VOGONS


Blood 2: The Chosen On Windows 8, 8.1

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First post, by MrEWhite

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Now, after months of trying. I have gotten Blood 2 to run at a solid 60 FPS on Windows 8.1!
First, download the latest version of dgVoodoo 2. (http://dege.freeweb.hu) the latest version is currently dgVoodoo v2.41
Unzip the file to any location. Run dgVoodooSetup.exe
Go over to DirectX and turn off the watermark.
Click apply and click Ok to close the program.
Go to the dgVoodoo directory and go to the MS folder
Drag the D3DImm.dll and the DDraw.dll to your Blood 2 folder.
Launch Blood 2.
The game should run at the correct FPS now. Make sure to use no resolution with a height over 1000 pixels to avoid crashing! You can also force 8x MSAA if you wish.

UPDATE: Dege has released a patch to play the game at higher resolutions, check it out. http://dege.fw.hu/temp/Blood2ResPatch.zip

Last edited by MrEWhite on 2015-03-03, 03:34. Edited 2 times in total.

Reply 1 of 41, by ZellSF

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You can go up to 1000px in vertical height actually. I'm playing at 1920x1000 (40 pixels of black bars on the top and bottom, but hey no scaling on a 1080p monitor).

I don't get a consistent 60 FPS though, no clue why not.

Reply 2 of 41, by MrEWhite

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ZellSF wrote:

You can go up to 1000px in vertical height actually. I'm playing at 1920x1000 (40 pixels of black bars on the top and bottom, but hey no scaling on a 1080p monitor).

I don't get a consistent 60 FPS though, no clue why not.

I also get a stutter, every time you load the game type in "Maxfps 60" in the console to stop this.
For me, at least every time I put it in the autoexec and set autoexec to read only after the main menu it sets it back to zero, even with it read only.

Reply 4 of 41, by ZellSF

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MrEWhite wrote:
ZellSF wrote:

You can go up to 1000px in vertical height actually. I'm playing at 1920x1000 (40 pixels of black bars on the top and bottom, but hey no scaling on a 1080p monitor).

I don't get a consistent 60 FPS though, no clue why not.

I also get a stutter, every time you load the game type in "Maxfps 60" in the console to stop this.
For me, at least every time I put it in the autoexec and set autoexec to read only after the main menu it sets it back to zero, even with it read only.

I'm not even getting 60 FPS to begin with, no point in limiting it to that (I did try, if you're wondering).

Reply 5 of 41, by MrEWhite

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ZellSF wrote:
MrEWhite wrote:
ZellSF wrote:

You can go up to 1000px in vertical height actually. I'm playing at 1920x1000 (40 pixels of black bars on the top and bottom, but hey no scaling on a 1080p monitor).

I don't get a consistent 60 FPS though, no clue why not.

I also get a stutter, every time you load the game type in "Maxfps 60" in the console to stop this.
For me, at least every time I put it in the autoexec and set autoexec to read only after the main menu it sets it back to zero, even with it read only.

I'm not even getting 60 FPS to begin with, no point in limiting it to that (I did try, if you're wondering).

What are your specs, it works fine for me on my i7 4770 and GTX 670.
I capped the FPS to 60 through Nvidia Inspector and that did it.

Reply 6 of 41, by ZellSF

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MrEWhite wrote:
ZellSF wrote:
MrEWhite wrote:

I also get a stutter, every time you load the game type in "Maxfps 60" in the console to stop this.
For me, at least every time I put it in the autoexec and set autoexec to read only after the main menu it sets it back to zero, even with it read only.

I'm not even getting 60 FPS to begin with, no point in limiting it to that (I did try, if you're wondering).

What are your specs, it works fine for me on my i7 4770 and GTX 670.
I capped the FPS to 60 through Nvidia Inspector and that did it.

i7 860 / GTX 670.

Wouldn't surprise me if Blood 2 was so poorly optimized it requires a 2013 CPU to run at constant 60 FPS.

Reply 7 of 41, by MrEWhite

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ZellSF wrote:

i7 860 / GTX 670.

Wouldn't surprise me if Blood 2 was so poorly optimized it requires a 2013 CPU to run at constant 60 FPS.

