Introducing GeDoSaTo

This is kind of awkward, but I have to do this quick because of external circumstances.

In 2013, after working on DPfix, I had a vision.

I saw a world in which everyone was free to downsample any game, unbound by the restrictions of their monitor or display driver. One where people could downsample at high refresh rates, and where the quality of the scaling in real-time was finally equal to that achieved in image manipulation programs.

But I dared dream further than that. What about providing a set of tools, which would allow anyone, without low-level knowledge of Windows programming or even access to a compiler, to perform game-specific modifications and improvements such as DSfix, AGmod or DPfix? Why not also enable talented artists to use their craft on any game, not just ones designed to be modifiable by their creators?

Initial Development

Around Christmas, I started work on GeDoSaTo, the Generic DownSampling Tool. It is a testament to both that dream, and to my complete inability to come up with good names. Development proceeded at a furious pace throughout January, using the very latest in development tools:

GeDoSaTo Advanced Bug/Feature Tracking System

At this point, I’d like to thank the beta testers who supported GeDoSaTo development during that time, and also Sara (of Ys PC fame among other things) who provided invaluable help regarding mouse position mapping when downsampling.

The Slowdown

In short, GeDoSaTo worked, but never sufficiently well for me to be happy releasing it to a broader public. It still only supports DirectX 9 and 9ex, and many games have issues even with those. Not all the features I originally envisioned are integrated yet. Moreover, in the second half of February and all of March I was swamped with “real work”, and so the project mostly rested.

However, with the release of Dark Souls 2 coming up, I’ve realized that if I wait until I am fully happy with it I might never release GeDoSaTo. Thus, this post.

Current State

Neat, huh?

Neat, huh?

As you can see above, GeDoSaTo works. It currently sports the following features:

  • Downsampling, better than any other solution:
    • Essentially no resolution limits (beyond those of the GPU)
    • Downsampling from more than 4x the resolution is useful (multi-stage downsampling)
    • Selection of downsampling methods (not just bilinear sampling)
    • Downsampling in linear color space
    • Support downsampling to high-frequency (e.g. 120 Hz or 144 Hz) target modes
    • Not limited by display hardware
  • Take screenshots of either the pre-downsampled full buffer or the actual image displayed on screen (automatically sorted in per-game folders!)
  • Generic texture overriding for all textures loaded using D3DX
  • It uses a far more solid injection and interception method than my earlier efforts

However, there are plenty of bugs, limitations, and many things I would like in order to call it “complete” are still missing:

  • Only DX9 and 9ex supported, and only in 32 bit. No DX10, 11 or OpenGL, and no 64 bit games
  • No per-game configuration yet
  • No plugin or scripting system yet, to allow everyone to implement game-specific graphical features

How? & the Problems

GeDoSaTo works by telling everyone who asks (generally, games and their configuration programs) that a given, configurable, arbitrary resolution is supported, and once that resolution is selected, it will actually use a different resolution in hardware, while pretending to use the other resolution to the software client. The final image is then downsampled (in a very high quality fashion) before being displayed on the screen.

The biggest challenges in development occurred (and continue to occur) due to the million ways an application can list resolutions, chose one, check it and so on. And it gets far harder if a game uses the mouse, with the billion and one ways you can get the mouse position in Windows. Furthermore, the whole interceptor environment is not really conducive to easy debugging, which is currently holding up scripting integration.

When?

Soon.

17 thoughts on “Introducing GeDoSaTo

  1. Keep up what your doing, this sounds awesome!

    Are you working on this alone or is there a chance for it to become opensource?

  2. So it’s the frames , I’m getting 3 fps , since the dropbox link for that version is sooo old my best bet is that that version doesn’t support Dota 2 ( Source ? ) , can’t w8 for release that does :D

  3. Since there isn’t a download button here I searched teh interwebz and found one on durantes steam page  for “prealpha5″ version , I have r9 270 and I wanted to downsample Dota 2 with it and it was strange that i was getting massive lag @ 2560×1440 since my card is supposed to run it 80-88 fps at that res by benchmarks , ill download fraps to mesure frames it felt the same way when downsampling 4k res , maybe it was stuttering and not fps

  4. I don’t know if it’s feasible or not, or even on your radar, but would triple buffering be a good feature for this? D3Doverrider is kind of crappy and ceased development, RadeonPro has ceased development since the guy was hired by Raptr, it would be fantastic if triple buffering would be in an application that’s not dead in the water.

  5. I am flabbergasted by this.

     

    Incredible work by yourself and all those who have helped. I can scarcely wait to downsample every game in existence. Just wow.

    • Well, we aren’t quite at that point yet, and may never be. Currently, it’s more like “downsample a significant portion of DX9 and DX9ex games” ;)

  6. This is so fantastic, what you’re doing is simply incredible – thank you for even considering to embark on such a huge undertaking.

    I’m hoping this tool will work with older games too, which I’ve always had troubles enabling AA in – Rogue Spear, Ceville, Darkstone, maybe Homeworld…

  7. I really like that idea.

    1 question: Is it possible that the mouse cursor keeps it’s normal size (-> not downsampled)? That’s what bothers me the most in any game that I actually downscale.

  8. That is absolutely fantastic. I have only one question: is it going to work with mobile GPUs (specifically Optimus)?

    The downsampling tool from nvidia never worked in Optimus laptops because the main adapter is Intel.

    Thanks a lot for everything that you did for this community.

  9. Wow :) Amazing… had no idea you were working on something like this, sounds very promising. Keep up the great work!

  10. What should I say? You’re a genius. Keep up the good work and get this done, so that we can climb up into the heaven of good graphics!

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