Why Does The Wiz Have Tearing?


DRED

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Can someone explain to me why the Wiz has tearing while other hand helds don't have this issue? Is it software or hardware related? Can it be fixed? What are the odds it is fixed? If it is fixed will it slow everything down?
 
It only happens in some games, so i'd say its software related. pretty sure it will be fixed.
Doesn't really bother me much.
 
DRED said:
Can someone explain to me why the Wiz has tearing while other hand helds don't have this issue? Is it software or hardware related? Can it be fixed? What are the odds it is fixed? If it is fixed will it slow everything down?

This happens because the brilliant folks at GPH put an OLED screen in the wiz, but flipped it sideways. Since it's flipped sideways it has to flip all the frames back the right way, which causes the tearing. Or at least that's how I understand it.
 
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The folks at GPH didn't have a choice, I'm sure they'd rather have taken a landscape screen instead of a portrait one, but OLED screens are made for cellphones mostly, thus they are portrait. But yeah, I think blueskycomplex got it right.
 
It is a hardware fault, there is code to fix it, but at a price (ie it slows things down).

It's possible that it could be fixed with code via the 3D chip without slowing things down, this is what GPH are planning to do I believe.
 
beavith said:
When it gets fixed, great. But for now... just deal with it.

It honestly doesn't bother me at all. It hasn't affected gameplay for any of the games I've played, and I don't really mind it at all. Maybe that's because I'm used to turning Vsync off on PC games my computer isn't exactly equipped to run =x
 
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DurTahar said:
It has tearing because you don't call your family enough :angry:

No it's because you touch yourself at night, get it straight! :angry:
 
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Console_Master said:
DurTahar said:
It has tearing because you don't call your family enough :angry:

No it's because you touch yourself at night, get it straight! :angry:

>.>


<.<


I thought it was because little gnomes were playing games with my eyesight....
 
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DRED said:
Can someone explain to me why the Wiz has tearing while other hand helds don't have this issue? Is it software or hardware related? Can it be fixed? What are the odds it is fixed? If it is fixed will it slow everything down?
The Dingoo also suffers from screen tearing. Here's the reason why.
 
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DRED said:
Can someone explain to me why the Wiz has tearing while other hand helds don't have this issue? Is it software or hardware related? Can it be fixed? What are the odds it is fixed? If it is fixed will it slow everything down?

As was stated the tearing is caused because the screen in the Wiz scans vertical and most software writes to the screen horizontally (because this is how TVs and monitors have done it). So what happens is the horizontal and vertical refreshing kind of "clash" causing a diagonal tear.

If all software wrote to the screen by scanning vertical there would be no problem. This though means re-writing the rendering routeens in emus to refresh vertical, allot of work. So instead of all of that work many coders have found ways to buffer the horizontal screen output, then display it verticaly scanning totally eliminating the tearing. The GBA emu, Genesis emu and MAME use a technique like this and the tearing is completely gone. I suppose there must be a performance hit but I don't really notice it at all. Genesis is totally fullspeed and GBA seems to run just as well as it did before.

As far as GPH "blowing it" as some suggest I really don't think that is the case here. They wanted an OLED screen to differenciate it from the hoards of other handhelds out there. Since OLED is a pretty new technology their choices for getting screens of this size, resolution and reasonable cost are quite limited.
 
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Console_Master said:
DurTahar said:
It has tearing because you don't call your family enough :angry:

No it's because you touch yourself at night, get it straight! :angry:


It's both, instead of touching yourself you need to be calling your dear old mother :angry:
 
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DaveC said:
If all software wrote to the screen by scanning vertical there would be no problem. This though means re-writing the rendering routeens in emus to refresh vertical, allot of work. So instead of all of that work many coders have found ways to buffer the horizontal screen output, then display it verticaly scanning totally eliminating the tearing. The GBA emu, Genesis emu and MAME use a technique like this and the tearing is completely gone. I suppose there must be a performance hit but I don't really notice it at all. Genesis is totally fullspeed and GBA seems to run just as well as it did before.

These things are using a post-processing software routine for it. The reason you might not notice it in the GBA emulator is because it's being baked into the scaling routine. If you turn off scaling you'll notice the performance difference.

I personally refuse to render the screen to RAM that's going to be read then rotated, I will not be doing this method no matter what. Performance = battery life, it does matter.

GPH blew it not so much by choosing the software they did but by not explaining the problem very well (rather just mentioning it then pretending they can fix it) and developing all the base stuff around 320x240 and shipping it like that. If it would have been 240x320 from the start then people would have had more of a start on doing things right.
 
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Exophase said:
These things are using a post-processing software routine for it. The reason you might not notice it in the GBA emulator is because it's being baked into the scaling routine. If you turn off scaling you'll notice the performance difference.

I personally refuse to render the screen to RAM that's going to be read then rotated, I will not be doing this method no matter what. Performance = battery life, it does matter.

Ok. I am curious to see what you come up with as far as tearing fix. I bet it would be pretty clever. I suppose the only problem is that you need a working wiz to try this :p
 
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klikklak said:
The folks at GPH didn't have a choice, I'm sure they'd rather have taken a landscape screen instead of a portrait one, but OLED screens are made for cellphones mostly, thus they are portrait. But yeah, I think blueskycomplex got it right.

Then why use the oled screen in the first place? What's wrong with a good quality lcd screen? They could have saved money using the lcd screen and lowered the cost or made it faster/better. It was a really dumb thing to do.

Chris
 
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No, it wasn't dumb. The OLED is pretty cool, better screen than any other handheld I got at home. I don't want to miss it.
And who says you can easily get a normal LCD at that size with 320x240? And who knows how long it will still be available?
There's no use getting an LCD which won't be produced anymore in a few months and having to change everything all over.

Since most modern OLED devices (mobile phones, etc.) use vertical displays, there wasn't a horizontal display available for the WIZ.

The tearing is not so big of a problem. It can be fixed by running the display in 240x320 mode and then use a small routine that rotates your normal 320x240 output to 240x320.
Yes, there's a bit of performance loss, but that should be minimal.
But the tearing CAN be fixed without a performance hit.
The game Propis is using EGL to rotate it using the hardware of the WIZ. As long as there's no SDK out, homebrew devs can't do this yet.

As soon as homebrew devs can use EGL, the fix should be possible without a performance hit.

As most devs use libs to output their graphics on the screen, that routine could even be implemented in the lib and the developer wouldn't have to care about anymore but you'd have no tearing anymore with any apps.
 
EvilDragon said:
The game Propis is using EGL to rotate it using the hardware of the WIZ. As long as there's no SDK out, homebrew devs can't do this yet.

As soon as homebrew devs can use EGL, the fix should be possible without a performance hit.

As most devs use libs to output their graphics on the screen, that routine could even be implemented in the lib and the developer wouldn't have to care about anymore but you'd have no tearing anymore with any apps.

EGL/ Opengles is usable now, we dont need an SDK, just updated drivers and source (port.cpp)
 
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Ah, cool. So... well, could such thing as an automatic rotator been included in one of the libs? (SDL, libcastor, etc.)?
Since we usually use dynamic linking it should help :)
 
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