Widescreen Gaming Forum

Is it just me? Or is it that OpenGL is more conducive to TH2go? I've noticed that Opengl games tend to let you adjust the FOV much more easyly than DX games. Has anyone else seen this?

It makes no difference. It just depends on how the engine is written.

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I think he was asking if a higher percentage of openGL games support TH compared to DX games.

IMHO, it's totally random. Whether it's OpenGL or DirectX has nothing to do with surround-screen compatibility in the current gaming market. It's all to do with the 3D engine, not the underlying graphics language. A few years ago, that might have been different, but now it's all the 3D engine programmers that dictate compatibility.

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Brad Hawthorne
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Nthusim Pty. Ltd. | www.nthusim.com

I don't think it was really that different years ago, either. ID have been basically the only company to continue using OpenGL as a renderer and they've historically been pretty good at coding engines that are flexible and end-user tweakable.

As Brad says... it's not really the language underneath, it's what the programs do with it.

What I was getting at about "years ago" was in DirectX at least you had some hard limits on resolution. I know some DirectX 7 titles couldn't go over something like 2048 and I believe the hard limit on DirectX 9 was 4096 which changed when the G80 chips arrived with DirectX 9c/10 capability. Reguardless of those past issues, currently the only hindrance that inhibits good compatibility is ignorance on the part of the programmer to not account for nonstandard resolutions. Once the programmer realizes that people use strange resolutions a lot of the time and goes about programming the 3D engine with flexibility in mind, things are a lot better. A good rule of thumb for a programmer is to account for any resolution within the maximum pixel width allowable by your hardware. Anything 8-series or newer on the nVidia side would be 8192 max. Makes me wonder what it might become for 300-series hardware soon.

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Brad Hawthorne
Product Manager
Nthusim Pty. Ltd. | www.nthusim.com

Like I said before, it depends on the how engine is written, not whether it's OpenGL or DirectX.


The problem in the past is that there were no set standards or guidelines to develop for.

Newer games, if they want to be "Games for Windows" certified, must follow a specific guideline, which includes supporting any resolution that your display driver does. However, there is no mention as to whether a game must scale horizontally or vertically, and for good reason — fighting games like Street Fighter IV, or others, should not scale horizontally. The current implementation scales vertically. This is wrong because when using extremely wide aspect-ratios, you can't really see anything and the game is unplayable. Instead, it should be anamorphic. This is left up to the developer to decide on how to handle it. On top of that, that's only for games that are "Games for Windows" certified. It's not a requirement to be certified, and very few games actually are.

The best thing to do is make a community outcry when a game doesn't work the way you want. It may or may not work in getting it supported. It's worked in the past so it's worth a shot.

At a minimum 5:4, 4:3, 16:10, and 16:9 should be supported properly, since those are common aspect-ratios that are within the reach of everyone. Games released within the last two years have primarily been designed for 16:9 as the native aspect-ratio. Lacking support for 5:4, 4:3, or 16:10 in that case is bad. However, if they support those, but lack support for triplehead, you can't really blame them. Not every developer has three monitors that they game on and can verify if it works in that situation or not. On top of that, if you look at how many people actually play games with three screens, it's a very, very small number. It's probably just not cost-effective to go out of their way to make sure everything works properly with three screens. I think in a case like this, it's probably best if Matrox goes out of their way to solicit all of the game developers and publishers to support TH.

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