I'll try to keep the
FF9 talk in my forum post so go check there for more info. I will say here that it runs decent to good, with frameskip its 57-60 FPS and some stuttering when battles are drawn. My moto driod bionic's resolution is 540 x 960.
As for
OpenGL vs softFPU - it makes a HUGE difference ... in some games. In others (that are more 2d), not as much - though it's always better (as long as it doesn't mess things up and is playably fast). in Street Fighter 2 the OpenGL was so slow it wasn't usable - but while it did render the graphics noticeably differently, I don't know that it was noticably better. In the FF games, the backgrounds don't get much change, but the characters themselves get fully rerendered. They go from being blurry or blocky & indistinct to full, sharp clarity. To me, it's amazing. About the softGPU screen filtering - I believe that's not really filtering but is smoothing. It does make things look quite a bit better - but really only because it takes the blocky look and makes it less blocky. Makes it softer. I like it. But, the graphics are still ... poor - compared to the OpenGL they're actually hard to watch. I really want to play FF8, and started playing it in softGPU since OpenGL breaks the fight scenes. But after seeing and playing in OpenGL it's so hard to go back to te SoftGPU. I've never played through FF8 and have always wanted to, and have played FF9 4 or 5 times. But I find I'd rather play FF9 (which I love) than go to the softGPU of FF8. The screen smoothing of the softGPU takes crazy CPU power, and is pretty unfeasible without a dual core or frameskip. And you can't frameskip on the FF games. And the dual core causes my phone to stutter like frameskip and the buttons to not work at times (like the whole emulator is skipping, e.g. the FPS in the upper left blinks).
As for
screen resolution - that's a great point. We want the higher resolution, but the GPUs have to pay a high price to render to them. I don't know that I've heard of changing the resolution of the screen, I wonder if it's possible with the current android tools. You can draw to a smaller part of the screen, and that makes a big difference (landscape vs portrait, or enabling the 'small screen' option). Like I said above, my resolution is 540 x 960.
If anyone has any comments on using OpenGL, please post your thoughts on
my OpenGL thread. I would like to update my original post and my Google Docs spreadsheet so have a place we can go to actually understand what the options do and can get a clue as to when / why to use them.