Screen Tearing Fixed Yet?

[slowmo310]

just wondering. It's whats stopping me from buying one.

 

[mittens]

It doesn't seem to be fixed universally by firmware upgrading, like many developers already mentioned it.

But there are some progress - Mame from Franxis has a fix option for it and new firmware(1.0.1) fix it for menu.

 

[darkriku]

Dang impatient

 

[forgeflow]

just wondering. It's whats stopping me from buying one.

I'm not 100% sure that "tearing" accurately describes the visual artifact. It's like the screen is divided in 2 diagonally from upper right to lower left, and the two sides of the screen refresh at different rates.

I upgraded my Wiz to firmware 1.0.1 today, and while the "diagonal" was visible in menus, in general it was not evident in games such as Quake, Quake 2, and Doom. Now, with the new firmware, the diagonal is quite visible in all three of these games. As an added "bonus" - the menus are slower. The only upside of the upgrade seems to be that diagonal isn't visible in the menus - the one place on the Wiz that I spend the least amount of time.

Is it possible to downgrade back to firmware 1.0.0 ?

 

[Ahua_Keren]

Hmm... yeah, I've noticed that too, 1.0.1 is suck! the diagonal/tearing issue is more tense at 1.0.1, what a pain!

 

[sam fisher]

I think people seeing the diagonal tearing more are hypochondriacs .

 

[Wootson]

I would like to buy one, if the Pandora takes up more time, and the screen tearing is fixed permanently in all applications and games. I'm sorry to say, but I can't live with such a thing.

I was thinking of buying one last month, but I hold back onto it because I heard rumors about the screen tearing (which ended up to be true). It's just too bad this happened. I really like the device, but this I just can't live with.

 

[rx_shorty]

Well I can imagine that...
IF we believe GPH, then it will be all solved when the release the SDK manual...
Ofcourse... I don't think it will, but I have my hopes up...

 

[notaz]

I would like to buy one, if the Pandora takes up more time, and the screen tearing is fixed permanently in all applications and games. I'm sorry to say, but I can't live with such a thing.

This can be fixed in per application basis. Currently Temper has it, I've just finished implementing it in gpSP, PicoDrive will get an update for that too. There is a performance hit, but if things are done right it shouldn't be much more than maybe 10% (in some cases it can be avoided completely).

I really doubt GPH can fix it in firmware though, only in harware if they find true landscape OLED screen. There is also a possibility of 3d hardware to be used for that, but nothing has come out of this yet.

Also note the tearing is hard to notice it in games that don't have fast scrolling and screen fading.

 

[Exophase]

Temper doesn't have such a fix yet, unfortunately. I refuse to do it if it means sacrificing any really measurable amount of speed.

 

[Michael Tracy]

I would like to buy one, if the Pandora takes up more time, and the screen tearing is fixed permanently in all applications and games. I'm sorry to say, but I can't live with such a thing.

This can be fixed in per application basis. Currently Temper has it, I've just finished implementing it in gpSP, PicoDrive will get an update for that too. There is a performance hit, but if things are done right it shouldn't be much more than maybe 10% (in some cases it can be avoided completely"].[/quote]I really doubt GPH can fix it in firmware though, only in harware if they find true landscape OLED screen. There is also a possibility of 3d hardware to be used for that, but nothing has come out of this yet.

Also note the tearing is hard to notice it in games that don't have fast scrolling and screen fading.

I think It can be fixed in firmware since they thought it would in the 1.0.1 update. The only good thing it did is fix the video player which is nice but it has caused more problems thn it has fixed.

 

[Exophase]

Listen to notaz please, he does know what he's talking about >_>

 

[DaveC]

I would like to buy one, if the Pandora takes up more time, and the screen tearing is fixed permanently in all applications and games. I'm sorry to say, but I can't live with such a thing.

This can be fixed in per application basis. Currently Temper has it, I've just finished implementing it in gpSP, PicoDrive will get an update for that too. There is a performance hit, but if things are done right it shouldn't be much more than maybe 10% (in some cases it can be avoided completely"].[/quote]I really doubt GPH can fix it in firmware though, only in harware if they find true landscape OLED screen. There is also a possibility of 3d hardware to be used for that, but nothing has come out of this yet.

Also note the tearing is hard to notice it in games that don't have fast scrolling and screen fading.

Will the tearing fix be compatible with the nicer horizontal software scaling that is used in emus such as Picodrive, Temper etc? I noticed in the NES emu if you use the rotate option to fix the tearing, the soft scaling is disabled. I hate the ugly blocky scaling and won't use it, and the blurr-fest bi-linear that is used often is not much better. Right now most (except GBA, GB) emus can get away with leaving the vertical resolution at 1:1 and only having the horizontal scaling with the nice averaging technique. It would be a shame to give that up if we didn't have to. We can use 1:1 of course to eliminate that but with the small Wiz screen scaling if nice does start to have an appeal.

I am sure you all thought of this but howcome the emu couldn't just be double buffered? Most games have used that technique to eliminate the horizontal tearing that can happen on any system. You would just render to the back buffer, then after the write is done flip it to the display but use a portrait mode flip so you don't get the line. What keeps that from working?

 

[Exophase]

Double buffering on the Pollux's display controller doesn't get rid of diagonal tearing. The OLED controller has an internal framebuffer and only room for one. Furthermore, applications don't have direct access to this framebuffer, it's filled transparently via hardware. In portrait mode it's possible to synchronize the SoC's framebuffer update with the OLED controller's display scan so it always stays behind but in portrait mode this is impossible to do all the time because the framebuffer update has to pass entire scanlines at a time and they end up crossing over each other.