It differs I guess 😜

Reply 8 of 41, by filipetolhuizen

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ZellSF wrote:

You can go up to 1000px in vertical height actually. I'm playing at 1920x1000 (40 pixels of black bars on the top and bottom, but hey no scaling on a 1080p monitor).

I don't get a consistent 60 FPS though, no clue why not.

Never understood why it crashes with height above 1000 pixels.

Reply 9 of 41, by MrEWhite

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Dege fixed the resolution issue after 17 whole years!

Reply 10 of 41, by ZellSF

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For reference, I turned off light mapping to get a stable 60 FPS.

Reply 11 of 41, by Dege

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I've investigated the dynamic lighting of LithTech engine and got to that it's programming technique is awful.
Ok, let's hold the scales even, this engine utilizes that blitting from video to system memory was done on the cpu on an old contemporary hw by a good chance, independently on the 3d gpu pipeline.

On a modern hw however it is not true and it generates several synchronization gaps between the cpu/gpu within a single frame that get summed up and it all results in fps dropdown.

I can reproduce it with a scene in Shogo (on the 1st floor in the computer hologram room where a green light is flashing).
I developed a new method to get the same performance on a modern hw as on the old ones (in general cases), so the mentioned scene in Shogo got fixed, I get stable 60 fps.
But I'm not sure if it's good enough.

Could somebody attach a Blood2 savegame where there are a lot of dynamic lights around and so causing the biggest performance drop?

Reply 12 of 41, by Firtasik

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I'm doing a playthrough right now. The first level is pretty bad. My save file is from a different map. Destroy the pipes. I'll try to find "better" spots.

Update:
A bigger drop with the green vortex.

11 1 111 11 1 1 1 1 1 11 1 1 111 1 111 1 1 1 1 111

Reply 13 of 41, by ZellSF

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First level is terrible. Can't maintain 60FPS on i7 860 + GTX 670.

I didn't have any problem the place you mentioned in Shogo though (with dgVoodoo, natively it's actually pretty bad).

Reply 14 of 41, by MrEWhite

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If I turn the frame cap off I get 600+ FPS. I upgraded to a GTX 980 though

Reply 15 of 41, by Dege

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I have only my weakest card for the weekend so I can't test it on a normal card right now but what I can say is the new method seems to work well.
Both the vortex and explosion is animated smoothly now even on this card (but I got slowdowns here and there even without light mapping).

Shogo scene I mentioned shows significant performance increase on this hw.
Promising, at least.

If I turn the frame cap off I get 600+ FPS. I upgraded to a GTX 980 though

With enabled light mapping?
If yes, then whoa, that card has a million horses inside. 😀

Reply 16 of 41, by MrEWhite

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Dege wrote:
I have only my weakest card for the weekend so I can't test it on a normal card right now but what I can say is the new method s […]
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I have only my weakest card for the weekend so I can't test it on a normal card right now but what I can say is the new method seems to work well.
Both the vortex and explosion is animated smoothly now even on this card (but I got slowdowns here and there even without light mapping).

Shogo scene I mentioned shows significant performance increase on this hw.
Promising, at least.

If I turn the frame cap off I get 600+ FPS. I upgraded to a GTX 980 though

With enabled light mapping?
If yes, then whoa, that card has a million horses inside. 😀

Over stated 😜
Just tested again, 100+ fps on level 1.

Reply 17 of 41, by Dege

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Over stated 😜
Just tested again, 100+ fps on level 1.

Ok, but it's strange a little to me.
Though this performance drop isn't hardly related to the gpu performance but to the processing of the 3D command queue.
So I think it does matter if a given driver does some threading optimizations on the queue processing or not, or something. 😀

Anyway, I've just tried the new version on a GTS450 and a GTX560 Ti and all the scenes I tried (Shogo, Blood2) rendered with smooth 60fps.

Reply 18 of 41, by vorob

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Hello, what should i press in this wondefull dgvoodoo to have fixed aspect raio? Cause for now it stretches 4:3 resolution to my 16:9 monitor.

Reply 19 of 41, by ZellSF

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vorob wrote:

Hello, what should i press in this wondefull dgvoodoo to have fixed aspect raio? Cause for now it stretches 4:3 resolution to my 16:9 monitor.

If you're on Nvidia you need to downgrade a few driver versions and use the aspect ratio override in the control panel. Don't know about AMD and Intel.

But... why? Blood 2 has a widescreen mod.