Links Corner Forum

The dev has been quite responsive and pleasant. :) I'm usually able to get 98% of the way to issue-free Links2k3 play w/ a discrete AMD GPU. I gave this wrapper a try to see if I could then do away w/ the AMD Adrenaline software and control panel since I only use it to force Links to 8X antialiasing and 16x anisotropic filtering, and for nothing else, laugh. So far, I've been able to do that with the new wrapper, as well as remove some of the visual artifacts that used to plague the splash/landing screen.

I have been impressed with this developer's responsiveness and helpfulness.

Some of the comments and your screenshot of the Opening Links screen on your AMD GPU lead me to look and resolve some issues (relatively minor it must be said) on Intel iGPU. I was also seeing the thin vertical black lines, but the solution on Intel GPU turned out to be different.

Des

I've updated the Intel .ini file to reflect your sprite detection fix, thanks.

No problem.

I feel with Intel it is getting down to areas of fine tuning. The basics seem to be fine.

Overall on Intel, DDrawCompat is much superior to dgVoodoo, that is where my main use for a wrapper is.

I loaded up a couple of 2001 courses from my part of the World - Stuart Kahle's Commonwealth and Yarra Yarra. Alas I have not been able to find a copy of his Victoria.

It seems to me with this new wrapper these courses are sharper and look better than ever, well at least on my systems.

If someone could point me at a copy of Victoria I would love to try it too.

Des

I have a desktop system with an Nvidia HBA that works fine but decided I should test it with the wrapper to try and gauge if it would be beneficial to use the wrapper instead of Nvidia driver settings.

This is a low end GT1030, one of the few HBAs that will fit the system physically, it is no powerhouse but more than adequate for Links.

From the point of view of image quality I am hard pressed to see any different, I did take the wrapper up to the highest AA & AF settings, which matches what I have the Nvidia driver set to.

One thing I did note with the wrapper, when addressing the ball under the wrapper the golfer movements seem rather slow compared to using Nvidia alone.

An advantage the wrapper does have is that it does allow me to change the mouse sensitivity.

Overall however on this particular configuration I think that Nvidia alone is probably the best option. I can see that on different machines the answer could well be different, certainly with an Intel GPU you need a wrapper.

So on machines where either way can work try it and see, there may well not be a universal answer. The wrapper is an easy setup in any case.

For information, this is using Nvidia driver version 582.28.

For anyone who is interested this wrapper is not working under Linux, it complains it needs other software, I have not persisted with trying to get it to work.

Des

The wrapper uses approximately twice as much processing power to apply AA and AF compared to native acceleration - on legacy systems it may be noticeable.