features and which uses increased detail to fill space that would be empty in the vanilla maps, I think it shines. It also gets points for having mouselook that doesn't warp the fabric of reality. And, y'know, literally everything that's advanced Doom mapping for like the past 15 years. And for letting us get rid of the niggling Vanilla bugs and curiosities. Whoops, forgot this was about software V hardware and not Vanilla V sourceport. Anyway software wins for me hands down. Special mention to Crispy Doom for keeping the magic while polishing and stylizing it just enough that it feels new. 0 Share this post Link to post
Endingghost Posted December 20, 2019 I prefer software, OpenGL seems to ruin the atmosphere. The colours also seem to be more vibrant when playing in software. 0 Share this post Link to post
esselfortium Posted December 20, 2019 I usually use software mode unless I'm playing something that's intended for GL. The crispness of software mode usually just looks better, and it supports things that GL can't replicate, like custom colormaps. I think a big part of it is what was explained above by Edward850 and ReaperAA about the coloring. You often get a more vivid look in software as a result of its limitations, and even now it's probably still safe to say that the majority of maps created during the 26 years of Doom's existence have been designed with that more vivid look in mind. 7 Share this post Link to post
Wagi Posted December 21, 2019 (edited) Keep in mind, as long as all of the textures/sprites/flats are restricted to the palette, there is technically nothing stopping there from being an OpenGL renderer that uses the COLORMAP. The COLORMAP could be fed into a fragment shader as a Sampler2D, and you would just need the light level and palette index as well. Hell, it would even be trivial to choose between smooth transitions between light levels and the "banded" look of the software renderer. Probably wouldn't jive well with a modern port like GZDoom though. Edited December 21, 2019 by Wagi 2 Share this post Link to post
CyberDreams Posted December 21, 2019 On 12/19/2019 at 7:16 PM, StoneMason said: I use Software pretty much almost exclusively. Hardware rendering in GZDoom can look pretty good with the right settings, but in the end, I just prefer how Software looks with Doom. Pretty much this. You can make Hardware rendering look damn good when you tweak the settings but i prefer software myself and i actually play using GZDoom. Software mode w/ whatever compat mode is needed. I don't really use the True Color Software mode much though. I just don't really like it much. The only downside that i see to using Software mode is that it can tend to be a little darker, or at least for me it is. My monitor is tipped back a little bit (on an angle) so that doesn't help either. I had a very hard time seeing in SIGIL when that was first released. Other than that little issue i prefer to use it for playing Doom. 0 Share this post Link to post
riderr3 Posted December 21, 2019 I use software mode for iwads and classic wads in PrBoom-Plus. Opengl mode for G/ZDoom wads in GZDoom. 0 Share this post Link to post
Lila Feuer Posted December 21, 2019 I prefer sector lighting type set to "Vanilla" in GZDoom, ever since it was added I refuse to use do without it. 0 Share this post Link to post
seed Posted December 21, 2019 (edited) On 12/20/2019 at 1:12 AM, kaleb. said: prboom+ for whatever reason doesnt, but glboom+ does.. E: Nvm. 0 Share this post Link to post
banjiepixel Posted December 21, 2019 Mostly a crispy user these days so software renderer is what I use. I have grown to love software renderer and low resolution because doom with fancy hardware renderer effects and high resolution just looks strange to me. Doom levels start to feel too simple and empty in hd resolutions and lower resolutions help because the game world feels more abstract that way. I also dislike unofficial visual enhancements like dynamic lights and brightmaps, so I don't really need to use hardware renderer. Hardware renderer does help with GZDoom performance but I rarely play anything anymore that requires that source port and just prefer to use simpler source port that works great on almost any hardware and also looks and feels closer to original doom. 0 Share this post Link to post
Linguica Posted December 21, 2019 On 12/20/2019 at 4:17 AM, anotak said: it's a lucky accident that we ended up with the game we got. are unintended elements a part of Doom? it gets awfully difficult to point to what is and isn't intended. what i like about the game isn't what id & friends wanted or expected me to like. during the video of "a visit to id software", romero runs into a HoM bug, and he's upset, but bobby prince is watching him play and is talking excitedly about how cool the HoM looks! to make good art, it must be larger than the creator can really conceive of. you have to let it form something else in the viewer's mind. What an ironic example since effectively zero source ports preserve the original HOM effect and a Chocolate Doom pull request to re-add it has languished for years. I think the choice between a "software renderer" or a "hardware renderer" is largely a false dichotomy. Doom draws graphics primarily by drawing vertical lines for walls and then flood-filling whatever is left over with floor texture. Effectively every newer FPS engine uses triangles being drawn by special hardware for drawing triangles. But this is not the only way to draw graphics using a hardware accelerator and I am positive a person could create a line-based renderer done entirely in GPU pixel shaders or whatever; conversely, GZDoom's softpoly option is a triangle-based renderer in software. 2 Share this post Link to post
anotak Posted December 22, 2019 i chose the hom example on purpose because of that. removing the old hom effect was also, not intentional. 2 Share this post Link to post
HorrorMovieRei Posted December 22, 2019 Not only do I play in software, but I also pimped my Gzdoom so even in OpenGL mode it looks as much as software as possible. 0 Share this post Link to post
MTrop Posted December 22, 2019 Count me in for using GZDoom in Software Mode when not running a mod that requires additional performance or aesthetic features only supported in Hardware. If GZDoom received an "Indexed-mode" Hardware Renderer that used the colormap/palette as a shading guide of sorts, then I'd happily just use OpenGL/Vulkan always. Blending would be an issue due to how you'd have to read from the pixels/texels written so far, since blending is not a programmable part of the pipeline, but you can still get results from sampling palette/colormap at least with passable results. NaSTY is an example of how it's possible (even though it's still not 100% perfect). In terms of color, GZDoom's Software Truecolor Renderer is closer to what I'd expect from the Hardware Renderer. Instead, the Hardware Renderer washes all of the colors out because it still does weird things like desaturate the fade in an effort to lazily emulate the intent of Doom's original colormap, and considers "fog" to be a special case, mixed with the original lighting, rather than a new fade color other than default black, and employs strange settings like "treat fog as fullbright" as workarounds for it or what-have-you. I wonder how many of those that use the Hardware Renderer change their settings get close to software's aesthetic. Without any more fine data like that, it's unfortunately easy to construe that the surveys were a veiled attempt at justifying work on GZDoom's Software Renderer as second-class, even at the height of the port's popularity and its effort to stay the "do everything" port that it seems to want to be. Regardless, people seem to want a color-accurate renderer (hell, I want one, too) with the performance benefits that GPU-based rendering provides. The current incarnation of the Hardware Renderer still keeps around a lot of approaches that are frankly obsolete, now. 4 Share this post Link to post