Exult Forum

Hi,

I love Ultima, so it's great to see the xBRZ scaler making some contribution to enhance the experience!
However I saw the variant you are using is really outdated. At this point the xBRZ scaler was still in heavy development. In the meantime I finished the "loose ends" in the code and am generally satisfied with both code quality and further graphical improvements:

Performance is about factor 3 faster than the old variant, which puts single-threaded xBRZ at the same performance level as HQx.

Additionally it fully supports multithreading, which allows to further cut down perf by the number of CPU cores available. Implementation is extremely simple with Intel TBB (it's really just the "hello world" of task-based parallelism)

You can find the most recent version here:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/hqxmame/

Best, Zenju

I'm a big fan of xBRZ

If I could do more than more or less simple code comparisons and changes learnt from that I'd go and merge with your up to date code...

I'm hoping that at some point a young and adventurous programmer take up the challenge and makes a multi scaler lib that seamlessly fits into projects (especially SDL based ones). So that all these game projects have an easy way to implement multiple scalers and when a new scaler surfaces it only needs to be added to the scaler lib to be available for all those projects....
Not to mention that it would seriously cut down compiler times when the heavy compiling is done once on building the lib and not everytime you build the program depending on the lib

/me keeps on dreaming....

I was already aware of the improvements; the issue is free time to backport them into Exult ("backport" because, among other things, we use C++03 in Exult, whereas your version uses C++11).

*glares at Dominus* I have seen your various hints at me writing a scaling library. It would be quite handy for the reasons you state. I am yet to decide if I want to do it or not.

*looks hopefully at colourless*