Do you use hardware renderer or software renderer when you use GZDoom?

[houston]

10 minutes ago, Professor Hastig said:

That dedicated freelook key was the worst feature ever. This alone killed all the fun in Build games for me until ports fixed it and started offering proper mouselook as the default option. It never actually bothered me in the software renderer.

Permanent freelook is actually available in the base game actually, at least going by Belgian Chocolate-Duke3D (well wouldn't surprise me even if that project added stuff in without telling the player it's not accurate). Maybe the nausea has to do with resolution too? Any time I bump the mouse and accidentally look upwards (when there's no optional freelook button/key (I personally like to use mouse2)), I almost feel like I'm about to hurl

[pantheon]

Not sure why, but GZ's software renderer makes items dropped by enemies flicker with the corpse sprite when they're too close to each other. Kill a chaingunner next to a wall and it will probably flicker. Still, it bothers me less than the clipping in hardware. When I try out My House it will be with software :)

[Manny84]

On 6/14/2023 at 2:49 AM, pantheon said:

Not sure why, but GZ's software renderer makes items dropped by enemies flicker with the corpse sprite when they're too close to each other. Kill a chaingunner next to a wall and it will probably flicker. Still, it bothers me less than the clipping in hardware. When I try out My House it will be with software :)

Just FYI, MyHouse.wad won't work with software rendering. The tricks the map uses all rely on hardware rendering. You could just use the Vanilla Essence mod to make it LOOK like software rendering, though.

 

EDIT: Even with VE, I'd recommend still using mouselook, disabling tonemapping, and using the "Doom" sector lighting for the map to be fully playable as intended. Using the palette tonemapper like vanilla will render one optional area of MyHouse basically unplayable.

 

I prefer the software look myself, but I only use GZDoom when a mod/wad requires its advanced features, which usually involves the hardware renderer. For everything else I just use Woof.

Edited June 18, 2023 by Manny84 : Added info about using MyHouse with Vanilla Essence

[kalensar]

The only time I use software render is if the maps are designed for it and if I need it to run more smoothly. Otherwise I always use hardware accelerated. 

 

One example that I have to use software rendering on in order for it to run somewhat reasonably is Planisphere 2 because the map geometry is so obtuse that even moderately good PCS have trouble running the map in hardware acceleration. It's a map set that requires z Doom at minimum and is incompatible with PR boom

[Gougaru]

There's other ports that give that software justice. Don't see the reason to use it in gz 

[Async Unicorn]

I use GZDoom only when I play mods or wads that require it, so it doesn't matter, but i play with hardware.

In terms of port optimization, everything is sad, regardless of the render, at least on my computer, so it doesn't matter twice.

 

[Bigbad75]

If I'm playing an old Zdoom or Vanilla wad I like to turn on software rendering to get a more authentic experience.

 

If it's something modern I'll use OpenGL to prevent graphical glitches.

[ludicrous_peridot]

Hardware as multisampling and texture scaling do amazing things to image quality these days, and then there are shader mods. That said I don't like dynamic lightning, materials or higher resolution textures/sprites packs with Doom.  For software I'd rather switch to another port, than to another renderer (e.g. Retro, Eternity or go to DOS).

[Dweller Dark]

Hardware, mainly because it gives the best performance with dynamic lighting turned on. And I can always download a different sourceport if I want software rendering.

[Not Jabba]

Another fun fact is that the palette tonemap for GZ's hardware renderer doesn't work with Heretic's palette at all.

[SovereignX9]

GZDoom is the only sourceport that I use hardware in, my preference is and always has been software. Usually play GZDoom with hardware, "always mouselook" on, and Smooth Doom, or whatever big mod/ total conversion I choose. LZDoom and Chocolate Doom are my main sourceports, but if I'm in the mood for a fancy shmancy experience with like MetaDoom or my Hellrider + Colorful Hell combo, along with some big/detailed maps, I'll use GZDoom. 

[Xenolith]

My main PC is an IBM Power9 running Fedora - basically a 64-bit PowerPC-descended chip with eight cores and 32 threads - and it's a little fussy about GZDoom. The short answer is that I run hardware except when the renderer's performance craters in huge maps (first map of Eviternity's last episode is a ballbuster), where I fall back to software. I've figured out that the lack of SSE2 chiefly affects the true color renderer, which is OK-ish at 1080p, but the Doom 8-bit software renderer flies. I’m trying to figure out how to trick the GZDoom compiler into translating SSE2 to equivalent Power instructions but it’s an uphill struggle. Of course, there's no way around the hardware renderer for Myhouse, which stutters but is manageable.

 

But most of the time on the Power9? Woof for crunchy pixels and truth to Doom's original experience, and DSDA-Doom for a much better-performing hardware renderer and a little more polish. Both of those ports run better in general and didn't need me to manually intervene in their compilation process... but GZDoom's an important port, so I keep it on hand.

 

thank you for reading my blog post lol

Edited July 17, 2023 by Xenolith

[houston]

A power9? Was it one of those multi-thousand dollar "atlas" computers or whatever?

[xX_Lol6_Xx]

Software rendering, even with OpenGLES my laptop struggles to give me stable 60fps (granted, it's nearly as old as me), but either software mode (TrueColor or Doom's) gives me better performance, and I play HeXen a lot, and on foggy maps I want that vanilla fog effect that IMO looks awful with Hardware Acceleration.

[Xenolith]

2 hours ago, houston said:

A power9? Was it one of those multi-thousand dollar "atlas" computers or whatever?

Raptor Computing, Blackbird motherboard. I was flush with COVID money and wanted to really commit to running a true-blue open source machine on a non-x86, non-ARM architecture. It's fast, it's fun, and it's been a hell of a learning experience.

 

Definitely fond of DSDA-Doom, for the record.

[ReaperAA]

On 7/15/2023 at 4:26 AM, Not Jabba said:

Another fun fact is that the palette tonemap for GZ's hardware renderer doesn't work with Heretic's palette at all.

 

Yeah, that's because Heretic (and also Hexen too) has a handmade and well-crafted colormap whose color fading can't be replicated by the Hardware renderer's palette tonemap (Unlike Doom, which uses a machine generated colormap).

 

This is part of the reason why I actually prefer using software renderer for Heretic and Hexen, but I don't mind using Hardware renderer for Doom.