Unlagged graphics with ddraw driver for RA2/YR

[tsactuo]

Disclose the following information or this thread will be locked (again):

• Which version of the DLL is this hack based on?
  
• What exactly does this hack do?
  
• How exactly does this hack achieve that?
  
• Who is the author and who has checked this DLL?
  

Also note that I consider you an idiot and a n00b for running DLLs you know nothing about. And had you the ability to use google (or simply knew what was going on on your machine), you'd know ddraw.dll is the Direct Draw Dynamically Linked Library, the 2D-part of DirectX.

And in case you wondered, the original version of this post was much less friendly.


I advise all users not to run a DLL without any background information. It looks like the poster himself has no idea what it does, and while it's probably not dangerous, it might as well fuck over your machine bigtime.

"OMG teh magic dlll!!11!1!!!!". My ass.

First of all, you must speak better. You call me an idiot (wtf?) because you think I don't know what a directdraw or dll is. Who told you that I don't know. I know pretty good what it is you don't need to tell me. I hope your over-reaction is because I uploaded a dll file and you thought it was a virus. I'm sorry if I created that illusion.

Anyway, as I said in the main post, I got the file from the RA2 1.007 Mod by Piscinex. http://www.blackassassins.org/pisc/readme.htm

That mod's launcher includes an option to disable hardware acceleration. When you disable it the ddraw.dll file is copied in the RA2. I saw that I had better performance (actually I never ever lagged again because of explosions etc) with that file and I got it from there.

What I understand (piscinex also says that) this ddraw.dll file overrides default graphics wrapper of RA2/YR.
What it probably does is to disable the hardware accelerated extensions and do them all in software. Hardware accelerated graphs as we know are bugged in RA2/YR (TS explosions never lagged to me for example) so that results in better performance.

Origin of file:

I'm not sure but I think (I don't have time to prove this, and I am bored to install my old PCI Trident 1MB card) that this file is automatically created when you install RA2/YR on a PC who's graphics card has no hardware acceleration at all (old laptops for example). If it finds no directx acceleraton it forces the game to run on software acceleration mode using this file. Westwood wouldn't have thought that today's 2ghz+ PC will run better in software mode.

If this is not the case the file may be a rip from TS, something that piscinex made or just a ddraw version of microsoft. Whatever, this file is not any dangerous, I use for 1 year+ and all my friends use that too. It doesn't cause any out of syncs in multiplayer, and allows you to add almost infinite graphics to your mods as it never lags. Use it if you have a good CPU and you will be pleased.

With that file, your graphics card is only used for drawing and not for render acceleration. This is proved by me as either with ATI 9000 or NVIDIA 6800 the performance is exactly the same. So it just depends on your CPU. That's why I said that this file is worth it if you have a 1.5ghz CPU or more (Though a friend of mine with p3 1ghz still preffers to play with ddraw.dll).

Note that this file causes the FPS meter in RockPatch new option panel to be always zero.