12.09.2011

Chainfire 3D Pro v3.3 /v2.8/ v2.0 (requires root)

Now that you have rooted your phone, here's something you must have if you're a gamer. Chainfire is a graphic driver that enhances performance in many 3D games, and even lets you play games that are not developed for your phone, if you own such. Play Tegra designed games, PowerVR, Qualcomm and Adreno games.



Requirements: Android 2.1+, Rooted.
Overview: Chainfire3D is an intermediary OpenGL driver. What does that mean? It means that Chainfire3D sits between your apps and the graphics drivers, and can intercept and/or change commands between the two. It has some built-in functions, and can be further extended with plugins to provide extra functionality.



Features
- CF3D OpenGL driver

- NightMode (inspired by Jeff Sharkey, more info here)
--- Handy shortcut to toggle on/off
--- Supports red, green, blue, amber, salmon and custom (pro only) modes

- Global OpenGL manipulation
--- Reduce texture size
--- Reduce texture quality
--- Unroll textures
--- Load plugins
--- Replace shaders
--- (Pro) Disable Chainfire3D detection
--- (Pro) Dump all shaders
--- (Pro) Force depth buffer size (EGL)
--- (Pro) Force MSAA (MultiSample Anti-Aliasing) (EGL)
--- (Pro) OpenGL manipulation on a per-app bases
--- (Pro) Fix market settings
--- (Pro) Manage installed plugins and shaders
--- (Pro) Backup and restore settings, plugins and shaders

A bit more detail about some features

NightMode
NightMode reduces the number of colors on your screen, which on OLED screens saves a lot of battery. The various modes (especially red) are also great in low-light conditions, as they have less effect on your night-vision than a full-color screen

Generic note about textures
The features below are only used if a texture format is supported. Natively Chainfire3D only supports raw textures, but these can be extended through plugins.

Reduce texture size
This essentially cuts (supported) textures' resolution in half, which usually reduces memory use (4x) and improves performance, at the cost of slightly reducing texture quality. This is not compatible with all apps! For many 3D apps, this works, as the GPU stretches the graphics, but it does not work for many 2D apps.

Reduce texture quality
This converts 32-bit textures to 16-bit textures, reducing memory use (2x). This will lower texture quality, but for many games the difference isn't even visible. Whether this is actually faster or slower depends on your hardware.

Unroll textures
Converts non-32-bit textures to 32-bit. This should not influence texture quality, but it does use more memory. On some hardware this is faster than using 16-bit textures.

Disable Chainfire3D detection
For compatibility reasons, Chainfire3D announces to applications that it is being used. Using this feature you can turn that off.

Depth buffer (per-app only)
Some apps expect a certain depth buffer size. Without setting this, they may not run (at all). This feature should only be used if an app specifically requires it - there is a good chance apps will NOT run if you change this setting the wrong way.

MSAA (MultiSample Anti-Aliasing) (per-app only)
Enabling MSAA drastically improves image quality at the cost of performance. Lines/edges become much smoother. Available options are automatic (the app decides), 4x, and 16x. Most apps don't enable MSAA themselves at all. The ARM Mali 400 MP (used in the SGS2) can even do 4xMSAA at no performance cost. Note that if your GPU does not support the level of MSAA requested, the app will likely not start at all.

Fix market settings
Plugins may add support for various features not normally supported by your hardware. Market, however, only reports the functionality your hardware provides. Using this feature, Chainfire3D will adjust Market so it also shows apps that require the features provided by the plugins. This is not useful without the plugins

Backup and restore settings
Backup and restore all app settings, plugins, shaders, etc to/from your SD card.

Plugins / API
At the moment, the Plugin API is rather limited, but it does allow for some rather interesting plugins like Tegra2 / PowerVR / ATI texture emulation (see the API docs a post below). The idea is to further improve Chainfire3D so Plugins can manipulate the entire OpenGL data stream.

Shaders
From version v1.9, you can replace app's shaders with your own modified versions. See a few posts down for further details.

Download: http://tinyurl.com/7yxo8cs

How to use: Download, extract rar, copy to your phone. Extract Plug-ins.rar to the root of SD card, install apk's from folders 1,2 and 3, one at the time. Restart the phone.


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