This update, apart from work-arounds for for broken graphics card drivers mainly introduces support for anti-aliasing of visual stimuli while the image processing pipeline is used. So far, use of the imaging pipeline and of multisampled anti-aliasing where mutually exclusive. Simultaneous use of both is available on graphics hardware and operating systems that support the required OpenGL extensions EXT_framebuffer_blit and EXT_framebuffer_multisample.

Hardware support

• Serial port support: Small improvements to “IOPort”, a new cross-platform driver for control of Input/Output ports and esp. serial ports. At verbosity level zero, the driver shut now really shut up. If opening a port fails at verbosity level zero, no abort due to error is done, instead an invalid handle -1 is returned. This allows code to probe serial ports via trial and error without cluttering the console window of Matlab/Octave. Timing behaviour of blocking writes to serial port improved: Should now really block on Windows until data has been written out the port. On Linux a new polling-for-completion mode allows to poll for write completion instead of blocking. This is useful to get lower latencies on short writes, e.g., for clock calibration routines that are used to sync PTB’s clock with external hardware clocks.

• KbCheck(-1) now allows to treat all connected keyboards on OS/X as one single keyboard, instead of querying each keyboard in isolation (when a keyboard index of a specific keyboard is passed) or of the primary keyboard alone. Contributed by Andrew Leber.

• CharAvail Christopher Broussard implemented some speed optimizations for that command.

Improvements to Screen – The Visuals

Most improvements are related to the image processing pipeline. While the detailed documentation is contained in the files referenced below, most functions are accessed and controlled by the PsychImaging function and the basic help for how to use them can be found there. Demos mentioned below demonstrate this stuff in “real world” scripts.

• Support for multisample anti-aliasing when using the imaging pipeline: If the optional ‘multisample’ parameter in Screen('OpenWindow') or PsychImaging('OpenWindow') is set to a non-zero value, then multisample anti-aliasing will be used in the same way as when the imaging pipeline is disabled. This wasn’t supported up to now, because it requires a totally different internal implementation. Additionally, Screen('OpenOffscreenWindow') with imaging pipeline enabled, honors a new optional ‘multisample’ parameter, so one can enable or disable multisample anti-aliasing for offscreen windows on a per-offscreen windows basis. Please note though that anti-aliased offscreen windows can’t be directly drawn or copied around via Screen('DrawTexture') or Screen('CopyWindow'), neither can’t there images be read-back directly via Screen('GetImage'). Instead one needs to create a “normal” offscreen window of matching size and use Screen('CopyWindow') to create a copy of a multisampled offscreen window into such a normal offscreen window. The copy will be anti-aliased and drawable. This is due to the way the underlying hardware works – The use of Screen('CopyWindow') triggers an explicit multisample resolve and anti-aliasing operation for more control.

• On MS-Windows and GNU/Linux, most recent NVidia and ATI GPU’s do support anti-aliasing with the imaging pipeline on. On OS/X, only some ATI GPU’s do support this feature when used on “Leopard” version 10.5.3 or later, but support for NVidia GPU’s on “Leopard” is expected to arrive in a future OS/X release.

• Screen('CopyWindow') will use a new internal implementation on systems that support EXT_framebuffer_blit extension for more flexibility and speed. Should this pretty new code expose any bugs, you can use Screen('Preference', 'ConserveVRAM', 2048); setting to switch back to the old implementation, but don’t forget to report such issues to the forum, should there be any.

• The subfunction Screen('Blendfunction') optionally allows to set a “color write mask”: You can selectively enable or disable drawing into specific color channels, in case this is of any use. E.g., you could only enable the red channel for drawing ops, so any following drawing commands only change colors in the red channel, but leave the green, blue or alpha components of the framebuffer untouched.

• Minor other fixes or help text updates.

New built-in workarounds in Screen for broken graphics drivers and operating systems

These workarounds get automatically enabled if the corresponding problem is detected on your system. Some will print out some warning messages to inform you about the problem and possible caveats related to the workaround. Remember: It’s always better to fix the system than to rely on some workaround which can only fix 90% of the problem and isn’t totally for free. Therefore stay informed about graphics driver and operating system updates if your system has problems.

• MS-Windows with many ATI cards and recent NVidia cards: Crash when trying to use 3D mode. Fixed: You no longer need to provide the special Screen('ConserveVRAM') flags to manually enable workarounds. Should just work, without any known limitations.

• MS-Windows with many ATI cards and recent NVidia cards/drivers: Beamposition queries fail and therefore get disabled. Certain types of failure can be auto-detected and a workaround is enabled. This workaround should reenable high-precison timestamping on such systems, at the expense of slightly increased processor load in certain cases. The warning message of Screen will tell you about more details and refer you to some help text that explains further caveats of this approach.

• OS/X with all graphics cards on both “Tiger” and “Leopard”: Wrong conversion of very small values in floating point textures of 16 bit float precision. Very small values (around 10e-9) which should be rounded down to zero, as they are not representable by that format, “wrap around” and result in huge numbers that create severe visual artifacts. This is an operating system bug. Our code now performs this rounding itself, restoring correct behaviour, at the cost of additional computation time in Screen('MakeTexture') when using such floating point textures. If you use 32 bpc floating point textures instead, numerical precision will be much higher, and there are no known problems with that format. 16bpc textures are accurate to 3 digits behind the decimal point, whereas 32 bpc float textures are accurate to around 7-8 digits - sufficient for any conceivable use. However such high precision textures take up twice the amount of memory and have potentially lower drawing speeds– Life is full of trade-offs…

• Some optimizations to the internal texture creation code to allow for faster texture creation on some broken ATI drivers on Windows: Speedup can be 10x or more.

• The timestamping code in Screen has been improved further to try to prevent false alerts wrt. broken timestamping on some slightly deficient graphics drivers under rare conditions.

• Workaround in Screen('DrawDots') and Screen('DrawLines') to prevent hard graphics system lockups on some totally broken OS/X 10.5 systems with NVidia hardware.

• Workaround in procedural gabor and sine grating shaders for bugs in the GLSL shading language implementation for ATI Radeon HD cards on OS/X 10.5.3 and 10.5.4. The workaround fully resolves the issue. Apple engineering confirms a fix will be available in an upcoming OS release.

• Small fix to InitializeMatlabOpenGL, contributed by Mingjing Zhang, Vision Research Lab., University of Science and Technology of China. Had trouble loading the GL constants file if PTB was installed in a path with spaces in its name on MS-Windows.

However, there are still a few unresolvable serious bugs in OS/X 10.5.3 and 10.5.4, especially prominent with NVidia 8000 series hardware for which no workaround exists. E.g., multi-display operation (stereo setups) seems to be highly unreliable and dysfunctional. Certain Screen('CopyWindow') commands can caus a hard graphics system lockup for no conceivable reason. Many posts on public internet forums and the Apple mailing lists suggest many more similar serious problems. Only Apple engineering will be able to fix this. Currently we recommend to not upgrade to 10.5.3 or 10.5.4 on machines that are crucial for your productive work!

Misc other stuff

• MoviePlaybackDemoOSX can now optionally the “Buy a Mac” ads from Apple’s website instead of the boring colliding discs demo movie on “OS/X”. Unfortunately movie playback from the web is only supported on “OS/X”, so the main target audience is missed ;-)
• MinimalisticOpenGLDemo allows to set flags to demonstrate multisample anti-aliasing with/without imaging pipeline enabled.
• Other small enhancements to demos, downloaders and installers.