AVS Quickstart Guide

Warrior of the Light

12th September 2006 20:00 UTC

AVS Quickstart Guide
Over the past few weeks I've been working on a guide to help n00bs to set up AVS so that it looks good (aka no pixel doubling in windowed mode etcetera).

I've attached the first public beta.

Since 'englisch does not be my virst lagnuage' and I could be just wrong about some things, I'd like to get some reactions before I publish this.

Please email your fixes (instead of posting them here) so that there won't be like 20 different versions all over the internet which are all incorrect. My email address is on my dA page for those that don't have it yet.

If you make adjustments, please mark them so that they're easier for me to spot.

Thanks in advance.

PAK-9

12th September 2006 21:30 UTC

I only skim read it but I noticed this:

"Your goal is that AVS runs with the highest refresh rate* as possible with the highest possible resolution**."

"Refresh rate" is a term used (generally) to signify how often a monitor physically redraws the screen. It is incidental to AVS, frame rate (how many frames AVS is capable of rendering in a certain period of time) is a judge of AVS processing performance which I think you were going for.

Feel free to copy this into an email and send it to yourself

Warrior of the Light

12th September 2006 22:01 UTC

fixed

Yathosho

13th September 2006 01:30 UTC

excellent

Mr_Nudge

13th September 2006 02:40 UTC

Originally posted by PAK-9
"Refresh rate" is a term used (generally) to signify how often a monitor physically redraws the screen. It is incidental to AVS, frame rate (how many frames AVS is capable of rendering in a certain period of time) is a judge of AVS processing performance which I think you were going for.

with that in mind and the fact that the human eye doesn't pick up anything faster than ~60fps, which is why you won't find that many screens with a refresh rate over 60hz, it's pretty pointless making avs run anything over 60fps, because your screen can't keep up, and neither can your eyes. so making a preset faster becomes pointless over 60fps, things will just move faster unless you put some framerate-independant coding in to keep things running at a steady speed.

eheiney

13th September 2006 06:42 UTC

Heh, my display and fullscreen settings are much different. That sort of explains a lot.

I have wait for retrace disabled, but pixel doubling enabled. I also have the performance slider at one notch to the right. All text is also suppressed. I do use the fullscreen overlay mode as it appears to be much faster for me, and as I have a widescreen laptop my resolution is set at 640x400 16BPP.

It's no wonder I get a lot of comments that my presets are slow. They seem fine to me but if the majority of the community uses settings similar to these listed in your guide... that kind of sucks for me. Sorry.

Mr_Nudge

13th September 2006 09:02 UTC

well with pixel doubling your resolution would actually be 320x200 @16bpp

jheriko

13th September 2006 12:13 UTC

Originally posted by Mr_Nudge
well with pixel doubling your resolution would actually be 320x200 @16bpp

Not quite. The resolution of the render is 320x200 but the screen resolution (i.e. screen mode) will be 640x400 still

Yathosho

13th September 2006 19:05 UTC

Originally posted by jheriko
Not quite. The resolution of the render is 320x200 but the screen resolution (i.e. screen mode) will be 640x400 still

which makes pixel doubling the reason for me to enable it.. fast presets in 400x300 and nice and small fonts for fps counter and preset name :)

Warrior of the Light

13th September 2006 20:04 UTC

:) It's out! :)

full version

lite version

PAK-9

13th September 2006 22:49 UTC

Originally posted by Mr_Nudge
with that in mind and the fact that the human eye doesn't pick up anything faster than ~60fps, which is why you won't find that many screens with a refresh rate over 60hz, it's pretty pointless making avs run anything over 60fps, because your screen can't keep up, and neither can your eyes. so making a preset faster becomes pointless over 60fps, things will just move faster unless you put some framerate-independant coding in to keep things running at a steady speed.

Its something of a misconception that the human eyes cannot differentiate frame rates above a certain speed (if a flash of light occured for 1 200th of a second do you think there is any chance you would miss it?). Your eyes can percieve refresh rates well above 60Hz depending on the intensite of the light, part of your vision you are seeing it from etc...

In the context of AVS a faster refresh rate on your monitor would indeed make fps's above 60 worthwhile and (probably more importantly) reduces the chance of the screen redrawing while the current frame is being swapped out (tearing)[unless you have wait for retrace/page flipping enabled]. I would agree that the worthwhileness (technical term) falls off pretty steeply past 60Hz :P

jheriko

14th September 2006 09:52 UTC

If the refresh rate is low enough (usually 60 or anything below) you can see tearing on the screen with wait for retrace or page flipping, especially in the peripheral vision. On CRTs it is especially obvious, it appears as a sort of flicking which seems to scroll down the screen. On LCD the effect is lessened somewhat, I think it is because the colour from each pixel fades less quickly so the flashing is less severe.