Need People To Test

You will need a MIC. Either a phone or discord. I need to be able to communicate with someone for about an hour or so during this. You need an decent cooling system and a 32GB SD card. REQUIRES FOR NOW A PI 3B ONLY. Contact me via KUPOkinz@gmail.com

I think you need to give more information on this so it seems less questionable

Is that half life video software rendering?

No. No way. That shit looks like a vchiq + hardware rendering (aka. drawing the pixels faster) the video AT LEAST.
Please give us more info as this shit looks amazing.

Everything is decoded/rendered on the CPU at the moment. The GPU only displays the image on a screen.
You can get smooth video playback if you manage to lower the system resources usage.

Can you link to the source code for these GPU drivers?

Yes I will Ben but it’ll be about another week. I have a few people helping me test the drivers right now, would like to make sure their fully working order. We are still having some crashes regarding video output ratios interfering with the default Windows Scaling (seems to be an issue where there is currently no support for an in-system resolution change) so a lot of the rending is being done in a Window’d mode until I can figure out the scaling issues. Any help would be appreciated, having a FullScreen on-the-fly mode would almost fix the entirity of gpu driver support Im using.

If someone could compile a fake Intel Graphics HD driver, we would be set as it would act as an iGPU for the scaling while allowing the GPU to run everything else in hardware mode. We could then use Symboise to emulated the Intel hardware and give us access to the control panel. I dont see any reason this wouldn’t work.

You’re using the Microsoft graphics driver sample for VC4, right?

I have a pi 3b+ inside a monitor. As in, powered by it. Making my own Windows AiO would be quite nice.
If you need help with a 3b+, tell me. Id be really, really happy to help.

Please message me on discord KUPOkinz#4894 as that would be useful :slight_smile: We need a couple more 3B+ users and inside a monitor sounds pretty nifty :stuck_out_tongue:

I’m sorry Ben, it does appear to be running under software emulation I think, under the Microsoft Basic Display driver, thanks Electrode for helping me out. DirectX seem to be running fine as long as they meet the requirements of the Pi. We are trying the IOT drivers atm but it seems performance is better off without any drivers. MSDN toolkit has an unofficial ARM64 beta client under v9.2 which were the drivers I slipstreamed into the iso but either they do not appear to be detected or arent working. Forgive my misunderstanding :stuck_out_tongue:

All good I kinda expected so, I still keep hoping to see working graphics drivers though

If I remember correctly the driver is a render only driver, not as a display driver. Kinda like how it you buy those ex mining GTX 1060s with no display outputs. It should be possible to set is a a display driver and then use it the same as any other graphics driver, but I’m not a driver engineer so I don’t know enough about them

Ive really got myself wondering if the MSDN Driver is actually working… and just the values/registry entries are not being recognised due to it being slipstreamed. After trying a few OpenGL titles. Both Soldier of Fortune and Quake are running in OpenGL at around 30 to 50fps in fullscreen, Quake prsents graphic issues but is fully playable (might have to do with 16/32 bit color maps?) and unless Im being fooled again, it does appear to be running out of software emulation, as it was for Halflife in DX mode. Thoughts please? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbeDDo5DkvU

Talked with @KUPOkinz via discord. Most of the drivers seem to be there, although in the Image he gave me the VCHIQ and VC4 Drivers were missing.
Nice guy though. Great work on the image dude!

The graphics driver works, but it is just very limited so Windows falls back to software rendering in most cases. I’ve read somewhere on the Github project page that it should help improve the XAML rendering performance, but that’s not very useful.
It doesn’t have any kind of OpenGL support (it’s supposed to be a DX11-only driver).

These are very old games, so I’m not very surprised they run at decent frame rates.

Neither of the games run outside of a ‘named’ software mode on a basic WoA install. As for WoD, I haven’t tried.

And thanks Electrode, you’ve quickly became one of the smartest people I know! Learned a lot from you in the course of the 2 days

3d Furmark returns with support for 1.0, invalid for 2.0 if that helps. It would be even better if we had many more people working on this or could somehow get in contact with some higher ups at MS.

What would be a specific thing we could test, right now, that would validate this?

edit; sorry I just understood what you said Mario, can you link to the github? Something might click with the other things me and Electrode have tried

I suppose OpenGL 1.0 support is provided by the inbox Microsoft Basic Display Driver (which is not hardware accelerated).

It doesn’t matter if you select D3D/OpenGL rendering instead of software mode in any game. The scenes are still software rendered by the default MSBDD driver. (even with the render-only driver present…)

Trying to “debug” the driver is useless since it does work. The only issue is that it is unfinished (and not doing anything useful) and Microsoft doesn’t seem to be interested in continuing its development anymore.

Some documentation about the graphics driver sample can be found there: